ABSTRACT
The first instance of a single dominating personality in the history of keyboard performance coincides with the elevation of instrumental-and particularly keyboardmusic to a level that was almost comparable with vocal music. Organs were, of course, already indispensable in the church and court life of German lands, but their performers and repertory were essentially anonymous. The spectacular career of the blind organist Conrad Paumann, and the survival of several major sources of keyboard music from the fifteenth century, together suggest a fundamental shift in the status of the keyboard medium. Paumann enjoyed much fame in his first position as organist of the church of St. Sebald, and subsequently town organist, in Nuremberg. Soon he became organist to the Duke of Bavaria and was promoted in concert-presumably as a status symbol of the Munich court-before Philip the Good of Burgundy, Emperor Frederick III, and ultimately in Mantua, three years before his death.
