Overture (Sinfonia da Chiesa)

Though Joseph Martin Kraus (1756-1792) became the most influential Swedish musician of the 18th century, he was born and educated in Germany and lived only eight years in Stockholm before his early death at the age of 36. Yet in that brief period he had taught composers and created the Swedish school of opera. Kraus had a lifelong fascination with drama and unsurprisingly his symphonies are full of unexpected twists and turns and contain many forward-looking stylistic devices that anticipate music of the next century. The Overture in D minor is an unusual and rather atypical symphonic work. It consists of an elaborate fugue that Kraus rearranged from the overture to Johann Georg Albrechtsberger’s oratorio Die Pilgrime auf Golgotha, preceded by a brief, musically complex Largo, replete with dramatic unisons, mournful suspensions, and a short fugato. This introduction was later reused by Kraus for the Funeral Cantata for Gustav III (1792). In form and structure this makes the work an example of the sinfonia da chiesa, a designation that its subsequent performance history supports. Although the autograph is not dated, watermark evidence shows that it was written about 1790.