Sacred Chameleons: Form, Function, and Dissemination Patterns in the Motets of Leopold Hofmann

Abstract

While the eighteenth-century Viennese Mass, oratorio, cantata, and litany have all been the focus of independent genre studies, smaller-scale settings of liturgical and non-liturgical texts, of which hundreds of exemplars survive, have been largely ignored. One of the most interesting of these genres, the motet, is also arguably the most complex in terms of textual studies since these works were treated as flexible musical texts that could be adapted for specific occasions throughout the liturgical year. The process of adaptation extended beyond the provision of contrafacta. Multi-movement motets were frequently dismembered, their individual arias and closing choruses appropriated for new purposes. The extent to which this practice flourished is evident both from extant manuscript copies of the works and entries in contemporary thematic catalogues. Inconsistent nomenclature and the flexible approach to instrumentation that characterises so much eighteenth-century music compounds the problem of establishing the original form and function of much of this repertory.