The Hebel songs by Martin Vogt

The Bavarian organist and composer Martin Vogt (1781-1854) is almost forgotten today. In the 1970s, however, the informative and amusing description of the first half of his life was popular with music lovers. The autobiography Memories of a wandering musicianpublished in Basel in 1971 by Heinrich Reinhardt, reveals that Vogt received extensive musical training as a choirboy at various German monasteries and came to Regensburg for further education at the age of thirteen. During the vacancies and after his studies, he made his way from monastery to monastery as a singer, organist and cellist and was a student of Michael Haydn in Salzburg for some time. The wandering church musician finally came to Vienna, from where he had to flee from Napoleon's recruiters.

We find Martin Vogt in Switzerland from 1806 to 1837. He worked as an organist at the monasteries of Einsiedeln, Muri, Mariastein and St. Urban, where he taught Langenthal's middle-class daughters to play the piano, then as an organist and teacher in Arlesheim and from there as a cellist in the Basel orchestra. Finally, he worked as music director and teacher in St. Gallen for 14 years before moving to his last station, Colmar, in 1837.

Martin Vogt's sacred compositions, organ pieces and masses, have appeared in print but are widely scattered. His only secular work, 24 songs with piano or guitar accompaniment based on poems by Johann Peter Hebel (1760-1826), can be traced back to a personal encounter between the musician Vogt and the successful dialect poet in 1806. At that time, Hebel's Alemannic poems in its third edition, but also the folk song collection The boy's magic horn were published. Vogt's melodious songs with simple instrumental accompaniments allow a comparison with the dialectal art songs in the folk idiom, as they were published, also with piano or guitar accompaniment, as Collection of Swiss carols and folk songs were to appear in Bern in 1826.

In 2011, a concert of Vogt's Hebel songs from the first edition, which is kept in the Solothurn Central Library, awakened Hans-Rudolf Binz's desire to make this pleasing composition accessible for practical use. It is to the great credit of former library director Verena Bider and research assistant Christoph Greuter that Martin Vogt's songs have been published in a new edition. A booklet with both the piano and guitar versions is available.

Martin Vogt: Johann Peter Hebel's Alemannic Poems. Songs with piano and guitar accompaniment, edited by Christoph Greuter, (Music from the Collection of the Solothurn Central Library, booklet 10); piano booklet, M&S 2523; guitar booklet, M&S 2524; Fr. 38.00 each, Müller und Schade, Bern 2019

Further reading:
Martin Vogt, Erinnerungen eines wandernden Musikers, edited by Heinrich Reinhardt, Gute Schriften, Basel 1971

Christoph H. Hänggi: Martin Vogt (1781-1854), an organist and composer of the first half of the 19th century. 2 volumes, Liz. Basel 1988 (with list of works)