Johann Caspar Kerll
[1] Born in Adorf in the Electorate of Saxony as the son of an organist, Kerll showed outstanding musical abilities at an early age, and was taught by Giovanni Valentini, court Kapellmeister at Vienna.
His pupils included Agostino Steffani, Franz Xaver Murschhauser, and possibly Johann Pachelbel, and his influence is seen in works by Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach: Handel frequently borrowed themes and fragments of music from Kerll's works, and Bach arranged the Sanctus movement from Kerll's Missa superba as BWV 241, Sanctus in D major.
The surviving oeuvre shows Kerll's mastery of the Italian concerted style, employed in almost all of his masses, and his highly developed contrapuntal technique.
Kerll gave up his post in Munich in 1673 for unclear reasons – it is believed that there was a particularly serious quarrel with other court musicians (Italian singers) which made him leave.
The 1679 plague, commemorated by Kerll in Modulatio organica, a collection of liturgical organ music, resulted in Anna Catharina's death.
He married Kunigunde Hilaris in 1682/3 and stayed in Vienna for the next 10 years, surviving the Turkish invasion of 1683, which he also commemorated in music in Missa in fletu solatium.
Although Kerll was a renowned teacher during his lifetime, his pupils did not, in all probability, include any considerably important composers, although Johann Joseph Fux possibly studied with him for a time.
Much of his music was lost, including 11 operas (which he was most famous for during his lifetime), 25 offertories, four masses, litanies, chamber sonatas and miscellaneous keyboard works.
Battaglia is a descriptive piece in C major, over 200 bars long and featuring numerous repeats of fanfare-like themes, it is also attributed to Juan Bautista Cabanilles.
Most vocal works employ an advanced concertato technique; the requiem mass Missa pro defunctis from 1669, scored for five voices with no accompaniment, is a notable exception.
The works of Delectus sacrarum cantionum, motets and sacred concertos for 2–5 voices, are sectional compositions alternating between imitative writing and free, highly ornamented parts.
The complex imitative counterpoint that dominates Kerll's chamber music is also present in most of his sacred vocal works: in Missa non sine quare every movement ends with a grand fugue, a similar technique is seen in Missa Renovationis (which is almost entirely based on five themes used for the Kyrie movement), where every division of the mass also closes with a large fugal section.
Stretto entries of a highly chromatic subject in works like Missa in fletu solatium result in strong dissonances (the mass in question, commemorating the events of a Turkish siege that cost Kerll's friend, Alessandro Poglietti, his life, contains a continuo part that includes an "avoid consonances" warning from the composer).
In addition to these, an assortment of other keyboard pieces survives: a chaconne, a passacaglia, a battaglia, a Capriccio sopra il cucu and an aria with two variations.
