 Né en Alsace, à Saverne, d'un père munichois, Franz Xaver Anton Murschhauser revint dès l'âge de 3 ans dans la ville d'origine de sa famille où il fut marqué par l'enseignement de Johann Kaspar Kerll et exerça de 1691 à sa mort les fonctions de chef de choeur de la Frauenkirche. Son "Prototypon Longo-Breve Organicum" (Prototype de pièces d'orgue longues et courtes) de 1703-1707, choix proposé pour la liturgie catholique, se répartit en huit ensembles classés par tons, sans cohérence musicale interne, qui regroupent 46 compositions : intonations, préambula, fugues, canzonas, toccatas et finales. Basées sur les modes ecclésiastiques, elles n'en sont pas moins tonales dans leurs développements mélodiques, leurs harmonies et leurs cadences. Leur style oscille entre ceux de Pachelbel, de la vieille toccata italienne et, dans les deux toccatas arpeggiatas, de l'ouverure à la française. Silva Manfrè est éblouissante de couleurs, de virtuosité et d'imagination sur l'orgue de l'ancienne église collégiale de Baumgartenberg (Autriche) construit par Johann Freundt en 1662, modifié par Franz Lorenz Richter en 1780 et restauré en 1999 par Christian Kögler. Mais cette suite de piécettes (entre 0'21 et 3'34) qui n'a pas été conçue pour être écoutée en continu tourne au pensum sur plus de 81 minutes. A consommer avec modération. (Michel Lorentz-Alibert) Franz Xaver Murschhauser was born in the summer of 1663. In 1676 Murschhauser joined the choir and orchestra of St Peter’s, where he benefited first from the tuition he received from the church’s choir director Sigmund Auer and later, from 1684 to 1693, from the Court Kapellmeister Johann Kaspar Kerll, which left a lasting impression on him. In July 1690, most probably on the recommendation of his teacher Johann Kaspar Kerll, Murschhauser was asked to stand in for the choirmaster of the Munich Frauenkirche, Ludwig Hölz, who was indisposed owing to illness. After the latter’s death in 1691, Murschhauser became his successor, holding the position for the remainder of his life. The Prototypon Longo-Breve Organicum (which might be translated as ‘Prototypes for organ pieces, long and short’) was published in two parts in Nuremberg in 1703 and 1707 and contains eight cycles/sections totalling 46compositions, comprising varying numbers of intonations, praeambulae, fugues, canzonas, toccatas and finales designed as preludes or postludes to figural music. In 20 of the more extensive numbers, Murschhauser indicates cuts as an aid for organists in liturgical use, if needed. It is precisely these sorts of adaptations of the musical material offered by the composer himself to suit the time available in liturgical performance that make the Prototypon such a practical and relevant work, right down to our own times. The intonations are made up of figures, broken chords and passages over a pedal point, deliberately kept free of any imitative interplay. The praeambulae consist either of motivic figurations with imitative passages and pedal points somewhat reminiscent of the style of Johann Pachelbel, or they are more akin to the old Italian toccata in their alternation of chord successions and scales. By contrast, the two toccate arpeggiate, with their full-voiced chordal writing and harmonic richness, point to the Overture in the French style which, at this time, was finding its way into southern German music primarily through the work of Johann Kaspar Ferdinand Fischer. In his edition of the Prototypon (housed in Vol. 18 of Monuments of Musical Art in Bavaria), Max Seiffert writes: ‘In all these pieces, Murschhauser demonstrates a remarkable creative power and contrapuntal skill’. In this respect, the Prototypon Longo-Breve Organicum by Franz Xaver Anton Murschhauser remains an important record of musical and organ performance in the southern German Early Baroque, and one that can still offer a valuable service to the organists of today.
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