SONGS AND MUSIC IN MORAVIA AND SILESIA. THE GUBERNATORIAL COLLECTION FROM 1819
The so called Gubernatorial Collection of songs from Moravia and Silesia is a result of extensive collecting efforts, undertaken in all the former countries of the Austro-Hungarian Empire following the initiative of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna in 1819.
In addition to classic folksongs, the collection also contains popular songs, broadsides and ballads, period art songs, instrumental dance music and arias from folk singspiels, and it therefore is an important historical source for the study of the structure of folk musicality of that period. Records were made by teachers from both towns and villages, as well as by organists, who were asked by district administrators to contribute to the collection. Thanks to the Moravian government, the largest collection was gathered in Moravia and to a great extent archived in Brno. The records were to be made out in two copies - one for the Viennese archives and the other for archives in Brno; however, in some cases both copies remained in Brno, while others were sent only to Vienna (206 records). The Viennese materials were copied by Karel Vetterl in 1948, who also considered publishing a selection from the gubernatorial collection.
The total number of registered items amounts to 1174 songs and instrumental pieces. Of that, 555 items are secular songs, 87 are records of instrumental music and 323 are religious songs (which are in addition to the religious songs which are kept in Vienna and which Karel Vetterl did not copy). In Moravian villages with some German population, 58 secular German songs, 106 religious songs and 45 instrumental numbers were recorded. So far, 201 secular and 44 religious songs have been published by Fr. Bartoš, J. Kabelík, L. Janáček - P. Váša and M. Jiroušek - 0. Sirovátka. A few excerpts have appeared in studies published in journals as well. The remaining records, some of them published (in some cases with mistakes) amount to 341 songs and 59 instrumental pieces, which means that 279 religious songs, 52 recitatives and arias from folk song-spiels and 3 instrumental records (2 harmonizations of religious songs and 1 art composition) have not been published so far.
As Karel Vetterl did not finish his work on the collection, another editor completed it: she gathered all the materials and added commentaries but left Vetterl's classification as it was - I. folk songs and popular songs - 1. love songs, 2. recruiting and military songs and ballads, 3. wedding songs, 4. dance songs and music, 5. humorous songs, tunes and fragments; II. semi-folk songs and art songs - 1. love songs, 2. moralizing songs and songs on the topic of marriage, 3. songs on historical and social topics, 4. parodies, couplets, fragments, 5. excerpts from folk singspiels and musical farces; III. obscene songs.
A list compiled from archival numbers of the State archive in Brno (A) and the archive of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna (M, S, R) provides a complete picture of collection in Moravia in 1819.
Every song printed in the material section of the collection contains the place where it was noted or from which it was sent, as well as the collection number of the archive where the original manuscript is kept.