Johann Andreas Herbst

Johann Andreas Herbst (baptized June 9, 1588 – January 24, 1666) was a German composer and music theorist of the early Baroque era.

He was a contemporary of Michael Praetorius and Heinrich Schütz, and like them, assisted in importing the grand Venetian style and the other features of the early Baroque into Protestant Germany.

In 1636 he accepted a position in Nuremberg, and returned to the city of his birth; it was evidently a frustrating appointment for him, for he wrote of his time there bitterly, and in 1644 he went back to Frankfurt, where he remained for the rest of his life.

During the war it became more and more difficult to find and employ the large numbers of musicians necessary for pieces in this style, and this trend towards simplification of instrumental forces can be seen in his music as well as that of his contemporaries.

His books of motets and his Teatrum amoris (meant to be in imitation of the Italian madrigal) avoid the continuo style then dominant in Italy, but otherwise Herbst uses many of the new Baroque era techniques which composers such as Hassler and Schütz brought back across the Alps from Venice.