Violinist and composer Johann Jakob Walther was a key figure in the development of virtuoso violin technique in the 17th century. Written for his own use, his music poses formidable technical demands but is also formally novel. Walther was born in 1650 in Wittersda in the Duchy of Thuringia, near Erfurt in what is now central Germany. He is apparently unconnected with the botanical artist of the same name, but his life is largely obscure. He did appear in the 1732 Musikalisches Lexikon by Johann Gottfried Walther, who was a cousin to Johann Sebastian Bach, and from this entry come the main outlines of his career. He seems to have learned to play the violin as a youth when he was employed as a servant. By 1670, he was working as a violinist at the court of Cosimo III de' Medici in Florence. Walther became primo violinista da camera at the splendid Dresden court in 1674. Two years later, the first of his two extant collections of music, entitled Scherzi da Violino solo con il basso continuo ("Scherzos for violin solo with basso continuo"), was published. It contained 40 pieces. After the death of his patron in Dresden, Walther moved to the city of Mainz in 1680, where he became a priest, church official, and Italian secretary at the court of the Holy Roman Empire's Elector of Mainz. In 1686, he published a second collection of pieces, Hortulus chelicus, which included 28 pieces. It did well enough to go into a second edition in 1694, now with a German title, Wohlgepflanzter Violinischer Lustgarten ("The Well-Planted Garden of Violin Delights"). These violin works contain technical devices of extreme difficulty, including difficult double stops and arpeggios; among German violinists of the 17th century, whose innovations led directly to those in Bach's sonatas and partitas for solo violin, he is comparable only to Heinrich Ignaz von Biber and Johann Paul von Westhoff. The 19th century critic François-Joseph Fétis likened him to a 17th century Paganini. His treatments of ostinato variation forms were often novel. Walther apparently prospered in Mainz due to his influential position, buying a house of his own in the central city and also a farm in Weilbach, some distance away. He died in Mainz on November 2, 1717. For several centuries, his music was largely unknown, but a general upsurge of interest in the German tradition of which he was a part has stimulated new performances and recordings. By 2022, some two dozen of his 68 pieces had been recorded; that year, violinist Bojan Čičić and his Illyria Consort issued a complete recording of the Scherzi da violino. ~ James Manheim, Rovi