Catholics who love the rosary may be unaware of an extraordinary aid to their prayer: the Rosary Sonatas, by the Bohemian composer and violinist Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber.
Biber was employed in the Austrian and Moravian towns of Graz and Kroměříž before entering his service in Salzburg, where he would compose the grand and glorious Missa Salisburgensis on the occasion of the 1,100th anniversary of the Salzburgian archbishopric in 1682. The great 18th-century musicologist Charles Burney wrote that “of all the violin players of the last century Biber seems to have been the best, and his solos are the most difficult and fanciful of any music I have seen of the same period”. And Burney didn’t even know the Rosary Sonatas for solo violin and continuo, which are yet more intricate works than the “Sonatæ violino solo” on which the Englishman based his judgment.
