Mystery Man

Donald Macleod explores the music, and what little is known of the life, of Baroque master Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber. Today, Biber’s best-known work – his Mystery, or Rosary, Sonatas.

Unpublished during his lifetime and unknown outside of a small circle at the Salzburg court, for more than two centuries Biber’s Rosary Sonatas existed in a single source – a mistake-peppered presentation copy which appears to have passed through the hands of a succession of private collectors before being deposited, eventually, in the Bavarian State Library in Munich. The sonatas – there are 15 of them, organised in three groups of five – describe events in the lives of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, starting with The Annunciation and culminating in The Coronation of the Virgin. Heard as a complete cycle, they take the listener on an emotional journey of extraordinary range and intensity, whose rich and varied palette of colours Biber summons up by means of a technique called scordatura – literally, ‘mis-tuning’. From the second sonata on, Biber deliberately mis-tunes the violin in 14 different ways, resulting in subtly different tone-colours and allowing the performer to play combinations of notes that would be impossible on a normally-tuned instrument. The collection ends with a Passacaglia for unaccompanied violin that while returning to the standard tuning in which it opened, brings the cycle to a transcendent conclusion.

Sonata 1 in D minor: The Annunciation (The Rosary Sonatas: The Five Joyful Mysteries)
Riccardo Minasi, violin
Bizzarrie Armonichi

Sonata 2 in A major: The Visitation (The Rosary Sonatas: The Five Joyful Mysteries)
Rachel Podger, violin
Jonathan Manson, cello
Marcin Świątkiewicz, organ and harpsichord
David Miller, archlute

Sonata 6 in C minor: The Agony in the Garden (The Rosary Sonatas: The Five Sorrowful Mysteries)
Walter Reiter, violin
Timothy Roberts, chamber organ
Elizabeth Kenny, theorbo

Sonata 10 in G minor: The Crucifixion (The Rosary Sonatas: The Five Sorrowful Mysteries)
John Holloway, violin
Davitt Moroney, harpsichord
Tragicomedia

Sonata 14 in D major, The Assumption of the Virgin (The Rosary Sonatas: The Five Sorrowful Mysteries)
Riccardo Minasi, violin
Bizzarrie Armoniche

Passacaglia in G minor for unaccompanied violin
Andrew Manze, violin

Produced by Chris Barstow for BBC Wales