Das Instrumentalrepertoire der Dresdner Hofkapelle in den ersten beiden Dritteln des 18. Jahrhunderts

During the first half of the eighteenth century the Dresden electoral court maintained a Kapelle that was the envy of rulers across German-speaking lands. Employed by or closely associated with the court were such important musicians as Johann Sebastian Bach, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, Johann Friedrich Fasch, Johann Adolf Hasse, Johann David Heinichen, Johann Georg Pisendel, Johann Joachim Quantz, Georg Philipp Telemann, Sylvius Leopold Weiss and Jan Dismas Zelenka. Although much of the royal musical collection went up in flames as a consquence of the Prussian artillery attack on Dresden in 1760, roughly 1,750 manuscripts of instrumental works from the first half of the century survived. At the time considered obsolete, they were locked away – and, for many decades, completely forgotten – in ‘Schrank No: II’ in the basement of the Catholic court church. This priceless corpus has since received attention from several generations of scholars working on subrepertories, but there have been few attempts to coordinate their efforts or to consider the collection as a whole. The idea of an international conference focusing on the Dresden instrumental manuscripts, with an emphasis on transmission and copyists’ hands, grew out of a research project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft during the period 2008–2010. Entitled ‘Die Instrumentalmusik der Dresdner Hofkapelle zur Zeit der sächsisch-polnischen Union. Erschließung, Digitalisierung und Internetpräsentation’ (The Instrumental Music of the Dresden Hofkapelle during the Saxon-Polish Union: Indexing, Digitization and Internet Presentation), the project resulted in the voluminous contents of ‘Schrank No: II’ being digitized, with databases of copyists and watermarks currently under construction. The digitized manuscripts themselves may be consulted at . Organized by Karl Wilhelm Geck (Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staatsund Universitätsbibliothek, Dresden), Gerhard Poppe (Universität Koblenz and Katholische Akademie des Bistums DresdenMeißen) and Peter Wollny (Bach-Archiv, Leipzig), the conference provided a first glimpse of how the digitization project might deepen our understanding of the Dresden Hofkapelle’s repertory. As someone who has worked with this repertory for many years, I am filled with admiration for the digitization project, which has already led to the attribution of many anonymously transmitted works and will doubtless lead to further pleasant surprises. At the same time, the conference’s unwavering focus on source-critical issues left me with the odd sensation of having travelled several decades backward in time, to an era when establishing a reliable chronology and the provenance of manuscript sources was regarded as practically an end in itself – in other words, when positivistic concerns left little room for those that have since become prominent in the discipline, such as the music’s cultural meanings. But if the digitization project reveals anything, it is that there is still important spadework to be done as a preliminary to asking additional questions about this repertory. Fittingly, speakers were placed in front of a large curtain printed with a facsimile of a Vivaldi autograph score belonging to the Dresden collection. The first two paper sessions were mainly devoted to the possibilities and pitfalls inherent in constructing digital databases of manuscripts and copying hands, but it was appropriate that the first words were those of Karl Heller (formerly Universität Rostock), whose foundational work on the copyists and paper types in the Dresden Vivaldi manuscripts during the 1960s inspired similar studies by other scholars on figures such as Hasse, Telemann and Zelenka. Heller recounted his efforts at identifying copying hands in particular, a story of both enlightening progress and blind alleys familiar to anyone who has engaged in such work. Next a summary by Karl Wilhelm Geck and Sylvie Reinelt (Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staatsund Universitätsbibliothek, Dresden) of the Dresden digitization project led to papers by Joachim Veit (Detmold Hochschule für Musik and Universität Paderborn), Uwe communications