H-Bn MS Bártfa Mus.Pr. 1

Budapest, National Széchényi Lbrary, MS Bártfa Pr. 1 (hereeafter ms. Pr. 1)

Large collection of liturgical music

1 partbook (of original 4): D.

Provenance: Copied for the church of St. Aegidius in Bártfa (Bardejov). See below for details.

Published catalogue: Róbert Árpád Murányi. Thematisches Verzeichnis der Musiksammlung von Bartfeld (Bártfa). Bonn, 1991.

DIAMM entry

Choralis Constantinus II contents (D only):

Ms. Pr. 1 is an elegant manuscript that is bound together with RISM 1545/5. It features a decorated capital at the beginning of each mass, with especially elaborate ones for Christmas and Easter.

The manuscript consists of three distinct sections. The first begins with an anonymous mass ordinary followed by ten numbers from Choralis Constantinus II (plus an additional Isaac piece substituting for one of the Choralis numbers) and an Isaac mass. The Isaac numbers in this section are:

The musical and textual readings of the Choralis II pieces in this group correspond to those in mss. 8 and 24. The pieces were copied from a manuscript in the Bártfa set, most likely ms. 8 or ms. 24. (In the very few instances in which readings differ between those sources, ms. Pr. 1 agrees sometimes with one and sometimes with the other.) The Isaac Kyrie in this set also appears among the Easter pieces in both ms. 8 and ms. 24.

Liturgical assignments are not specified in the manuscript, but the implied assignments agree with those in mss. 8 and 24. Christmas, Epiphany, and Easter are unproblematic The sequence Regem regum and the tract Ave Maria belong implicitly in the Purification group (rather than with Circumcision and Annunciation, respectively, as in Choralis II). The introit Rorate coeli is assigned to Advent in both ms. 8 and ms. 24, though it is placed between Purification and Easter in ms. 8 (as in the Choralis II print, where it belongs in the Annunciation group).

The second section of the manuscript includes a variety of liturgical numbers by more recent composers. It features a note after the end of a piece on fol. 29r that reads: “Scripsit haec Johannes Frisch manus Norimberg, Anno 1610, 9 Novem[bris]” (Murámyi, p. XXX). It is hard to imagine that this note applies to the opening Isaac group, since there is no apparent reason that one of the Bártfa sources would have been in Nuremberg at that time. The note presumably applies only to the second group, which may originally have been a separate manuscript. That group begins on a new folio in the only surviving partbook. If the second section was copied independently of the first, its date implies nothing about the date of copying of the first section.

The third section of the manuscript, following the above note (on the same page), contains music from Michael Praetorius’s Missodia Sionia, which was published in 1611.