The oldest scores of sacred music in the collection of Carl Winiker's Musikalien-Leih-Anstalt in Brno

Abstract

The paper presents the oldest scores of sacred music in the former Winiker's Music Library (Carl Winiker's Musikalien-Leih-Anstalt), whose surviving collection is now housed by the Moravian Library. The paper looks at some of its most valuable sheet music and explores nearly 200 manuscript and printed scores. Many of these can be traced to the well-known Leipzig conductor and composer Johann Gottfried Schicht (1753–1823), which is why the paper covers sheet music published or copied up to 1823, the date of Schicht's death. Besides the inventory of the scores, the paper offers an analysis of the repertoire as well as the provenance of all the identified copies. It draws on the surviving catalogues of Winiker's Library, the extant scores in the Moravian Library, and the auction catalogue of Schicht’s collection after his death.