Thematisches Verzeichnis der Kompositionen von Franz Danzi (1763-1826).

Alexander, Peter M.

Of the many composers overshadowed by Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Danzi would appear to offer attractive prospects for study. A man liked and respected during his lifetime, he was a capable and proficient composer whose music continues to please listeners and find a place in the chamber repertory. Nevertheless, until recently, little serious scholarship has been directed at Danzi and his music.

It is good, then, that Danzi has now been honored with a catalogue of his works. For the first time since his death, it will be possible to survey the output of this versatile artist, whose work has far greater variety than a few woodwind quintets would suggest. He was active in the theater, writing both operas and incidental music for plays; he was a prolific composer of sacred music; he wrote numerous songs and a great variety of chamber music, symphonies, and concertos.

Volkmar Pechstaedt's thematic catalogue displays this diversity fully, and by beginning with stage works and church music, it places the least familiar works, and those most central to Danzi's career, at the fore. The catalogue further brings together an impressive amount of new information, taking particular advantage of newly available sources in the former East Germany and making good use of Danzi's letters.'

Each entry provides a catalogue number, title, performing forces, and generous thematic incipits (with a separate incipit for each movement or number). This is followed by extensive bibliographic information, including manuscript sources; early editions and their locations; references in Danzi's letters; contemporaneous advertisements, catalogue listings, and review articles; and citations in scholarly works. Danzi's literary works are also included.

With so much information, minor errors are unavoidable - the occasional source or reference that is missed, for example. Beyond such inevitable lapses, there are procedural problems throughout the catalogue, however. For example, it is a curious choice to give catalogue numbers to published collections rather than individual works, with the inequitable result that a sacred piece of twenty-two and one-half measures has its own number (P118, p. 59), but a four-movement string quintet of more than eight hundred measures does not (P280 no. 3, p. 162). For stage works, the decision to list incidental music under the title of the play creates confusion, since dates of performances may refer to the play or to Danzi's music.

Hoping to avoid confusion elsewhere, Pechstaedt instead contributed to it when he decided to alter the new RISM siglum for Slovenia from SI to SL, on the grounds that the country symbol SI is identical to the city symbol for Sigmaringen - which he changes to SIG. But the main users of the catalogue will be scholars who are familiar with RISM sigla. These symbols should be adopted universally, so that users do not have to relearn abbreviations with every new volume.

In some sections of the catalogue, Pechstaedt has failed to organize his extensive information in a way that is helpful to the user. For example, his attempt to divide church music into categories based on the texts creates more problems than it solves. The eighteen subdivisions mix dissimilar categories, including "Gradualien" (p. 42) and "Communiones" (p. 52), which refer to liturgical function, along with "Psalmen" (p. 60), which refers to textual origin. Since texts, and especially psalms, traveled around in the liturgy, the same text can appear in more than one category. Thus, settings of "Laetatus sum" appear among the "Gradualien" as P66 (p. 42), and among "Psalmen" as P132 (p. 63).

Pechstaedt does not explain his categories, but they appear to reflect titles on the sources rather than any rigorous classification scheme. Thus, the first "Laetatus sum" is one of "2 Gradualia" in a manuscript, and is listed among the graduals (p. 42); the second turns up in IX Lateinischen Vesper-Psalmen, and is listed among the psalms (p. 63). Considering the variability of liturgical practice in the late eighteenth century and the dispersion of the sources, it would have been better to group all Latin church works together in alphabetical order, excepting only settings of the Mass Ordinary and Requiem.

Dating is another serious problem. Pechstaedt does not give dates for the works themselves, but rather for the activities around them. Thus, when a performance date is known, it is listed. Otherwise, dates are given only for sources of bibliographic references: editions, catalogue listings, letters, and so forth. Consequently, for many works the user must derive a date from information scattered among several topics within an entry. In some cases, Pechstaedt does provide a listing of the "Datierung der EA" (date of the first edition) or "Datierung nach Pl-Nr." (date according to plate numbers), but this is not consistent. The dates are most specific when he can cite a source that is itself specific, such as a letter or Hans Schneider's Makarius Falter und sein Munchner Musikverlag (Tutzing: Schneider, 1993) for the works issued by that publisher.

