Annotated melody edition of the liturgical plays belonging to the Holy Week and the Easter season

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Franz Körndle
• Subject Area: Musicology ; German Medieval Studies (Medieval German Literature)
• Term: from 2013 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 246262174

The project's aim is to eliminate a desideratum, which has been a topic of longtime complaint and a hindrance to the inclusion of the melody tradition into the research on liturgical dramas of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period: For the first time ever all melodies of the 83 known Latin, Latin-vernacular and vernacular dramas of the Holy Week and the Easter Season (i.e. from Palm Sunday to Ascension), including 21 Planctus, are to be edited according to uniform standards. A commentary to the melodies on a comparative basis is to be provided, too. The corpus comprises approximately 2700 melodies to about 618 different non-liturgical chants and to 298 different liturgical chants. The aim of the project is to create a fundamental work for both musicological and philological research. It will comprise all comparable sources from Germany, Bohemia, France, the Netherlands, England and the Patriarchate of Aquileia, which date from the 13th to the 17th century. As the commentary will be laid out on a comparative basis, it will e.g. be possible to tell, which melodic variants are local or regional and which melodic variants are chronological instead and whether certain dramas or dramatic traditions have their own melody tradition. In this way philological criteria concerning the determination of dependencies between the sources may be confirmed or corrected. The strict distinction between liturgical and non-liturgical melodies will contribute to a more detailed investigation of the transmission of melodies concerning local, regional and institutional factors. With the help of the comparative commentary and based on the whole melody tradition it will be possible to reassess a couple of assumptions about the relationship between the strictly liturgical visitatio ceremonies and the not strictly liturgical Easter and Passion plays, e.g. the question, in how far there are melodical differences between these two groups. To sum up the project wants to create a solid basis in order to finally include the melody tradition as an integral part into the research on liturgical drama, which has not been the case up to now

• DFG Programme: Research Grants