Il nuovo catalogo delle opere di Luigi Gatti View larger

The «Kapellmeisterbuch», Gall Morel’s Catalogues, and the Salzburg Repertoire in Einsiedeln

Online only

Author Claudio Bacciagaluppi
Series Studi e Saggi
Nr. 2
Size 17×24 cm, pp. XVIII+259
Year 2017
ISBN 9788870969115

Price 7,00 €

The present contribution follows the footsteps of Hanke Knaus’, Hochradner’s and Neumayr’s research on the transmission of Salzburg sources and Salzburg repertoire to the Benedictine abbey of Einsiedeln. Attention is, especially, focused on two outstanding documents of musical life in Einsiedeln in the early 19th century: the Kapellmeisterbuch—a diary of all music played on feast days—and Gall Morel’s catalogues of the abbey chapel’s music archive (started in 1835). Until the end of the 18th century, the repertoire in Einsiedeln was dominated by local and Milanese composers. Little evidence could be found for musical exchange at the time of the exile of the monks during the temporary abolition of the convent in the wake of the French Revolution (1798–1803). Instead, the abbey’s musical archive greatly profited from the secularization of monasteries in Germany and later in Switzerland, acquiring sources dismissed from former convents: most importantly, from Weingarten, but also from other convents, such as Münsterlingen (closed in 1848). The only compositions by Luigi Gatti that were performed in Einsiedeln before 1852 were no original works, but contrafacta of arias from his youth in Lombardy, prepared in Einsiedeln in the 1780s and 1790s. Further works arrived with Sigismund Keller, owing to his inexhaustible copying activities. Keller’s dating of the score for Gatti’s offertory «Terra tremuit» from October 1870 seems to suggest that he remained in Söllheim, near Salzburg, for a longer time than formerly assumed. Unlike the practical interest testified by the performances listed in the Kapellmeisterbuch, Keller looked at Salzburg music with musicological interest, which he shared with other Einsiedeln fathers such as Anselm Schubiger and Gall Morel