Adding to the problems, one important group of sources for dating editions is used inconsistently. Known collectively as the Whistling-Hofmeister catalogues, these checklists of published music were issued annually, making it possible to place many editions within an approximate twelvemonth span (Carl Friedrich Whistling and Friedrich Hofmeister, Handbuch der musikalischen Literatur: A Reprint of the 1817 Edition and the Ten Supplements, 1818-27 (New York: Garland, 1975). For the chamber works, Pechstaedt consistently lists Whistling-Hofmeister catalogue entries and the period covered by each. But for many other printed works, he makes no reference to them - as with the 6 deutsche Lieder for vocal quartet and piano, P201 (pp. 99-100), which he dates "1825/26?" on the basis of Otto Erich Deutsch's out-dated lists of plate numbers (Musikverlagsnummern: Eine Auswahl von 40 datierten Listen 1710-1900, 2d ed. [Berlin: Merseburger, 1961]), but without noting that the 6 deutsche Lieder are listed in Whistling-Hofmeister March 1825 to February 1826 (Handbuch, "Neunter Nachtrag," 48).

The very works for which Pechstaedt consistently gives Whistling-Hofmeister data are the chamber works, for which that information was already available in the catalogue included in my dissertation ("The Chamber Music of Franz Danzi: Sources, Chronology and Style" [PhD. diss., Indiana University, 1986], pp. 425-81.) And unfortunately, this is not the only use he has made of that source, since several of his remarks on the chamber works are near-exact translations of comments in my catalogue.

For example, I wrote the following about the closely related Quartet and Quintet in D minor, opp. 40 and 41 (p. 453; comments quoted in full):

Comments: Except for instrumentation, Opp. 40 and 41 are identical. They were issued simultaneously and have the same plate numbers; the piano parts are identical. Later Breitkopf & Hartel catalogues describe the wind version as 'Nach d. Quartet Op. 40,' but it is difficult to be certain which version should be considered the original form of the work.

Because he subdivides the chamber music by size of ensemble (duos, trios, etc.), Pechstaedt lists the Quartet and Quintet separately, and therefore refers to the works separately, but he begins his comments on the quintet version (P275) with what is otherwise a translation of the above paragraph (p. 157):

Anmerkung: Abgesehen von der Instrumentation, ist dieses Quintett identisch reit dem Klavierquartett d-Moll 'op. 40' (P 269). Sie wurden gleichzeitig veroffentlicht und haben identische Plattennummern. Die Klavierparte sind vollig identisch. In spateren Katalogen von B & H findet sich zur Blaserfassung der Hinweis: 'Nach d. Quartett op. 40'. Dennoch ist nicht eindeutig zu bestimmen, welche Fassung die ursprungliche ist.

There are a half dozen other similarly related passages, ranging from a single sentence in length to a short paragraph, not counting another version of this paragraph under the Quartet P269 (p. 150). It should be unnecessary to add that borrowings so close to the originals ought not appear un-credited in a scholarly work.

Another unfortunate oversight is Pechstaedt's failure to consult the resources of the Deutsches Theatermuseum in Munich (DTM), which holds many useful documents. One such is a list of performances at the court theater in Karlsruhe, where Danzi served from 1812 until his death in 1826 (4 [degrees] 926, "Alphabetisches Register der, vom 9ten November 1810 an auf dem Hoftheater zu Karlsruhe gegebenen Vorstellungen"). In several cases, this document provides exact dates, (e.g., Die Tochter Jephthas, a play for which Danzi wrote incidental music, was performed in Karlsruhe on 5 November 1812; Pechstaedt, P39, p. 27, gives only the year).

