From Berlin to Cracow: Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Prints of Italian Secular Vocal Music in the Jagiellonian Library

Abstract

As events in eastern Europe demonstrate almost daily, we live in the shadow of the Second World War and the geopolitical arrangements that the post-war era ushered in. The interests and concerns of scholars have hardly escaped the weight of these arrangements over the years, as anyone who has worked or attempted to work in eastern European libraries and archives can attest. The post-war history of Berlin's Prussian State Library provides one of the most elegant-and exasperatingdemonstrations of the difficulties that continue to confront musicologists. The relocation for safekeeping of virtually the entire contents of this enormous library, undertaken in 1941 in response to the Allied bombing of Berlin, produced results with which we are still dealing fifty years later. The remarkable story of the dispersal of the library's holdings to several sites in southern Germany and Poland, and of the disappearance and eventual resurfacing of materials long thought to have been destroyed, has been recounted in detail elsewhere.' Yet more than ten years after the widespread acknowledgment that a significant number of manuscripts and prints formerly in Berlin are now in the Biblioteka Jagiellonska in Cracow (hereafter called the Jagiellonian Library), a range of unresolved political and bibliographical issues remains. From the moment that word began to circulate in the West of the preservation in Cracow of a substantial part of the Berlin library, interest among musicologists has tended to focus on manuscripts rather than prints, and on works by Bach, Mozart and Beethoven preserved there, rather than on those of lesser figures.2 Nevertheless, scholars of Re-