Caspar Kittel (1603–1639) belonged to the generation of German musicians who brought the new Italian art of singing to Germany and gave it its own distinct style. After completing his training in Dresden, he was sent to Venice in 1624 to study, where he became acquainted with the new Italian art of singing firsthand. He returned to the Dresden court as a theorbo player, singer, and teacher of the choirboys, and in 1638 published his only surviving collection: Arias and Cantatas for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Voices.

The work is one of the early German examples of the stile nuovo, the modern monodic style that emerged in Italy around 1600. At the same time, the term “Cantate” appears here for the first time in a German music print. Kittel combines the rhetorical power of the German language with Italian virtuosity, creating music of remarkable linguistic precision and melodic expressiveness.

The five solo arias are particularly revealing. Kittel composed them specifically for “as yet untrained singers” and used them to train his choirboys. The first verse of each appears in a simple, unadorned form; in the following verses, an increasingly rich ornamentation unfolds step by step, closely attuned to the meaning and emotion of the text. Thus, the collection offers a rare insight into the singing practice of the early 17th century and into the transmission of Italian vocal art in Germany.

The program presents a selection from Kittel’s only surviving printed work and places it in the musical context of his time with works by Giulio Caccini, Johann Nauwach, Biagio Marini, and Matthias Weckmann.