Johann Friedrich Fasch (15 April 1688 – 5 December 1758) was a German violinist and composer. Much of his music is in the Baroque-Classical transitional style known as galant.
Fasch was born in the town of Buttelstedt, 11 km north of Weimar, the eldest child of schoolmaster Friedrich Georg Fasch and his wife Sophie Wegerig, from Leißling near Weißenfels. After his father's death in 1700, Fasch lived with his maternal uncle, the clergyman Gottfried Wegerig in Göthewitz, and it was presumably in this way that he made the acquaintance of the Opera composer Reinhard Keiser.
Fasch was a choirboy in Weissenfels and studied under Johann Kuhnau at the St. Thomas School in Leipzig. It was in Leipzig in 1708 that he founded a Collegium Musicum. In 1711 he wrote an opera to be performed at the Peter-Paul Festival in Naumburg, and a second one for the festival in 1712.
In 1714, unable to procure aristocratic patronage for a journey to Italy, Fasch instead travelled to Darmstadt to study composition for three months under his former Leipzig prefect Christoph Graupner and Gottfried Grünewald. He then traveled extensively in the Holy Roman Empire, becoming a violinist in the orchestra in Bayreuth in 1714, was an amanuensis in Gera till 1719 and from 1719 until 1721 held a court post as organist in Greiz.
His next major post was Prague, where he served for two years as Kapellmeister and court composer to Count Morzin. In 1722, he "reluctantly accepted the position" of court Kapellmeister at Zerbst, Saxony-Anhalt, a post he held until his death. (The organist Johann Ulich was his assistant.) Also in 1722, he was invited to apply for the position of Thomaskantor in Leipzig at his alma mater, the St. Thomas School, but he chose to withdraw his name from the competition. The Leipzig opening was eventually filled by Johann Sebastian Bach, who had considerable esteem for Fasch.
His works include cantatas, concertos, symphonies, and chamber music. None of his music was published in his lifetime, and according to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians in 2014, "it appears that most of his vocal works (including 9 complete cantata cycles, at least 14 masses and four operas) are lost, while the instrumental works are mostly extant." However, his music was "widely performed" in his day and was held in high regard by contemporaries. Georg Philipp Telemann performed a cycle of his church cantatas in 1733 in Hamburg; an organ work once attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach as BWV 585 is now known to be an arrangement of movements from a Fasch trio sonata; and Bach's Collegium Musicum in Leipzig (a different group than the one founded by Fasch) performed some of Fasch's Orchestral Suites (ten of them, according to Hugo Riemann in 1900, based on his examination of copies in the library of the St. Thomas School, which Riemann said were partly in Bach's hand. Only one of these suites survived World War II; it had in Fasch's era fallen into the hands of Bach's student Carl Gotthelf Gerlach).
In 1900, Riemann asserted that Fasch's style was an important link between the Baroque and Classical periods, and that he was one of those who "set instrumental music entirely on its feet and displaced fugal writing with modern 'thematic' style’"; New Grove's entry on Fasch states, "Later research has largely confirmed [Riemann's] assessment."
Fasch died in Zerbst at the age of 70 on 5 December 1758. He was the father of Carl Friedrich Christian Fasch, born on 18 November 1736, like his father a musician of note. The city of Zerbst/Anhalt has been hosting International Festivals since 1983, biennially since 1993. The Sixteenth International Fasch Festival (2021) was cancelled due to COVID-19 restrictions.
This listing is based on Rüdiger Pfeiffer's now out-dated Fasch Werke Verzeichnis. The Internationale Fasch Gesellschaft e.V. has been working on a new online Fasch-Verzeichnis, which is now called Fasch-Repertorium. Its main contributor, Dr. Gottfried Gille, gave a paper on the project's progress at the 2013 international Fasch conference, held on the occasion of the twelfth International Fasch Festival (18-21 April 2013). All papers presented at the conference were published in vol. 12 of Fasch-Studien.
Fwv B: 3 \ Freudenbezeugung der vier Tageszeiten, autograph score at D-DS
Fwv B: 4 \ Beglückter Tag (for the birthday of Catherine the Great, 1757), autograph score and performing materials in the Sing-Akademie Berlin archive, D-B; performed at 10th Fasch-Festtage on 10 April 2008
Fwv C:B 1 \ Beständigkeit bleibt mein Vergnügen
Fwv D:B 1 \ Bewahre deinen Fuss
Fwv D:D 1 \ Dein allerhöchster Adel
Fwv D:D 2 \ Der Gottlose ist wie ein Wetter
Fwv D:D 3 \ Die den Herrn vertrauen
Fwv D:D 4 \ Die Gerechten müssen sich freuen
Fwv D:D 5 \ Die so das Land des Lichts bewohnen