‘Il grosso pacco della musica’: The Galuppiana Consignments for August III and Count Heinrich von Brühl in Warsaw, 1757–1761

Abstract

The Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (SLUB), holds one of the world’s largest collections of sacred and secular works by the Italian composer Baldassarre Galuppi, “il Buranello”, whose operatic music was very popular in the mid-1750s with the Saxon elector and Polish king August III and other members of his court. This impressive collection of Galuppiana includes numerous copies of liturgical works from the copying house of the Venetian priest and notorius forger Iseppo (Giuseppe) Baldan. Recently, several compositions falsely attributed to Galuppi by Baldan have turned out to be the works of Antonio Vivaldi, including an excellent setting of Dixit Dominus (RV 807).
 This article demonstrates that the Galuppi-Baldan manuscripts were sent in several batches from Venice to Warsaw (and not Dresden, as originally thought) during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), when August III resided in the Polish capital. The Saxon prime minister count Heinrich von Brühl and his musically gifted daughter Maria Amalia also stayed in Warsaw during this period, as did Brühl’s secretary and musical director Friedrich August von Koenig, who arranged for the purchases from Galuppi and Baldan. The fact that operas were also being sent from Rome to Warsaw during the war shows that the nobility in the Polish capital was up-to-date with all the latest Italian music. Reports of performances of Galuppi’s music in Warsaw is presented through official documents and letters written by Friedrich August de Rossi, secretary of Italian affairs at the Saxon-Polish court. This includes a description of a serenate performed at the fifty-seventh birthday of Brühl in August 1757, and evidence is provided which strongly suggests that the music, the so-called “Endimione” serenate, was specially composed by Galuppi for this occasion. Finally, details of the musical manuscripts being sent from Warsaw to Dresden in 1763 and the cataloguing of the collection is presented, in addition to an account of a previously unknown visit of Galuppi to the Saxon capital in 1765.