Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel
When he was thirteen, he was sent to study in Schneeberg, where he was taught music, including thoroughbass, by cantor Christian Umlaufft, a former student of Johann Kuhnau.
A few years later he was admitted to the gymnasium in Gera, where he further practiced music under Emanuel Kegel, the director of the court chapel.
The city had a lot to offer from a musical point of view: its opera had been reopened shortly before, which Stölzel liked to visit.
He became acquainted with Melchior Hoffmann, at the time music director of the Neukirche and conductor of the Collegium Musicum, both in succession of Georg Philipp Telemann, who had left Leipzig in 1705.
Returning to Halle after over two years in Silesia, he composed the operas Valeria, instigated by Johann Theile, for Naumburg, and Rosen und Dornen der Liebe for Gera.
[7] Stölzel wrote several theoretical works about music, but only one of these was published during his lifetime: a treatise on the composition of canons, of which 400 copies were printed in 1725.
As a member of this Society he composed a cantata and wrote a treatise on the recitative, which was published as Abhandlung vom Recitativ in the 20th century.
Mizler printed Stölzel's obituary as second of three (of which Johann Sebastian Bach's was the third), in the fourth volume of his Musikalische Bibliothek [de], the organ of the Society of Musical Sciences.
[citation needed] Among his extant compositions are a Brockes Passion of 1725, two Christmas Oratorios, made of cantatas,[15] and a Deutsche Messe (German Mass), a Lutheran Mass consisting of Kyrie and Gloria, in German, set for four-part choir, strings and basso continuo.
Stölzel is reputed to have composed over 18 orchestral suites alone (none survive), as well as 90 serenatas (vocal pieces performed as "table music").
Shortly after his death some of his compositions were still performed, and Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg rated him slightly above Bach in his list of prominent composers of the 18th century.
[citation needed] Georg Benda, Stölzel's immediate successor at the court in Gotha, restaged church music of his predecessor, sometimes with score revisions, until 1768: Passion settings and many cantatas such as the 1728–29 double cantata cycle (restaged in the liturgical years 1752–53, 1763–64 and 1765–66) were included in such repeat performances.
[13] In 1778 Benda wrote: "... Only the best works of my predecessor, which could be used even today for church music, are saved, because already a long time ago I separated them from useless junk and kept them in my own house.
C. P. E. Bach adopted several movements of Stölzel's Sechs geistlichen Betrachtungen des leidenden und sterbenden Jesus in his 1771 Lukas-Passion and his 1772 Johannes-Passion pasticcios.
[19][33][34][35][36][37][38][39] Reference works by Johann Adam Hiller (1784) and Ernst Ludwig Gerber (early 1790s) contain biographies of Stölzel.
[8][9] Hiller describes part of Stölzel's music production as "heard today and forgotten tomorrow": over-all light in spirit and, according to the standards of the time when these pieces originated, with pleasurable singing lines over a sparse instrumental accompaniment.
[8] Hiller qualifies Stölzel's choral music as full in texture and rich in harmony, and names the Canonic Mass in thirteen real voices and the German Te Deum as examples of Stölzel's accomplished style, fully mastering the composition of canons and fugues.
[8][4] Gerber largely repeats Hiller's biographical notes and judgement about Stölzel's music, adding descriptions of Stölzel's 1736 double cantata cycle and vocal chamber music, where the singing voice is treated as an instrumental part, in some passages rather an accompaniment than the leading voice.
[9] Georg Pölchau [de] collected manuscripts of Stölzel's music, many of these ending up in the Berlin State Library.
[35][42][43] Pölchau offered a copy of this edition to Carl Friedrich Zelter, leader of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin.
[16][45] In the first half of the 19th century one of Stölzel's masses was copied by Johann Gottfried Schicht, and, with the orchestral part arranged for organ by Carl Ferdinand Becker, performed in Leipzig.
[73] In 1976 an updated version of that thesis was published in one volume as Das Kantatenschaffen von Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel.
[80] Stölzel's Ave Regina, Sind wir denn Kinder, Ehre sei Gott, and a new edition of the 1725 cantata Kündlich groß ist das gottselige Geheimnis were published in 2003.
In 1971 he recorded Stölzel's Concerto Grosso a Quatri Chori with five other trumpetists, Pierre Pierlot on the oboe and the Jean-François Paillard Chamber Orchestra conducted by Philippe Caillard.
