In 2012 Allan Badley announced in this journal the goal of creating a new catalogue of the works of Johann Baptist Waṅhal (Eighteenth-Century Music 9/1, 157–158). I took over responsibility for the project in 2015, and it is my great pleasure to announce that the first section of this project, a catalogue of the composer's masses, has now been published. The project is a cooperative one between the University of Auckland and the Norges teknisk-naturvitenskaplige universitet in Trondheim, the latter of which is currently hosting it through the research cluster ‘The Classical Ages’ (www.ntnu.edu/classical-ages), under the name Catalogus novus Wanhali.

This project is eventually going to lead to the first complete catalogue of Waṅhal's works. Previously, a private agreement from the post-war decades led to Paul Bryan cataloguing the symphonies (Johann Waṅhal, Viennese Symphonist: His Life and His Musical Environment (Stuyvesant: Pendragon, 1997)) and Alexander Weinmann the remaining works (Themen-Verzeichnis der Kompositionen von Johann Baptiste Wanhal (Vienna: Ludwig Krenn, 1986)). However, despite working on it for at least three decades, Weinmann did not manage to finish his catalogue before his death, and it is therefore unsatisfactory for most repertories. The opening of the former Eastern Bloc and an increased interest in Waṅhal's music mean that an update is long overdue.

Waṅhal's oeuvre is huge, and it presents a plethora of challenges for cataloguers. We therefore decided that the catalogue should be published digitally. In our current model, we intend first to create an overview of the known extant sources, and thereafter to include more information as we are able to survey them. In this way, we hope to be able to make new entries and add to existing ones as information becomes available.

As noted above, Waṅhal's masses are the first works to have been catalogued. He produced more works of this type than any of his Viennese contemporaries: we currently recognize fifty-four masses as being most plausibly attributed to the composer, with fourteen more being regarded as having dubious or spurious attributions. That we have begun with these is not only in recognition of Waṅhal's importance as a composer of sacred music, but also in recognition of their having been inadequately treated in Weinmann's catalogue: most of this material survives in manuscripts in modern-day Czechia, and these Weinmann only knew from library cards sent to him. This resulted in many errors, omissions and double entries, and meant that no attempt could be made to account for different versions of the same piece, or even to authenticate the attributions of a work.

These problems are even greater for other sacred works. Weinmann's catalogue did not properly acknowledge the fluidity of genre at the time, but remained faithful to the labels found on the works’ wrappers, resulting in a complex web of generic cross-references that makes it hard even to say how many such works he thought Waṅhal composed. This will be my next contribution to the catalogue over the coming few years. Beyond this, I will be acting as general editor for the catalogue at large. We are currently looking for specialists who may be interested in taking on the responsibility for charting Waṅhal's contributions to particular genres and as found in particular collections. We are especially interested in assisting students who are writing (or planning to write) their theses on music collections in central Europe and can help us better to understand the role Waṅhal's works played in the musical life of the institutions where manuscripts survive.

One of the earliest decisions for the catalogue was to replace the quasi-Linnaean numbering system of Weinmann (reminiscent of Hoboken) with a single sequence of digits (as in Köchel), but to keep this organized according to genre. Whilst these digits are intended to be replaced by Waṅhal numbers in the future, we have created a temporary system of Nokki numbers that will remain in use until that numbering scheme is completed. (Nokki takes its name from my parents’ cat, which was recovered two hundred and fifty kilometres from home after having been missing for several months.) As we believe that the complete numbering scheme is still far off, we recommend that Nokki numbers be fully embraced at this point, and promise they will remain supported by the catalogue.