One hundred years before Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was appointed a court musician in Salzburg, another well-known musician was in the employ of the Archbishop as composer and violinist. Heinrich von Biber (1644-1704) was generally considered to be the greatest violin virtuoso of his time and the composer of demanding and revolutionary music for solo violin and for the orchestra.

In 1673 von Biber created his Battalia à 10, a descriptive set of movements for string orchestra in the tradition of vocal descriptions of battles by Janequin, Matthias Werrecore and Orazio Vecchi. Composers of battle music for instruments included Andrea Gabrieli, William Byrd and Annibale Padovano and the tradition could be considered to have continued in later times with Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and Prokofiev‘s Battle on the Ice from Alexander Nevsky.

 In the Battalia à 10, which may have been composed for a carnival pantomime, much of von Biber’s imagery is woven into the music itself. He calls for a number of unusual instrumental techniques, such as: col legno, in which the players use the wood of their bows to beat the strings of their instruments; a percussive pizzicato in Die Schlacht (“The Battle”) to imitate cannon shots; and even instructing the bass player to use a piece of paper to buzz on the strings in Der Mars (Mars, the god of war) to imitate a snare drum, while the solo violin imitates a military fife.

In the second movement, titled Die liederliche gesellschaft von allerley Humor (“The lusty society of all types of humor”), Biber mixes a number of different German, Slovak, and Czech folk songs into a quodlibet (combining of several melodies simultaneously that don’t necessarily fit together) . He even notes on the second violone part that “hic dissonat ubique nam ebrii sic diversis Cantilenis clamare solent.” (“Here it is dissonant everywhere, for thus are the drunks accustomed to bellow with different songs.”) Though this may have been a carnival piece, the realities of seventeenth-century warfare are marked by the pathos of the concluding Adagio: Lamento der verwundten Musquetir (“Lament of the wounded musketeers”).