Attribution is not an act of faith
Distinguishing hand, period, and function in a musical document is not an aesthetic pastime. It is a concrete task, often demanding, and above all cumulative. You do not reach an attribution because something sounds convincing, or because someone, two centuries ago, wrote a name on a title page. You reach it when a cluster of different clues, material as well as musical, keeps pointing in the same direction, and when the alternatives, once tested, begin to collapse one after another.For us, Johann Simon Mayr’s Verter became an ideal test case, also because it did not remain locked inside a library. It moved from the desk to the music stand and then to the concert hall, and that shift changes everything. When a work comes back to life, philological questions stop being abstract. They demand payment, bar by bar, word by word. And at that point you realise that attribution and reconstruction are not parallel disciplines. They are the same operation, seen from two sides.
From manuscript to concert hall
We worked on Mayr’s Verter, which we discovered in Milan, along a path that is, in the end, the best possible introduction to the problem of attribution. The score had been wrongly catalogued and was confused with another work by Mayr. Only by truly working through it, by transcribing the manuscript note by note and putting text, music, and structure back into order, did we realise it was not at all what the catalogue description suggested. This was not a rediscovery in the romantic sense, as if the work had simply fallen into our hands by chance. It was a technical discovery, born from prolonged contact with the source and systematic control of details. In other words, Verter did not emerge from an archival statement. It emerged from our editorial work.From there, the sequence became natural. In Poznań we were guests of Adam Mickiewicz University, at the Faculty of Musicology. We spoke in English for more than an hour and a half in front of staff and students, showing manuscripts, comparisons, musical examples, and explaining how one reconstructs a text that no longer exists in a stable form but only through witnesses that contradict one another. Professor Marcin Gmys introduced us and also presented our work on Mayr, Mozart, Goethe, and the milieu of the Bavarian Illuminati. In the room there were scholars who had known Mayr for years and students who were meeting him for the first time. The best part, and the most instructive, was the quality of the questions. When an audience is alert, you immediately learn whether your attribution is robust or whether you have merely told an elegant story.
After Poznań came the rehearsals with the orchestra. There you feel a different kind of vibration. Scores are no longer objects. They become instructions for sound. You hear details that remain silent on the page. You can tell whether certain instrumental gestures have an internal logic, whether the crescendos work with that almost mechanical precision you recognise when you are dealing with a composer who knows exactly what he is doing.
Then came the transfer to Warsaw, travelling by coach with the Poznań Philharmonic Orchestra. It might sound like a colourful aside, but it is not. That shared time of waiting, among scores, conversations, and landscapes sliding past the window, restores the human scale of musicological work. You are not only proving something. You are also handing that work over to a community that will make it exist again.
In Warsaw, in the hall of the National Philharmonic, the performance of Verter closed a circle. We were seated next to leading figures, and that alone shows how a recovery can be perceived as a genuine cultural event, not as a curiosity. At the end of the concert, conductor Łukasz Borowicz raised our full score high in the air. A simple gesture, but unmistakable. It repays years of study because, in a single moment, it says everything. Research is not a solitary exercise. When it is done well, it returns to the public.
What makes this case exemplary
This is where attribution in the strict sense begins. Verter is a perfect case because, within the same dossier, it concentrates almost every problem a musical philologist is likely to meet. There is a manuscript bearing an autograph signature, but that is never enough on its own. There is a Viennese copy attributed to another composer, so the tradition itself tries to trip you up. There is a printed libretto with yet another name on the title page, and we know all too well that a frontispiece can be a theatrical device rather than a notarial act. There are structural variants, musical cuts, copying errors, and even those thematic reuses which, if you know how to read a catalogue, function like fingerprints.When we speak of attribution, the first trap is to believe there must be a single decisive proof. In reality that is rare. An autograph signature is a strong datum, but it is not a universal passport. A signature can be copied, imitated, or added. And attribution does not only concern who wrote a name, but what we actually have in our hands. An autograph source can coexist with later interventions, cuts, and reworkings. What matters is understanding the nature of the document and its function, because a working score does not behave like a theatre copy, and a revival reduction does not behave like an original.
Milan, the autograph, and the network of copyists
In the case of the Milan manuscript, preserved at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory, Mayr’s autograph signature appears on the first page. It is an excellent beginning, but the most interesting aspect is another one, and it is less photogenic. The copy was produced by two scribes who also worked on other Venetian-period works by Mayr. This matters greatly because it takes you beyond the single document and places you inside a network. Copyists’ hands are not isolated entities. They are recognisable, and when they reappear across multiple sources they create a material coherence that is extremely difficult to fake systematically. Philology, when done well, often resembles contextual investigation. It does not tell you only who, but also where and with whom.Then comes the other half of the work, the part many avoid because it demands time and ear. Musical attribution enters the fabric of the score. In Verter there are symphonic structures, instrumental interactions, and crescendo designs that read as Mayrian not by impression but by comparison. Comparison is the key word. One does not say this resembles Mayr. One shows that Mayr often does exactly this, in the same way, with the same logic.
A crucial example is the first theme of the Allegro in the Sinfonia. That melodic profile, and the way it is set in motion within the orchestra, reappears in varied form in the Allegro of the Bagatella, datable to 1795 and written in the same key of F major. An even stronger comparison involves the Sinfonia to Un pazzo ne fa cento from 1796. Half of Verter’s Sinfonia, transposed to D major, overlaps strikingly with that page. The resemblance is so close that, if repetitions are removed, the two pieces can be played together from beginning to end without disturbing the harmonic structure. This is not a vague memory. It is architectural kinship.
