On 7 May 2019 the community of Zelenka scholars lost a highly esteemed colleague when Wolfgang Horn unexpectedly passed away. He was one of the first musicologists to establish a more or less clear view of Zelenka's entire compositional output, and his foundational work during the 1980s did much to bring coherence to the field. He will certainly be missed. It was therefore fitting that this conference, held in the Musicological Library of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, was dedicated to his memory. The one-day conference is usually folded into the flow of the Zelenka Festival Prague–Dresden, which is organized by Adam Viktora's Ensemble Inégal. While the stated aim of the conference is to showcase foreign (non-Czech) research on Zelenka, it also seeks to stimulate local research on the composer, which has waned somewhat in recent years, so it was exciting to see two papers by Czech scholars (one a student) on the programme. Performances of music surrounding the event included: secular vocal works from Zelenka's personal collection, given by the ensemble Musica Aeterna; Zelenka's sepulchre oratorios, or sepolcri (zwv58–60), from Collegium Marianum; and his Missa Purificationis B. V. M. (zwv16) together with a world premiere of the offertory Currite ad aras (zwv166), given by Ensemble Inégal. They were all of outstanding quality, and I congratulate the musicians, whom I do not have space to name here (but who are listed on the Festival website, www.zelenkafestival.cz/en/). A Tridentine votive mass was also celebrated in memory of Professor Horn, with music from Zelenka's collection.
Viktora and Petr Daněk (Ústav dějin umění, Akademie věd České republiky) warmly welcomed attendees to the conference, and the day's papers were chaired by Samantha Owens (Victoria University of Wellington). The independent scholar Jóhannes Ágústsson (Reykjavík) opened proceedings with a paper examining, in typically meticulous fashion, the career of Johann Samuel Kaÿser (1708–1750), a composer, double-bass player, and colleague of and assistant to Zelenka. Ágústsson revealed new information, based on his study of Dresden church registers, about Zelenka's later life, which has been the subject of much speculation in the literature. He showed that Zelenka and his colleague Tobias Buz became godfathers to the Lutheran Kaÿser's son (Johann Friedrich) in 1737, providing another illustration of how Zelenka – a man about whom we effectively know very little – led a more socially connected life into his older age than previously thought. (Persistent stereotypes originating in the nineteenth century have typically framed Zelenka's later life as isolated and lonely.) Ágústsson showed that Kaÿser taught the Lutheran Kapellknaben (boy choristers), and he identified Kaÿser's almost exact borrowing (for his cantata Finstre Nächte Trauerstunden machen jedermann betrübt) of music from the Invitatorium from Zelenka's Officium Defunctorum (zwv47). Ágústsson also discussed several examples of Kaÿser's handwriting, which will surely assist future attempts to identify manuscripts prepared by him.
After a short coffee break, Janice Stockigt (University of Melbourne) then presented a fascinating paper on Zelenka's first mass, Missa Sanctae Caeciliae (zwv1), showing how alterations to structure and scoring speak to transitions from French to Italian influence in Dresden during the reign of August II. The autograph includes various erasures, crossings-out, paste-overs and insertions, as well as different paper and ink types, making it difficult to discern a singular compositional vision for the work. Other sources for the mass include a manuscript prepared by one of Zelenka's copyists, Philipp Troyer, in the second decade of the eighteenth century, a nineteenth-century copy formerly held by Wilhelm Christoph Fischer and a set of parts held in the Archive of the Knights of the Cross with the Red Star in Prague. (This last source was previously part of the collection of Christoph Gayer, choirmaster at St Vitus Cathedral in Prague, whose widow sold the collection to the Order after his death in 1734.) Stockigt discussed the earliest performances of the mass, which were given by French musicians of the Dresden court, most likely led by concertmaster Jean-Baptiste Volumier, and argued that contemporary evidence reveals a shift in the pitch of the organ of the court church from Chorton (the old German high pitch) to Kammerton. Instructions received in 1719 from the Saxon electoral prince stipulated that the mass should not exceed forty-five minutes in length, and an option given by Zelenka in the score would have helped accommodate that request. Stockigt concluded the paper by congratulating Viktora and Libor Mašek on their edition used for a recent recording of the mass, given the difficulty of interpreting the source materials and their sometimes conflicting or optional performance instructions.
