An unknown collection of music manuscripts from Otyń (Wartenberg)

• Authors: Patryk Frankowski , Alina Mądry
• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

PL

The Museum of Musical Instruments in Poznan (a branch of the National Museum) is in possession of a very important collection of music manuscripts from the former Jesuit monastery in Otyń (Ger. Wartenberg), which was dissolved in 1776. The activities of this centre were associated primarily with the figure of Karol Reinach, the monastery’s last superior (from 1753). Reinach maintained friendly relations with Frederick II the Great, who was an ardent flautist, as we know, and visited Otyń from time to time. The Otyń manuscripts were bequeathed to the museum in 1947, along with three preserved instruments: a pair of kettledrums and a bass viola da gamba. At present, the collection of manuscripts from the Jesuit ensemble of Otyń contains fifty-six compositions, written between 1753 and 1768. Thirty-one pieces have fully certified provenance, reflected on the title pages of the manuscripts in the form of inscriptions, such as ‘pro Choro Residentiae Wartenbergensis’, and in the names of the Otyń transcribers. Twenty-two compositions were classified as belonging to the Jesuit collection on the basis of its inventory number, placed in the top right corner. Seventeen of the preserved manuscripts were provided with exact dates of origin (ten compositions were dated to the day, the other seven to a particular year). In these manuscripts, one can find compositions of the following types: offertoria, antiphons, Marian hymns (mostly arias), litanies, carols, a cantata, a dialogue and a sequence. All of them are vocal-instrumental. The lyrics were written in Latin and German, and their subject matter is mostly connected with the Marian cult (the antiphons Ave Regina Caelorum, Alma Redemptoris Mater and Regina Coeli Laetare\ the hymn Ave Maris Stella), Jesuit themes (a litany of St John Nepomucen, a prayer of St Francis Xavier, O Deus Amo ego te) and Christmas (carols). The well-known composers include Frantisek Xaver Brixi (1732-1771), Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1739-1799), Carl Heinrich Graun (1704-1759), Johann Adolph Hasse (1699-1783) and Karel Loos (1724-1772), and there are also the less well-known or nearly unknown, such as Carolus Gaebel [Gebel], F. Passelt [?], Joseph Rhodigez, Antonio Josepho Ronge (or Runge [?]), Francisco Rudolph and Wollmann. The continued examination of the collection will certainly reveal more details that are unknown or as yet barely identified. The research is due to be capped with the publication of a thematic catalogue of Otyń’s music manuscripts and their registration in the RISM database.

Keywords

PL

Otyń; Wartenberg; musical culture; Jesuit music; musical manuscript; Karol Reinach

• Publisher: Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu
• Journal: Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology
• Year: 2012
• Issue: 11
• Pages: 67-80

Dates

published

2018-10-17

Contributors

author

Patryk Frankowski

• A musicology graduate of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Patryk Frankowski is currently a senior assistant at the Museum of Musical Instruments in Poznań. He is currently writing his PhD thesis on a collection of musical instruments from the Jasna Góra Monastery in the context of the musical repertoire inherited by the monastery from the ensemble that was active there from the late sixteenth centuiy until 1914. His research is concentrated on woodwind and brass instruments, their history, repertoire and performance practice, especially from the Baroque up to the end of the nineteenth century. He is a member of the Research and Editing Team of Jasna Gora’s music collection.

author

Alina Mądry

• PhD is an assistant professor on the Department of Musicology of Adam Mickiewicz University (AMU) in Poznań. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on the keyboard works of C. P. E. Bach in the context of German musical aesthetics of the second half of the eighteenth century (AMU, Faculty of History). She is the author of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: estetyka, stylistyka, dzieło [C. P. E. Bach: aesthetics, style and oeuvre] (Poznań, 2003), for which she was awarded the Hieronim Feicht Prize of the Polish Composers’ Union (2005). Her research interests are focused mainly on the history and aesthetics of eighteenth-century music in Europe and Poland. Since 2005, she has been a member of the Research and Editorial Team of the Jasna Góra music resources. Currently, her research is focused on eighteenth-century Polish music, mostly the exploration and discovery of local music sources. She works closely with the Archdiocesan Archive in Poznań, supervising its music collection, and pursues her research interests in instrumentology as an assistant at the Museum of Musical Instruments in Poznań. She has participated in more than thirty conferences in Poland and abroad. Since 2010, she has led a group conducting research into a unique instrument collection inherited from a music ensemble active at the Pauline monastery of Jasna Góra (seventeenth-twentieth centuries). Her wide-ranging research will be reflected in her forthcoming book The Baroque, part two: 1697-1795, to be published in English and Polish as part of the prestigious series The History of Polish Music (Sutkowski Edition, Warsaw). Her other publications include scholarly papers on source text studies and instrumentology. In 2009, she established the Musica Patria association. The Musica Maxima ensemble associated with Musica Patria performs compositions discovered by Dr Mądry in Polish archives.