Giovanni Henrico Albicastro
Giovanni Henrico Albicastro (c. 1660 – 26 January 1730) was a talented amateur musician who published his compositions pseudonymously in Amsterdam.
Biography[]
His name is the italianized version of Johann Heinrich von Weissenburg. Albicastro came from Klosterneuburg near Vienna,[1] or the village of Bieswangen, near Pappenheim in central Bavaria, not far from the village of Weissenburg ("White Castle", thus "Albicastro" in Latin or Italian). Johann Gottfried Walther included Albicastro in his Musicalisches Lexicon (1732) under the mistaken supposition that Albicastro came from Switzerland; consequently he has often been included in lists of Swiss musicians.
In 1686, Albicastro moved to Leiden, in the Netherlands, where he registered at the University of Leiden as a Musicus Academiae, but his name does not appear in the university's archives.
In 1696, a collection of twelve of his trio sonatas appeared, entitled Il giardino armonico sacro-profano ("The sacred-profane harmonic garden"), Op. 3. Edited by François Barbry, it was published in Bruges by François van Heurck; no copies of the last six, or of Albicastro's opus 1 or opus 2 from Bruges seem to have survived. In Amsterdam a separate set of opus numbers were published by Estienne Roger: collections of violin sonatas (Opp. 2, 3, 5, 6 and 9), trio sonatas (Opp. 1, 4 and 8), and string concertos (Op. 7) in a Corellian idiom.
During the last phases of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1713), he served as a captain of cavalry. He remained active in this position until 1730, when he died in Maastricht.[2] One source mentions that he may have died in 1738, but this is erroneous.[3]
References[]
- ^ https://www.amadeusmusic.ch/attachments/BP2778_V.pdf
- ^ Ritmeester Weissenburg, Regiment Baron Van Regteren, died 26 January 1730 in Maastricht; p. 247 (17 March 1730 Hendrik Carel, Graaf van Nassau, replaces the deceased Johan Hendrik Weissenburg in the Regiment Van Regteren). Resolutien van de Heeren Staaten van Holland en Westvriesland ... (1730), p. 230
- ^ Musical Heritage review, vol. 6 (Paganiniana Publications, 1982), p. 15.
External links[]
- Free scores by Giovanni Henrico Albicastro at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)
- Radio Netherlands music: Rudolf Rasch, "Giovanni Henrico Albicastro"
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- 18th-century classical composers
- 18th-century German composers
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- German Baroque composers
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- People from Pappenheim