Samuel Scheidt (1587-1654); DEU

Samuel Scheidt (1587–1654) was a German composer and organist born in Halle. He studied in Amsterdam with Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck and returned to Halle, where he served as court organist and later Kapellmeister to the Margrave of Brandenburg. The disruptions of the Thirty Years’ War repeatedly affected his professional life, but he remained in Halle and became one of the leading German Protestant composers of the early Baroque.

Scheidt was especially important in the development of German organ and keyboard music, combining the contrapuntal discipline of the Sweelinck school with Lutheran chorale traditions and emerging Baroque techniques. His monumental collection Tabulatura nova, published in 1624, includes fantasias, variations, chorale settings, and liturgical works and was innovative in its use of score notation rather than traditional keyboard tablature. Together with Schütz and Schein, Scheidt forms a central triumvirate of early-seventeenth-century German composers.

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Read biography at allmusic.com.