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  • Pavel Vejvanovský and the Kroměříž Music Collection: Perspectives on Seventeenth-Century Music in Moravia
  • Mark Germer
Pavel Vejvanovský and the Kroměříž Music Collection: Perspectives on Seventeenth-Century Music in Moravia. By Jiří Sehnal. Olomouc: Palacký University, 2008. [343 p. ISBN 9788024421339. €56.] Facsimiles, color plates, music examples, bibliography, indexes. [End Page 780]

More refinement than challenge, it is probably fair to say, characterizes the wealth of new attention lavished on the eventful era overseen by Leopold I, the seventeenth century's Central European counterweight to Louis XIV. The essential outlines of the synergy between imperial ambitions of dynasty and Church during the age of both Habsburg consolidation and Catholic reclamation remain essentially intact, however much our conceptions of the inner workings of baroque ideology undergo a shift from their apparent emphasis on virtue and piety to the celebration of military might and valor (an important theme of Maria Goloubeva's The Glorification of Emperor Leopold I in Image, Spectacle, and Text [Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2000]). Catholic ambitions in Central Europe as well as perpetuation of the Reich were necessarily entwined with the internal and external politics of Habsburg rule. It had been Leopold's grandfather Ferdinand II who had crushed the serpent of heresy, most bloodily in the Bohemian heartlands, and who had fundamentally reaffirmed the dual identity of Habsburg and Holy Roman succession, itself at once realized and shaken by Ferdinand III in the difficult years after the Peace of Westphalia. Leopold's long reign (1658–1705), however, not only successfully reconstructed a Catholic identity through public ritual and sanctification of the landscape but also met and repulsed the greatest threat of the age: the Ottomans. The 1680s, all accounts still agree, were "the real turning point for the Habsburg lands," the cessation of external hostilities finally permitting the settling of "old religious scores" (Howard Louthan, Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation [Cambridge: Cambridge Univer sity Press, 2009], 277–78), to say nothing of reignited evangelization by force.

By midcentury, not all, but many from the surviving ranks of the native nobility could be relied upon to occupy positions of power long vacant or hitherto ill defined. In addition to the offices of high civil service, those of the Church hierarchy—canon, prelate, bishop, and archbishop—were held predominantly by members of the aristocracy. Though many received benefices at an early age, even before their Jesuit educations had been completed, they often matured to serve with devotion and organizational skill. The power vacuum in Bohemia had been dire, but from 1623 noblemen wielded the prestige and influence of the Prague archdiocese, with brief exceptions, through the end of Counter Reform and beyond (on this transformation, Alessandro Catalano's La Boemia e la riconquista [Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2005] is now essential; likewise on the nobility more broadly, Petr Mat'a, Svět české aristokracie, 1500–1700 [Prague: Lidové noviny, 2004]). In Moravia (leaving the convoluted case of Silesia aside), representatives of the families Dietrichstein, Habsburg, and Liechtenstein-Castelcorno officiated as bishops in Olomouc. There were important similarities among the Czech domains. Archdiocesan and diocesan court chanceries played critical if not always explicitly visible roles as diplomats abroad, as administrators of the empire's territories, in the monitoring of its disparate populations, and in the founding and maintenance of its parishes and shrines. But the Moravian case also differed—indeed almost extravagantly. Whereas many of the landed estate properties in Bohemia had never been recovered after the devastations of confessional war, lands held by the Church in the Moravian margravate had been retained almost without interruption. The archbishops of Prague never acquired resources sufficient to sustain such trappings of court as, for instance, music chapels of their own. The border region "between Bohemia and Vienna," as some historians have tagged Moravia (see Tomás. Knoz, "Barokní Morava mezi Čechií a Vídní," Barokní Praha, Barokní Čechie, 1620–1740, ed. Olga Fejtová [et al.] [Prague: Scriptorium, 2004], 349– 59), managed to secure a cultural and artistic legacy closely allied with that of Vienna and independent, to a degree, from that of Bohemia.

The majority of music collections known to have existed at aristocratic...

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