Gottlieb Garvo

If there is one student of Johann Sebastian Bach whom posterity has definitely not forgotten, it is Johann Gottlieb Goldberg. However, he owes this destiny to his position as harpsichordist to Count Keyserling: during the latter’s bouts of insomnia, it was Goldberg’s task to play for him the famous variations that he had commissioned from the Leipzig Kantor. This has probably long obscured the fact that Goldberg was also an excellent composer. Aside from his only two surviving cantatas (already recorded by Ricercar), his output is essentially instrumental, and the genre of the trio sonata occupies an appreciable place within it. Here are his complete trio sonatas, along with a sonata in C major at one time attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach (BWV 1037).

Although little known today, during his lifetime Johann Gottlieb Naumann (1741–1801) occupied a very respected niche in the world of late 18th-century music. Born and raised near Dresden, his career was largely made there; after moving to northern Italy in 1757 for further musical training (his teachers there included Padre Martini), he was called to the Saxon imperial court in 1764 on the recommendation of Johann Adolf Hasse as second church composer, attaining promotion to Kapellmeister in 1776. Between 1777 and 1786 he was also active as a musical reformer of opera along Italian lines in Stockholm and Copenhagen; to retain him in Dresden, the Saxon elector promoted Naumann to Oberkapellmeister in 1786. Naumann remained there for the rest of his life, dying a wealthy and respected man. (For further details see Brian Robins’s review of the composer’s oratorio Betulia liberata in Fanfare 30:2.)