From Moravská Třebová to Klosterneuburg: to the fate of one part book

Abstract

Not many Renaissance musical sources survived to this day from the region of Moravia. Other sources, however, may also testify to what repertoire was performed in the churches in the sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries. These include music inventories, for example, which survived in the case of some Moravian towns already from the late sixteenth century and, more numerously, from the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. One such inventory was written in 1644 in Moravská Třebová and it captures the actual form of the music collection of the local Parish Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The inventory lists about sixty pieces of musical manuscripts and printed sheet music, most of them containing compositions by Baroque composers of the first half of the seventeenth century, in addition to some works by Renaissance composers. Except for three medieval liturgical codices, no sheet music survived from this music collection. This fact, however, has changed recently. A tenor book (a composite volume of four Nuremberg prints from the turn of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries – those of Kaspar Hassler, Christoph Demantius, and Valentin Haußmann), which had originally been part of the music collection in Moravská Třebová, has been identified among the holdings of the Klosterneuburg Abbey. In a 1644 music inventory written in Moravská Třebová, this composite volume figures as the thirty-second item. The part book probably made its way to Klosterneuburg only in the nineteenth century, i.e., it had been in practical use in the church in Moravská Třebová and not in the Klosterneuburg Abbey. This study aims to describe the facts we know about this part book and, at the same time, formulate some hypotheses and questions related to its transfer from the Czech Republic to Austria.