Johann Paul von Westhoff was a German violinist and composer of the Baroque era, born in Dresden, where he served in the Hofkapelle from 1674 to 1697 before briefly teaching languages at the University of Wittenberg and then joining the Weimar court as a court musician from 1699 until his death in 1705. Celebrated in his lifetime as a virtuoso who performed before Louis XIV, he composed chiefly for solo violin, including a set of six partitas that stand among the earliest surviving examples of unaccompanied violin music.

Westhoff was one of the most highly regarded German violinists of his generation, ranked alongside Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber and Johann Jakob Walther as a founder of the German solo violin tradition. His unaccompanied partitas are widely considered a direct precursor to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin, which Bach composed while working in Weimar not long after Westhoff’s death, and modern scholarship credits him with helping establish solo violin composition as a serious genre, even though much of his output has since been lost.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Paul_von_Westhoff