Thomas Hochradner begins his introduction to this magisterial and long-awaited thematic catalogue of the works of Johann Joseph Fux (c1660–1741) with a characteristically impassioned call-to-arms from Thomas Bernhard's novel Ja (1988):

These radical imperatives are answered by the publication of volume 1 of this catalogue, through which Fux newly emerges ‘equally as a composer and a phenomenon’ (liii). This dual focus is reflected not only in the methodology and contents of the catalogue, but also in its critical orientation, especially in regard to Fux's standing as a prestigious servant of Habsburg culture during the reign of Charles VI (1711–1740) versus the self-standing (and highly problematic) integrity of his musical works. Both of these aspects have scrupulously informed this vast retrieval of sources, documents, incipits and secondary literature through which Fux's work has been transmitted over the past three centuries.

Volume 1 contains an overview of the life and works of Fux (ix–xii; xxxv–xxxvii), an introduction to the entire catalogue (xiii–xxi; xxxix–xlvi) and an explanation of its structure (xxi–xxxiv; xlvii–lx). All three of these sections are published in German and English. In addition, the prefatory material includes a list of general abbreviations (lxi–lxv), archival and library sigla (lxvi–lxxii) and a bibliography of specialist literature used throughout the catalogue itself (lxxiv–lxxvii). These are followed by the first three parts of the catalogue proper: ‘Musiktheoretische und Musikpädagogische Werke’ (the Gradus ad Parnassum and the Singfundament, 1–59); ‘Dramatische Werke’ (Fux's secular-dramatic and sacred-dramatic compositions, including his operas and oratorios, 60–274); and ‘Instrumentalwerke’ (Fux's trio sonatas, sonatas for larger ensembles, partitas, larger secular instrumental works (including the Concentus musico-instrumentalis), works for keyboard, lute intabulations, instrumental duos and canonic works, 275–414).

The volume is completed by a concordance (which links Hochradner's new numbering to older worklists, principally those by Ludwig von Köchel, Andreas Liess, Hellmut Federhofer, Friedrich Wilhelm Riedel and Hochradner himself, 415–417), an index of text incipits (cross-referenced to part 2, 418–444), an index of dramatic characters (also cross-referenced to part 2, 445–446), a geographical index of source locations (447–448), an index of persons named in the primary sources and related documents as well as in selected secondary literature (449–454), a miscellaneous index of work titles, place names, publishers, terms and publications referred to in the catalogue (455–460), and a list of source catalogues and inventories (including music collections, 461–465). Its table of contents also includes information on the contents of volume 2, which catalogues Fux's church music, as well as other works which ‘can be accepted with a high degree of certainty, but cannot be clearly identified on the basis of existing ones’, together with ‘works of doubtful attribution, and spurious works’ (xlvii) – these latter categories are grouped in appendices to the main catalogue itself, which recognizes 645 works (apart from the probable, doubtful and spurious, which comprise 346 items).

‘Sacred music is unequivocally its centre of gravity’, Hochradner remarks of this immense corpus (xlix, note 13), an observation borne out not only numerically – 464 of the 645 firmly attributed works in this Fux-Werke-Verzeichnis (FuxWV) belong to this category – but also by the sheer proliferation of contemporary sources which attest to Fux's prominence as a composer of liturgical music above all else. Nevertheless, the corpus as a whole presents significant challenges to the cataloguer when we come to consider that only fourteen of these 645 works survive as autographs. This tiny fraction throws into sharp relief the preponderant transmission of Fux's music through the agency of court copies (in Vienna) and of monastic and other archival sources throughout the former empire. In a fascinating aside, Hochradner observes that many such sources, publicly available during the communist era, have now reverted to private ownership: ‘The fact that it was possible to view the rich Fuxian holdings – including several unica – of the Kreuzherren mit dem Roten Stern . . . in Prague must, in the light of later experiences of music-researchers, be considered an unbelievable stroke of luck’ (xlviii). But the very small role played by autographs in the survival, and thus in the cataloguing, of Fux's oeuvre demands a reorientation away from the textual authenticity (and authority) of autograph readings as determinants in relation to both critical editions and the catalogue raisonné of a given composer. The exemplary case in both regards is surely Bach. Hochradner adduces Mozart (for the good reason that Köchel catalogued his music as well as Fux's), but the argument he makes in his extensive Introduction in favour of contemporary copies as a form of transmission equal in importance to the autograph and of far greater relevance to Fux is one which is bound to excite commentary and, perhaps in some quarters, mild dissent: ‘in the history of the “Köchel Catalogue” [of Fux] and the Complete Works one can observe in exemplary fashion how the nature of the tasks and the teamwork between the two kinds of musicological texts drift apart’ (lii). Pace the quest for an authentic text espoused by musicological philologists such as Georg Feder (whose work is invoked here), Hochradner prefers the distinction between an idealized (if unattainable) ‘work’ and the achievement of a text which most nearly approaches the editor's conception of the work as rehearsed by James Grier in The Critical Editing of Music: History, Method and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). ‘Pretensions to definitiveness are no precondition for the existence of a work’, Hochradner argues, and adds for good measure that ‘giving up the emphatic nature of the work-concept’ would bring ‘aesthetic experience’ and different kinds of musical transmission into closer agreement (li, note 28).

