Life
Sylvius Leopold Weiss was a German composer and lutenist, born in 1687 in Grottkau near Breslau, the son of lutenist Johann Jacob Weiss. He served at courts in Breslau and Rome before settling in 1718 at the Dresden court of the Elector of Saxony, where he remained a highly paid virtuoso until his death in 1750. In later life he befriended Wilhelm Friedemann Bach and, through him, met Johann Sebastian Bach; the two were said to have competed in improvising fantasias and fugues. Weiss taught Prince Philip Hyacinth of Lobkowicz and his wife, and his son Johann Adolph Faustinus Weiss succeeded him as Saxon court lutenist. He is buried in Dresden’s Old Catholic Cemetery.
Impact
Sylvius Leopold Weiss is widely considered the greatest lute composer of the late Baroque and a contemporary of J.S. Bach, with whom he was famously said to have traded improvisations at the keyboard and lute. He left roughly 850 surviving pieces that pushed the baroque lute to its technical and expressive limits, synthesizing French, Italian, and German styles and representing the summit of solo lute composition before the instrument’s eighteenth-century decline.
Repertoire
Passacaglia in D major, c. 1719
A large-scale set of variations over a repeating bass, one of Weiss’s most celebrated and frequently performed solo works.
Sylvius Leopold Weiss Passagaille in D Dur. Evangelina Mascardi baroque lute — Performed by Evangelina Mascardi · baroque lute
Passacaglia in D major by Sylvius Leopold Weiss, Jadran Duncumb (baroque lute) — Performed by Jadran Duncumb · baroque lute
Tombeau sur la mort de M. Comte de Logy, c. 1721
An elegiac memorial piece mourning the death of fellow lutenist-composer Count Jan Antoni Losy, regarded as one of Weiss’s most emotionally profound works.
S. L. Weiss – Tombeau sur la mort de M. Comte de Logy – Evangelina Mascardi – Baroque lute — Performed by Evangelina Mascardi · baroque lute
Raphaella Smits – Tombeau sur la mort de M. Comte de Logy – S. L. Weiss — Performed by Raphaella Smits · 11-string guitar