Johann Ernst Eberlin

• Born — 27 March 1702 • Died — 19 June 1762

Eberlin's first musical training began in 1712 at the Jesuit Gymnasium of St. Salvator in Augsburg. His teachers there were Georg Egger and Balthasar Siberer, who taught him how to play the organ. He began his university education in 1721 at the Benedictine University in Salzburg where he studied law, but from 1723 turned to music. His first breakthrough was in 1727 when he became the organist for Count Leopold von Firmian (then Archbishop of Salzburg). He reached the peak of his career when he was the organist for Archbishop Andreas Jakob von Dietrichstein. By 1749 he held the posts of Hof- und Domkapellmeister (Court and Cathedral chapel master) simultaneously, an achievement which his successors Michael Haydn, Leopold Mozart, and Mozart himself were not to match. Despite Leopold Mozart's great opinion of Eberlin, and having sent his son some of Eberlin's best-known works, his keyboard pieces, the young Mozart later tired of them, writing in a letter of 20 April 1782 that Eberlin's works were "far too trivial to deserve a place beside Handel and Bach." Eberlin composed industriously and played at church concerts. After his death, though, his strict choral pieces in the stile antico faded from popularity and only his keyboard works were (to a limited extent) remembered. His contemporaries included Anton Cajetan Adlgasser.