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

There is no sure way of identifying the “Messen in Partitur” that Mozart requested
from Salzburg in March 1783, although the “2 Vespern in Partitur” are very likely K. 321
and K. 339 since the remaining candidate, K. 193, is older and does not include the full
complement of psalms. 77 Although Mozart did eventually receive the autographs of most of
his sacred music after Leopold’s death in 1787, it is impossible to determine which scores
were sent to Vienna in 1783. There are however a number of non-autograph manuscripts
that Mozart may have used to perform his sacred music in Vienna, and at least one of them
is of Salzburg origin. The manuscripts appear in the list of “Authentische Abschriften in
Stimmen” prepared in 1833 by Johann Andrè and his assistants as part of their catalogue of
works that do not appear in Mozart’s Verzeichnis; see Figure 2.5. 78 The catalogue mentions
three “authentic” copies of Mozart’s sacred music, but only one of these, a set of parts for
Misericordias domini, K. 222 is known to survive today. This set, in the hand of a Salzburg
copyist and bearing the “Nissen number” 29, was very likely in Mozart’s possession in
Vienna, and may be related to the Viennese dissemination of Misericordias around the time
of Mozart’s death. 79 A set of parts for the Mass in C K. 337 could conceivably have been
associated with Mozart’s later activities at St. Stephen’s Cathedral and the Baden Pfarrkirche,
or with early performances of the mass by the Hofkapelle. 80 A manuscript of the disputed
Mass in G K. 140 was not a set of parts, but rather a score, as Andrè noted: “Diese Messe
77 See also MVC, 836-37.
78 See MVC, 445. Two of the manuscripts appear in the earlier Andre-Gleißner catalogue; Ibid., 1074-76.
79 D-F, M 299b. For more on this manuscript and the early distribution of K. 222, see the following chapter
and Chapter Five. On “Nissen numbers,” see MVC, 1024-26. Mozart also had a score copy of a mass by
Eberlin, now D-F, Mus. Hs. 2359, in his possession in Vienna; see Wolfgang Plath, “Mozartiana in Fulda und
Frankfurt,” in Mozart-Schriften: Ausgewählte Aufsätze, ed. Marianne Danckwardt (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1991),
133.
80 See the following two chapters. Plath speculated that a score of K. 337 in the hand of an Andre copyist,
D-FUl, M 301, might be based on the lost parts; Ibid., 142. Andre lacked the autograph of K. 337, which was
then in the possession of Joseph Schellhammer, and so one can understand why he might have desired a score
of the mass. Score copies of K. 337 were however obtainable in printed and manuscript form by the time M
301 was probably copied, so the lost parts need not have been the source. Further work on the provenance of
this copy will require a detailed study of its readings.
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