John Antes - Work

Work

Antes’s compositional style is often compared to that of Franz Joseph Haydn, since the two were contemporaries. The instrumentation of Antes’s string trios might have followed that of Haydn, who wrote 21 trios for the same scoring. Haydn’s music was highly visible in the Moravian Church, most likely a large part of the music library at Fulneck, and joined that by other composers of the time such as Ignaz Pleyel, Muzio Clementi, George Frideric Handel and Jean Paul Egide Martini.

Karl Kroeger states in his article “John Antes at Fulneck” that Antes’s music stands well alongside the work of other major composers of the day, with a nod to Haydn, as well as Franz Anton Hoffmeister and Carl Stamitz. Kroeger also describes the string parts of Antes’s anthems as displaying, “subtle expression, contrapuntal interplay of motive, and idiomatic string writing.” Antes’s vocal works often used texts that illustrated his individual and sometimes painful relationship with God. This was often displayed through a “harmonic polarity between the tonic and the dominant.” Antes was also fond of “dotted rhythms, melodic thirds, long vocal lines, high tessituras, and wide ranges,” as well as equal importance to each instrument as in his string trios.