“He was a good contrapuntist, and his quartets currently continue to be the best models of this style.” (Wilhelm Hertel, 1784). The musician on whom fellow composer Hertel lavished this praise had, by then, been dead for more than twenty years – a long time when considering the enormous change in musical taste during the latter 18th c. The “good contrapuntist” was Johann Gottlieb Janitsch (1708-63), by trade one of the “first chapel servants” of Frederick the Great, from 1736. Numerous manuscripts, some recorded here, survive solely in the Archive of Berlin’s Singakademie.
