CD 69
Andreas Hofer Memorial Concert 1994
Johann Baptist Gänsbacher (1778-1844) in 1824, the year he was appointed director of music at St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna
Starting in 1991 and continuing for several years in a row, the music collection of the Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum put on concerts of sacred music to commemorate the day of Andreas Hofer’s death. We took the 1994 anniversary as an opportunity to bring to mind the works of the Tyrolean composer and freedom fighter Johann Baptist Gänsbacher. Infl uenced by Viennese classicism, he was one of the leading representatives of musica sacra and was considered by many contemporaries as a worthy successor of the brothers Joseph and Michael Haydn. Johann Baptist Gänsbacher was born in Sterzing in 1778. At the peak of his musical career he rose to the post of director of music at Vienna’s St Stephen’s Cathedral in 1824, which he held until his death in 1844. Among his most important teachers were the famous theorists Johann Georg Albrechtsberger (1736-1809) in Vienna, who also taught Beethoven, and Georg Joseph Vogler (1749- 1814) in Darmstadt, where he completed his studies with his friends Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826) and Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1861). The great Requiem in E Flat Major dating from 1811 is probably Gänsbacher’s most important piece of sacred music. Carl Maria von Weber performed this brilliant composition in Prague in 1814 and wrote to his friend Gänsbacher afterwards: “It went well and I was with you in spirit, it is an excellent work ... and I would like to have given you a kiss for it.”
Track 7, 2:06
Mass Nr.2 in C
Kyrie