Life
Little is known about his youth, but he obviously grew up in a musical family: his brother Peter Albrecht Hagen (also called Peter Albert van Hagen, 1714 - September 12, 1777) studied the violin with Francesco Geminiani, learned to play the lute and organ, and was an organist in Rotterdam. There are several transcriptions of Geminiani's violin works for lute by J.B. Hagen extant.
The younger Bernhard Joachim Hagen must have learned to play lute and violin early too, for in 1737 he was already employed as an assistant to Bayreuth violin virtuoso and Kapellmeister Johann Pfeiffer; later he was listed officially as a court violinist. He kept this position at the Bayreuth and since 1769 the Ansbach court until his death. Adam Falckenhagen and Charles Durant (Carol Duranowski), also called to the Bayreuth court by Wilhelmine of Bayreuth, may have further trained him in playing the lute.
In 1745, Hagen married Anna Fikentscher (born in Bayreuth; died May 22, 1789 in Ansbach). During 1760/1761 he visited his brother in Rotterdam and there gave five concerts from November till March.
Read more about this topic: Bernhard Joachim Hagen
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“But poor devil, poor devil, he’s best gone out of a life where he has to ride a rocking horse to find a winner.”
—Anthony Pélissier. Anthony Pélissier. Oscar (Ronald Squire)
“It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)