His Name Immortal : Five Studies in the Sacred Music of Johann Baptist Waṅhal

Abstract

This thesis comprises five studies of the sacred music of Johann Baptist Waṅhal (1739–1813), and his masses in particular. A review of the historical records reveals that his sacred music was highly regarded by those who knew it – without the caveats that were sometimes attached to his secular music – and that a number of details in his biography need to be revised, the most important of which concern the likely date of his move to Vienna and the consequences this has on the chronology of his early compositions. On the basis of the extant sources, twenty masses can be attributed to Waṅhal beyond reasonable doubt (including eleven cantata masses referred to here as the ‘Domine Deus’ masses), and a further fourty-two works are plausibly attributed to him. Waṅhal was not a non-entity in Austria and Germany, but his sacred works are preserved to a far greater extent in Bohemia and Moravia, a fact that suggests that he may have received commissions from these lands, or communicated with a number of establishments there. A study of the Osek collection, the largest surviving single collection of his sacred works, suggests that these compositions were acquired largely in the period 1783–1788 (despite the church reforms of Joseph II). This may have been an expression of a pre-revolutionary nationalist support for Bohemian composers abroad. Waṅhal supposedly suffered from a mental illness around 1771, and over time biographers and lexicographers came to associate this with his sacred music production. A hermeneutic analysis of the Qui Tollis (which includes the line ‘Domine Deus Agnus Dei’), typical of his ‘Domine Deus’ masses, indicates a particularly close reading of text, and his numerous settings of ‘O Maria virgo pia’ indicate that the text may have held particular importance to him, possibly owing to a connection between the text’s author and Varaždin, where he lived in the 1770s. A larger formal analysis suggests that Waṅhal composed the Erdödy masses following a coordinated tonal, formal and proportional scheme, and attempted to retain aspects of this in his shorter masses as well.