A particularly musical corner of the Upper Palatinate is the birthplace of composers Christoph Gluck and Max Reger as well as Franz Biebl, who was born on September 1, 1906, in Pursruck near the fairytale town of Amberg. He possessed a spontaneous musical talent and studied at the Berlin Conservatory of Music with the great teacher Joseph Haas. Here his natural gift was nurtured into the clear, uncompromising technical assurance and musical mastery which are characteristic of Biebl's works.His successful early teaching career at the Mozarteum in Salzburg was interrupted by World War II. Upon his release as an American prisoner of war he continued his musical career as choir director at Fürstenfeld near Munich, He accepted a position with the Bavarian Radio where he was apppointed director of choral. There he single-handedly developed the professional choir. He achieved astonishing success, both with his flair for programming music and for building a choir from the ground up. He established an amateur choir as well, encouraging widespread musical expression in the broader community. Franz Biebl brought together his experience as a teacher, his creative sensibility, and his astonishing choral mastery to produce a unified expressive musical achievement.
A glance at the works of Franz Biebl shows its richly varied nature, which responds to his artistic approach to form a unified whole. Every composition is crafted with the same sense of honesty and careful attention to detail. Biebl's approach to creativity demands that whether his compositions are based on folk song motifs or the composer's original material, the smallest turn of phrase for Biebl is an exquisite piece of artistry. This tremendous appeal captivates the listener as well as the performer, in this case, the singer. Biebl's music makes intimate claim and speaks directly to the heart without making pretentious demands on either performer or listener. Precisely this directness in Biebl's writing lies in his unity of simple but profound mastery of the material, delivering a spontaneous freshness carefully worked through in thought and detail.
Biebl impresses with the delicacy of the lyric poet who catches "the voice of the people in their songs." He manages to sketch human feeling with a silver pen, as the musical greats of the 17th century did, or as Friedrich Silcher does in the 20th century, capturing contemporary realities in a valuable frame. For him, the "social" in the 19th century meaning of "companionable" and the contemporary understanding of "social" as "sociological" are one and the same in the music he presents. The resulting song cycles and choral pieces forge completely new paths of vocal expression because they provide fresh outlooks on contemporary thinking. Central to all of Franz Biebl's work is that every note, every line of music is directed toward contemporary human longings and ideals. None of his work is self-absorbed. Franz Biebl's music has human dimension with universal appeal.
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