Hermann Potzlinger's Music Book: The St Emmeram Codex and its Contexts. By Ian Rumbold and Peter Wright.

Abstract

This is a wholly admirable piece of work, a delight to read—somewhat surprisingly, given the nature of the subject; it could easily have been as dull as ditchwater—and also a very finely produced book. In fact, admiration mingles with astonishment as one reads it. The handling of the primary documents and the construction of a narrative from them is first-rate. But it is also astonishing that so much material actually survives to tell us about a very minor figure, whose activities were sometimes restricted to centres of little historical significance. In more ways than one, therefore, the book is an eye-opener, and also a model of historical reconstruction. Hermann Pötzlinger's music book is better known as the ‘St Emmeram Codex’, so named in the subtitle of this volume. It has long been valued as a relatively early source for the music of Dufay, with a significant number of English compositions. One hopes that Pötzlinger's name will now stick, for when he copied the greater part of the book in the early 1440s he could not have prophesied that after his death it would pass into the library of the great Benedictine monastery of St Emmeram in Regensburg. As a young man he would certainly have known about Regensburg and St Emmeram, although his family's home area was further north, nearer Nuremberg, Bamberg, and Bayreuth than Regensburg, and Hermann Pötzlinger himself appears to have come from Bayreuth or nearby. Born probably between 1415 and 1420, he is traceable in Regensburg in the late 1440s, and by 1450 was rector scolarum of the monastery school. He carried out the schoolmaster's duties for only about two years, but by 1459 was resident in Regensburg again, living in a house next to the school. He died ten years later. During his life he amassed a very remarkable library of 110 books, many of which he had copied himself or written in, and he exchanged these for what was known as a ‘precaria’, a sort of retirement annuity, which enabled him to live at St Emmeram, the place of which he was especially fond and where he was buried. So his music book, the only music book in his remarkably extensive collection, was eventually integrated into the monastery library. After the dissolution of the monastery in 1810 its library (or most of it) was taken into the Royal Library in Munich, now the Bavarian State Library. For some years the ‘St Emmeram Codex’ was part of the music collection there, with the shelfmark Mus. ms. 3232a, but it has since resumed its rightful place amidst Pötzlinger's other books, with the shelfmark Clm (codex latinus monacensis) 14274.