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

page of the concertmaster’s part for K. 317. The parts, copied around 1800, were in constant
use into World War II and beyond, as the “player’s graffiti” on them reveals. Dates written
here include 1 October 1939, “Kurz nach Beendigung des Krieges mit Polen,” 23 June
1940, “Kurz nach Waffenstillstand mit Frankreich,” and 22 June 1941, “Kriegserklärung an
Russland” at the start of Operation Barbarossa. In other performance parts of similar vintage,
one finds dates into the 1950s. Such remarkable longevity is not restricted to the Hofkapelle:
Dexter Edge has shown that much of the original Viennese performance material for Le
Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni, copied in 1786 and 1788, was in continuous use at the
Court Theatre as late as the 1890s. 216 The crucial question, of course, is whether any of the
Hofkapelle’s Mozart sources date from the composer’s lifetime or shortly thereafter, and
whether they show any evidence of use at the coronations.
Table 3.2 lists all Mozart sources from the Hofkapelle that I can identify at present as
dating from around 1800 or earlier. 217 The process of reconstructing the early Mozart
holdings of the court chapel is not straightforward: as most of the parts saw continuous use
over a period of 150 years, the potential for individual items to go missing or become
216 MVC, 1513.
217 The parts for the Requiem do not derive originally from the Hofkapelle, but from the personal collection of
Empress Maria Therese (1772-1807). A further set of parts for a “Missa in C maggiore” by Mozart listed
among the Empress’s holdings may correspond to one of the other masses listed in the table. These parts were
transferred to the Hofkapelle after Maria Therese’s death; see John A. Rice, Empress Marie Therese and Music at
the Viennese Court, 1792-1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 39-44, 273. For the sake of
completeness, the table lists an unusual set of parts for K. 220 featuring an additional “orchestra” of toy
instruments, attributed solely to Paul Wranitzky. This material, which is partially in Wranitzky’s hand, also
derives from Marie Therese but was not transferred to the Hofkapelle due to its liturgical unsuitability. The
watermarks, three moons | BV over C under a canopy and three moons | GF under canopy probably do not
match any described by Tyson or Duda, but nevertheless suggest a date in the 1790s or 1802 at the latest, when
the arrangement was performed. On this arrangement see Rice, Empress Marie Therese, 148-50, John A. Rice,
“Adding Birds to Mozart's "Sparrow Mass": An Arrangement with Children's Instruments by Paul Wranitzky,”
Newsletter of the Mozart Society of America 8, no. 2 (2004): 8-9. K. 220 in its original form did not enter the
repertoire of the Hofkapelle until the 1820s. One further manuscript which entered the Hofkapelle by unclear
means is Mozart’s autograph copy of Michael Haydn’s offertory Tres Sunt MH 183, now Mus. Hs. 34233.
203