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

when, as in this case, the autographs were created more than three decades apart. Curiously
enough, Nowak seems to have been unaware of the “Freystädtler-Studien”, the most
extensive example of Freystädtler’s handwriting contemporary to the Requiem, despite the
fact that Wolfgang Plath had identified the hand more than a decade before. 189 Even if one
accepts Nowak’s case for the distinctiveness of the “hook” on the natural sign, this shows
only that Freystädtler and the unknown scribe in the Requiem share one characteristic – not
the multiple concordances of clefs, time signatures, accidentals and the like that are necessary
for a credible identification. 190 Nowak rather bizarrely attempts to bolster his case for the
distinctiveness of the hook by providing examples from autographs by Bruckner and his
student Karl Aigner. Such examples are at best anachronistic, and reveal more of Nowak’s
own experience in Bruckner scholarship than anything to do with Freystädtler. Nowak
further ignores the many inconsistencies – some observable in the facsimiles he provides –
between Freystädtler’s handwriting and that found in the Kyrie. Most obviously, two of the
lines in Freystädtler’s sharp sign consistently point upwards about 45 degrees from the
horizontal, while those in the Kyrie are approximately straight. 191 In view of these weaknesses
and the apparent caution implied by the “preliminary” status of the article, it is difficult to
see how Nowak could ever consider it “wohl als sicher...daß in der Kyrie-Fuge des Mozart-
Requiems die begleitenden Instrumente von Freystädtler...geschrieben worden sind.” 192
189 Wolfgang Plath, “Der Gegenwärtige Stand der Mozart-Forschung,” in Mozart-Schriften: Ausgewählte
Aufsätze, ed. Marianne Danckwardt (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1991), 69n3 and 83. The manuscripts were previously
thought to be the result of Mozart’s own studies under his father.
190 See especially MVC, 229-30.
191 A good example of Freystädtler’s handwriting may be seen on “Seite 3” of the Studien (NMA X/30/2, 59).
Freystädtler’s bass clef is entirely different to the bass clef written in the bassoon part at the start of the Kyrie, as
the former curves right instead of left and has two vertical lines between the clef and the two dots. However, it
is uncertain at this stage whether the same hand wrote both the clef and the subsequent notation in the Kyrie,
and the possibility that Mozart was responsible for this bass clef cannot be entirely excluded.
192 Nowak, “Instrumentalstimmen,” 201.
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