Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel

Weihnachtskantaten für den Hof Schwarzburg-Sondershausen

Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel has been "rising again" as a "newly discovered star" in the Baroque musical firmament for around a decade and is attracting more and more attention with his brilliance and charm. This late renaissance is also due to the fact that Stölzel supplied the court in Sondershausen with cantatas from Gotha and the works that were sent there or composed especially for the Sondershausen court chapel have fortunately been preserved. These pieces include these Christmas cantatas, which have now been published here for the first time.

Stölzel's cantatas are still moving today. In their intimate and heartfelt festivity, the Christmas cantatas provide excellent evidence of this specific, heartfelt musical language and prove to be gems of Protestant cantata art - not least because Stölzel cultivates a confident and highly creative approach to the Protestant hymn: Simple chorale movements as well as different variants of chorale arrangements of often high compositional complexity are encountered.

Exemplarily, the extraordinarily subtly composed and distinctively orchestrated Christmas cantatas make it clear that Stölzel was not an insignificant minor master alongside Bach, Handel and Telemann, but a highly independent composer personality with music that moves "mind and soul" and represents a high level of compositional craftsmanship.

Score published in the series "Denkmäler Mitteldeutsche Barockmusik"

Orchestral material available on loan - please contact the publisher directly.