Composers identified in Dresden's royal music collections

Nina Eichholz

Thursday, April 2, 2015

This article is by Nina Eichholz (SLUB Dresden) and originally appeared on the Hofmusik in Dresden(Dresden Court Music) project website. It is reprinted here with kind permission.

In the DFG project Hofkirche und Königliche Privat-Musikaliensammlung (Dresden Court Church and Royal Private Music Sheet Collection), which has been underway for the past year and a half, scholars working on the project have already made numerous new identifications. Composers of anonymous works have been identified and incorrect attributions were corrected–particularly in the extensive collection of arias and cantatas–and individual arias have been matched to their operas.

For example, a collection of cantatas that was previously thought to be by Agostino Steffani was identified as being a composition by Carlo Luigi Pietragrua, who was kapellmeister in Dresden in the late seventeenth century before moving on to Düsseldorf. Additional identifications fill out more pieces of the puzzle concerning the activities of musicians at the Dresden Court: Parts to a “Sub tuum praesidium” by August Uhlich, court violinist and organist, were found on the back of parts to a different piece, and an opera identified as Il secolo vendicato (premiered in 1773 in Rimini) by Niccolò Savini was also found. This decoratively bound Italian manuscript was dedicated to Countess Maria Antonia Walpurgis, who was also a composer and was in all likelihood a patron of the Philharmonic Society in Rimini during her travels in Italy in 1772.

Share Tweet Email

Category: Library collections


Browse the news archive by category below or use the search box above.

Categories

Top posts

- Joseph Bologne’s “L’Amant Anonyme”
- The Public Domain in 2023
- Scott Joplin and the St. Louis World’s Fair
- The Vienna State Opera in 1955
- Elizaveta, Elisabeth, and Elizabeth

Featured posts

- A Word about RISM
- Chopin Heritage in Open Access
- Sarah Levy
- Discovering Vivaldi Sources
- Finding Unica in RISM

Send us your news

Share your news with RISM and reach an international community of scholars, musicians, librarians, and archivists. Find out more here.

Copyright

All news posts are by RISM Editorial Center staff unless otherwise noted. Reuse of RISM’s own texts is permitted under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. In all other cases, please contact the individual author.

CC_license