Anton Zimmermann

Anton Zimmermann (1741–1781), born in Široká Niva in Silesia, began as cathedral organist in Königgrätz and, after failing to secure posts in Brno and Olomouc, settled in 1770 in Pressburg, today's Bratislava, then capital of the Kingdom of Hungary. He lived at first by composition alone, his music meeting with great success, and stood in occasionally for the ageing organist of St Martin's Cathedral. In 1774 he became Kapellmeister to Archbishop Joseph Batthyány, one of the powerful figures of the reigns of Maria Theresa and Joseph II, whose orchestra of twenty-four excellent players gave concerts twice a week in the winter palace or the gardens of the summer residence, open to any decently dressed citizen. Batthyány loved theatre, balls, fireworks, hunts and Danube cruises, and Zimmermann supplied the music for all of it: chamber works, symphonies, singspiels and melodramas alongside a large body of sacred music. He is one of the notable composers of the Classical era in the Habsburg lands, a contemporary of Haydn whose symphonies are only now being rediscovered. The organist he deputised for was Johann Andreas Schantroch, and on Schantroch's death in 1780 Zimmermann gained the post at St Martin's himself, only to die unexpectedly the following year at forty. He left more than two hundred and sixty sacred works, many of them published in Europe in his own time, and a number of his symphonies were long taken for Joseph Haydn's.