As presented to us here, the FuxWV functions in explicit independence from the former (and incomplete) Fux Gesamtausgabe (1959–2014), expressly in relation to its inclusion of works of doubtful attribution, spurious works and works for which no material source (other than a bibliographic entry or index incipit) exists. Hochradner states that the methodology underlying his catalogue represents a ‘fundamentally new orientation: the question of authenticity did not determine a work's inclusion in the catalogue, but rather, an assignment of its authorship to Johann Joseph Fux’ (lii). One scarcely needs to add not any old assignment, but rather one carefully abetted by circumstantial evidence and archival scrutiny of the most thoroughgoing kind. This is Hochradner's guiding principle throughout. Hochradner doubts whether a complete edition of Fux is ever attainable (not least because of the nature and condition of the sources he comprehends here), but he does not allow this doubt to impair his inclusion in the main section of the catalogue of ‘everything which through tradition, dating, musical language and nature of transmission opens the possibility of Fux's authorship’ (liii). And one must add that whatever divergences necessarily obtain between the FuxWV and the newly established (2015) edition of Fux's works (also being published by Hollitzer), the general editors of the latter have expressed their intention of adopting Hochradner's entirely new system of numbering when the catalogue has been published. Thus the first volume of the new Fux Werke, currently identified as an edition of k34A (see Harry White, review of Johann Joseph Fux, Missa Sancti Joannis Nepomucensis, ed. Ramona Hocker and Rainer J. Schwob, Eighteenth-Century Music 14/2 (2017), 307–310) will subsequently carry the catalogue number (FuxWV) IV.1.6. Because all previous catalogues of Fux's works (beginning with Köchel) began their numbering from 1 onwards, it was necessary for Hochradner to begin his new numbering afresh rather than attempt to retain the old numbers (an impossibility in any case). Mozart's K numbers have (in the main) withstood revisions to the composer's catalogue over the years: it is unlikely that the signification of ‘k491’ (in respect of the famous C minor piano concerto) could be displaced now by a new number without considerable confusion (and resentment). Fux scholars, likewise, may find it difficult to adopt the new numbering of the FuxWV in the case of certain works, especially those which have appeared under the Köchel numbering in the Fux Gesamtausgabe and in all previous literature.

When we turn directly to the works entered in volume 1 of the catalogue, the generosity, scrupulousness and exactitude of Hochradner's archival and bibliographical expertise become richly apparent. It is perhaps easiest in the present context to take as an example his entry for Fux's last Italian oratorio, La Deposizione dalla croce di Gesù Cristo Salvator nostro (1728) which is assigned the catalogue number (FuxWV) II.1.12 (123–130). Following principles of layout and content explained in the introduction to the catalogue, Hochradner gives the generic title of the work (‘Sepolcro’) drawn from the extant scores and printed libretto, the author of the libretto, the characters, vocal disposition and orchestral scoring, the dates of the first and second performances (in 1728 and 1738), and a brief summary of the libretto and its textual sources. He then provides a table of incipits which includes the introduction and every subsequent number (recitatives as well as set pieces) and which registers the length of each number, its instrumental accompaniment, and – in the case of arias, duets and ensembles – sufficient material to understand the relationship between the opening ritornello and the vocal writing. (The sheer detail and clarity of these incipits must surely be ranked as one of the volume's many outstanding features.) A description and account of the provenance of the musical sources (‘Abschriften’) of the work follows, including major divergences between these. Hochradner begins with material from Viennese inventories and archives (which is to say court copies made during the composer's lifetime) and ends with copies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of the later sources are fragmentary, and some of them (notably those catalogued in Russian libraries) were lost or destroyed after the Second World War. Hochradner next gives a list of printed textual sources (‘Textdrucke’), which in this case range from the original libretto published in Vienna in 1728 to later versions published in Prague (1751) and Rome (1764), as well as in the collected works of the librettist Giovanni Claudio Pasquini (Arezzo, 1751). He also records whatever information such sources contain as to subsequent performances. An incisive commentary (‘Bemerkungen’) on each of the principal sources follows, with additional information from other contemporary or later sources about subsequent performances in Brno (1729) and perhaps also in Salzburg and Prague in the mid-eighteenth century, as well as information on partial or abridged renditions well into the nineteenth century. Hochradner records the only excerpt of the work to have appeared in print and then proceeds to a comprehensive and staggering engagement with the secondary literature the oratorio has accumulated over the centuries (from 1755 to the present day).

