04/17/2026
Join us for a musical journey that explores Venetian music as it would have been experienced in Austria during the baroque era:— on Saturday May 2 at 7:30 PM, we seek to illustrate how Giovanni Priuli transformed the Viennese court into a thoroughly Italianate institution sponsoring some of the most opulent music ever composed.
Archduke Charles II. had transformed his court of Graz into a glittering oasis of Italian art & culture in his zealous efforts to spread the Counterreformation north of the Alps, and — following his death in 1590 — his son Ferdinand steadily increased the number of Italian musicians in his employ. Indeed, “by the late sixteenth century, it had become a mark of distinction for Catholic rulers north of the Alps to have a musical chapel staffed by Italians.” Archduke Ferdinand hired Priuli around 1614, and when Ferdinand was elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1619, he moved the entirety of his court from Graz to Vienna, making Priuli the first in a long line of Italian composers working for the Holy Roman Emperors. Graz was, therefore, the entry point which brought the baroque into Austria, and, from there, throughout the rest of Europe.
We are proud to present an all-Priuli program to commemorate four centuries since this immensely important composer’s death. We have the privilege to feature works that have likely not been heard in nearly four centuries, including a mass setting for four choirs from a choirbook from 1610 brought by Ferdinand II. from Graz to Vienna (slides 2 and 3), and large-scale motets drawn from Priuli’s Sacrorum Concentuum … pars altera from 1619 which only survives in two physical locations: one in Poland, and the other in the British Library (slides 4, 5, and 6, which were taken by our esteemed accompanist, Sean Maxwell, when he scanned this nearly impossible-to-find collection at the British Library). Since no portraits of Priuli survive, we have depicted his patron, Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II., on the first slide.
Quote taken from an article by Glixon, Kurtzman, and Saunders entitled “Musical Connections between the Austrian Habsburgs in Venice in the late 16th and 17th Centuries”.