Reliance on sources at the DTM could have prevented the catalogue's most serious error. Reference works generally give the premiere of Danzi's most successful work, the opera Die Mitternachtstunde, as April 1788. Playbills of the Bavarian Court Theater refute that date, as I reported in my dissertation ("Chamber Music," p. 55) and elsewhere ("Franz Danzi. Introduction," in The Symphony 1720-1840, ed. Barry S. Brook, Series C, Vol. 5 [New York: Garland, 1983], xxvi), and they document a premiere on 16 February 1798 - a date that fits better with other documented events that followed soon after, including Danzi's promotion in May 1798, publication of selections from the opera in 1799 and the entire work in 1801, and known performances outside of Munich in 1799, 1800, and 1803.

Pechstaedt insists on the 1788 date, with the justification that Joachim Veit "widerspricht der Annahme von ALEXANDER entschieden" ("resolutely contradicts Alexander's assumption," p. 6). But that greatly overstates Veit's position. After citing a source for the 1788 date, Veit simply adds: "Alexander kommt auf Grund eines Theaterzettels im Deutschen Theatermuseum Munchen, der die Bemerkung zum erstenmal aufgefuhrt enthalt, zu der Annahme, das Werk sei erst am 16. Februar 1798 uraufgefuhrt worden" ("Based on a playbill at the Deutsches Theatermuseum in Munich, which contains the remark 'performed for the first time,' Alexander makes the assumption that this work was premiered on 16 February 1798"; Der junge Carl Maria von Weber, [Mainz: Schott, 1990], 226, fn 57).

But this brief mention is not a contradiction, far less a resolute one. In the first place, the date is a peripheral issue in Veit's book, where it appears in a footnote. Further, Veit implies that he has not seen the playbills, and that he is simply reporting both dates. But the evidence goes beyond what Veit mentions, clearly showing the earlier performance to have been of a play and the later one to have been the premiere of Danzi's opera. The 1788 playbill, with no mention of music, Danzi, or the opera's librettist, reads in part:

Heute Freytag den 25 April 1788 wird | auf der hiesigen Nationalschaubuhne | zum erstenmal Aufgefuhrt: | Di Mitternachtstunde, | oder | List gegen List. | Ein Lustspiel in 3 Aufzugen aus dem Englischen | ubersetzt von Philipp Schumann. [Today, Friday, the 25th of April, will be performed for the first time at the National Theater here: Die Mitternachtstunde, or Cunning against Cunning, a comedy in 3 acts, translated from the English by Philipp Schumann.]

The 1798 playbill has the following:

Freytag den 16. Februar 1798 wird | auf der Churfurstlichen | Hofnationalschaubuhne | zum erstenmal | aufgefuhrt: | Die Mitternachtstunde. | Singspiel in 3 Aufzugen, nach dem bekannten | Lustspiel. | Die Musik ist vom Herrn Franz Danzi. [Friday, the 16th of February, will be performed for the first time at the Electoral National Court Theater: Die Mitternachtstunde. Singspiel in 3 acts, after the familiar comedy. The music is by Mr. Franz Danzi.]

The combination of such unambiguous documentary evidence with the known biographical facts supports only one reasonable conclusion, that the correct date of the opera is 1798. And with such clear evidence available, Pechstaedt should have based his position on the primary sources rather than a secondary source - especially Veit, where the date of the opera is a minor issue. Pechstaedt's reliance on such thin evidence is troubling in a scholarly catalogue, which should be based firmly on the best evidence available. Unfortunately, such a serious error concerning the most prominent work of Danzi's professional life, coupled with the borrowing and dependence on secondary sources documented above, casts doubt on the catalogue's reliability as a reference work.

Although it falls short of being an authoritative work of scholarship, this volume is valuable for the wealth of new information it offers on Danzi's music. This edition cannot remain the final one, but must be followed by a revision or a supplement. Until then, it is a useful source of information for scholars interested in Danzi's music, but one that must be used with considerable caution.

PETER M. ALEXANDER The University of Iowa