Martin Vogt was born a son to the teacher, organists and property manager Ambrosius Vogt on 3 April 1781 in Kulmain in Upper Palatinate. Up to his tenth year of life he received the musical training in his parents' house. As a ten year old singer boy he cause a stir with his appearances in monasteries. In addition he noticed, “that even the arias were so liked that someone nearly carried me away in the hands of the choir.” Traveling to the monasteries via four-horse drawn carriages likewise made an impression for the boys' choir at that time. Written around 1850, in his autobiography Martin Vogt characterized his own musical family as follows:
“My father was not only an excellent organist, particularly fuguist, but played in additon the stringed instruments and all all wind instruments, horn and trumpet, spendidly. My mother maiden name Zach, daughter of a brewer from Fichtelberg. I remember that my mother was a relative of the famous cathedral conductor and counterpointists Zach in Mainz. The older brother of my father was Benedictine in the Weissenohe Abbey near Nuremberg, also an excellent musician; the younger brother of my father was world clergyman and director of music in the Jesuiten Seminario at Amberg, at the time famous not only as musician, but also as a composer.”
From 1791 to 1794 Martin Vogt received eclectic music lessons in the monastery school Michelfeld. From 1794 to 1799 he visited the Jesuitenseminar St. Paul in Regensburg with more than thousand students of different orientations. Here he was instructed by Father Brixi on the organ. After head organist of this seminar had been ruled out, the position was entrusted to the 15-year old student. It was considered already at that time as masterful connoisseurs of the basso continuo. During this time his first compositions, pieces for singing and orchestra also developed. During holidays the music students were pulled often from monastery to monastery and were thankful to their musical contribution gladly seen by guests.
During his years of travel starting in 1799 he participated in musical scene in Austria, among other things in Vienna and Salzburg. He saw In 1806 he sought refuge into Switzerland from Salzburg in order to escape the threatening draft into the Napoleonic army. During his travels in Switzerland he made music in many monasteries such as Ottobeuren, St. Trudpert, Einsiedeln, Muri, Mariastein and St. Urban, where he remained more than two years. To his recollection was not only Southern Germany, Austrian and Swiss, but Prague, Budapest, Venice and Padua.
Only starting in 1812 did he feel free at that time in French Arlesheim, thanks to employment (without military obligation) as cathedral organist and a school teacher. From here he traveled regularly to Basel for further musical ventures. In Basel he came into contact with well-known musicians and was also visited by them in Arlesheim: Fränzl and Peter von Winter in Munich, Carl Maria von Weber, Louis Spohr, Bernhard Romberg as well as the son of Mozart particularly admired by him.
From 1823 to 1837 he assumed the position of director of music in the cathedral St. Gallen and the music teacher at the catholic high school.
In the last phase of his life from 1837 to 1854 he was cathedral organist and choir leader in the Münster St. Martin von Colmar. There he died on 18 April 1854.
In the twentieth century the French publishing house Les edition Delatour France calls Vogt “Alsatian Haydn” and promotes Vogt's melodies as the inventions of wealth and the quality.
The musical work consists of over 300 compositions, which are kept by France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland in libraries. In printed form all organ compositions appeared and of the 36 masses somewhat more than half. Since different masses were ordered directly with Martin Vogt, they remained partly unpublished.
He added to this: “Through the many guests, who always came to St. Urban my compositions in Switzerland would become known at the moment and I would have wanted to satisfy all requests, though then I would have had to write day and night”.
The compositions are kept particularly at Swiss monasteries like Einsiedeln, Fribourg, Solothurn, Lucerne, Disentis and Engelberg, where the largest organ of Switzerland is. In the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris compositions are also found, which probably came from Colmar. The widespread places of discovery say something about the fame of his work in the nineteenth century.
Apart from the church compositions also different works developed like popular scores of most “Alemannic poems” from Johann Peter Hebel, which were printed around 1806 in Karlsruhe. He wrote about composing in Salzburg: “With the Augustinians, where Michael Haydn spent all evenings with a good beer. All evening was quartet singing. From there on into the taverns of St. Peter. For this society I composed now a great many three and four-vocal songs of which most were printed at Häckler in Salzburg.” During his stay in St. Urban he dealt with the direct orders of compositions for masses himself. Out of St. Gallen the bookshop Scheitlin (later Scheitlin and Zollikofer) partook in the expansion of his work in German-speaking countries. Apart from working as an organist in Colmar, his son Caspar Vogt published further compositions of Martin Vogt in France.
