Johann Kaspar Mertz was a Hungarian guitarist and composer.

He was born in August

17th, 1806 in Pressburg, now Bratislava. He lived in Wien between 1840 and 1856,
where he would eventually know other important figures of the guitar, like Antonio
Diabelli, Mauro Giuliani and Simon Molitor. Hes best known thanks to his virtuosity: in
fact he was able to play in several cities of the Central Europe like Berlin, Dresden,
Krakow and Warsaw. Typically, he used a 10-string guitar for concerts. He met his wife
on one of his concert tours, the pianist Josephine Plantin, whom he married in Prague
in 1842.
Mertz eventually devoted most of his life to the guitar, but his concert activity was
suspended because he became seriously ill from a strychnine overdose, taken to
relieve symptoms of neuralgia. During his convalescence, he wrote his famous
Bardenklnge, a work perhaps inspired by the pianism of his wife, who was then
steeped in the Romantic repertory of the day.
From 1848, Mertz resumed his concert tours, and his wife often appeared with him in
duo repertory. In 1856 he entered a competition for composers held in Bruxelles by
Nikolaj Makaroff, but Mertz died on October 14th, 1856, in Wien shortly before news
was released hat he had won first prize for his Fanatsie Hongrois, Fantasie Originale
and Le Gondolier (Op.65)
Most of Mertzs guitar works were transcriptions or arrangements of famous Classical
pieces from opera, song, and other sources, which are still highly regarded today. His
famous Bardenklange is a two-part collection of pieces said to carry the spirit of
Schumann, with echoes of works like Carnival and Kreisleriana. Among his better
known transcriptions are the Six Schubertian Songs. While the works of Mertz have
gained rightly deserved attention since the 1990s, they are mostly still fare from
standard-repertory status; but fortunately, a good portion of Mertzs better efforts
have been widely available via recording in the past couple of decades. His music
follows the style of Chopin, Mendelssohn and Schumann, unlike most of his
contemporaries who followed Rossini (as did Giuliani) and Mozart or Haydn (as did Sor
and Aguado).