Inventoria rerum musicalium domum Societatis Iesu in Polonia et Lituania tempore suppressionis

The present publication discusses various aspects of Jesuit musical culture in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It provides an edition of the inventories of Jesuit houses issued in late 1773 and early 1774 as a result of the Suppression of the Society of Jesus. These sources prove valuable for musicological research for two reasons. Firstly, so far they have virtually never been used in the study of Jesuit musical culture, which has mainly focused on music sources (both handwritten and printed) and the narrative sources from the Roman Archive of the Society of Jesus (historiae, litterae annuae). Secondly, they substitute the archival records and artefacts originally belonging to the Jesuit houses, which have been dispersed in the aftermath of the Jesuit Suppression. This edition includes excerpts from 43 manuscript inventories, describing 55 Jesuit houses located on the territory left under Polish sovereignty after the First Partition of Poland-Lithuania (1772). The sources describe 16 colleges, 7 residences, 2 novitiate houses, 2 professed houses, two tertianship houses, as well as 26 Roman or Greek (Uniate) Catholic churches located in Jesuit missions or landed estates. Compared to the approximately 140 Jesuit houses operating in Poland and Lithuania in 1773, those 55 institutions constitute a representative group albeit not a majority. Most of the inventories are related to towns in the eastern part of the Polish-Lithuanian state, and are now kept in Russian, Belorussian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian archives and libraries. This depends on the dismemberment of the archive of the Commission of National Education (KEN) by Austrian, Prussian and Russian authorities following the Third Partition of Poland (1795). The documentation relating to the territories annexed to the Russian Empire in 1793 and 1795 was transported from Warsaw to Petersburg, and can now be found at the Russian State Archive of Early Records in Moscow (RGADA). In turn, few inventories of Jesuit houses situated in ethnically Polish territories have been preserved, due to the losses suffered by Warsaw libraries and archives during the Second World War, resulting among other in the destruction of the inventories of the colleges in Warsaw, Drohiczyn, Lublin, Poznań and Rawa Mazowiecka, as well as the Łęczyca residency. Despite such geographic disproportion, the extant material does reflect the development of Jesuit musical culture in various contexts, from the towns of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Volhynia, where the Jesuits competed with the Eastern Church in the field of liturgical music, to the Polish-Prussian border, where the Society of Jesus used music to counteract Protestant influence. The published material is uniform regarding both content and the circumstances under which it was issued. The inventories deal with several aspects of musical activity in Jesuit circles: the location and furnishing of the choir balcony, the buildings and equipment of Jesuit music boarding schools, the music sheets and instruments used by the ensembles, their funding sources, as well as music-related books available in college libraries. These aspects, however, are not covered by all Jesuit inventories to the same extent. In some cases, omissions occurred since inventorisation was carried out hurriedly. Another major problem was the theft of instruments by musicians who left the Jesuit boarding schools after the promulgation of the Suppression brief Dominus ac redemptor. Despite these shortcomings, the inventories provide detailed information on a wide range of topics and thus represent Jesuit musical culture in a much broader perspective than the former studies on Jesuit music boarding schools. The documents in question demonstrate that Jesuits were active in the field of musical life also in the smallest towns, where they made use of hired musicians instead of maintaining professional ensembles. The inventories provide information about daily life and humanistic education of the members of Jesuit ensembles. Lists of musician names can spur further research into private ensembles, since many Jesuit-trained instrumentalists and singers later found employment at the aristocratic courts. The inventories were issued by inspectors appointed by the General Confederations of Poland and Lithuania. Their task was to take stock of the former Jesuit property and hand it over to the Distribution Committees, which were responsible for sharing and allocating the possessions of the suppressed religious Order. The former Jesuit schools were, in turn, entrusted to the Commission of National Education. Due to the similarity of content, two records related to the colleges in Bar and Kamyanets-Podilskyi were included in the edition, despite being issued by the emissaries of the local bishop Adam Stanisław Krasiński rather than by secular inspectors. The same decision was made regarding the anonymous inventory of the Myszyniec mission in Masovia, which is most likely related to the activity of Michał Jerzy Poniatowski, Bishop of Płock. The published materials allow to characterise the Jesuit church music repertoire in the 2nd half of the 18th century. Most of the ensembles maintained by Jesuit colleges included 8 to 10 musicians. Only the boarding schools of the Vilnius Academy and Pinsk college were significantly larger, consisting of 29 and 20 musicians respectively. In turn, residences and missions usually employed six-person ensembles. The lists of musical instruments indicate that these mainly performed a late Baroque repertoire characterized by a degree of local colour. This was reflected among others by the use of flageolets, and the predilection for fanfares played by a large complement of wind instruments. In turn, no traces of the influence of the Sensitive Style (Empfindsamer Stil) and early Classicism can be found. New forms of expression and instruments (such as clarinets) promoted by these trends were virtually absent, with the exception of the Pinsk boarding school, where clarinets were listed among newly purchased instruments. The editor tries to identify the authors and the musical compositions mentioned in the inventories. Due to the brevity of the descriptions, only certain work titles can be determined based on the RISM catalogue. Apart from local artists, the inventories mention many composers from South German monasteries, such as Albericus Hirschberger, Isfried Kayser, Marian Königsperger, Lambert Kraus, Johann Valentin Rathgeber, and Gregor Rösler, as well as the lay Swiss musician Joseph Leonti Meyer von Schauensee. Their music, mostly based on Kirchentrio, was appreciated for its relative simplicity, which made it suitable for small ensembles. This particularly applies to Rathgeberʼs compositions, which enjoyed considerable popularity in Poland-Lithuania. The influence of composers from Italy (Gaetano Carpani is the only one listed) and Bohemia (Václav Norbert Červenka) was less prominent. The lack of works by musicians connected with the Saxon court, such as Johann Adolf Hasse and Jan Dismas Zelenka, is also intriguing since these composers were well-known and highly appreciated among the Polish-Lithuanian aristocracy. At the same time, college libraries show that the Jesuit interest in music went far beyond its practical application to the liturgy. For instance, works dealing with musical theory like Athanasius Kircherʼs Musurgia universalis and Gaspar Schottʼs Cursus mathematicus were available in several colleges. Occasionally, the Jesuits were also acquainted with the 18th-century Italian musical theatre, as shown by a collection of 21 librettos from the Sandomierz library. Thanks to their content, the published inventories provide a new insight into the musical culture of Polish-Lithuanian Jesuits.