By Samantha Owens

In some ways, it feels as though Johann Sigismund Kusser (or, as he was known in early eighteenth-century Ireland, John Sigismond Cousser) has been following me around since the 1990s, when, during the course of my Ph.D. research, I first became aware of the brief period he was employed as Württemberg court kapellmeister. Born in 1660 in Bratislava (at that time Pressburg, Hungary), Kusser moved to Stuttgart with his family while still a teenager, before going on to study music in France. His professional career began in the early 1680s with a string of kapellmeister appointments at different German courts, as well as several years working at the Gänsemarkt Opera in Hamburg. Typically (for him), the duration of Kusser’s leadership of the Württemberg Hofkapelle was short, lasting from 1698 until 1704. His stay was not without impact, however, since while there he championed the fashionable Italian musical style and produced a significant series of German-language operas. Also typical—at least of this early phase of Kusser’s career—was the fact that his time in Stuttgart was clouded by heated confrontations with both authority figures and fellow musicians. This was presumably due (at least in part) to what Johann Gottfried Walther described as Kusser’s “volatile and fiery temperament.” Further afield, even Sébastien de Brossard had heard that Kusser was “quarrelsome” and believed (erroneously) that he had been murdered due to his “unpleasantness.”

Whatever the truth concerning his character, by the time Kusser had reached his late forties, he appears to have been ready to settle down. On 4 July 1707, following two and a half years working in England as a freelancer, Kusser arrived in Dublin, where he lived the remaining twenty years of his life. As the second largest city in the British Isles, ever-expanding Dublin was a hive of activity—both commercial and cultural—with music playing an increasingly important role in the capital’s life. It is possible that Kusser traveled there in the company of violinist William Viner, who had performed “Corelli’s Sixth double Note Solo” at his own benefit concert in London not long before. The two men were clearly on friendly terms, since Kusser later owned two portraits of Viner: a large painting on display in his garret, and a further image that hung in his parlor.[1] It certainly seems likely, as Master of the State Music for the Irish viceregal court, that Viner suggested that Kusser—a recent foreign import with an impressive professional pedigree—be commissioned to set to music an ode marking Queen Anne’s birthday (“Britannia! From thy restful peace arise”), a work subsequently performed at Dublin Castle on 6 February 1708.


John Tudor, 
A Prospect of the Upper Castle Court from the Council Chamber, Dublin, ca. 1750.

John Tudor, A Prospect of the Upper Castle from the Council Chamber, Dublin, ca. 1750

Over the course of the next twenty years, Kusser would compose and direct the performances of more than twenty such odes, most of which were also produced at Dublin Castle. Labeled serenatas—in the manner of similar works presented at Continental European courts—most of these marked the birthdays of the reigning monarch (Anne, George I, and George II), with others composed for other major celebrations, including the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) and the coronation of George I (1714). Regrettably, however, despite playing such an important and regular role in the festive culture of Ireland’s viceregal court, music survives for only three of these works. This trio of rare musical sources—which have been brought together in my edition—survive as manuscripts held by Oxford’s Bodleian Library and Hamburg’s Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Carl von Ossietzky; each one is in Kusser’s hand. They comprise The Universal Applause of Mount Parnassus (for Anne’s birthday, 1711), An Idylle on the Peace (Treaty of Utrecht, 1713, set to an English translation of the prologue to Quinault and Lully’s Proserpine), and a work associated with either the birthday of King William III or the anniversary of his death. The last-named work, which is the only one of the three for which no published libretto survives, is highly significant as an Anglo-Irish musical-cultural artifact, with its virulently anti-Catholic text potently reflecting the rise of Orangeism in eighteenth-century Ireland.[2]

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Presented before the elite of local Dublin society in semi-staged productions featuring costumes, stage machinery, and dancing, these serenatas could be seen to have functioned as an operatic substitute in the city’s cultural life. Each one opens with a French-style ouverture, followed by a succession of arias, recitatives, instrumental ritornellos, and dances, and they display some unusually colorful instrumentation along the way, including “hunting horn” and voice flutes. No doubt this reflects the capabilities of the musicians Kusser had on hand in the Irish State Music, an institution over which he was appointed “Chief-Composer and Music Master” in 1716. Forming part of the lord lieutenant’s household, this ensemble comprised around twelve instrumentalists—largely string players, some of whom also played woodwinds—plus a further six trumpeters and a kettledrummer.

Despite the problematic comments made by Walther (and others) concerning Kusser’s personality, in 1728 (the year after his death) he was described by Johann Mattheson as “a worthy German musician, whose equal in the science of [musical] direction would be difficult to find in the present day.” Moreover, John Hawkins (writing in the mid-1700s) reported that Kusser’s “loss was greatly lamented,” the composer “having recommended himself to the people of that city [Dublin] by his great abilities in his profession, and the general tenor of his deportment.” During the process of editing these works, I was extremely fortunate to have seen Dubliners embrace Kusser’s music in wonderful performances mounted by Peter Whelan, director of both the Irish Baroque Orchestra and Ensemble Marsyas (including as part of the latter’s landmark concert, “Rediscovering Irish State Musick,” at St. Patrick’s Hall, Dublin Castle, August 2017). Both in performance and on paper, there is no doubt that these works provide a vivid and fascinating impression of the musical culture of the Irish viceregal court in the first two decades of the eighteenth century.


[1] For details of further artworks owned by Kusser, see my monograph, The Well-Travelled Musician: John Sigismond Cousser and Musical Exchange in Baroque Europe (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2017).

[2] See my article, “Johann Sigismund Cousser, William III and the Serenata in Early Eighteenth-Century Dublin,” Eighteenth-Century Music 6 (2009): 7–39.


Samantha OwensSamantha Owens is Professor of Musicology at Victoria University of Wellington/Te Herenga Waka, New Zealand and an Honorary Professor of Music at the University of Queensland, Australia. In 2012, she was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and she has also held visiting fellowships at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel (2004); Clare Hall, University of Cambridge (2007–8); and (as an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow) at the Institut für Musik, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg (2009–10) and the Bach-Archiv in Leipzig (2018). Her research centers on early modern German court music, the musical life of early eighteenth-century Dublin, and the reception of German music and musicians in Australasia, 1850–1950. Recent publications have included a monograph, The Well-Travelled Musician: John Sigismond Cousser and Musical Exchange in Baroque Europe (Boydell and Brewer, 2017) and an edited book, J. S. Bach in Australia: Studies in Reception and Performance, with Kerry Murphy and Denis Collins (Lyrebird Press, 2018).