Carl Heinrich Graun

Carl Heinrich Graun (Wahrenbrück, 1703 or 1704 – Berlin, 8 August 1759) was one of the most celebrated composers at the Prussian court in the eighteenth century and the brother of the composer August Friedrich Graun. His career is best understood against the backdrop of Italian opera in the first half of the century, which he cultivated both as a singer and as a composer, and of Frederick the Great, in whose service he spent much of his life.

His training began in Dresden, where he studied at the Kreuzschule and received lessons in singing, keyboard and composition. There he took part as a singer in court performances (such as Lotti's Teofane, 1719), and in 1723 he played the cello in Prague in Fux's Costanza e Fortezza. He probably also composed motets and sacred cantatas, although almost none of this music survives. In 1724 he entered the service of Duke August Wilhelm of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel as a tenor and as the person responsible for the opera, court music and church music. His first opera, Polidorus, dates from 1726, and in Brunswick he wrote several stage works in the Italian style.

In 1735 he moved to Prussia, attracted by the offer from the future Frederick, and when Frederick came to the throne in 1740 he commissioned Graun to recruit singers in Italy. Graun returned to Berlin in 1741 and was appointed court Kapellmeister with a very high salary. For almost fifteen years he composed one or two operas per season, generally on a grand scale, for the theatre on Unter den Linden, whose opening in 1742 featured Cleopatra e Cesare as its first work. Until the theatre closed during the Seven Years' War, he shaped a repertoire that combined the model of opera seria with features particular to the Berlin court, such as dramatic ensembles, the use of dance and cavatinas in two sections.

The best-known part of his output came in the last years of his life. The Passion Der Tod Jesu, to a libretto by Karl Wilhelm Ramler, premiered in Berlin in 1755 and became a classic of the sacred repertoire, performed in Berlin for more than a century, until the late nineteenth century, and disseminated beyond the capital. His Te Deum, premiered in 1757 to celebrate a Prussian victory, was also very successful and took him beyond the court circle. Graun died in Berlin in 1759 while preparing new collaborations with publishers, and his death cut short his last known work, a cantata on a text by Metastasio.

His legacy is twofold. As an opera composer, his style was soon eclipsed by Jommelli, Piccinni or J.C. Bach, although his works remained in the Berlin repertoire until 1785 and some theorists regarded them as models. As a composer of sacred music, by contrast, his Tod Jesu represented an ideal of balance between text and music in keeping with Enlightenment aesthetics, and its success endured long beyond his own era. As a performer and composer of concertos for flute and keyboard, he also contributed to the evolution of the piano concerto form.