Classical Music | Ensemble Music

Georg Muffat

Passacaglia  Play

Baroque Band Ensemble

Recorded on 05/24/2007, uploaded on 09/24/2010

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Passacaglia    Georg Muffat

The selections heard in tonight's program afford the listener a chance to hear a good representative overview of music from the mature to the late baroque periods. Most of the composers' names, Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Albinoni and Muffat are well-known, and the first three names are assuredly "household words" in the world of baroque music.

A German Baroque composer of Scottish descent, Georg Muffat (1653 – 1704) was born in Megeve, Savoy, (an independent duchy, which is now part of France).  He studied in Paris with Jean Baptiste Lully, and then became an organist in Molsheim and Sélestat. Later, he studied law in Ingolstadt, afterwards settling in Vienna.  He could not get an official appointment, so he traveled to Prague in 1677, then to Salzburg, where he worked for the archbishop for some ten years.  In 1681 he went to Italy and in Rome studied with Arcangelo Corelli and Bernardo Pasquini.  From 1690 he was Kapellmeister to the Bishop of Passau.