 In 1639 he left Freiberg again, moving to Zittau, where he succeeded Christoph Schreiber as organist; he remained in Zittau at this post for the rest of his life.While musical life in Zittau was severely damaged by the Thirty Years' War, including the decimation of the choirs and general reduction in musical standards, Hammerschmidt survived; after the end of the war in 1648 musical life slowly regained its former high standard.Exact records of his activities in Zittau are spotty, for the documents were burned in 1757 when the city was destroyed by the Austrians in the Seven Years' War; however Hammerschmidt during this portion of his career became one of the best-known composers in Germany, and the most famous representative of the concertato style of the generation after Heinrich Schütz.