The Catalogus Musicalis in Ecclesia Metropolitana

When Luigi Gatti was appointed Kapellmeister of the Salzburg court in 1782, archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo ordered him to register all music manuscripts in an inventory “so that nothing of the music shall be withdrawn”, as his decree of appointment says. Gatti assigned the main copyist at the Salzburg court, Joseph Richard Estlinger (1720−1791), who is an important figure for the transmission of Mozart’s Salzburg works, to the task. Subsequently Estlinger wrote an inventory of the music archive of the cathedral (Dommusikarchiv), which he designed as a thematic catalogue in two approximately equal volumes consisting of 196 respectively 188 pages, both entitled Catalogus Musicalis in Ecclesia Metropolitana.

Each volume has an additional inscription on the title tag indicating where or by whom the volume was used: one has the label “Archivium”, the other the label “Gatti”. So, apparently, one copy stayed in the archive, where the music manuscripts were kept, while the other was permanently at the Kapellmeister’s disposal.

However, Estlinger was not the only writer. After his death in 1791 several copyists continued to keep records in the Catalogus so that constant additions, corrections, cancellations, and commentaries made the two volumes quite confusing. When Luigi Gatti died in 1817 an inventory was ordered by the authorities, and, successively, court cellist and later Kapellmeister of the cathedral Joachim Joseph Fuetsch finished the new catalogue in 1822, again in two volumes.

In order to explore it’s full information and to estimate the reliability of entries, it was necessary not only to reconstruct the history of the Catalogus in some detail but also to transfer it’s entries to a data-base. This has been done fully with the copy “Gatti”. All the records were cross-referenced to the RISM-data-base.