Rosary sonatas

Description

Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber’s “Rosary Sonatas” for violin and basso continuo are unique in the violin literature and in the history of music. This masterfully composed cycle offers a unique combination of programmatic material and the use of scordatura (tuning a string instrument differently from its usual tuning). Biber was born in 1644 in Wartenberg in Bohemia — today Stráz pod Ralskem in the Czech Republic. Biber had the reputation of being one of Europe’s greatest violinists. Nearly a century after his death, Charles Burney wrote: “Of all the violinists of the last century, Biber seems to have been the best, and his solos are the most difficult and fanciful of all the music I know from that period.” The exact dating of the sonatas is uncertain and ranges from the early or mid-1670s to 1687, the year of the archbishop’s death. The collection has been preserved in a beautiful manuscript in which a copper engraving has been inserted at the head of each sonata, depicting a key moment in the corresponding mystery. Since the manuscript has no title page and includes no titles for the sonatas, it is these engravings that have suggested the titles commonly used today. Moreover, Biber did not use the term “sonata” to describe these fifteen sets, only for the individual movements. It is only since the work’s first publication in 1906 that it has been known as either the Rosary Sonatas, Mystery Sonatas, Biblical Sonatas, or even Copper-Engraving Sonatas.