The Musical Repertoire of the Salzburg Cathedral

In the Europe of the 17. and 18. century, Salzburg was a music centre of rank. Famous musicians, among them H. I. F. Biber, Leopold and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johann Michael Haydn, poduced works for the court of the archbischop as well as for the cathedral. Other composers, many of them unknown today, created music of high qualitiy as well. While almost all instrumental and vocal works, that were created for the court have been lost during secularisation, most sheets and scores of the repertoire played at the cathedral have survived and are now preserved at the "Archiv der Erzdiözese" (Archive of the Archdiocese) Salzburg. The project "The Music Repertoire of the Salzburg Cathedral in the 18. and 19. century aims at making the resource materials between 1700 and 1841 available for reseach by preparing a computer-assisted catalogue using the computer program CALISTO. This inventory will be placed at the disposal of the "Repertoire Internationale des Sources Musicale" (RISM), where the results of the research will be published as a CD-Rom periodically. However, a catalogue of the Salzburg sources in the form of a book will be published independently. Research results concerning the local, national and international music history (i.e. Mozart-Research) and findings regarding liturgical practise are to be expected.

In the Europe of the 17th and 18th century, Salzburg was a music centre of some rank. Famous musicians, among them H. I. F. Biber, Leopold and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johann Michael Haydn, as well as numerous up to now little appreciated composers produced works for the court of the prince-archbishop as well as for the cathedral. While almost all instrumental and vocal works, that were created for the court, were lost during secularisation, the larger part of the music composed for the cathedral has survived and is now preserved at the Archiv der Erzdiözese Salzburg. The subject of the project was the sacred music of the Salzburg prince-archiescopal chapel from the end of the 17th to the dissolution of the court in 1807. The musical sources were entered into the database of the International Inventory of Musical Sources - Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) and has been researchable online for the interested public under http://opac.rism.info/ since July 2011. In addition to this, a printed catalogue is being prepared. During catalogisation, Salzburg copyists and watermarks were collected and used in dating and tracking Salzburg manuscripts. Thus, many manuscripts of Salzburg provenance could be identified in the Music Library of the Benedictine Abbey of Maria Einsiedeln, Switzerland, in the Music Library of the Conservatorio `Luigi Cherubini` in Florence, Italy and the Staats- und Stadtbibliothek Augsburg, Germany. Several questions, in connection with the dissemination of Salzburg sources and the history of the collection, could be solved.