Rosenkranz at Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart

In September 2020 I worked on a performance of Biber’s Rosary Sonatas with artist and stage director Michael Kleine.

The title “Rosenkranz-Sonaten” of this unpublished but today very popular collection is not original: the opening piece of the book is missing, and we will never know under which name the composer meant to present his work. However, each of the 15 sonatas represents one of the Rosary mysteries, as is clearly visible from the emblems (copper engravings) which show a particular scene at the beginning of each piece.

Whether the content of the music could be interpreted in a programmatic, symbolic or abstract way, is a discussion on which every musician will have his own opinion (mine is a combination of the three, with an emphasis on the third). It is also unclear in what context these pieces would have been performed, and the player will need to find an own approach to combining the religious content with the virtuosity of the music, which is typical for anything Biber wrote for violin. The fifteen different scordaturas can be seen as playing around with the possibilities of the instrument (as Biber often does), but can also have a more profound meaning. For me it is very clear that, no matter the content, virtuosity is always a way of expression, not a goal in itself, which doesn’t take away any of the joy a violinist can have while being technically challenged.

Because of the unclear context and meaning of this music, while the ritual of the Rosary is a very suggestive image, it is an attractive idea to perform these pieces not just in a concert, but in a staged environment, where everything that can be seen, heard and felt is part of the performance, or the ritual if you will (every musical performance has a ritual character, too).
Each location has its own character and provides its own material to work with. In this case we were in the rococo chapel of Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, the concert being enabled by Akademie Schloss Solitude. The programme consisted of the Annunciation, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, embedded by twice Biber’s solo Passacaglia and two shorter improvised passacaglias.
We aim to perform all of the Rosary Sonatas this way in the future: there will be updates on this project.

Staging, decor and costumes by Michael Kleine
Assistance and organ accompaniment by Roman Lemberg
Pictures by Frank Kleinbach