Jan Antonín Losy, Count of Losinthal, also known as the Comte de Logy, was a Bohemian aristocrat, Baroque lutenist, and composer born around 1650 near Steken in southern Bohemia and active in Prague until his death in 1721. Born into a family ennobled for defending Prague against Swedish troops, he earned a doctorate in philosophy at Prague’s Charles-Ferdinand University before traveling through Europe, likely including France, where he absorbed the French lute style associated with lutenists such as Charles Mouton and François Dufaut. Despite being an aristocratic amateur rather than a professional musician, Jan Antonín Losy was celebrated by contemporaries such as Johann Kuhnau and Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel for playing as skillfully as any professional, and he composed several hundred works, chiefly dance suites, of which only one piece was published in his lifetime.

Losy was probably the most important lutenist-composer active in Bohemia during the lute’s Baroque heyday, fusing French style brisé with a more cantabile, Italianate melodic sensibility. Though he published almost nothing himself, his suites circulated widely in manuscript and were later arranged for guitar, keyboard, and other instruments. His reputation was memorialized after his death when Sylvius Leopold Weiss, the era’s greatest lutenist, dedicated a celebrated Tombeau to his memory, cementing Losy’s place in the history of the lute.

Sources:

• https://sites.google.com/view/another-lute-website/l/jan-antonin-losy