The Research Committee of the Association Johann Baptist Wanhal – Allan Badley, Stanislav Bohadlo (Univerzita Hradec Králové), Michaela Freemanova (Akademie věd České republiky) and Marc Niubo (Univerzita Karlova) – met in Prague in June to further the Association's plan to issue a new thematic catalogue of the composer's works.
Owing to a personal agreement between Alexander Weinmann and Paul Bryan to exclude symphonies from Weinmann's Themen-Verzeichnis der Kompositionen von Johann Baptiste Wanhal (Vienna: Musikverlag Ludwig Krenn, 1988), no thematic catalogue of Wanhal's complete works has ever been prepared. While the publication of Bryan's excellent 1997 monograph Johann Wanhal, Viennese Symphonist: His Life and His Musical Environment (Stuyvesant: Pendragon) included the long-awaited catalogue of the symphonies and their sources, it also highlighted the shortcomings of Weinmann's catalogue of the remaining works. The Association Johann Baptist Wanhal, of which Paul Bryan is a founding member, has set the preparation of a new integrated Wanhal catalogue as a priority.
The Association's initial plan was to issue a revision of Weinmann's catalogue, following the style employed by Bryan in his symphonies catalogue, which would correct many of its errors and omissions and draw on recent Wanhal scholarship in a series of introductory genre-based essays. At the Prague meeting, however, it was agreed that a new numbering system should be devised to replace the overly complex quasi-Linnean system of work classification employed by Weinmann and better to reflect the integration of the two catalogues. I was asked to develop a numbering system for consideration by the committee.
The data to be included in the catalogue entries was also discussed at length. While standardization of the data fields is desirable, these will change according to the requirements of individual genres. The complex transmission of eighteenth-century sacred works, with their multiple texts, flexible multi-movement structures and variable instrumentation, poses particular problems to the cataloguer and will demand the most detailed description of the sources. Whether this extends to the inclusion of copyists and paper types as standard catalogue data will be determined largely by the resources available for the project. Other genres appear at this stage to be less problematic, but the sheer volume of music and the number of extant copies of Wanhal's works present other challenges.
The Research Committee also discussed plans for the publication of scholarly editions, the recording of Wanhal's works and the mounting of public concerts in the lead-up to the composer's bicentennial in 2013.
