Halifax Judas, The

The first oratorio to be given by the Associierten was Judas Maccabaeus, in 1786, probably drawing on the services of Mozart, among others. Starzer was musical director for the Associierten at this point, however, and although the 1779 Tonkunstlersozietat performance of the 'Starzer' version had not lived up to expectations, it would have been both untactful and uncharacteristic of the rank-conscious Swieten to have commissioned a new arrangement from Mozart for this occasion. Starzer would have had easy access to performing materials from the Tonkunstlersozietat library. Furthermore, the existence of several late eighteenth-century copies of the 'Starzer' arrangement in which the 'organo' part has been omitted indicates that this arrangement received performances after 1779 in venues where an organ was not available (neither the Court Library nor the majority of the aristocratic palaces of the Cavaliere had organs).18 When Starzer died the following year, however, Mozart was appointed musical director for the Tonkunstlersozietat in his place - a desirable position, in view of the honorarium and opportunities it offered to enhance his connections with major aristocratic patrons. Mozart, we can speculate, might well have jotted down ideas for a new arrangement of Judas at this point, either at Swieten's suggestion, or in order to show him ways in which Starzer's version could be improved on, perhaps even as a means of encouraging the Cavaliere to favour him with the appointment.

Several obstacles are encountered when testing out this thesis. Mozart listed his arrangements of Acis and Galatea, Messiah, Ode for St Cecilia's Day and Alexander's Feast in his Verzeichnuss alter meiner Werke - the notebook in which he kept track of his compositions with details, dates and incipits - and there is no mention of an arrangement of Handel's Judas Maccabaeus. The Handel entries were added out of sequence, however, at the bottom of the relevant pages, marked `nota bene'.19 They could date from long after the arrangements themselves were completed, therefore, allowing the possibility that Mozart simply forgot to mention his work on Judas. Moreover, Mozart did not, in fact, list all the arrangements he made for the Associierten in this notebook. His first duty as music director for the Associierten was to direct performances of CPE Bach's Auferstehung and Himmelfahrt Jesu on 26 February, 4 March and 7 March 1788, the final rendition taking place in the Burgtheater. Although Bach's scoring required fewer alterations than the Handel works, Mozart still had to divide the concertato trumpet part in the tenor aria `Ich folge dir, verklarter Held' between flute, clarinet and trumpet before it could be rendered by the players at his disposal. A score and parts for this arrangement have survived (A-- Wgm III/14232 Q.678), yet there is no record of this arrangement (K.537d [=K626b/19]) in his notebook.20

A second problem with the attribution of the Halifax arrangement to Mozart is the absence of performing materials or a score in Mozart's hand, or indeed of any other source for this arrangement. (The Halifax score itself, as we have seen, probably dates from after 1800, and possibly as late as 1820, and the source from which it was copied does not appear to have survived.) By contrast, the other Mozart Handel arrangements are well catered for in this respect, as Holschneider reports in the prefaces and critical reports of his volumes for the Neue Mozart Ausgabe: for the Messiah arrangement, for example, the printed word book, a complete set of performing parts, the third part of Mozart's working score, and a later copy of the entire arrangement are all extant. It is unlikely that any performance parts or printed word books would have been produced, however, if the 'Mozart' Judas arrangement had remained unperformed; and the absence of corroborating musical sources would not in itself be sufficient grounds to disregard the attribution of the arrangement.21