Heinrich Biber

The Mystery Sonatas, Part I

The Joyful Mysteries
Sonata I in D minor:  The Annunciation
            Praeludium - Aria and 2 variations - Finale

Sonata II in A Major:  The Visitation
[Sonata] / Presto - Allamanda - Presto

Sonata III in B minor:  The Nativity
[Sonata] /Presto - Courente and double - Adagio

Sonata IV in D minor:  The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple
Ciacona with 12 variations

Sonata V in A Major:  The Finding of Jesus in the Temple
Praeludium - Allamanda - Gigue - Sarabande and double 

The Sorrowful Mysteries
Sonata VI in C minor:  The Agony in the Garden
Lamento

Sonata VII in F Major:  The Scourging of Jesus
Allamanda and variation - Sarabanda and 3 variations

Sonata VIII in Bb Major:  The Crowning of Jesus with Thorns
Sonata: Adagio/Presto - Gigue and 2 doubles

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Sonata X in G minor:  The Crucifixion
Praeludium - Aria and 5 variations

Program notes
by Martin Pearlman

Heinrich Biber, one of the greatest violinists of his century, wrote not only avant-garde music for his own instrument but also many large and small-scale choral works, which only recently have begun to receive the attention they deserve.  His choral output includes masses, requiems, motets and other works, some of them among the grandest church music of his time.  (One polychoral mass attributed to him is scored for 53 voice parts!) 

Born in Bohemia, Biber worked at the courts of Graz and Kroměříž (now in the Czech Republic), but from the 1670s until the end of his life, he worked at the archbishop's court in Salzburg.  There he rose to the rank of Kapellmeister and was granted a title of nobility by the emperor. 

Biber's Mystery (or Rosary) Sonatas rank, along with Bach's unaccompanied violin music, among the most challenging works in the Baroque violin repertoire, and his experimentation with the instrument is unique, even to this day.  The collection dates from the 1670s and is grouped into three sets of five sonatas -- five joyful mysteries, five sorrowful mysteries, and five glorious mysteries -- concluding with a Passacaglia for unaccompanied violin.  Each of the 15 sonatas depicts one of the mysteries of the rosary, which Biber illustrates with an anonymous engraving showing the appropriate episode in the life of Jesus. 

Our performance, the first of two, presents a little over half of the complete collection.  It includes the first eight sonatas and then closes with the final sonata of the "sorrowful mysteries" (#10, The Crucifixion).  Although there is occasional tone painting of events in the life of Jesus -- the fluttering of angels' wings, the hammering of the nails, the earthquake -- these sonatas do not paint the story in an obvious way.  Indeed, some listeners have wondered how certain sonatas relate to the mysteries in their titles -- why, for example, there may be a dance or a virtuosic passage in the middle of a sorrowful part of the story.  The music seems to be meant more as moments of reflection, leaving each listener to find his or her own meaning.

The occasion for which these sonatas were written is itself something of a mystery, although they may have been played during the month of October, which was dedicated to the celebration of the rosary.  Devotion to the rosary was particularly popular in Europe at this time, and in Salzburg, there was a Confraternity of the Rosary, of which Biber's employer, the Archbishop Maximilian Gandolph, was a member.  Addressing the archbishop, Biber dedicates his collection "to the 15 sacred mysteries, which you promote so fervently."

Biber's technical experiments
It is perhaps not surprising that a virtuoso player like Biber would write technically challenging music.  However, these sonatas go far beyond normal virtuosic writing.  Biber instructs the violinist to tune the strings differently from the way they are normally tuned, so that no two sonatas have the strings tuned to the same set of notes. 

The effect of this "untuning" or scordatura is not only that the violinist can play chords that are normally impossible but, more importantly, that the instrument resonates differently for each sonata.  Tuning strings higher creates greater tension on the instrument, and tuning some of them down makes it less bright.  When the strings are tuned to the notes of a particular key that key sounds more resonant -- the open strings vibrating sympathetically to the notes of that key -- and other keys sound darker. 

For the player, having a different tuning for each sonata can be disorienting at first, because the notes that she is reading and fingering are not always the ones that are actually sounding, and because the usual conventions for reading music shift for each sonata.  Notes that are written as large leaps may actually sound close together in some sonatas; and, as shown below, some tunings result in bizarre key signatures which include both sharps and flats. 

With all this retuning from one sonata to the next, the violin can become unstable and go quickly out of tune, as strings are put under greater or less tension.  For that reason, our performance today uses multiple violins plus a backstage assistant to retune them, so that the strings can have some time to settle into their new tunings.

Click here for a page detailing the key and tuning for each sonata.

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