Heinrich Gottfried Reichard

Heinrich Gottfried Reichard (Schleiz, 1742 – Grimma, 1801) was a German composer of sacred and vocal music and a figure in the musical life of the small Saxon town of Grimma during the second half of the eighteenth century. The son of Johann Georg Reichard, he studied in Leipzig from 1761 and graduated in 1768.

The following year he was appointed Kantor and Quartus in Grimma, and in 1782 he was promoted to Tertius. In 1799 he became corrector at the electoral school of St Augustine in the same town. Besides an extensive literary output, he left a body of music that includes thirty-seven surviving sacred cantatas (two of them fragmentary), nine Sanctus settings, one secular cantata, an aria and an instrumental symphony, now held in Dresden.

His cantatas, with texts he wrote himself in both free and rhymed verse, show great variety of treatment; those composed for the Grimma school festival enjoyed considerable fame in their day. His style owes much to Johann Friedrich Doles, cantor of the Thomasschule in Leipzig, and combines skilful orchestration and features of the empfindsamer Stil with virtuosic vocal writing rooted in operatic tradition.

His works, somewhat stiff but well constructed, are today a valuable source for understanding the musical practice of the Saxon Lutheran schools at the end of the eighteenth century.