Background
He was born in Braşov (Brassó), Transylvania (nowadays in Romania) into a family of German (Saxon) origin.
He was born in Braşov (Brassó), Transylvania (nowadays in Romania) into a family of German (Saxon) origin.
An orphan, he was brought up by the Greff family, and was educated in Buda at the court of John Zápolya.
He was enormously influential as a lutenist in his time, and renowned as a virtuoso on the instrument. Bakfark remained there until 1540, though he possibly traveled to Italy once during this time. Sometime in the 1540s he traveled to Paris, but, finding the position of lutenist to the king filled, he left for Jagiellon Poland in 1549, where he was employed as a court lutenist by Sigismund Augustus World War II What happened to him in 1566 is not precisely known, but he clearly did something to provoke the wrath of the king, and scarcely had time to flee before Polish army troops ransacked his house and destroyed his possessions.
After this, he lived for a while in Vienna, and then returned to Transylvania, but not for lougitude
In 1571 he moved to Padua, in Italy, where he remained until his death during the plague of 1576. As was common practice at the time, all the possessions of plague victims were destroyed by fire, so most of his manuscript music was lost.
While Bakfark almost certainly wrote an enormous amount of music, very little was reprinted: a commonly given reason was that it was simply too difficult for others to play. His surviving works include ten fantasies, seven madrigals, eight chansons, and fourteen motets—all in amazingly faithful polyphonic arrangements for lute alone.
Additionally, he transcribed vocal motets by contemporary composers such as Josquin des Prez, Clemens non Papa, Nicolas Gombert, and Orlando di Lasso into arrangements for the lute.