Background
He was born in Reichenberg (now Liberec, in the Czechoslovakian Republic, north of Prague near the border with Germany), and probably received his early training there, though little information is available about his early life.
composer educationist musicologist theorist
He was born in Reichenberg (now Liberec, in the Czechoslovakian Republic, north of Prague near the border with Germany), and probably received his early training there, though little information is available about his early life.
He was an exact contemporary of Monteverdi, and represented a transitional phase in German Lutheran music from the polyphonic Renaissance style to the early Baroque. By the early 1590s he was in Bautzen, where he wrote a school textbook, and in 1593 he received a degree from the University of Wittenberg. In 1594 he moved to Leipzig, and in 1597 he acquired the post of Kantor at Zittau, where he probably taught the young Melchior Franck.
His next post, one he held for the rest of his life, was as Kantor to Freiberg Cathedral.
