Music history is plagued with beautiful, yet unimportant works and others that were obviously significant, but almost impossible to listen to. Biber’s works have a double life though one doesn’t interfere with the other. Undoubtedly, his works remain as they were at the time they were written (or, at least, what a contemporary view can surmise from that original reading), but they are also what history has constructed of them. The famous quodlibet in different keys from the ten-part Battalia in D major is both the funny story in which “the company dissipated with all kinds of humour” (Die liederliche Gesellschaft von allerley Humor) is represented by extreme dissonance (although it also features extremely simple popular songs) and the advanced work that a twenty-first-century ear will discover in it. His notable Passacaglia for solo violin—whose score is prefixed by a picture of a guardian angel and child—is a masterful variation constructed over 65 repetitions of a descending tetrachord (G-F-E-D). It may have been performed on the Festivity of the Guardian Angel, falling on 2 October, at Salzburg Cathedral. But (in the same way as Kafka’s precursors) it is also the new work that emerged once the shadow of its obligatory inter-text was projected over it, the Ciaccona from Bach’s Partita II in D minor.