Hans Leo Haßler has been played on NTS in shows including Getting Warmer w/ Jen Monroe, featured first on 15 January 2018. Songs played include Fantasia and Sanctus.

Please use Hans Leo Hassler

Hans Leo Haßler von Roseneck (also Hassler or Hasler) (baptized 26 October 1564 – 8 June 1612) was a German composer and organist of the late Renaissance and early Baroque eras. He was born in Nuremberg and died in Frankfurt am Main.

Haßler most likely studied music as a boy with his father, an organist. In 1584, like many German composers of the time, he went to Italy to continue his studies; he arrived in Venice during the peak of activity of the Venetian school, the composers who wrote in the resplendent polychoral style, which was soon to become popular outside of its native city. Haßler was already familiar with some of this music, as numerous prints had circulated in Germany due to the interest of Leonhard Lechner, who was associated with Orlande de Lassus in Munich.

While in Venice, Haßler became friends with Giovanni Gabrieli; together they studied with Andrea Gabrieli, Giovanni's uncle.

Haßler returned to Germany in 1586, moving to Augsburg where he served as an organist to Octavian II Fugger, a nobleman there. The Augsburg years were extremely creative for him; in addition he became well-known as a composer and organist at this time, though his influence was limited because he was a Protestant in an area which was still heavily Catholic. Later he moved to Nuremberg, and then to Ulm; around this time he acquired tuberculosis, which proved to be fatal, although he did have a brief stint as chapel organist in Dresden, where he composed his last works. After he died, Michael Praetorius and Heinrich Schütz were appointed in his place.

Haßler was one of the first to bring the innovations of the Venetian style across the Alps. While musicians of the stature of Lassus had been working in Germany for years, they represented the older school, the prima pratica, the fully developed and refined Renaissance style of polyphony; in Italy new trends were emerging which were to define what was later called the Baroque era. Musicians such as Haßler, and later Schütz, carried the concertato style, the polychoral idea, and the freely emotional expression of the Venetians into the German culture, creating the first and most important Baroque development outside of Italy.

Haßler's sacred music is both for the Roman Catholic church and the Lutheran. Stylistically, his earlier music is more progressive than his later: he uses polychoral techniques, textural contrasts and occasional chromaticism in the music he wrote after coming back from Italy; but most of his later religious music is conservative, using linear polyphony in the manner of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. His secular music — madrigals, canzonette, and songs among the vocal, and ricercars, canzonas, introits and toccatas among the instrumental — show many of the advanced techniques of the Gabrielis in Italy, but with a somewhat more restrained character, and always attentive to craftsmanship and beauty of sound.