Foreword Thanks to the musical patronage of the Polish kings of the Vasa dynasty, the period of the end of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century was an exceptional one in the history of music in the Commonwealth of Poland- Lithuania. Musicologists, as well as historians of theatre, literature and art, have studied this phenomenon for over a hundred years. A crucial influence on the standard of musical life at the royal court was brought to bear by Italian musicians, who dominated the royal chapel from 1595, when Sigismund III brought the first group of musicians from Italy, until the times of the Swedish ‘Deluge’, when the ensemble became dispersed1 and the collection of sheet music containing the repertoire of the Vasas’ chapel, kept at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, was probably destroyed. That repertoire comprised works written both by Italian and local musicians active within the Commonwealth and by foreign composers, dedicated in part to Polish kings and magnates. Of particular significance for the raising of the musical qualifications of members of the royal chapel was the fact that up to 1630 the chapel-masters were outstanding Italian musician-composers, in chronological order: Annibale Stabile, Luca Marenzio, Giulio Cesare Gabussi, Asprilio Pacelli and Giovanni Francesco Anerio. Sigismund III engaged most of them in Rome, where they held posts in the most renowned chapels in the world. During the last years of his life, following the premature death of Anerio, the king failed in an attempt to acquire the services of another musician and composer who was highly regarded in the Eternal City, Vincenzo Ugolini, a former master of the Cappella Giulia.2 Little more than a year 1 A great many works have been published on this period in the history of music at the court of the Polish kings, most recently including Szweykowska-Szweykowski 1997; Przybyszewska-Jarmińska 2007/2. 2 This is evidenced by a letter sent by Sigismund III on 18 January 1631 from Tykocin to Stanisław Mąkowski, who, on completing his mission to Spain, was probably staying in Italy or on his way there. The king wrote: ‘zdało się nam teraźniejszym listem zlecić do Wierności Twojej w tamtych krajach będącemu, abyś się nam o Magistra Capellae postarał, nie tylko wziętego w profesji swojej, ale i człowieka dobrego. Proponowany nam jest Vincenzo Ugolini, który teraz snać privatos w Rzymie mieszka. Z tym tractuj Wierność Twoja. A jeśliby ten być nie mógł, oznajmisz nam o subiektach inszych, żadnego nie zaciągając, do dalszej informacjej naszej…’ (‘It occurred to us with the present letter to entrust to you, our Faithful Servant, being in those countries, to seek for us a Magister Capellae, not only successful in his profession, but also a good man. We have been proposed Vincenzo Ugolini, who is apparently living privately in Rome. Treat with him, 8 Foreword later, King Sigismund died, and his son and successor, Ladislaus IV, appointed Marco Scacchi as his maestro di cappella. Scacchi was the first chapel-master who had not established a reputation in his homeland, but honed his musical skills in Poland, where he worked in the Polish king’s chapel from a young age, under the eye of Italian masters. During the 1620s and subsequent years, the royal ensemble also included musicians of unknown origins born in the Commonwealth who achieved, doubtless not without the assistance of the Italian chapel-masters and other members of the chapel brought in from Italy, a high standard of musical professionalism. Some of them went on to make a name for themselves as composers. Prepared before the Second World War were monographic books on the works of Bartłomiej Pękiel, who after Marco Scacchi’s departure from the Commonwealth became the first non-Italian chapel-master to the Polish kings of the Vasa dynasty,3 and Adam Jarzębski,4 a highly-regarded violinist, construction manager of Ujazdów Castle and author of the rhymed work Gościniec abo Krotkie opisanie Warszawy [A parting gift, or A brief description of Warsaw]5. During the last decades of the twentieth century, the entire known output of those two composers was published in critical source editions,6 and it continues to be the subject of research conducted by new generations of musicologists, as well as performances and recordings. Another of the most prominent and esteemed Vasa musicians was Marcin Mielczewski (d. 1651), a member of the royal ensemble and, during the last few years of his life, chapel-master to Charles Ferdinand Vasa, Bishop of Wrocław and Płock. In terms of quantity, the extant output of this composer – the best known Polish composer in seventeenth-century Europe – is second only to the work by Mikołaj Zieleński,7 organist and chapel-master to the Primate of Poland, Wojciech Baranowski, which was published in Venice in 1611, and with regard to its stylistic and generic diversity it is without analogy in the oeuvres of other Polish composers working during the seventeenth century with which we have thus far become acquainted. The oeuvre of Marcin Mielczewski has been studied since the late nineteenth century. A large body of his works was published in the three volumes of his Faithful Servant. And if that one cannot be, then inform us on the subject of others, without recruiting any until further information from us…’) (RUS-Mn, MS F. 183/I no. 1792, fol. 74v). This letter was recently discovered by Professor Henryk Lulewicz, who kindly made it available to me. 3 Feicht 1925/1980, pp. 290–453. 