Jakob Kremberg

Jakob Kremberg
(b Warsaw, c1650; bur. London, 20 Sept 1715). Composer, lutenist and music copyist of Polish birth, later active in England.

He was registered at the University of Leipzig in 1672, became a chamber musician to the Duke-Administrator of Magdeburg in 1677, and joined the royal music at Stockholm the next year. He was an alto at the Dresden court between 1682 and at least 1691. Between 1693 and 1695 he directed the Hamburg opera with Johann Sigismund Kusser; he may have been the author of the libretto for Georg Bronner's opera Venus, oder Die siegende Liebe (1694; lost). Some time in the following two years he was at the University of Leiden, where he composed a setting of a poem by the physician and scientist Herman Boerhaave and perhaps taught John Clerk of Penicuik (Davidson).