The Königsberg Manuscript from the Kugelmann Circle

Abstract

TorunK 29-32 is attached to the only surviving copy of Paul Kugelmann’s print Etliche Teutsche Liedlein Geistlich und Weltlich… (Königsberg, s.d.). The manuscript, consisting of four partbooks, was probably written c. 1558-60. Its scribe and possible first owner may have been Paul Kugelmann, a musician at the court of Duke Albrecht in Königsberg. The last private owner of the partbooks was Heinrich Bötticher, a music-lover from Toruń (Thorn), at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The approximately ninety pieces in the manuscript include French chansons, German secular and sacred songs, and Latin motets. All the French and many of the German and Latin texts are inscribed only as incipits. Pieces with text incipits were probably intended for instrumental performance, a reflection of the fact that Kugelmann was a trumpet player and that many other instrumentalists—among them four ‘welsche cantores’—were also employed in the ducal Instrumentalkapelle at that time. These players were probably the main users of the manuscript. Some of the composers represented in TorunK 29-32 were connected to Königsberg, including Kugelmann himself, Adrianus Petit Coclico, and Franciscus de Rivulo. One composition was written by—or connected in a special way to—Duke Albrecht’s wife, Anna Maria. Some interesting links exist between Kugelmann’s partbooks and other sources from the Baltic region, particularly GdańPAN 4003.