A catalogue of Joseph Brentner's works is the first title from a forthcoming series of online publications created as part of a project on thematic catalogues supported by the Strategy AV 21 programme of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The website https://brentner.katalog-skladeb.cz aims to provide a more open and engaging way to explore this composer's output. At the same time, it is closely connected with broader-based research on music composed in Prague during the first third of the eighteenth century.
The first writers to deal with the musical history of Prague had already noted a discrepancy between the apparent economic and architectural flourishing of the metropolis in the first decades of the eighteenth century and the lack of notated sources of music written by local composers at that time. As Otakar Kamper aptly pointed out in Hudební Praha v XVIII. věku (Music in Prague in the Eighteenth Century) in 1936, ‘musical works of Bohemian origin from that period – mainly from the first three decades – are relatively rare and are, therefore, insufficient for familiarization with Bohemian music production to its fullest extent’ ((Prague: Melantrich), 179; my translation). The musical inventory of the Prague Knights of the Cross with the Red Star (1737), documents on oratorio and opera productions and extant music collections of Prague provenance show the capital of Bohemia to have been an important centre from which an up-to-date repertory – both imported and locally composed – was disseminated far and wide. For research on local compositional output, however, the best approach is still to focus on the work of a particular composer.
Joseph Brentner (1689–1742) is an example of a Bohemian musician who tried to establish himself as a composer in Prague in the 1710s. He adopted new stylistic practices by following the latest Italian models and made efforts to publish his compositions – especially sacred arias – in the form of printed collections. His other works, such as the funeral motets or antiphons and litanies to St Teresa of Ávila, can be viewed as responding to local demands. By studying his collected works, we can follow how these stylistic trends were received by contemporary audiences; they also tell us a lot about Prague's musical life at that time. The challenge, though, is that while Brentner wrote most of his compositions in or for Prague, sources for them are dispersed across many libraries and archives, mainly in central Europe – but also in the Vatican and even in Bolivia.
Since it is not possible to establish its chronological order, the catalogue is organized according to genre. Extant works are numbered continuously and categorized into sections. Lost works and compositions of uncertain or doubtful attribution are listed in the appendix and numbered separately. The catalogue is conceived of as a work in progress, which means it should be expanded continually with the date of the last update mentioned at the end of each entry. Any works discovered or identified in the future will obtain the next number in sequence, and they will be included under appropriate categories based on their description in the record. The catalogue records use the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) format and are made using the MerMEId (Metadata Editor and Repository for MEI Data) editor developed by the Danish Centre for Music Editing (http://www5.kb.dk/en/nb/dcm/projekter/mermeid.html).
When possible, the incipits contain all the voices included in the composition. The incipit thus not only provides comprehensive information about the composition itself, but also allows for playback using the Verovio plugin and MIDI output. The opening page of the catalogue provides a quick overview of the collection, which can be filtered by category or searched by title or catalogue number. All other standard information can be viewed upon selecting and opening individual records. For navigation in the catalogue as a whole, several indices (such as the Names Index) are available. The catalogue is also supplemented by a short biography of the composer, with a chronological overview of his life and work, and an edition of selected archival documents.
Would the RISM Catalogue suffice for mapping the work of a minor composer like Brentner, especially after the planned work level has been fully established in RISM? Neither now nor in the near future, it seems. The workflow of RISM is justifiably based on the processing of music sources within specific music collections, but the activity of a future editor of a RISM-originated work catalogue would focus on sources connected with a particular composer across different archive collections. In other words, it would require a major change in the workflow and raise new demands in the way that cataloguers collaborate. For now, this dedicated resource in form of a thematic catalogue of works is a welcome addition both for creators of work-title records in RISM and authors writing about the music in question.
Other catalogues are being prepared as part of the current project, including for the works of Antonín Reichenauer (c1696–1730) and Bohuslav Matěj Černohorský (1684–1742). To that end, a simple portal gathering basic information on thematic catalogues of Bohemian composers has been set up at https://katalog-skladeb.cz/. A list of historical music inventories in the Czech lands will be soon available at the same address, so stay tuned.
