Johann Andreas Herbst

Johann Andreas Herbst (baptized June 9, 1588 – January 24, 1666) was a German composer and music theorist of the early Baroque era. He was a contemporary of Michael Praetorius and Heinrich Schütz, and like them, assisted in importing the grand Venetian style and the other features of the early Baroque into Protestant Germany. Life He was born at Nuremberg, and most likely had his early education there. Possibly he studied with Hans Leo Hassler, one of the most prominent German composers at the turn of the century, since Hassler was teaching in Nuremberg while Herbst was a student, and there is a close stylistic relationship between the music of the two composers. Herbst became Kapellmeister at Butzbach in 1614, at Darmstadt in 1618, and at Frankfurt am Main in 1623. In 1636 he accepted a position in Nuremberg, and returned to the city of his birth; it was evidently a frustrating appointment for him, for he wrote of his time there bitterly, and in 1644 he went back to Frankfurt, where he remained for the rest of his life. His most productive time was the period in Nuremberg and the second Frankfurt employment, during which he wrote his theoretical treatises and composed the bulk of