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

Whether Burney communicated any of these impressions to the Cathedral’s
Kapellmeister is unknown, but it was perhaps not the most appropriate time to evaluate the
performance of the ensemble. The Kapellmeister, Leopold Hofmann, had occupied the
position for just six months, taking over from the now deceased Reutter. 58 The new
incumbent did eventually achieve some success: in 1773 he received a medal from the
Vienna Magistrat for a mass written to celebrate the election of a new mayor, and ultimately
served the Cathedral for over two decades before his death in March 1793. 59 The small
amount of scholarship on Hofmann’s church music, however, has characterised this period,
and the final decade in particular, as a lost opportunity, in which the composer entered a
period of semi-retirement and treated the position as a virtual sinecure. Certain of
Hofmann’s contemporaries were less than impressed with his performance, and pious
Mozartians have sought to portray him as an aging irrelevance who should have made way
for his younger contemporary. Their indignation could only increase in the knowledge that
Hofmann was particularly well-off by the standards of Viennese musicians, counting among
his possessions a house and vineyard in Oberdöbling, a fine set of clothes, and a telescope. 60
Any attempt to formulate a judicious assessment of Hofmann’s compositional
activities in the decade leading up to Mozart’s application is now, unfortunately, impossible,
as the bombing of the Cathedral in April 1945 resulted in the complete destruction of all of
the sources for Hofmann’s own music. These manuscripts, which we know included parts
Nicolai, Beschreibung Einer Reise Durch Deutschland und die Schweiz im Jahre 1781, 12 vols. (Berlin and
Stettin: n.p., 1783-96), iv.544.
57 Burney, An Eighteenth-Century Musical Tour in Central Europe and the Netherlands, 122.
58 The St. Stephen’s position entailed responsibility, at least nominally, for several other churches in the inner
city; see Biba1783, 49. A 1783 accountbook for St. Salvator, the church within the city council complex (A-
Wsa, Handschriften A 162/7, f. 8v-9r) records further payments to Hofmann and the St. Stephen’s organist,
Matthias Mittermeier.
59 On Hofmann’s biography, see Hermine Prohászka, “Leopold Hofmann als Messenkomponist” (PhD diss.,
Universität Wien, 1956), 12-30.
60 Hofmann’s Verlassenschaftsabhandlung is transcribed in Ibid., V/9-23. For an analysis, see Julia Moore,
“Beethoven and Musical Economics” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1987), 440-46.
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