Johann Kropfgans (also Kropffgans, Kropffganss; 14 October 1708 in Breslau – c. 1770/71, presumably in Leipzig) came from a veritable family of lutenists: his father, also named Johann Kropfgans (b. 1668 in Neustadt an der Orla), had studied with the important lutenists Philipp Franz Le Sage de Richée and Silvius Leopold Weiss and was active in Breslau both as a lutenist and as a merchant; Kropfgans’s younger siblings, Johanna Eleonora (b. 1710) and Johann Gottfried (b. 1714), also took up the lute from an early age. Kropfgans presumably received his first instruction from his father; shortly after 1735 he joined the private chapel of Count Heinrich Adolph von Brühl in Dresden and there became a pupil of Silvius Leopold Weiss, the most important and most highly paid instrumentalist at the Saxon electoral court.
A biographical detail of particular significance for music history is Kropfgans’s participation in a visit to Johann Sebastian Bach in the summer of 1739: together with his teacher Weiss and Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, he called on the Leipzig Thomaskantor at his home — an event also cited in Bach scholarship in connection with Bach’s contacts with leading lutenists of his time, contacts reflected, among other things, in works such as the “Prélude, Fugue et Allegro,” BWV 998. In 1763 Kropfgans moved to Leipzig, where he is documented, until at least 1769, as a performer in Johann Adam Hiller’s “Großen Konzerte,” and was particularly valued for his skill in accompanying recitative on the theorbo.
Compositionally, Kropfgans wrote in the homophonic galant style, which stands in marked contrast to the more contrapuntally dense, late-Baroque manner of his teacher Weiss, marking a stylistic generational shift within lute music characteristic of the mid-eighteenth century — a development observable in similar fashion within the output of Bach’s own sons. Surviving works by Kropfgans include various sonatas, divertimenti, and trios, encompassing both solo lute music and chamber works. During his lifetime, however, only a single work appeared in print: the “III Sonates pour le Lut,” Op. 1. The greater part of his remaining compositional output has not survived, or is considered lost — a fate Kropfgans shares with numerous lute composers of his generation, whose manuscript-circulated repertoire has only incompletely withstood the passage of time.
Unlike the works previously treated in this essay series, no notable reception history on the modern classical guitar can currently be established for Kropfgans’s compositions; his output remains, as far as can be determined, almost exclusively a subject of specialist lute scholarship and performance practice, represented for instance by the musicologist Tim Crawford, who specializes in his work. This distinguishes Kropfgans markedly from his teacher Weiss, whose more extensive and better-preserved body of work has long since become a fixed part of the guitar’s concert and transcription repertoire.