Like Stockigt, David Irving (ICREA & Institució Milà i Fontanals-CSIC) examined the transition from French to Italian influence in Dresden, but he approached this question through the lens of performance practice. Irving discussed the differences between French and Italian bow holds in the early eighteenth century, and their implications for the changing sonority of the Dresden Hofkapelle. The French bow hold places the thumb under the hair of the bow, near the frog (sometimes with half of the thumb under the frog), and the little finger under the stick; the Italian places the thumb on the stick, which is more akin to the modern bow hold. Irving's discussion was based on a careful examination of contemporary treatises and iconography, which helped him clarify the implications of these national-stylistic differences for performance practice in Dresden, especially with regard to circular motions, retakes and wrist position. The paper helped bring to life the implications of the transition from French to Italian styles for the sound of the Hofkapelle, and Irving ably demonstrated the key differences in these bow holds on the violin, using examples from Zelenka's first mass setting, which linked back neatly to Stockigt's preceding paper.
Following the lunch break, Jana Perutková (Ústav hudební vědy, Filozofická fakulta Masarykovy univerzity, Brno) examined various sources for sepolcri in Bohemia and Austria in the eighteenth century. The genre was defined primarily by its function during Holy Week, being performed at the holy sepulchre to strengthen the piety of the congregation. Perutková's nuanced discussion covered local differences in the treatment of the genre by various religious orders, including female orders such as the Ursulines. While the genre became highly popular in Vienna during the reign of Leopold I, it was equally popular in Prague, and Perutková discussed different approaches to staging, varieties of subject matter (usually allegorical, biblical or both), librettos (which shared many similarities with opera) and musical structure (usually in one or two parts, less often three). She then considered Zelenka's three sepolcri (zwv58–60), and especially his use of ‘chalamaux’ in zwv58 – at the Zelenka conference of 2018, Kjartan Óskarsson (Tónlistarskólinn í Reykjavík) had speculated that the use of the instrument in this 1709 work may have resulted from a trip made by Johann Hubert Hartig to Vienna in May 1708. Given that Zelenka was then residing with Hartig in Prague, it is possible that Zelenka accompanied him. In addition to being informative, this paper provided a nice way to reflect on the wonderful performances of Zelenka's three sepolcri the previous evening.
Andrew Frampton (University of Oxford) followed with a paper that highlighted the benefits of detailed source study, and the need for future work of this type on Zelenka's music. He examined the composer's approach to parody, a technique commonly used in the eighteenth century, and especially by those with immense compositional obligations such as J. S. Bach. Frampton identified three types of parody in Zelenka's output: 1) the straightforward reuse of music, 2) the blending or juxtaposition of phrases or sections of existing music with newly composed material and 3) the ‘hidden’ parody, whose models are no longer known outside the work in which the parody appears. Frampton illustrated this third type with reference to the Missa Sancti Spiritus (zwv4), whose autograph score contains evidence of an unknown ‘Qui tollis’ setting, physically removed from its place in the original manuscript and inserted into the mass. Now that the model is lost, the setting exists only as a ‘hidden’ parody in the new composition. The paper raised fascinating questions about what constitutes a ‘version’ of a work and where the boundaries of musical works lie.
There followed a paper written by Shelley Hogan (University of Melbourne), which was presented in absentia by conference chair Samantha Owens. This careful consideration of numerous primary sources revealed new information about Zelenka's early career in Dresden as a contrabass player, and helped to reconstruct the biographies and career trajectories of several of his colleagues. Hogan focused especially on the second decade of the eighteenth century, following Zelenka's arrival in 1710 or 1711. She explored the development of the bass section of the Hofkapelle, the shift in its membership away from multi-instrumentalists to single-instrument specialists, the actual instruments used (interestingly, she contends that Zelenka played on a sixteen-foot bass instrument) and how these developments reflected a broader plan by the court to modernize the orchestra.
Pavel Jurák (Ústav hudební vědy, Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy, Prague) then presented a hypothesis that three works listed in Zelenka's Inventarium (a catalogue of his personal music collection) were in fact composed by Nicola Porpora. This paper, which emerged from the author's bachelor's thesis, offered some interesting speculations and highlighted the need for future work in this area. My own paper (Frederic Kiernan, University of Melbourne) concluded the day, with a reflection on the immense contribution to Zelenka scholarship made by the man in whose memory we had gathered, Wolfgang Horn. I had the privilege to interview him in 2017, and my presentation took the form of a scholarly eulogy, using Horn's own words as a lens through which to consider broader questions about Zelenka's music, its reception history and music historiography in general. It was difficult to deliver a paper on such an emotive subject. The Zelenka conference and Festival were, yet again, truly rewarding and enjoyable, and the papers led to some particularly animated discussions that lasted into the evening.
