Johann Rosenmüller was born around 1619 in Oelsnitz, Germany, near the Czech border. By the time he completed his education at the University of Leipzig in 1640, he appeared to be headed towards an important musical career. He was a teacher at the Thomasschule by 1642 and had published an anthology of instrumental works and two volumes of sacred concertos, which he called Kern-Sprüche ("Pithy Sayings"), all by 1653. At that time it was a virtual certainty that Rosenmüller would succeed Tobias Michel as Kantor of the Tomaskirche, a position that would later be held by J. S. Bach.
But then Rosenmüller's life took an unexpected turn. In 1655 he and several students were accused of homosexual conduct and imprisoned. Penalties for such behavior were severe, but somehow Rosenmüller managed to escape, making his way to Italy. He supported himself playing the trombone at St. Mark's cathedral, Venice.
Only the scantiest documentary information exists for the rest of Rosenmüller's life. He seems to have re-established his reputation as a composer by about 1660, because at that time an emissary was sent to Venice to collect music commissioned by the Court at Weimar; several works by Rosenmüller were included in that collection. We also know that between 1673 and 1674 Johann Philipp Krieger traveled to Italy to study with Rosenmüller.
At the end of the 1670s, Rosenmüller is known to have provided music for the Ospidale della Pietà, the home for girls for which Vivaldi composed music in the eighteenth century. Rosenmüller returned to Germany around 1682 and lived the last two years of his life in Wolffenbüttel.
Rosenmüller's large musical output consists of a number of fine collections of instrumental music and sacred vocal music set to German and Latin texts. The preponderance of the vocal works are settings of Biblical texts. Several psalms, notably Beatus vir, Confitibor Domine, Dixit Dominus, Laudate pueri, and In te Domine speravi, are given a number of very different treatments. Rosenmüller's musical forces range from solo voice and continuo to grand armies of voices and instruments: cornetti, trumpets, trombones, bassoons, and all sorts of strings.
The large-scale compositions are beginning to get the attention they merit, but until now, the lovely chamber works have suffered from unjust neglect, especially those preserved in manuscript sources. This program is part of a project to reintroduce audiences to Rosenmüller, which culminated in a recording by the Newberry Consort and the King's Noyse for harmonia mundi usa.
Despite the shadow cast on his character, Rosenmüller was highly respected by his contemporaries. His printed music enjoyed a wide circulation, and the works composed in Italy were lovingly copied into score shortly after his death. Incidentally, the Rosenmüller scholar Kerala Snyder points out that the more important German composers of the period 1650–1700 rarely published their more ambitious works. Early moveable type made colaratura writing difficult to read; the notation of fast notes practiced by copyists rendered difficult music far more legible. Moreover, simple, accessible music was printed in order to reach a larger, more general audience.
The strongest influence on Rosenmüller before his years of exile in Italy was his older contemporary Heinrich Schütz. While there is no evidence that Rosenmüller actually studied with Schütz, it is possible that they met; Schütz visited Leipzig in the late 1640s. Certainly they knew and admired one another's work. They exchanged laudatory verses and references to their works. While they are structured quite differently, Rosenmüller's sacred concerti—small-scale works for groups of solo voices and instruments—owe a great deal to Schütz's works.
In the course of the twenty-seven years he spent in Venice, Rosenmüller must have worked with Alessandro Grandi, Giovanni Rovetta, Francesco Cavalli, and Giovanni Legrenzi, all of whom were associated with St. Mark's between 1650 and 1680. Clearly Rosenmüller learned much by exposure to these musicians, though his work is superior to all of theirs, with the exception of Legrenzi.
Rosenmüller's use of instruments must have been affected by his experiences with the instrumental ensemble used by the cathedral, which between 1660 and 1670 consisted of a somewhat fluid combination of cornetti, trombones, bassoon, organs, and a string ensemble of violins and viole (at that time, a frustratingly imprecise term for any number of low-pitched bowed strings).
The Ospidale della Pietà, which was to become so famous during Vivaldi's day that it was written up in several travel books, boasted more modest forces than St. Mark's, though the standard of performance was excellent. Ospedali were orphanages for young girls; the children were educated and highly trained as singers and instrumentalists, a tradition that began at the turn of the seventeenth century. Rosenmüller's large number of works for soprano may have been intended for this institution.
There is some question as to how conventional four-part vocal music may have been performed—it is possible that lower parts were played instrumentally by the young women. It is also possible that some transposition would allow low-voiced girls to sing bass parts. Rosenmüller's numerous and varied In te Domine Speravi settings may have been written for compline services at the Ospedale.
One of the more perplexing enigmas surrounding Rosenmüller's Italian output is the matter of the religious audience for whom they were written. To date, no music of his has been found in an Italian library. All of this music is preserved in German sources, presumably from sets of parts Rosenmüller brought with him to Wolffenbüttel or circulated by Krieger or his other North German admirers.
While a great deal of Rosenmüller's music accompanied Italian religious services, it was designed to be easily adaptable to the Lutheran rite: in a Protestant service, a sacred concerto or cantata could precede the sermon or communion. The virtuosic psalm settings could just as easily have been sung by boys as girls; young boys were given a rigorous vocal training in Lutheran choir schools. Rosenmüller appears to have written no Italian secular music. He seems to have remained for all intents and purposes a Lutheran church musician in exile in Venice.
Rosenmüller's instrumental music consists of dances and sonatas written throughout his career. The sonatas are superb, some of the best of the period to be written by a German. The pieces for larger ensembles of four or five strings are particularly fine, being beautifully constructed and thematically inventive. The ensemble sonatas are apt for both church and recreational use.
Most of his instrumental compositions were printed in Germany and were intended, we may assume, to appeal to a relatively large and diverse market. The undeserved obscurity of this outstanding composer cannot be accounted for by his homosexuality. This aspect of his character did not much dampen the enthusiasm of his contemporaries for his work. The lack of printed vocal music was actually an evidence of his excellence, rather than a sign of any effort to suppress his music. Instead, he may be yet another victim of the "canon of great composers" attitude of mind that has dominated the study of music until the fairly recent past.
Rosenmüller was a harmonic and formal moderate, rather than a revolutionary. His music is elegant, superbly crafted, but not possessed of an aggressive individualism. But he is every bit the musical equal of Cavalli or Grandi, and a masterful integrator of German and Italian musical traditions.
—Mary Springfels
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