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

copied before Reutter became Kapellmeister in 1738. Although these manuscripts,
principally of works by Fux and Caldara, were still part of the collection in the 1780s, they
were sold in the early nineteenth century and passed to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde,
where they remain today. 30 A sadder fate awaited many works that are listed in the catalogue
but are marked with a red “NB”. This notation indicated pieces that were no longer in active
use and were stored in the Bartholomäuskapelle of the Cathedral. In 1889, the then
Domkapellmeister, Gottfried Preyer sold them to a cheesemonger as scrap paper. 31
Accounts of the events in April 1945 usually describe the St. Stephen’s collection as
entirely destroyed, 32 but this is not quite correct. A number of manuscripts in a room
adjoining the main archive survived the fire, 33 and these are still held today by the
Cathedral. 34 The surviving collection comprises some one hundred manuscripts dating from
the mid-eighteenth through the late nineteenth-century, in addition to a large number of
printed chant books. The eighteenth-century material consists mostly of works by Reutter,
but there is also an offertory by “Kayser” probably copied around the same time, and a
number of pieces by the Haydn brothers, Preindl and Vanhal from the first decade of the
nineteenth century. The numerous Mozart sources will be discussed later in this chapter.
As I have mentioned in the previous chapter, many of the sources from St. Stephen’s
are in the hand of Edge’s Viennese Mozart-Copyist 3. Figure 4.4 shows the first page of the
30 Otto Biba, “Haydniana in den Sammlungen der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien,” Österreichische
Musikzeitschrift 37, no. 3-4 (1982): 178. Some more recent instrumental repertoire for the Cathedral may also
have been transferred; see Neal Zaslaw, “Mozart, Haydn and the Sinfonia Da Chiesa,” Journal of Musicology 1
(1982): 103. I have not had the opportunity to examine these manuscripts, but given the small place such “old”
music occupied in the repertoire of the Hofkapelle, their relevance for this study is likely limited.
31 Franz Kosch, “Florian Leopold Gassmann als Kirchenkomponist” (PhD diss., Universität Wien, 1924), 46.
Neither of these sales is noted in Jahn, Die Musikhandschriften.
32 See, for example, Biba, “Haydniana in den Sammlungen der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien.”
33 Karl Pfannhauser, “Epilegomena Mozartiana,” Mozart-Jahrbuch 1971/2 (Salzburg, 1973), 294. I have been
unable to establish the exact circumstances of their survival, or the origin of Pfannhauser’s information.
According to Michael Jahn, “Zwei Kästen von Noten blieben zu Kriegsende des Jahres 1945 aus unbekannten
Gründen vom Feuer verschont.” Jahn, Die Musikhandschriften, 51.
34 For a catalogue, see Ibid., 58ff.
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