This article examines Cat Power’s project Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert through the lens of authenticity discourses in popular music. Using a critical fan review as a point of departure, the study reveals audience expectations centered on technical mastery, performative authority, and the handling of canonical repertoire. Drawing on theoretical frameworks by Alan Moore, Ralf von Appen, Philip Auslander, and Emma Mayhew, the analysis investigates Cat Power’s recreation of Bob Dylan’s 1966 Manchester concert across the dimensions of personal, sociocultural, and emotional authenticity. The article argues that Cat Power constructs authenticity not through reinterpretation but through performative restraint and historical proximity to Dylan’s original performance. Her fragile vocal delivery, reduced instrumentation, and controlled stage presence produce an aesthetic of reverence that frames authenticity as attentiveness and canonical fidelity. From a gender perspective, her vocal vulnerability challenges dominant rock conventions that associate authority and authenticity with masculine-coded vocal strength and expressive assertiveness. Ultimately, the project demonstrates authenticity as a negotiated cultural effect shaped by staging, performance, audience reception, and gendered listening practices.
The research project Paper and Copyists in Viennese Opera Scores, 1760–1770 (duration 2021–2025, funded by FWF, P 34188), to which the following articles relate, aimed to study the making of music manuscripts: it focused on the production of opera scores written by professional Viennese copyists. It continued the work of its predecessor project Cultural Transfer of Music in Vienna, 1755–1780 (duration: 2014–2018, funded by FWF, P 26456), so that the two projects and the resulting website completely cover Viennese opera scores from the period from 1760 to 1775. The manuscripts stem from the Imperial collection and beyond. Besides opening an option for dating manuscripts, observations on the material structure of the music manuscripts and the distribution of scribes and paper offer insight into the practice of manuscript production in Vienna, especially concerning the cooperation of copyists, the use of paper, the staff ruling, and the book binding. The studies in this special issue of Musicologica Austriaca operate within this field.
The production of eighteenth-century opera buffa often involved modifications to its poetic or musical text. Italian comic operas written for Vienna during the second half of the century, however, were rarely modified during a performance series and were even more rarely revived. The present article examines a well-known exception to this “rule,” Antonio Salieri’s La locandiera, which was first performed in the Habsburg capital in 1773 and restaged there nine years later. The nature of modifications applied for the revival has not been acknowledged in scholarly literature. A first glance at the musical sources suggests a seemingly uneventful performance history, with no apparent differences between the version of the premiere and that of the 1782 revival. However, a codicological examination of one particular surviving copy— conducted as part of the research on Viennese opera scores from 1760 to 1775 by the project Paper & Copyists—revealed some irregularities: not only did it contain a substituted aria for the servant character Lena, but it also featured a paper with a watermark not consistent with those used in the early 1770s. The internal differences among the copies, all written by professional Viennese scribes, prompted me to examine the only surviving autograph of the complete opera. This source has previously been studied by musicologists and has formed the basis for all musical and dramaturgical analyses of La locandiera to date. Salieri’s manuscript, however, revealed inconsistencies similar to those in the previously examined copy, and it contains parts of the later version of the opera. The information gathered in the Paper & Copyists database, along with a thorough codicological examination and comparison of all surviving Viennese sources, has helped me to illuminate the 1782 restaging of La locandiera. It reveals a degree of musical rethinking by the composer, mostly done to accommodate the new cast of singers.
Most of the paper used for Viennese opera scores in the 1760s and 1770s originated from the region around the Toscolano River near Lake Garda, one of Italy’s most significant centers of paper production. Cadastral records and notarial documents provide insights into the conditions of production, the location of the mills, and the extensive, interwoven networks of papermaking families. Some of these, including the Calcinardi, Fondrieschi, Zuanelli, Fossati, and Seguito families, dominated the market. Each had its own distinctive watermarks, often featuring similar motifs as a form of branding. The large number of surviving scores from this period offers valuable information about the production cycle of paper. Every two to three years, as the moulds wore out and had to be replaced, new paper with updated watermarks entered the market. Before reaching Vienna, blank paper from the Valle delle Cartiere (“Valley of the Paper Mills”) was likely transformed into music paper in Venice, where specialized rigatori added staff lines. These craftsmen used special ruling devices that enabled them to draw all lines on a sheet simultaneously. An analysis of staff ruling patterns indicates a rising demand in the 1770s, prompting rigatori to employ multiple ruling devices at once to increase output. The transport of Venetian music paper to Vienna was rarely handled by specialized paper merchants. By the late eighteenth century, paper was often imported alongside other goods. As a result, not only music publishers and booksellers but also Viennese merchants dealing in a broad range of imported wares made Venetian music paper available to composers and copyists.
Bonn’s musical life in the final decade of the Electorate of Cologne (1784–94) was decisively shaped by Viennese influence, particularly through the acquisition of approximately 140 sacred music compositions by Georg Reutter the Younger (1708–72). This article argues that the Viennese sacred music repertoire cultivated at the Bonn Electoral Court functioned as a key medium of political and dynastic representation, staging Habsburg belonging and authority through ritual, liturgical, and musical practice. A case in point is the introduction of a new feast day for Saint Leopold (15 November 1790) into the liturgical calendar; reflecting imperial and dynastic interests, it underscores the close interdependence of sacred music and politics. Focusing on Reutter’s motet Leopolde Sancte Marchio, the article examines the veneration of Saint Leopold as it was transferred from the Habsburg hereditary lands to the empire’s northwestern borderlands. It analyzes the material transmission of the composition, its textual and instrumental adaptation, and the ways in which Reutter’s music was prepared for performances in Bonn. The discussion then turns to the planning and conceptual framing of court festivities surrounding Leopold’s celebrations, with particular attention paid to Ludwig van Beethoven’s Kantate auf die Erhebung Leopolds II. zur Kaiserwürde (Cantata on the Accession of Emperor Leopold II), WoO 88. Read together, Reutter’s motet and Beethoven’s cantata reveal that the celebration of Saint Leopold in Bonn was not merely occasioned by Leopold II’s imperial coronation (1790) but was embedded within a longer Habsburg tradition of commemorating the Babenberg margrave Leopold III (1073–1136). By integrating medieval saintly veneration with contemporary imperial politics, Leopold’s celebrations demonstrate the ritual’s capacity to merge different temporal layers of piety and to “mask historical contingencies.” It is precisely this integrative function that helps explain how Bonn’s sacred musical life could be perceived by contemporaries—and later by historiography—as sounding like a “little Vienna.”
