Jan Josef Ignác Brentner: Hymnodia Divina

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The arias in this particular recording come from Hymnodia divina, a collection which was Brentner’s opus No. 3 in 1718 or 1719 and which was long mistaken for a similarly conceived first collection by the same composer. Notably enough, its contains more text already set to music before. Most of these are arias da capo except the one entitled Domine, non sum dignus with oboe solo. The collection typically ends in a funeral aria Parce mihi, Domine a musical setting of selected verses from the Old Testament Book of Job, also a part od the Office of the Dead. In Baroque times, figural music accompanied not only the Mass, but, in some cases, also selected parts of the office or liturgy of the hours, mainly vespers. As a rule, psalms and Magnificat were performed to instrumental or figural accompaniment, and it was exactly such sets of compositions that were mostly preserved in the collection, apart from separate psalms set to music. Vespers in this recording are rendered in the form, in which they were found in the Wroclaw church of the Holy Cross where they were scored by the above-mentioned Emilián Trolda. In their time, they were obviously a very popular and widely acclaimed kind of music. Such vespers or their parts in combination with Brentner’s other psalms or with different Dixit Dominus and Magnificats remained preserved at a number of places in Bohemia and also, for example, in Dresden. Since some of the sources are inaccessible, we are hard put to reliably corroborate Brentner’s authorship, the most often mentioned alternative, though judged by the music as such it appears to be very like, indeed.