The prospect of a complete edition of the works of Johann Joseph Fux (c1660–1741) has a long history. Between 1959 and 2014 the Johann-Joseph-Fux-Gesellschaft (established in Graz in 1955) published thirty-eight volumes of Fux's music and theoretical writings (in collaboration with the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften from 2012). Despite this impressive accumulation, however, the Fux Gesamtausgabe (hereafter Fux-GA) often appeared to founder on the very large number of compositions awaiting its attention. The Fux-GA made serious inroads into Fux's oratorios and secular dramatic works: five of the ten wholly extant oratorios appeared in this edition between 1959 and 2008, and eight of the sixteen extant secular dramatic pieces were published between 1962 and 2005. It likewise represented a substantial portion of the composer's instrumental music and his complete theoretical writings (the Gradus ad Parnassum and the Singfundament). But it faltered before the sheer bulk of Fux's liturgical music. Only nine of Fux's masses, including requiem masses, appeared in the Fux-GA between 1959 and 2006 (out of an approximate total of one hundred such works); moreover, the discrepancy between Fux's extant settings for the Office (for Vespers in particular) and the Proper of the mass and their very modest representation in the Fux-GA is even more extreme. The eight volumes of music for the Proper of the mass or for the Office which appeared between 1963 and 1996 represent only a very small part of Fux's liturgical works, many of which are settings of the same text. To cite just one graphic example: the current Fux catalogue recognizes seventeen settings of Psalm 109 (‘Dixit Dominus’), not one of which appears in the Fux-GA. The challenge of resolving Fux's liturgical music within the parameters of a complete edition has proved formidable, not to say overwhelming, to date.
This is a challenge which raises (compellingly, in my view) questions about the nature and desirability of a complete Fux edition, to which I shall briefly return at the close of this review. But my immediate duty is to welcome most warmly the appearance of this magnificent editio princeps of Fux's Missa Sancti Joannis Nepomucensis, k34A, which appears as the first volume (series A, group 1, volume 1) of a newly conceived complete edition, now under the auspices of the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften alone, and with Gernot Gruber and Herbert Seifert as its general editors. Significantly or not, this new edition is heralded as Johann Joseph Fux Werke – and not, as in the Fux-GA, Sämtliche Werke (complete works). It boldly proclaims a fresh start. The series is published by Hollitzer Verlag (Vienna), which has already done so much to rejuvenate and refresh the condition of Fux scholarship and the music of the Austro-Italian Baroque in general, not least by publishing the first volume of Thomas Hochradner's magisterial (and long-awaited) catalogue of Fux's works (also in 2016). This handsomely produced and beautifully printed edition of k34A augurs extremely well for the remainder: it is bound in hard covers (and is also available as a PDF); its editorial introduction and critical apparatus are published in English as well as in German; its musical typography and text underlay are both exemplary, and the volume successfully reconciles its twin objectives, which are to provide a critical edition of the work and to promote (or at least facilitate) its afterlife in performance. Following a general preface, the volume opens with a detailed introduction (xi–xl) to the historical and cultural background of the mass (including an account of the cult of St John Nepomuk in Austria and the Czech lands); an explanation of the provenance of the autograph manuscript on which the edition is based; a scrutiny of Fux's revisions in the autograph (a rarity in itself, given how few of Fux's compositions survive in the composer's hand); a discussion of the scoring and formal disposition of the work; and extensive commentary on the compositional technique, instrumental sonority, word-setting and vocal textures of the mass. Three images (two from the manuscript) separate this introduction from the edition itself (3–58), which is followed in turn by a Critical Report (59–79) that meticulously engages with issues of performance practice and the nature and contents of the source. This report also features a table of various close readings and ambiguities in the source (resolved in the edition itself) and a table of evident revisions made by Fux in the autograph.
In most respects, these materials and their disposition reflect and carry over the editorial principles adopted in the Fux-GA, with two notable exceptions. The first is that this edition mercifully omits a continuo realization (a feature of the Fux-GA which – in my experience, at least – imposed a burdensome obligation on contributing editors which was scarcely justified); and the second, by contrast, is that the editors of this volume are a little bolder than their predecessors in suggesting colla parte instrumentation, particularly in respect of alto and tenor trombone doubling of the corresponding vocal parts, and (most strikingly) bassoon doubling of the bass vocal part. Although they justify these editorial suggestions by referring to the existence of such additional (reinforcing) instrumental parts for Fux's Missa Corporis Christi (k10), which is similarly scored to k34A, one might also note Fux's own recommendation that the vocal parts be doubled this way in his discussion of liturgical ‘mixed style’ in the Gradus. (In this regard it is somewhat distracting to discover that Ludwig von Köchel, in his fundamental biography and catalogue of Fux (published in 1872), inadvertently described k34A as being scored for soprano, alto, tenor, bass, two trombones and organ, an error carried over into the Fux worklist in the revised New Grove (2001). Köchel's incipit for the mass, however, correctly identifies these instruments as trumpets.) Colla parte additions to one side, the work is scored for two trumpets (in C), two violins, viola, continuo and SATB (which alternate tutti and solo passages).
