ABSTRACT
Keyboard suites by Matthias Weckmann have survived, but no consort suites; it is difficult to believe that one of the leading figures of Hamburg's town music never explored the genre. In addition, a good deal of the suite output of Dieterich Becker, one of the most important Hamburg town musicians, was not printed but circulated in manuscript. Hamburg was one of the wealthiest cities in the German lands and was largely free from royal interference. The consort-suite tradition in Hamburg flourished from the 1660s until the early 1690s. Establishing a background to the specifics of the Hamburg tradition is as problematic as establishing a reliable chronology. Johann Jacob Froberger's use of variation techniques was sporadic but, when he did use them, it was often with great imagination, and it is this feature of his work that particularly seems to have attracted the attention of Hamburg composers.
