Girolamo Frescobaldi - Legacy

Legacy

Contemporary critics acknowledged Frescobaldi as the single greatest trendsetter of keyboard music of their time. Even critics who did not approve of Frescobaldi’s vocal works agreed that he was a genius both playing and composing for the keyboard. Frescobaldi’s music did not lose direct influence until the 1660s, and his works held influence over the development of keyboard music over a century after his death. Bernardo Pasquini promoted Girolamo Frescobaldi to the rank of pedagogical authority.

Frescobaldi's pupils included numerous Italian composers, but the most important was a German, Johann Jakob Froberger, who studied with him in 1637–41. Froberger's works were influenced not only by Frescobaldi but also by Michelangelo Rossi; he became one of the most influential composers of the 17th century, and, similarly to Frescobaldi, his works were still studied in the 18th century. Frescobaldi's work was known to, and influenced, numerous major composers outside Italy, including Henry Purcell, Johann Pachelbel, and Johann Sebastian Bach.

Bach is known to have owned a number of Frescobaldi's works, including a manuscript copy of Frescobaldi's Fiori musicali (Venice, 1635), which he signed and dated 1714 and performed in Weimar the same year. Frescobaldi's influence on Bach is most evident in his early choral preludes for organ. Finally, Frescobaldi's toccatas and canzonas, with their sudden changes and contrasting sections, may have inspired the celebrated stylus fantasticus of the North German organ school.