WATERMARKS AND MUSICOLOGY: THE GENESIS OF JOHANNES WISER’S COLLECTION

Abstract

The twin questions of the origin and purpose of Trent 88–91, the four celebrated codices compiled by Johannes Wiser during the third quarter of the fifteenth century, have continued to puzzle musicologists ever since the manuscripts were rediscovered more than a hundred years ago. Adler and Koller, whose pioneering study of the Trent Codices, published in 1900, still retains so much of its original force, saw Wiser’s collection as having been compiled ‘in and for Trent’ under the humanistic influence of Johannes Hinderbach, provost of the cathedral from 1455 and prince-bishop of the city and region from 1465. At the time of writing, next to nothing was known about the life of the obscure priest who had been responsible for the most important musical collection of the fifteenth century, and it was not until nearly thirty years later that the Trentino scholar Renato Lunelli published his crucial discovery showing that Wiser was employed as schoolmaster at the cathedral school in Trent during the very period when he must have been busy assembling his great collection. The article in question was written partly in response to a highly polemical and largely unsubstantiated piece that had been published by the Austrian historian Rudolf Wolkan a few years earlier. Wolkan had rejected the idea of a Tridentine origin for the codices, arguing that there was literally no evidence of any form of musical activity in Trent prior to Hinderbach’s time, and that the reign of his predecessor, Georg Hack (1444–65), which Adler and Koller had defined as the period during which most of the copying must have taken place, would not have been conducive to so large-scale an artistic enterprise, owing to Hack’s strained relations with the city over which he presided. Instead, Wolkan maintained that the codices had been compiled in Vienna, where they might have formed part of Hinderbach’s library, and suggested that it could have been under his auspices that they eventually reached Trent.