Ubt Codemao

Georg Friedrich Kauffmann did not at all leave behind many traces documenting the course of his life. Ostramondra, his little place of birth, lay between Erfurt, where he received his education from Johann Heinrich Buttstett, who was Pachelbel’s pupil and successor, and Merseburg, where he was trained and worked for over four decades. His teacher there, Johann Friedrich Alberti, who according to Mattheson was »an excellent theologian, learned jurist, and complete musician,« had (among other things) studied with Werner Fabricius, the organist at the Church of St. Nicholas in Leipzig, before Duke Christian I of Saxony appointed him to serve as court and cathedral organist in Merseburg. Alberti’s poor physical condition following a stroke meant that he had to have his pupil substitute for him beginning in 1698.

Like the Occitan troubadours and the trouvères of northern France, the Minnesänger celebrated courtly love and gave medieval German its letters of nobility. These "singers of love" — Minne is the old German word for love — thus perpetuated a poetic and musical tradition that had begun nearly two centuries earlier in Occitania. The Minnesänger, generally of noble and knightly blood, gradually emancipated themselves from their French models and developed their own styles and forms during the 13th century.

Northern Europe was a fertile ground for lyrical music: it has borrowed many memorable historical figures but is also indebted to it for many masterpieces by Baroque composers. Handel and Bach come to mind, of course, but we would be forgetting the Heinichen, Schürmann, Keiser and Telemann, whose brilliant opera music is so rarely performed. Many of them have portrayed monarchs, terrible or majestic, in their operatic works - roles that, unlike their southern colleagues, the composers of the Septentrion do not hesitate to entrust to lower voices.