Jory Vinikour

Trained at the court of Stuttgart, Johann Jakob Froberger was exposed to different European styles from an early age, thanks to the foreign musicians living at the court. He completed his training with a trip to Rome where he studied with Girolamo Frescobaldi. His work, almost entirely dedicated to the keyboard, shows these multiple influences synthesised into a unique style which strongly marked the following generations.

The Capriccios and Canzone bear witness to a training rooted in the contrapuntal tradition. The rigorous writing in four voices shows the composer’s great mastery of the stile antico. These pieces are structured in several parts, each presenting a variation on the original subject, either by diminutions or by a change of measure that gradually accelerates the discourse. Froberger places great importance on expressiveness, notably through the use of numerous dissonances or chromaticism, as in the subject of Capriccio VI.

Froberger’s modernity is particularly perceptible in his Toccatas, pieces in which free sections, a kind of notated improvisation, alternate with contrapuntal sections. The exuberance of the Italian school is present, and the years of training spent with Frescobaldi are particularly evident in the free parts. The performer is invited to play them with great rhythmic flexibility guided by the richness and expressiveness of the harmony and the inflections of the melody. Froberger shows his mastery of rhetoric, through the careful construction of his discourse and the use of figures such as the abruptio, the exclamatio or the congeries (accumulation of voices that evolve together to transform the harmony).

Rhetoric also occupies a central place in the tombeaus or lamentos that sometimes replace the allemandes at the beginning of Froberger’s dance suites. The Lamento sopra la dolorosa perdita della Real Maestà di Ferdinando IV, composed following the death of the very young king of Hungary, ends with a scale representing the ascent of the soul to heaven. The rhythmic freedom is sometimes specified by the mention “with discretion”, as in the allemande opening Suite No. 20, named “Meditation on my future death”, which is played slowly and with discretion.

The dance suites are irrigated by the French style. Their “style luthé” (lute style) of composition, which nourishes the harpsichord’s resonance by tampering with the harmonies, is directly inherited from the French lute school. Froberger was intimately acquainted with this repertoire, as evidenced by the Tombeau pour la mort de Monsieur Blancrocher, a tribute to his lutenist friend he met in Paris. This writing would become characteristic of the harpsichord language.