Ouverture und Fuge in B-Dur

And again, one of my first compositions, which required thorough editing in order to be heard on the beautiful baroque organ of St. Peter's Church in Erfurt Büßleben. The basic theme is the French melody, the Marseillaise, which dominates the overture (a French overture, of course), the fugue and the concluding movement.
I have taken the tempo down considerably and placed great emphasis on the articulation and ornamentation in particular, and also invested time in order to achieve the best possible result.

Now a few words about the history of the Song of the French People:
The Marseillaise was composed by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle on the night of 26 April 1792 during the French declaration of war in the First Coalition War in Strasbourg, Alsace. It was initially entitled Chant de guerre pour l'armée du Rhin, i.e. "War Song for the Army of the Rhine", and was dedicated to the Commander-in-Chief and Governor of Strasbourg, Count Luckner, who had been appointed Marshal of France the year before. This is why the Marseillaise still sounds daily at 12:05 from the carillon on the market square in Cham in the Upper Palatinate, the Count's birthplace.

As early as the end of the 18th century, it was disputed that de Lisle was the author of the Marseillaise; in the mid-19th century and again in 1915, on the occasion of the transfer of de Lisle's remains to the Invalides Cathedral in Paris, newspaper and magazine articles appeared according to which the melody came from a German composer (a certain organist Holtzmann in Meersburg), of all people, or at any rate that it was based on an old German melody. This assertion appears again and again (mostly anecdotally or in connection with a polemic against French state symbols), although it can be considered convincingly refuted at the latest since 1922.

The song was given the name Marseillaise because it was sung by soldiers from Marseilles on 30 July 1792 when they entered Paris, shortly before the Tuileries storm.