Although he was born in Bavaria in 1763, educated in the Germanic world until 1787, Simon Mayr was a real Italian-European musician, so to speak: set up in Venice from 1787 to 1803, he finally wound up in Bergamo, where he became the musical pillar of the town, indeed of the region, and sufficiently internationally famous that he was offered much more prestigious posts in Vienna, St Petersburg, Lisbon, London, Milan, Dresden and even Paris, in the court of Napoleon I. But he would have none of it, and remained faithful to his Bergamo home, where he is now buried, not far from his famous disciple Donizetti.
This album concentrates on the Venetian motets for soloist; remember that in the Italian world, a religious motet was a religious cantata in Latin, made up of two arias and two recitatives, with a concluding "Hallelujah" generally sung after the Credo as part of the mass. One of the most famous examples of this very codified format is surely Mozart's Exultate, jubilate. Those by Simon Mayr all date from the Venetian period, between 1795 and 1802. Of course, the melodic Italian influence is ubiquitous, but the two decades of German teaching centred on the art of counterpoint, polyphony and painstaking instrumentation, and they make themselves felt. Note also that all these works are recorded here for the first time ever. © SM/Qobuz