Then the trail went cold – which is to say that, in this not yet fully digital age, no one was motivated, or had the practical opportunity, to comb this repertory thoroughly enough to come up with further works of the same provenance. In 1992 the Beatus vir RV 795 emerged in 2003, a Nisi Dominus in 2006, a Dixit Dominus and a Lauda Jerusalem. Students of Vivaldi have been made aware since the early 1990s of a group of uniquely preserved psalm settings belonging to the former Hofkirche repertory today held by the SLUB (D-Dl) that are attributed on their manuscripts to Galuppi but can be shown through concordant musical material plus stylistic and structural factors to be in reality by Vivaldi, from his late (post-1730) period. In the majority of instances, applying these filters produces no great revelations, but since the process of calling up these lists and (if the incipits provoke further investigation) accessing digital reproductions of the sources is so unbelievably swift – one would have to spend hours, and perhaps overtax the patience of busy library staff, to do the equivalent in situ – one is encouraged to move into “What if …?” mode and test out hypotheses that within actual library walls would nearly always appear too precarious and time-consuming to pursue. It enables visitors to the RISM portal, by means of a single click, to isolate and consider as a potentially significant group all the manuscripts belonging to this corpus that share a watermark and/or a scribe. This project was unusual in being not only a “mass” digitization programme but also a vast exercise in analytical cataloguing that supplied for every item a detailed bibliographical description including, wherever possible, a watermark ID and a scribe ID. Regular Dresden-watchers will be aware of the ambitious project “ Die Notenbestände der Dresdner Hofkirche und der Königlichen Privat-Musikaliensammlung aus der Zeit der sächsisch-polnischen Union” supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), which was brought to a successful conclusion in 2016.
The following is a guest post by Michael Talbot (University of Liverpool, Department of Music, Emeritus):
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