Johann Gottfried Walther (1684 – 1748) was a German
music theorist, organist, composer, and lexicographer
of the Baroque era. Walther was born at Erfurt. Not
only was his life almost exactly contemporaneous to
that of Johann Sebastian Bach, he was the famous
composer's cousin.
Walther was most well known as the compiler of the
Musicalisches Lexicon (Leipzig, 1732), an enormous
dictionary of music and musicians. Not only was it the
first dictionary of musical terms written in the Germ...(+)
Johann Gottfried Walther (1684 – 1748) was a German
music theorist, organist, composer, and lexicographer
of the Baroque era. Walther was born at Erfurt. Not
only was his life almost exactly contemporaneous to
that of Johann Sebastian Bach, he was the famous
composer's cousin.
Walther was most well known as the compiler of the
Musicalisches Lexicon (Leipzig, 1732), an enormous
dictionary of music and musicians. Not only was it the
first dictionary of musical terms written in the German
language, it was the first to contain both terms and
biographical information about composers and performers
up to the early 18th century. In all, the Musicalisches
Lexicon defines more than 3,000 musical terms; Walther
evidently drew on more than 250 separate sources in
compiling it, including theoretical treatises of the
early Baroque and Renaissance. The single most
important source for the work was the writings of
Johann Mattheson, who is referenced more than 200
times.
Walther was the music teacher of Prince Johann Ernst
von Sachsen-Weimar. He wrote a handbook for the young
prince with the title Praecepta der musicalischen
Composition, 1708. It remained handwritten until Peter
Benary's edition (Leipzig, 1955). As an organ composer,
Walther became famous for his organ transcriptions of
orchestral concertos by contemporary Italian and German
masters. He made 14 transcriptions of concertos by
Albinoni, Gentili, Taglietti, Giuseppe Torelli, Vivaldi
and Telemann. These works were the models for Bach to
write his famous transcriptions of concertos by Vivaldi
and others. On the other hand, Walther as a city
organist of Weimar wrote exactly 132 organ preludes
based on Lutheran chorale melodies. Some free keyboard
music also belongs to his legacy.
Although originally composed for Organ, I created this
arrangement for Concert (Pedal) Harp.
SHEET MUSIC