4 Dunicz 1938. 5 Jarzębski 1943/1974. 6 Jarzębski/Rutkowska 1989; Pękiel/Dobrzańska-Fabiańska 1994/I-II. 7 Zieleński/Malinowski 1966, 1974, 1978, 1989, 1991. Foreword 9 Opera omnia.8 However, doubtless on account of his very large and stylistically diverse output, transmitted in dispersed sources requiring detailed research, no one has previously undertaken to prepare a monograph of this composer’s life and work. During the 1990s, interest in Marcin Mielczewski and his music grew considerably, undoubtedly triggered by my own discovery of thirty-seven previously unknown compositions (and their variants) by a composer identified by the monogram ‘M.M.’, which I ascribed to Mielczewski.9 The arguments in favour of such an attribution that I presented in a range of publications were backed and supplemented by the results of research into that repertoire conducted by other musicologists specialising in the history of music of the Baroque era.10 Since 1945, the rediscovered works, which up to the Second World War had been part of a collection of music manuscripts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries originally belonging to the main Lutheran churches of Wrocław, centralised in the nineteenth century, housed in the Stadtbibliothek in Wrocław and catalogued by Emil Bohn,11 had been considered as lost, along with the entire collection. Since German Reunification, the collection from the former Wrocław Stadtbibliothek has been available to researchers at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz, as the ‘Sammlung Bohn’. The large body of works found there, catalogued under the collective shelf-mark Slg Bohn Ms. mus. 170, originating – as we have succeeded in establishing – from the Church of St Mary Magdalene in Wrocław, represents around half the currently-known output of Marcin Mielczewski. The present state of knowledge relating to sources of Mielczewski’s works and of research into his compositions and the history of music written and performed under the patronage of the Vasa kings of Poland and members of their family, in particular the prince-bishop Charles Ferdinand, is conducive to attempting a profile of this musician within the context of musical life at the courts of the Polish Vasas. In producing this work, the author drew on the very rich subject literature, which to a large extent represents the results of her own research into historical sources and systematic-analytical work. The lengthy process of ‘discovering’ and getting to know Mielczewski and the sources of his works is shown in the chapter on ‘Research history’. The ‘Outline biography’ constitutes the fullest picture of the composer’s life produced to date, compiled on the basis of published information, 8 Mielczewski/Szweykowski 1976, 1986, 2003. 9 Przybyszewska-Jarmińska 1994/1; Przybyszewska-Jarmińska 1998/1. 10 Particularly crucial from this point of view are Dobrzańska-Fabiańska 1999, Kazem-Bek 1999, Patalas 1999/2, Szweykowski 1999/3, Wilk 1999 and Jasiński 2002. 11 Bohn 1890/1970. 10 Foreword supplemented with a small amount of new source information relating to the musician’s life and to the functioning of the chapel of his patron, Charles Ferdinand Vasa. In connection with the above-mentioned attribution to Marcin Mielczewski of a large collection of works signed with the monogram ‘M.M.’ and also the fact that his compositional output, apart from two printed compositions, has been preserved in poorly researched manuscripts of various provenance scattered around Poland and the rest of Europe, which vary in terms of the time they were produced, their form and the degree to which they conform to non-extant original sources, the documentation of the sources of his works and their evaluation occupies proportionately the largest part of this book. It was deemed particularly crucial to assemble and strengthen the arguments behind the ascription to Mielczewski of the works signed merely ‘M.M.’ Research has made it possible to augment the composer’s known output with further works that can be firmly or speculatively attributed to him. In the chapters devoted to analysis of Mielczewski’s compositions in various genres, considered against the background of the reconstructed repertoire of the Vasas’ music ensembles, this composer’s musical language is characterised. Techniques that should be regarded as conventional for the time, attesting the reception of work by particular musicians or of specific stylistic trends, are singled out, as are individual technical solutions employed by Mielczewski.