As Ramona Hocker and Rainer J. Schwob remark in their absorbing introduction to k34A, ‘the manuscript's history is as clouded as its occasion and time of origin are’ (xxx). Even its ascription as an autograph is necessarily conjectural (if likely), and one cannot mistake the (actual or potential) significance of the source in one outstanding respect, namely, the evidence it transmits of Fux's compositional process, however fragmentary this evidence may appear given the magnitude and volume of his liturgical output in sum. But the fascinating (and forensic) scrutiny of the source itself undertaken by the editors of this volume (especially in regard to Fux's alterations and erasures) is alone worth the price of admission. Textual critics of Fux sources will, I think, be drawn by the examples of the composer's handwriting included in the facsimile reproduction of page 51 of the manuscript (xlii), which differs (to my eye) in striking respects from other reproductions of Fux's script (as in the excerpt from k10 on page 140 of Rudolf Flotzinger, ed., Johann Joseph Fux: Leben – musikalische Wirkung – Dokumentation (Graz: Leykam, 2015), or the excerpted Completorium, k127, included as an endpaper in Köchel (1872), following Appendix X, 187).
k34A is a votive mass – commissioned, it would appear, in fulfilment of a vow made to St John Nepomuk, as the title-page suggests – but, as is so frequently the case with Fux's liturgical music, we know next to nothing about when or for whom it was composed. Hocker and Schwob plausibly exclude the imperial chapel in Vienna (where Fux was employed from 1698 until his death) as a likely venue for the work's first performance, partly on account of the (uncertain) provenance of the autograph itself (one reason why we have so few Fux autographs is that his music for the imperial chapel was routinely preserved in court copies there), and partly on account of the very late appearance of the saint's feast day in the official court rubrics, so that this was ‘probably not regarded as a prominent High Holiday’ (xxx). Readers (and listeners) familiar with k10 (which inaugurated the Fux-GA in 1959 and was recorded by Martin Haselböck and the Wiener Akademie in 1997 (CPO 999528-2)) will discover strong echoes of that mass in the texture, compositional technique and internal design of k34A. The very openings of both works closely compare (thematic exchanges between trumpets and vocal soloists, with string support, opening out into tutti affirmations of the Kyrie eleison). And so too does the characteristically nervous and short-lived thematic invention in both works which is such a marked feature of Fux's orchestral masses, with or without the stately (and often restrictive) intervention of high trumpet parts. Although the editors of k34A make a worthy case for the sensitive and occasionally unorthodox nature of Fux's word-setting (especially in relation to the trumpet writing which adorns it), my own impression of the Missa Sancti Joannis Nepomucensis is that it affirms, rather than develops, the composer's adherence to those exigencies and conventions of the imperial mass in Vienna which Fux himself so assiduously (if not laboriously) cultivated. When one compares the Fux of k34A to the sovereign ease and fluency of his Roman counterpoint (in a cappella works such as the Missa vicissitudinis, k44) or indeed to the thematic conviction and expressive prowess of certain of his da capo arias, it is difficult to avoid the impression that the writing of so much liturgical music – by contrast – took its toll on his musical imagination. There is, perhaps, an instructive irony to be had from holding in apposition the immense workload represented by Fux's liturgical music and the daunting obligations of representing this music in a complete-works edition.
Such observations are not meant to impugn the inherent value of such an edition, still less the immaculate retrieval of k34A which Hocker and Schwob achieve in this first volume (some small slips in the extremely welcome English version of their critical apparatus, such as the use of ‘accolades’ for Akkoladen (grouped or braced staves) notwithstanding). Anyone interested in the music of Fux and his colleagues in Vienna will want to congratulate all parties concerned on this splendid enterprise – above all, the editors themselves – and the editorial renaissance which it promises. But the proverbially monumental (and empirical) nature of this undertaking might yet inspire, rather than inhibit, a commensurate degree of critical engagement with the cultural meaning of Fux's music, independent of his standing as ‘the most important Austrian composer of the Baroque era’ (vii). That is a long-standing accolade (sic) which may yet have eclipsed Fux's wider significance.
