“one of the greatest geniuses I have ever known…”

Then an event occurred which was to suddenly interrupt Kraus’s studies. As a result of defamations, his father was taken to court in 1776, and because of this he was suspended from his office until the verdict was pronounced. This meant that for the time being, he could no longer finance his son’s studies. Joseph Martin Kraus returned to his family in Buchen and stayed there for a year. He was not idle during this time. On the contrary, it is thanks to these circumstances that we have many church music works which he composed for his Buchen congregation: for example, his Requiem in D minor VB2 1, a truly remarkable half-hour work, often with very short concise movements omitting some lines of text in the Sequence between the “Dies irae” and “Lacrymosa”, and the oratorio Der Tod Jesu VB2 17 for which Kraus also wrote the libretto. Kraus also had considerable literary talents, which is why he himself was sometimes undecided about whether his own future lay as a composer or a poet. At the beginning of his studies he had some pastoral poems printed which are no longer extant. He used the events surrounding his father’s trial in his drama Tolon in 1776. And in 1777 his work Etwas von und über Musik fürs Jahr 1777 was published anonymously. In this he pointedly and impulsively explained his own music aesthetic and again positioned himself here as a typical representative of ‘Sturm und Drang’. He strongly criticised, for example, the common practice in church music of composing mass settings with little relation to content, instead the tendency to set the text for splendid effect, sparing no scorn: “Before the first Kyrie a roaring Overture with trumpets and timpani was heard – the chorus joined in joyfully with great force, and nothing was spared in celebrating the piece, so the organist pulled out all the stops and with each entry he needed all ten fingers. Schmidt, Holzbauer, Brixi, Schmidt in Mainz have composed Masses: set other words to these, so they could make operettas out of them. One takes the more solidly (or whatever you call them!) arranged works by Waßmut, Pögel, Richter, the great Fux, Gaßmann – why does one need to repeat a simple Amen several hundred times? Should not music in churches be mainly for the heart? Are fugues suitable for this?” For Kraus, the fugue, probably in its instrumental form, was of particularly high importance as long as it was used artistically. He wrote about this elsewhere: “O – thou diamond of harmonic reason – thou source of the emotions – thine is the power to enrapture the connoisseur heavenwards, and to open the lover’s eyes wide or even send him to sleep!” He then expressed his feelings about the canonic double fugue: “Thou, thou art the masterpiece of nature.”