I quickly verified from RISM that the scribe (Baldan) and the paper type (coded W-Dl-428) were not only common to the four manuscripts but also largely coterminous within the wider repertory. If so, filtering first by scribe and then by paper type might produce a hit list moderate enough in length to be quickly searchable for any additional Vivaldi works previously missed. It occurred to me that if all four of the above-mentioned works were wholly in Baldan’s hand (which would seem probable if he wished to conceal his fraudulent behaviour from his assistants), they might also be written on the same paper type as determined by the watermarks. In mid-March 2017 I had what Germans call an Einfall (there is no adequate English word, although “sudden inspiration” gets the gist). So he cut corners and co-opted settings by other composers that he happened to have handy in his stockroom (the Vivaldi pieces could well have come to him via two of that composer’s nephews, who were his employees for a time). A likely rationale for Baldan’s substitution of Galuppi’s name for Vivaldi’s soon presented itself: in the late 1750s or very early 1760s Baldan had evidently been commissioned to supply to the Saxon-Polish court, perhaps at very short notice, a great quantity of up-to-date sacred vocal music, primarily by Galuppi, and found himself short of the necessary liturgical items by the desired composer. It was known from the early years of the present millennium that all four of the misattributed works originated from the prominent Venetian music copying shop of Iseppo Baldan, an astute but rather unethical proprietor whom Haydn scholars had earlier revealed to be guilty on occasion of presumably deliberate misattributions. 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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