Although much of this secondary literature is repeatedly cited from one entry to the next, it is nevertheless entirely remarkable to find so many primary and secondary sources so attentively countenanced in the enterprise of documenting the transmission and reception history of Fux's musical works, especially when one considers how constricted this reception history has been beyond the purview of a very narrow (if industrious) band of scholarship. Writing from the perspective of someone who has periodically engaged with some of these sources (and pertaining secondary literature) over a period of thirty-five years, I am all the more deeply impressed by the curatorial panache and agility of Hochradner's deployment of these materials. It is not only that Hochradner proves himself a worthy and brilliant successor to Köchel in this enterprise, or that his panoptic attention to and gathering of primary and secondary sources so handsomely represents the work of older scholars (in respect of the sacred-dramatic music, one feels especially glad to see that Hochradner acknowledges and deploys the vital source work conducted over twenty years ago by Rudolf Schnitzler). It is also that this catalogue steers Fux gently but firmly away from what Hochradner disavows as the ‘fatherland-based’ approach to the composer (which has at best reinforced a well-intentioned but hermetic degree of cultural nationalism). Instead, Hochradner's primary and secondary listings promote a much more nuanced consideration of Fux as the definitive exemplar of an imperial musical culture which until recently has received far less than its due in the annals of history, musical or otherwise.

Although Hochradner predicts an online existence for the catalogue (which would permit the addition of new sources as these come to light), the symbolic value of this printed volume (and its forthcoming companion) can scarcely be exaggerated: we can trace through the chronology of manuscript sources and prints (the latter are much rarer) the gradually fading afterlife of Fux's currency as a composer within and beyond the domains of the Habsburg empire. In short, Hochradner's Fux is not Köchel's Fux. In this book, the ‘great but neglected composer’ (that most painful case in the narrative of European music) yields to a much more interesting and plausible figure, whose own conception of music as the very grammar and syntax of civic and religious order has (I would argue) never been adequately explored. Such an exploration can only be encouraged and enriched by the materials presented in this volume.

It may seem to many that Fux, like some Orphic figure in early opera, is destined to languish forever in the archive, released on occasion into the bright but transient dawn of an early music festival or CD (or online resource) but otherwise restricted to the scholarly shades of Avernus. The first volume of this catalogue confounds that reading and invites us to make a fresh appraisal of Fux's international significance as an immensely prolific custodian of Habsburg culture and north Italian musicianship alike. It also makes this reader impatient for its successor. Hochradner's approach to the liturgical music, given its central importance not only to Fux himself but to an understanding of his wider significance in early eighteenth-century Europe, will surely make this second volume of acute interest. To that end, one cannot close here without saluting Hochradner's greatly gifted collaborators, Géza M. Vörösmarty, Martin Czernin and Volker S. Weyse, as well as his immediate colleagues in Salzburg, Adriana De Feo, Sarah Haslinger and Kerstin Schmid-Pleschonig. One must also congratulate Hollitzer Verlag for having produced such an elegantly designed, beautifully typeset and legible book. ‘Johann Joseph Fux cannot be counted among the fortunate in the history of musical reception’, Hochradner ruefully concedes in his Introduction (xlv). But this volume, at last, proves otherwise. It is a magnificent achievement.