Music Seminar Series: Allan Badley

Dr Allan Badley presents his current research, "Issues of Authenticity and Chronology in the Sacred Music of Leopold Hofmann."

This event is part of the Music Seminar Series: a series of presentations highlighting current research at the School of Music.

Abstract:
Leopold Hofmann, Kapellmeister at St Stephen’s Cathedral from 1772 until his death in 1793, was the senior church musician in Vienna during the last twenty years of his life. His works were widely disseminated and continued and performed and copied until well into the mid-19th Century.

In the absence of autograph scores and parts, the authenticity of Hofmann’s sacred works rests on an uneasy combination of provenance, the existence of multiple copies with attributions to the composer, and stylistic evidence. The single most important source for these works is the music archive of St Peter’s, Vienna, where Hofmann served as regens chori from 1764. The recording of performance dates on some of the wrappers in this collection allows us to compare their possible acquisition sequence with copies found in other collections. A comparison between the works in the St Peter’s archive and those that formed part of the cathedral collection (destroyed in May 1945) sheds valuable light on Hofmann’s professional activities as Kapellmeister. It also provides a frame of reference in which to consider the authenticity of the large number of sacred works attributed to Hofmann preserved outside Vienna and its environs.

This paper considers the evidence offered by the sources and argues that from them a more complete picture emerges of a composer whose reputation and influence extended far beyond the confines of Vienna and whose sacred works survived, for several decades at least, the stylistic revolution that cast his instrumental music into unrelieved oblivion.

Biography:
Senior Lecturer at The University of Auckland’s School of Music, Dr Allan Badley is a specialist in late 18th-century Viennese music. His publications include several hundred scholarly editions of works by major contemporaries of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Among the most significant of these are his editions of the complete works for piano and orchestra by Ferdinand Ries, now nearing completion, mass settings by Wanhal and Hummel and an extensive series of symphonies and concertos. He has published articles on Leopold Hofmann, Ignaz Pleyel and Haydn, contributed to the Oxford Composer Companion and, more recently, contributed analytical essays on the symphonies of Wagenseil and Pleyel for the forthcoming volume on the eighteenth-century symphony edited by Barthia Churgin and Mary Sue Morrow for Indiana University Press.

Allan Badley co-founded the now Hong Kong-based publishing house Artaria Editions in 1995, which is regarded as one of the leading specialist publishers in its field. His own editions have featured in over fifty critically-acclaimed recordings on the Naxos label.

A graduate of The University of Auckland (PhD, 1986), Allan Badley is a Distinguished Alumni Award winner (2003) and in 2007 was awarded the Goldene-Pleyel-Medaille of the Internationale Ignaz Joseph Pleyel Gesellschaft (Austria). He is a member of the editorial board of Eighteenth-Century Music and was recently elected inaugural president of the Swiss-based Johann Baptist Wanhal Society.

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