Published
Lamento sopra la dolorosa perdita della Real Maestà di Ferdinando IV Rè de Romani (FbWV 612 Ant. 633 / 634)
Lamento sopra la dolorosa perdita della Real Maestà di Ferdinando IV Rè de Romani (“Lament on the sorrowful loss of His Royal Majesty Ferdinand IV, King of the Romans”), FbWV 612—formerly numbered 633 or 634 depending on the catalogue—is one of Johann Jakob Froberger’s most profoundly funerary, personal and theologically charged compositions.
In a sense, the work closes the cycle of meditations on death that the composer developed during the 1650s, after experiencing several losses and gradually withdrawing from courtly life.
Ferdinand IV died young, aged twenty-one, of smallpox in 1654, shortly before his coronation as emperor. For Froberger, who served within his circle, the death was a devastating personal and spiritual blow.
By then Froberger had already suffered a succession of losses, including the death of his friend Blancrocher in 1652, followed by that of the imperial heir who represented his hope for stability and patronage.
The composer’s response was deeply inward. He wrote a series of funerary works—tombeaux, plaintes and méditations—that can be understood as a cycle of mourning and contemplation of death, almost a “sonic theology.”
The Baroque lament was a codified rhetorical form that used specific procedures to represent grief. Froberger employs these resources with an almost ascetic economy of means: his lament does not theatricalise sorrow, but contemplates it. This is music that accepts death as mystery rather than tragedy.
Froberger writes not only to mourn the king’s death, but also to reflect on the finitude of the political world and the inevitability of universal death.
The Lamento sopra la dolorosa perdita della Real Maestà di Ferdinando IV is one of the purest musical documents of Baroque mourning, transforming grief into sonic and spiritual meditation. In it, death ceases to be an ending and becomes a silent revelation of time and the soul.
Froberger was one of the earliest composers who produced programmatic pieces, which he would usually include in his suites. These pieces are always very personal, written in an affective style and with individual titles. They include the following (in alphabetical order):
- Allemande, faite en passant le Rhin dans une barque en grand péril
- Lamentation faite sur la mort très douloureuse de Sa Majesté Impériale, Ferdinand le troisième (FbWV 633) (1657)
- Lamentation sur ce que j’ay été volé et se joüe à la discretion et encore mieux que les soldats m’ont traité (FbWV 614) (1656)
- Lamento sopra la dolorosa perdita della Real Maestà di Ferdinando IV Rè de Romani (FbWV 612) (1654)
- Méditation faite sur ma mort future, la quelle se joue lentement avec discretion (FbWV 620) (1660)
- Plainte faite à Londres pour passer la melancholie (FbWV 632)
- Tombeau fait à Paris sur la mort de Monsieur Blancrocher (FbWV 632) (1652)
These works frequently feature musical metaphors. The structure and style of Froberger’s programmatic works contributed to the development of the ‘unmeasured prelude’.
Louis Couperin, Georg Böhm, Dieterich Buxtehude, and Johann Pachelbel are among the composers who were influenced by Froberger. Various less known composers such as François Roberday or Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer also knew his music and borrowed from it. Johann Sebastian Bach was influenced by Froberger, although only to a certain degree. One of the fugues of the Well-Tempered Clavier uses a subject from Froberger’s Ricercar No. 4 (FbWV 404); however, Bach probably picked the theme from J.C.F. Fischer, who borrowed it from Froberger for his Ariadne musica, published some 20 years before the Well-Tempered Clavier.