The Rediscovered Schwedler Codex from Kłodzko and Nysa (1626‒38)

Katarzyna Spurgjasz

Abstract

This report presents the so-called Schwedler Codex, a manuscript written in Kłodzko and in Nysa in the years 1626–38, regarded as one of the most important seventeenth-century sources of music created in Silesia. After the Second World War, this manuscript was considered lost. Recently, it was rediscovered in the collection of the University Library in Warsaw, recombined from three separate parts, identified on the basis of annotations made by copyists (the first few sheets, including the sheet with the provenance note, were indeed lost during the war). The owner of the manuscript (and copyist of a large portion of it) was Christoph Schwedler, cantor of the collegiate church in Nysa, who had previously served as cantor in a parish church in Kłodzko. Most of the compositions recorded in this source still need identification, which requires comprehensive comparative research. However, the notes added by copyists and verified through reference to bases of available music sources reveal that the manuscript contains inter alia music by Italian composers, such as Lodovico Viadana and Giovanni Valentini, and works by Protestant composers (Michael Praetorius, Samuel Besler and Leonard Paminger), which attest to the exchange of repertoire between environments of different religious confessions. It is also the only known source of works by Simon Praunstein, a Jesuit composer active in Kłodzko and elsewhere. Appended to the text is an inventory of the compositions recorded in the manuscript.