Francesc

Francesc Soler

Tarragona , 1645
Girona , 1 de maig de 1688

Composer, Performer i Teacher

He was Kapellmeister of Montroig del Camp until 1680, when he obtained the same position at the cathedral of Vic. He set apart the role of organist from that of Kapellmeister and restructured the musical activity of the cathedral and the placement of the choirboys. In 1682 he became Kapellmeister of the cathedral of Girona, where he organized the musical activity and the teaching of singers and instrumentalists for over six years. Among his output 115 works have survived, 63 of which were written in Latin and 52 in Romance. The liturgical corpus includes 11 masses in addition to offices, antiphons, chants, lamentations, motets, psalms and litanies. In these pieces, he used baroque polychoral polyphony of up to fifteen parts (distributed between voices and instruments), as is the case in Completes a 15 –a piece composed in 1686 to celebrate the victory of the Girona against the French troops in the spring of 1684. He also composed a voluminous collection of villancets grouped into different religious topics: Christmas, the Virgin, the Saints and the Holly Sacrament.