Joseph Martin Kraus

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German-Swedish composer, born in Miltenberg am Main, Germany 20 June 1756, died in Stockholm, Sweden 15 December 1792. He moved to Stockholm in 1778, and is often referred to as "the Swedish Mozart". Joseph Martin Kraus’ dates (1756-1792) make him an exact contemporary of Mozart, integral with the untimely death at the age of 36 (of tuberculosis), one year and ten days after Mozart (he was his younger by a mere five months). He was born and trained in Germany but his compositional career really started in full in 1781, at 25, when he entered the service of the enlightened King of Sweden Gustav III after three years spent in Sweden in dire conditions, vying for recognition. Gustav even sponsored Kraus on a four-year training tour of Europe, from October 1782 to the end of 1786 – the ancient regime version of J. William Fulbright, I call it. As for Gustav, he was kind of the Swedish Lincoln or Kennedy, not because he abolished slavery or stood up to the Russians (although, for the latter, he did, to regain the Baltic provinces, but only after having allied with them to conquer Norway) but because of his assassination (and Gustav is famous for providing the model of Ricardo in Verdi’s Ballo in Maschera, derived from Auber’s Gustave III ou le Bal masqué). In fact Gustav is a highly controversial figure, an enlightened despot, admirer of Voltaire, who cut down the powers of the parliamentary nobility (the Brits and the French would have chopped his head off after a mock trial, and had he been a Roman some 1700 years earlier, his own son would have stabbed him), legalized Catholic and Jewish presence in Sweden and lavished a lot of money on the arts. No wonder then that Kraus wrote his Funeral Cantata to his memory: one puts one’s art where one’s mouth is, the French call it “la reconnaissance du ventre”, “the stomach’s recognition”. Himself died a mere nine months after his patron, an admirable case of a servant’s faithfulness to his masters, considering what I pay my cleaning lady by the hour, I doubt that she will do the same for me.

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