Te Deum-Vertonungen K 271 und L 35 by Johann Joseph Fux (review)

Johann Joseph Fux (1660–1741), arguably the most important and certainly the most influential Austrian composer of the late baroque, served the imperial court in Vienna for over thirty years and was Kapellmeister there for well over a decade, from 1715 into the early 1730s. He was a notable teacher, and his Gradus ad Parnassum (1725) was an essential text for composers in his time and after. His more than six hundred works range from keyboard pieces and chamber music to operas and celebratory pieces supporting the magnificence of court ceremony. Yet only a small portion of this important and industrious composer's surviving music has been published. The Fux edition begun in 1959 (Johann Joseph Fux: Sämtliche Werke [Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1959–2008]) includes a selection of music from the composer's principal genres in its some thirty volumes, and several other volumes of his music have also appeared, including a revised edition of the keyboard music: Johann Joseph Fux, Werke für Tasteninstrumente, edited by Guido Erdmann and Friedrich Wilhelm Riedel, (Johann Joseph Fux: Sämtliche Werke. Serie VI, Instrumentalmusik, Bd. 1 [Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 2012].)

The new critical edition of the composer's works, begun in 2015, is described by the publishers as "currently one of the most extensive undertakings in the realm of Baroque music." The aim of the project is to allow Fux's music to "be comprehensively investigated, placed in its eighteenth-century musical context, and brought back to life through musical performance." (My translations; http://www.hollitzer.at/wissenschaft/programm/uebersicht/programm/johann-joseph-fux-werke.html [accessed 12 September 2019].) The edition is intended to be both scholarly and practical. Three volumes have now appeared, of which this is the second. As the publisher's homepage tells us, in the process of preparing the volumes of the edition, many new sources have been uncovered that are important both for the musical texts and for the reception history of Fux's works. Thus appearing in tandem with the edition is a new catalog: Thomas Hochradner, Thematisches Verzeichnis der Werke von Johann Joseph Fux: Völlig überarbeitete Neufassung des Verzeichnisses von Ludwig Ritter von Köchel (1872) (Vienna: Hollitzer Verlag, 2016–).

The volume under review contains two previously unpublished Te Deum settings. The first is K 271 (the number in Köchel's catalog; FuxWV IV.15.4 in the new catalog); its principal source, a set of parts from the collection of the Imperial court chapel, held in the Department of Music of the Austrian National Library, has the date 1704 on the cover. K 271, the earliest dated of Fux's six Te Deum settings and also his most widely disseminated, employs soli and ripieni vocal parts, strings and continuo, trombones and cornetti, and a full ensemble of trumpets and timpani (it has been recorded: Vienna 1700: Baroque Music from Austria, Armonico Tributo, cond. Lorenz Duftschmid, CPO 999919-2 [2002]). The second, L 35 (the number in Andreas Liess, Johann Joseph Fux: Ein steirischer Meister des Barock [Vienna: Ludwig Doblinger, 1948], 69; FuxWV IV.15.6 in the new catalog) is preserved in a unique source, a set of parts in the music archive of the Rytířský řád křižovníků (Knights of the Cross with the Red Star) in Prague. It is a magnificent double chorus setting with trumpets and timpani and oboes. The two works illustrate some of the creative possibilities in setting this standard text, which was used in situations of splendid ritual...