Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel

Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel was born in 1690 in a village in the mountains of Saxony, in eastern Germany. His father was the village schoolteacher and organist, but he earned more of his living from mining. He loved music, and he made the boy practise singing and the keyboard from a very young age. At about 13 Stölzel went to school in a nearby town, and he lived in the house of the town’s music teacher. He later wrote that he was lucky: his teacher taught him the rules of composition, but not too many of them. So he still had room to think about melody.

At his next school some of the teachers tried to stop him making music. They taught that music was useless and even dangerous. In 1707, at 17, he went to the university in Leipzig to study religion, as his parents wished. But he never missed a performance at the opera house. The music director of one of the city’s churches played many of the student’s pieces under his own name. People liked them, but nobody knew who had written them. Shortly before he left Leipzig, Stölzel finally let people know that the music was his.

At 23 he travelled to Italy, paying for the journey with money from teaching. It is said that on the way he had to wait at the border for many days, because of a dangerous disease in the region. After eight days alone he was almost free to go. Then a newly arrived musician playfully threw his glove at him. Because Stölzel had touched someone new, he had to start waiting all over again. But the two became friends and later travelled home together. In Venice Stölzel got to know Vivaldi. In Florence people tried to persuade him to become a Catholic, which would have helped his career. But he would not give up his Protestant faith.

In 1719, at 29, he married Christiana Knauer, and they had ten children. The next year he became the head of music at the court of Gotha, a small German state. He stayed there for the rest of his life. For thirty years he wrote new church music for almost every Sunday, more than a thousand pieces, and he wrote most of the words himself. He was happy in Gotha. In 1739 he wrote that he lived there “contentedly.”

His church music was liked in other cities too. In Leipzig, Bach used Stölzel’s music for the Sunday services of a whole year, from 1735 to 1736. Bist du bei mir (If You Are with Me) comes from his opera Diomedes (1718). Bach’s wife, Anna Magdalena, copied it into her music notebook. For a long time people believed that Bach had written it. Stölzel died in Gotha in 1749, at 59. After his death most of his music was lost.

Stölzel wrote more than a thousand pieces for one small court, and even Bach used his music. Most of it is now lost, but Bist du bei mir is still sung all over the world.