Vespro della Beata Vergine - Reconstruction of an early baroque

Johann Stadlmayr Vesper Psalms from ‘Salmi a due, e tre voci con due violini o cornetti’ (Michael Wagner - Innsbruck, 1640)
vita & anima
Jacob Lawrence - tenor
Jakob Pilgram - tenor
Frithjof Smith - cornett
Gebhard David - cornett
Barbara Fischer - violone
Reinhild Waldek - baroque harp
Andreas Arend - chitarrone
Peter Waldner - positive organ

In 1640 Johann Stadlmayr, the famous court music director of Archduchess Claudia de' Medici in Innsbruck, published a collection of psalms and Magnificat settings for vespers. This opus was published by Michael Wagner, who had married Johann Gäch's widow a year earlier and thus taken over his publishing house. The print was considered incomplete until recently, but the missing partbook for violin I / cornett I has since been located in the Marienberg monastery above Burgeis in the Upper Venosta Valley in South Tyrol. The collection from 1640 shows Stadlmayr's mastery of the latest Italianate concertante church style: The solo voices are joined by violins or cornetts and basso continuo. In our concert, we present these works in the typical sequence of a vesper service as it might have been performed at the Innsbruck court around 1640. While most of Stadlmayr's works were dedicated to members of the Tyrolean Habsburgs, whom he had served since 1607, he dedicated this opus to Don Federico Enriquez, the Spanish ambassador at the Innsbruck court, who, according to Stadlmayr's dedicatory preface, must have been a great music lover.