Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi

Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi was an Italian cleric and composer associated especially with the Gonzaga court and the church of Santa Barbara in Mantua. Reference works differ over his exact birth and death dates; modern authority records commonly normalize them to 1556 and 1622, while older music dictionaries give other dates. He served as a singer and church musician and became an important figure in Mantuan musical life during the late Renaissance.

Gastoldi is especially remembered for his balletti, short, rhythmically buoyant vocal pieces that circulated widely beyond Italy. His Balletti a cinque voci, published in Venice in 1591, included the secular piece whose melody was later adapted for the German sacred song In dir ist Freude. The German hymn tune therefore began not as a Lutheran chorale composed for this text, but as an Italian secular melody that was given a new sacred text in the practice known as contrafactum.

That distinction is important for this hymn's history. Gastoldi supplied the musical source, while German editors and poets transformed its function in the 1590s. The resulting tune, now known as IN DIR IST FREUDE, retained the compact phrases and dance-like vitality of its Renaissance origin and later entered a substantial organ and congregational tradition.