1.Froberger is usually credited as the creator of the Baroque suite. While this may be misleading, French composers of the time did group dance pieces by tonality above all,[10] and while other composers such as Kindermann did try to invent some kind of organisation, their dances did not attain as high a degree of artistic merit as seen in Froberger's suites. The typical Froberger suite established allemande, courante, sarabande and gigue as the obligatory parts of a suite. However, there is some controversy surrounding the placement of the gigue. In Froberger's earliest authenticated autograph, Libro Secondo, five out of six suites are in three movements, without the gigue. A single suite, no. 2, has a gigue added as a 4th movement (and a later copy adds gigues to suites nos. 3 and 5). The suites of Libro Quarto all have gigues as the 2nd movement. The order that became the standard after Froberger's death, with the gigue being the last movement, first appeared in a 1690s print of Froberger's works by the Amsterdam publisher Mortier.
All Froberger's dances are composed of two repeated sections, but they are very rarely in the standard 8+8 bars scheme. When symmetrical structure is employed, it may be 7+7 bars or 11+11 bars; more frequently one of the sections is longer or shorter than the other (more often the second is shorter than the first). This irregularity may be employed by Froberger in any dance, whereas in Chambonnières, who used similarly irregular patterns, the sarabande is always composed in the 8+16 fashion. Froberger's keyboard adaptation of the French lute style brisé almost invariably shows itself in most pieces written during and after his Paris visit.
Froberger's allemandes abandon the original dance's rhythmic scheme almost completely, abounding in short gestures, figures, ornaments and runs typical of style brisé. Like Chambonnières, Froberger avoids emphasizing internal cadences, or indeed anything that would hint at any sort of regularity;[11] unlike him, Froberger tends to use faster sixteenth-note figurations and melodies. Most of the courantes are in 6/4 time with occasional hemiolas and the eighth-note motion typical of the courante. Some of the others, however, are in 3/2 time, twice slower and moving in quarter notes. Still others are in 3/4 time and closely resemble the Italian corrente of the time. The sarabandes are mostly in 3/2 time and employ a 1+1/2 rhythm pattern, rather than the standard sarabande rhythm with the accent on the second beat. The gigues are almost invariably fugal, either in compound (6/8) or triple (3/4) meter; different sections may use different motifs, and occasionally the first section's subject is inverted for another section. Bizarrely, a few gigues use dotted rhythms in 4/4 time, and a couple feature exquisite rhapsodic 4/4 endings.
Some of the works feature written indications such as "f" and "piano" (to notate an echo effect), "doucement" ("gently") an "avec discrétion" (expressive rubato). In some of the sources such markings are particularly abundant, and the newly (2004) discovered Berlin Sing-Akademie SA 4450 manusrcipt adds similar indications to free sections in organ toccatas.[12] Some suites feature doubles; in a few, the courante is a deriative of the allemande (although this is rare; more often Froberger unites the two dances by giving them somewhat similar beginnings, but keeps the rest of the material different). Suite no. 6 from Libro Secondo is actually a set of variations subtitled Auff der Mayerin, and one of the more popular Froberger works, although it is clearly an early work and not comparable to the late suites neither in technique nor in expression.
2.Although only two of Froberger's works were published during his lifetime, his music was widely spread in Europe in hand-written copies, and he was one of the most famous composers of the era (interestingly, although he studied in Italy and obviously had friends and former mentors there, no Italian sources of his music were found). Because of his travels and his ability to absorb various national styles and incorporate them into his music, Froberger, along with other cosmopolitan composers such as Johann Kaspar Kerll and Georg Muffat, contributed greatly to the exchange of musical traditions in Europe. Finally, he was among the first major keyboard composers in history and the first to focus equally on both harpsichord/clavichord and organ.
Froberger's compositions were known to and studied by, among many others, Johann Pachelbel, Dieterich Buxtehude, Georg Muffat and his son Gottlieb Muffat, Johann Caspar Kerll, Matthias Weckmann, Louis Couperin, Johann Kirnberger, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Georg B?hm, George Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach. Furthermore, copies in Mozart's hand of the Hexachord Fantasia survive, and even Beethoven knew Froberger's work through Albrechtsberger's teachings. The profound influence on Louis Couperin made Froberger partially responsible for the change Couperin brought into the French organ tradition (as well as for the development of the unmeasured prelude, which Couperin cultivated).
Although the polyphonic pieces were highly esteemed in the 17th-18th centuries, today Froberger is chiefly remembered for his contribution to the development of the keyboard suite. Indeed, he established the form almost single-handedly and, through innovative and imaginative treatment of standard dance forms of the time, paved way for Johann Sebastian Bach's elaborate contributions to the genre (not to mention almost every major composer in Europe, since the vast majority composed suites and were influenced by the "French style" exemplified by Froberger).
passage of time
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