There is also the martial stride before the start of the second part of the Sinfonia, which recalls a Mozartian effect in the expressive sphere of Die Zauberflöte. Here again the point is not to say Mozart is present. The point is to observe that Mayr was struck by that effect and reused it more than once, for example in Avviso ai maritati from 1798. A copyist can copy a note. He cannot build a coherent system of reuse over time, unless he is effectively reconstructing the composer, which in practice leads to the same conclusion.
Vienna and the logic of revival
When one moves from the Milan manuscript to the other two witnesses, attribution is no longer played only on the ground of identification, but on that of hierarchy among sources. It is not enough to know who wrote what. One must understand who depends on whom.The second witness is the manuscript preserved in Vienna at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek. Here the work is titled Verter, farsa, and it is attributed to Vincenzo Puccita, with an indication of performance at the Teatro San Moisè in the spring of 1802. At first glance, this might look like a parallel tradition, perhaps another setting. This is where philological work must cool enthusiasm and turn on the microscope.
The Viennese manuscript is a fair copy, far more compact. Where the Milan manuscript spreads across forty-four pages, the Viennese copy compresses the material into thirty. This is not only a matter of denser handwriting. It is a reorganisation. Slurs are introduced, dynamic markings multiply, the layout is regularised. All this has the air of a later clean-up. In the Milan manuscript, Mayr leaves many dynamics implicit, as often happens in a working text meant for musicians who know his language. The Viennese copy, instead, spells out, clarifies, and standardises.
The decisive point, however, is the cuts. Carlotta’s aria in the Milan manuscript contains a virtuoso passage of twelve bars which, in the Viennese witness, is simply removed. Not shortened, not varied. Cut. This is not an ornamental detail. It is a functional intervention. It signals an adaptation for a different singer, probably less technically equipped than the original performer. The operation does not create new music. It simplifies existing music. And that is exactly what a theatre revival does, not what a composer does when conceiving a work from scratch.
The same pattern appears in the instrumentation. In some accompanied recitatives the Viennese manuscript reduces the forces and the writing becomes leaner than in the Milan autograph. Again there is no invention. There is lightening. It is the gesture of someone who must make a production work with different means or different performers.
Even more telling are the errors. In the first violin, in the Allegro that closes the quintet, there appears a bar written an octave too high, later corrected with the indication 8a bassa. This is a typical copying mistake, especially when one is working quickly or copying from a less-than-clear model. In the Milan manuscript that bar flows without any hitch. An original tends toward coherence. A copy will, now and then, betray the labour of transcription.
Then there are the scene divisions. In Mayr’s manuscript the dramatic pacing is compact and coherent. In the Viennese manuscript and in the printed libretto the numbering shifts, slides, and doubles. Some scenes are fused, others split. In one point a scene disappears entirely in the Viennese copy. Elsewhere the printed libretto inserts a scene change in the middle of an accompanied recitative, creating a fracture that does not exist in the autograph. These discrepancies are not the sign of a different work. They are the sign of a different production.
The printed libretto and the problem of the name on the cover
The Venetian printed libretto adds a further layer of complexity. It is attributed to Domenico Camagna, a capocomico who in those years was attempting a career as a librettist. The stylistic comparison between Verter and a text securely associated with him, such as Teresa e Wilck from 1807, is a simple and ruthless test. In Verter we find a more refined lexicon, a more articulated metre, a more self-aware dramatic construction. In Teresa e Wilck the writing often slips into poorer rhymes and a coarser kind of comic effect. The distance is obvious even without turning it into a moral judgement.This gap makes it highly plausible that Verter’s text derives from Antonio Simeone Sografi’s theatrical adaptation from 1794, later transformed into a musical farsa. The practice of the time was to rework theatrical successes quickly for musical theatre, especially in Venetian circuits. In 1794 Mayr is in Venice and collaborates precisely with Sografi. The context is coherent and requires no acrobatic conjectures.
A context that explains without replacing the proofs
There remains the historical context, which does not prove attribution by itself but makes it more intelligible. Mayr is connected with the milieu of the Bavarian Illuminati. Goethe’s Werther circulates in related environments and is printed in Poschiavo by Ambrosioni for De Bassus, figures with whom Mayr is in direct contact during his formative years. That the young Bavarian engaged with that text, even as a way of becoming familiar with Italian, is not a far-fetched idea. And that later, having become Maestro di Cappella in Bergamo in 1802, he may have preferred not to highlight a musical setting of a book placed on the Index, is equally understandable.But context does not replace musical analysis. It accompanies it. The attribution of Verter to Mayr does not rest on a single pillar. It rests on convergence.
Why this case matters
The point, in the end, is simple. Copies are never innocent. Printed attributions can be opportunistic. Theatre revivals transform, cut, shift, and simplify. And yet the deep musical fabric, when it truly belongs to a composer, preserves a coherence that resists reworking.Attribution is not an act of faith. It is a process. It is the patience of reading the same scene three times in three different witnesses and asking why one version cuts twelve bars and another does not. It is the courage to say that a name on the cover is not enough. It is the ability to recognise that a composer can quote himself for thirty years, while an adaptor inevitably leaves the marks of his intervention.
Verter, brought back today into the concert hall, shows that a work can be reduced, renumbered, attributed to others, and still keep within its musical texture a recognisable signature. Not the one written in ink on the title page, but the one engraved in the structure of the music itself. And that is where one must look for it, if one truly wants to do research.
La verifica dell’autenticità è un metodo.
Scopri come ItalianOpera struttura l’analisi delle fonti musicali attraverso criteri materiali, confronto sistematico e valutazione probabilistica.