Biber is not completely unknown, but also not exactly famous - you have to be an aficionado of high Baroque music and especially violin music to know him (he wrote a great cycle of violin sonatas called "Mystery Sonatas"). Biber was one of the many musicians who came from the Czech lands and sought their fortune in the cultural capitals of Austria. Salzburg was an independent bishopric that played an important role in the Counter-Reformation, with monasteries and numerous Baroque churches built. In 1731, more than 20,000 Protestant citizens were expelled from the city and found new homes in Prussia. This "Catholic fortress" was the Salzburg in which Biber and later Mozart and his father worked and the Missa Salisburgensis is the major statement of all it stood for.
Big, bigger, biggest... The Missa Salisburgensis à 53 voci is the largest-scale piece of sacred Baroque music, an archetypal work of the Colossal Baroque that is now universally accepted to be by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644-1704). The manuscript score of this Mass was rediscovered in the 1870s in the home of a greengrocer in Salzburg, Austria. It has been said to have narrowly escaped being used to wrap vegetables, the fate of old newspapers and almost old music as well. At that time, the manuscript was also attributed to several other composers, but based on modern methods of analyzing handwriting and watermarks it has now been proven that the Mass must have been written for the 1682 commemoration of the 1100th anniversary of the Archbishopric of Salzburg, and stylistic analysis clearly points to Biber as the composer.
Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber received his musical education in a Jesuit grammar school in Silesia and took further lessons from Johann Heinrich Schmelzer. His first known composition dates from 1663, a Salve Regina for soprano, violin, viola da gamba, and organ. After a first employment as court musician of the Moravian bishop of Olomouc, Biber from 1670 entered the service of Archbishop in Salzburg. In the next decades he would climb to the positions of Vice Kapellmeister and Kapellmeister. He was considered a brilliant violin virtuoso; for his compositional work, Emperor Leopold I awarded him a title of nobility, which meant that he was allowed to call himself "Biber von Bibern." His monthly income at that time was 60 guilders, with free housing, wine, bread and firewood.
Biber wrote masses, two requiems, numerous violin sonatas, and table music. Except the Missa Salisburgensis, most of his sacred works are virtually unknown. In many of his works for the violin, Biber used scordatura (the retuning of
individual strings) to achieve special sound effects and to enable
difficult fingerings in the lower registers and on empty strings. Of few violinists and composers before his time are double stops, triple and quadruple chords found as frequently as in Biber! His most famous work for the violin is the collection of Sonatas called "Mystery Sonatas" or "Rosary Sonatas."
The huge Missa Salisburgensis is a polychoral composition which takes advantage of the multiple organs and various locations at balconies available for groups of singers and musicians performing in Salzburg Cathedral. The vocal parts feature in concerto (soloists) and in cappella (the full choir) parts across the sixteen vocal lines. However, several times in the Mass, the composer "collapses" all the voices into simple four part harmony (SATB) and uses some of the instrumental groups, the cornetto and trombone choir, in particular, to play in unison with the human voices. The work is in C major throughout – necessitated by the use of ten clarino trumpets fixed in C. There are 53 vocal and instrumental parts, leading to an outsize score of 82 by 57 centimeters!
Missa salisburgensis is noble music, which splashes up in big waves against the tall church walls. Listen to a performance by Václav Luks Collegium 1704:
Choral Masterworks