Gregor Aichinger

Gregor Aichinger (1564 or 1565 – night of 20/21 January 1628) was a German composer. Karl Proske, in the preface to vol. 2 of his Musica Divina, calls him a priest of Regensburg, and praises him for the devout and ingenuous mastery of his style. Life His epitaph states he died in 1628 aged 63, making his birth year 1564 or 1565. In 1577 he moved to Munich to study under Orlando di Lasso, moving the following year to the University of Ingolstadt, where he studied alongside Jakob Fugger, later Prince Bishop of Constance. This put him in contact with the wider Fugger family of Augsburg, to whom he later dedicated many of his works. Jakob’s main patron was Jakob III. Fugger (1542–1598), who appointed him his organist in 1584, using an instrument he had paid for in 1580 at the Augsburg basilica of St.s Ulrich and Afra. He also made Aichinger his court composer and director of his chamber-music. Fugger also funded a number of Italian trips for Aichinger – in Venice he became one of Giovanni Gabrieli’s first pupils and probably also converted from Protestantism to Catholicism. Fugger granted him more study leave in 1588 during which he studied theology and philosophy back at the Universit