Paul Hallmann

Paul Hallmann (Friedland, now Frýtland, near Schweidnitz, Silesia, 1600 – Breslau, now Wrocław, 1650) was a German composer of religious music associated with the Protestant court of the dukes of Liegnitz (Legnica) in early seventeenth-century Silesia. His importance rests above all on the body of sacred works he wrote for that setting, a repertoire that survives today only in fragments.

Hallmann was a member of the chapel of Duke Georg Rudolph in Liegnitz. The duke reportedly admired him so greatly that on 31 January 1624 he granted him noble status, and in 1632 he was appointed a member of the princely council. Fourteen of his sacred works were preserved in the famous Rudolphine Library in Liegnitz, but the dispersal of that collection during the Second World War meant that some were lost and the remainder were left incomplete.

The musicologist Scholz, who had known the library before the war, grouped his output into three blocks. The first comprises three masses and a Magnificat, including a five-voice mass in Greek and German and two six-voice masses in Latin, one of them based on the motet by Jacobus Handl. The second consists of four-voice harmonisations of melodies, three of them based on a single Christmas melody. The third, probably the most interesting, consists of four motets, including an eight-voice requiem without continuo and a five-voice piece with instruments, the most modern in the collection, whose expressive writing seems to reflect the Thirty Years' War, which struck Liegnitz between 1627 and 1635.

Hallmann is today remembered as a local composer of uneven quality, whose best pages bear witness to the religious and political climate of Protestant Silesia during the war. His heavily damaged output survives only in part.