Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era

Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber (1644-1704), best known today for his instrumental music, held posts at the archiepiscopal courts in Kromèríz (Moravia) and Salzburg and was also an accomplished composer of liturgical music. Of his ten or so settings of the Mass, the 22-part Missa Christi resurgentis remains his only authenticated concerted Mass settings yet to be published for which all parts are extant. This edition, based on the only surviving source now held in the music archives of the archbishop's castle in Kromèríz , makes available for the first time a composition which reveals much about Biber's polychoral style and the style of polychoral music performed in late seventeenth-century Salzburg. It also displays many stylistic similarities with the famous 53-part Missa Salisburgensis - now thought to be by Biber - and is an important source for substantiating the claim for Biber's authorship of that work.

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