(b Teuchern, bap. 12 Jan 1674; d Hamburg, 12 Sept 1739). German composer. He wrote operas for Brunswick from c 1693 and in 1694 became court chamber composer. From 1696-7 he was Kapellmeister at Hamburg, and from 1700-01 also Kapellmeister to the Schwerin court. As joint director of the Hamburg Theater-am-Gänsemarkt, 1702-7, he presented 17 of his own operas. Der Carneval von Venedig (1707), which included local dialect, was especially successful. He remained active in Hamburg until 1718. After a period as a guest Kapellmeister at Stuttgart he served intermittently at Copenhagen. He was back in Hamburg by 1723 and in 1728 became Kantor of the cathedral. The Singspiel Der hochmüthige, gestürtzte und wieder erhabene Croesus (1730), a version of a 1710 opera, was among his last stage works.
Keiser was the central and most original figure in German Baroque opera, and wrote over 80 stage works. Most have serious German texts, which cover a wide range of subjects and often include allegorical or comic elements. They are notable for their dramatic flavour and skilful characterization. Italian and French musical elements appear (including Italian arias from 1703), with dramatic recitatives and ariosos, varied aria forms and inventive instrumentation. His several Passions, oratorios and cantatas show similar features. Among his other works are sacred music and trio sonatas. Handel drew heavily on his works in his own.
Reinhard Keiser was, to his contemporaries, the preeminent German composer of opera of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Although he did not create a truly German national opera, the quality of his compositions raised German operatic art to a new, higher level. He was known especially for his prolific melodic inspiration, his adventuresome orchestrations, and his versatility as a composer and dramatist. He composed music in many genres, including sacred music, chamber music, and French ballet, but opera was his first love, and he devoted most of his energies to dramatic vocal works. He composed operas on all kinds of subjects, including pastoral, comic, biblical, romantic, historical, and mythological. One of his finest works was an operatic character study of the Neapolitan revolutionary Masagniello, and he also set a story based on the escapades of two Hamburg pirates. He treated each of his subjects individually, changing his musical approach to fit the dramatic content of the libretti. His view of opera was that the music should express the changing emotions and motivations of the characters of the drama. To this end, he made a study of musical declamation, and turned his recitatives into highly expressive lines reflective of the oratorical and rhetorical nature of the texts. Mattheson and Scheibe both considered him the finest and most original of the contemporary German composers, and Handel pirated Keiser's scores repeatedly, using Keiser's smooth, graceful melodies in countless of his own operas and oratorios. Earlier musicologists numbered Keiser's operas in the hundreds, and there were also numerous occasional works, ballets, and serenatas. Only a portion of these works survives today.
Keiser's personality was both extravagant and self-indulgent, while his work habits were exacting. His later operas show increasingly the influence of Italian opera on his own works; he adapted aria forms, scenic structures, and much of his musical language from the Italians. He introduced, in the 1720s and 1730s, the practice of interpolating into his German operas, pre-composed Italian arias. Because Italian music was so popular and well loved in Hamburg, this soon became a standard practice with all German composers. The interpolations were many, but the other composers were always acknowledged in the libretti.
Born in Teuchern, near Weißenfels, Reinhard Keiser was the son of the organist and composer Gottfried Keiser. His father abandoned his mother and her two sons while Reinhard was still a youth. Reinhard studied music at the Thomasschule with Johann Schelle and may have also studied composition with Johann Kuhnau. His first formal position was as a court composer in Brunswick. Johann Kusser was in charge of the Brunswick opera, and it was due to his early influence that Keiser began having operas produced for the theaters in Brunswick and Hamburg. By 1697, Keiser had already written several operas for the Hamburg stage, and moved there permanently. In 1703 he began to manage the Hamburg Opera House, also known as the Gänsemarkt Theater of Hamburg, but financial difficulties soon followed, supposedly due to his own extravagances. Between the years 1705 and 1718, he produced countless new works. But when management changed hands, he was dropped as musical director, and did not again work steadily for any theater until 1722. He was brought back to the Gänsemarkt under Telemann, and the two composers worked side by side, with Keiser the dominant force in operatic composition and production. On 28 December 1728, Keiser became the Kantor of the Hamburg Cathedral, and retired from operatic composition altogether. He died on 12 September 1729. ~ Rita Laurance, All Music Guide
He was born in Teuchern (in present Saxony-Anhalt), son of the organist and teacher Gottfried Keiser (born about 1650), and educated by other organists in the town and then from 11 at the Thomas School in Leipzig, where his teachers included Johann Schelle and Johann Kuhnau, direct predecessors of Johann Sebastian Bach.
In 1694, he became court-composer to the duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, though he had probably come to the court already as early as 1692 to study its renowned operas, which had been going on since 1691, when the city had built a 1200-seater opera-house. Keiser put on his first opera Procris und Cephalus there and, the same year, his opera Basilius was put on at Hamburg and, as the musicologist Johann Mattheson noted, "received with great success and applause."
This was a fruitful period for him - composing not only operas, but arias, duets, cantatas, sérénades, church music and big oratorios, background music - all for the city's use.
About 1697 he settled permanently in Hamburg, and became the chief composer at the highly renowned Gänsemarktoper (now rebuilt as the Hamburg State Opera) in Hamburg from 1697 to 1717. From 1703 to 1709, Keiser changed the opera house from being a public institution to a commercial venture with two to three performances a week, in contrast to the opera houses intended for the nobility.
In 1718, with the Hamburg Opera defunct, he left Hamburg to seek other employment, going to Thuringia and then Stuttgart. From this period three manuscripts of sonatas in trio for flute, violin and bass continuo survive. During the summer 1721, he returned to Hamburg, but only a few weeks later made a rapid exit to Copenhagen with a Hamburg opera troop, probably because of the growing influence of Georg Philipp Telemann, engaged by the city magistrate in Keiser's absence. Between 1721 and 1727, Keiser traveled back and forth between Hamburg and Copenhagen, receiving the title of Master of the Danish Royal Chapel.
Gänsemarktoper
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After the dissolution of the opera troop, Keiser returned once more to Hamburg, but changes in its modus operandi made repeating past success difficult. Three operas from the period between 1722 and 1734 survive. Personal relations with Telemann remained good, with Telemann programming several productions of Keiser's operas.
In 1728 he became the cathedral precentor of Hamburg, and wrote largely church music there until his death in 1739.
Major operas
(First performances in Hamburg, Theater am Gänsemarkt, unless stated otherwise)
Basilius (Der königliche Schäfer oder Basilius in Arkadien) (probably Braunschweig 1693)
Cephalus und Procris (Braunschweig 1694)
Adonis (Der geliebte Adonis) (1697)
Janus (Der bei dem allgemeinen Welt-Frieden von dem Großen Augustus geschlossene Tempel des Janus) (1698)
