Johann Bernhard Staudt

Johann Bernhard Staudt (Wiener Neustadt, 1654 – Vienna, November 1712) was an Austrian composer and educator whose output belongs to the tradition of Jesuit school theatre in Baroque Vienna. He is of interest above all for the music he wrote for performances at the colleges of the Society of Jesus, an environment that in his day brought together pupils, courtiers and authorities around major social occasions.

It seems that Staudt was a boarder at the Jesuit college in Vienna from 1666 to 1670, and he attended some university lectures during the 1667–1668 academic year. Very little documentation survives of his time in the city between 1670 and 1684, largely because the college archives were lost after the suppression of the order in 1773. From 1684 until his death he served as regens chori of the Viennese Jesuit house, a post in which he was responsible for the musical training of the pupils. His standing is reflected in his admission as a free citizen of the city.

His duties included organising the music for the great celebrations, which held a central place in the Jesuit educational ideal. For these he composed both secular and sacred music and directed the rehearsals. These occasions usually revolved around dramatic performances and were the principal social events in the capital, often presided over by the Emperor and Empress. Staudt composed music for 39 stage works performed between 1684 and 1707, most of them written by the Jesuit Johann Baptist Adolph, whose dramas are regarded as the high point of Jesuit dramatic art.

The theatre of the period aimed at a very broad moral, to display the achievements of the pupils and of the Society, and to strengthen faith, often with tributes to the sovereign, such as the epilogue of Ferdinandus quintus (1684), a eulogy of the Habsburgs and of Emperor Leopold I. Apart from that work, where the music carried more weight than usual, modern criticism, citing Kramer, describes him as a technically well-trained but prolific composer whom routine had left stale, although it should be remembered that his pieces had didactic purposes. The choruses and ritornellos are simple, the arias frequently include roulades, and strophic forms were extended to da capo. The instrumentation is clearly modelled on that of Kerll's Pia et fortis mulier in S. Natalia (1677).

Beyond his school music, Staudt was expected to write liturgical works, although only a few survive, and these have not yet been studied in detail. Among his surviving works are the sacred dramas Eucharistia dissidentium (1697) and Eucharistia Amoris nexus (1704), as well as numerous secular titles of a moral character. His legacy is above all that of a very complete record of the music that accompanied Viennese Jesuit theatre at its height.