MOZART AND THE PRACTICE OF SACRED MUSIC, 1781-91 a ...

The Zeremonialprotokoll occasionally gives notice of what music was performed. For
example, on 26 December 1782, Elisabeth of Württemberg, the future first wife of Archduke
Franz was confirmed by Archbishop Migazzi in the Hofburgkapelle. There was a high mass,
“welches auf allerh. Befehl ein von der Composition des sel. Hofkapellmeisters Reitter mit
Trumpeten und Pauken versehenes Tutti Amt war.” 19 The most important source, however,
for the repertoire of the Hofkapelle during Mozart’s time is the original performance material,
which often has dates written on the wrappers and occasionally locations as well. The
holdings of the Hofkapelle are unusually well-preserved by the standards of eighteenth-
century sacred music archives, although the history of their provenance is not at all
straightforward. 20 As pieces fell out of active use, it was customary for their manuscripts to be
donated to the Hofbibliothek in Vienna and its successor, the Österreichische
Nationalbibliothek. The library initially numbered them as part of the main sequence of
manuscripts, so that their origin was obscured and one has to use catalogues of various sorts
to recover the extent of the collection. 21 In the 1920s, the library began using a separate
classification, HK, for manuscripts deriving from the Hofkapelle. As of 1981, however,
almost all of the musical sources for the works of Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Bruckner and
many other composers still remained uncatalogued in the chapel archives, even though they
had not been used in performances for decades and in some cases dated back to the
eighteenth century. The Hofmusikkapelle’s managing director, Ernst Karner, justified the
19 Quoted in Wolfsgruber, Die k. u. k. Hofburgkapelle, 309.
20 For an overview of the collection, see Günter Brosche, “Das Hofmusikarchiv,” in Musica Imperialis: 500
Jahre Hofmusikkapelle in Wien, 1498-1998, ed. Günter Brosche (Tutzing: Schneider, 1998), 117-24.
21 Among these are A-Wn, INV 3/Tabulae 2 (olim Mus. Hs. 2485), INV 1/Hofmusikarchiv 4 (olim Mus. Hs.
2480) and INV 1/Hofkapelle 5 (olim Mus. Hs. 2475). Many manuscripts from the Hofkapelle are stamped “E.
v. Raymond” or “Raymond,” probably referring to Ernst von Raymond (1792-1866), a k. k. Kammerfurier.
The Kammermusikarchiv of the Hofkapelle, initially transferred to the Hofoperntheater, was acquired by the
ÖNB in 1927 and is now under Mus. Hs. 3601-4550; see Robert Haas, “Aufgaben und Ziele der
Mozartforschung,” in Neues Mozart-Jahrbuch 1942, ed. Erich Valentin (Augsburg: Gustav Bosse, 1943), 81.
The collection is catalogued in Mus. Hs. 2474.
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