Giovanni Henrico Albicastro

Johann Heinrich von Weissenburg (c. 1660 – 26 January 1730), known as Giovanni Henrico Albicastro, was an amateur musician and composer of the Baroque era. Biography Albicastro came from Klosterneuburg near Vienna, or the village of Bieswangen, near Pappenheim in central Bavaria, not far from the village of Weissenburg (“White Castle”, thus “Albicastro” in Latin or Italian). Johann Gottfried Walther included Albicastro in his Musicalisches Lexicon (1732) under the mistaken supposition that Albicastro came from Switzerland; consequently he has often been included in lists of Swiss musicians. In 1686, Albicastro moved to Leiden, in the Netherlands, where he registered at the University of Leiden as a Musicus Academiae, but his name does not appear in the university’s archives. In 1696, a collection of twelve of his trio sonatas appeared, entitled Il giardino armonico sacro-profano (“The sacred-profane harmonic garden”), Op. 3. Edited by François Barbry, it was published in Bruges by François van Heurck; no copies of the last six, or of Albicastro’s opus 1 or opus 2 from Bruges seem to have survived. In Amsterdam a separate set of opus numbers were published by Estienne Roger: collect