Joseph Martin Kraus

Joseph Martin Kraus (20 June 1756 – 15 December 1792), was a composer, sometimes referred to as "the Swedish Mozart".

Legacy

Bertil van Boer divides Kraus's sacred music into two periods. The first, from 1768 to 1777, comprises Kraus's music written as a Roman Catholic for Catholic services. For the second, from 1778 to 1790, Kraus was still Catholic, but wrote music for Lutheran services. Aside from short hymns and chorales, there was not much use for sacred music in Sweden at that time. There was also a debate going on regarding the role music should play in the church, and Kraus participated in that debate by writing three articles on the subject in the newspaper Stockholms Post.

Related Topics:
Roman Catholic - Lutheran - Stockholms Post

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For the staging in January 1792 of Voltaire's Olympie, Kraus wrote an overture, a march and interludes. On March 1792, Gustavus III attended a masked ball where he was assassinated, and he died shortly after. (Giuseppe Verdi started to write an opera on this event, Gustavus Terzo, but later changed the names of the characters, the setting, and the title of the opera, to Un Ballo in Maschera). Kraus wrote a funeral cantata and the Symphonie funèbre which were played at the burial ceremony on April 13. Kraus himself died a few months later, of tuberculosis.

Related Topics:
Voltaire - Giuseppe Verdi - Un Ballo in Maschera - April 13 - Tuberculosis

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Two different catalogs exist of Kraus's music, one by Karl Scheiber, Verzeichnis der Musikalischen Werke von Jos. Kraus, which gives each composition an A number, and Bertil van Boer's Die Werke von Joseph Martin Kraus: Systematisch-thematisches Werkverzeichnis, which gives each composition a VB number. Bertil van Boer also edited modern editions, on Artaria, of all Kraus's symphonies recorded on Volume 4 of Naxos's complete set of Kraus symphonies, and also wrote the programme notes for those discs as well as the article on Kraus in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Volume 1 won the Cannes Classical Award in 1999, while Volume 2 contains world premiere recordings of three of Kraus's symphonies.

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