Selected items from Froberger

The outstanding figure in the history of music for keyboard instruments in the 17th century was undoubtedly Johann Jacob Froberger (1616-1667). He can be regarded as the main promoter of the suite (partita) in the field of tension between French dance culture and German love of order, and his toccatas and contrapuntal works, which combine Italian and German stylistic elements, form the starting points for Buxtehude's and Bach's organ works. Common knowledge among harpsichordists and organists, Froberger is also occasionally included in piano recitals by pianists such as Grigori Sokolow.

To mark the 400th anniversary of the composer's birth, Leipzig musicologist Peter Wollny has now published a selection of four works, all of which are taken from the meticulous autograph of Froberger's Libro Secondo (A-Wn, Mus. Hs. 18706). All that had to be done was to transfer Froberger's differing staves and clefs into the notation commonly used today. However, Wollny's notation leaves users in the lurch where technical problems arise due to too large a range of hands and where a reader-friendly distribution across the two modern staves would have been necessary.

The publisher's interest in such an edition may be justified, but as a scholarly achievement it falls far short of Siegbert Rampe's edition (Bärenreiter, 1993, BA 8063). Where Rampe makes a fine distinction between different beams, each with a different expressive value in terms of articulation, Wollny simply makes the same distinction. Where Rampe takes into account the genre-typical lack of bar lines, Wollny at least places scale lines. Wollny's preface is extremely short, and the few critical notes are immediately integrated into it. If anyone who wants to get to know more than just four randomly selected pieces by Froberger compares the effort involved in this edition (using a generally accessible digital copy [p. III]) with that of Rampe's research, which has also led to easily readable variants in the main text, he will quickly see that he has to opt for the older edition. The fact that Wollny also based his product on this preliminary work, albeit without making an appropriate note of it, is only clear from the numbering of the pieces according to Rampe's Froberger works index (FbWV).

Johann Jacob Froberger, Selected works for keyboard instrument, edited by Peter Wollny, HN 1361, € 10.00 G. Henle Publishers, Munich 2016