Back from the dead

When conductor Marion Doherty turned detective, she unearthed a gem, writes Arminta Wallace

History is a cruel business: and music history is, if anything, worse. Some pieces become essential listening; some become inescapable listening; and others - sometimes for good reason, but more often by a series of unfortunate accidents - peter into silence. Occasionally a piece of music is unearthed from the silence of oblivion and given another hearing. Such will be the case at the Helix on May 7th, when a choral work by a Bavarian monk will be sung for the first time in 250 years.

"Light, fresh, pleasant music," is how Marion Doherty describes Romanus Pinzger's Missa Brevis No 2. "Charming, I think, would be the word I would use for it." The tale of how Doherty dug Pinzger out and dusted him off for the 21st century is an extraordinary one, part labour of love, part musical detective story packed, as Doherty puts it, with "brick walls and red herrings and eureka moments".

Currently head of the music department at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra, she was doing research for a doctorate in choral conducting at the University of Iowa when she stumbled across a scrap of manuscript in the university library's rare books room. "I was rooting around one day," she says. "They had nine sets of manuscripts. I put out all the parts in a fan shape on a table, and read the first bar of all of them together. Eight were very run-of-the-mill - but the Pinzger just jumped off the page at me. I knew immediately it was something exciting."

It was a set of six short Masses - Missae Breves - called Laus Dei Jocunda Et Sonora, or Praise and Joyful Noise of God which had been published in 1750. Doherty quickly realised, however, that what she had found was as much a jigsaw puzzle as a manuscript. "There should have been 11 part books - one with the soprano parts, another with the violin parts, and so on. They didn't have complete scores in those days because the first fiddle, or the organist, would have conducted. I was missing the brass, timpani and cello parts."

Doherty checked Grove's Dictionary of Music, but it had no entry on Pinzger. Nor did its German equivalent. "But it did have an article on the island monastery of St Lambert at Seeon, where Pinzger lived and worked. In the course of a very long bibliography it mentioned a Mozart Jahrbook from 1960/61. I looked it up - and there was an article about a visit of Maximilian III to Seeon in 1777. In the article there was a paragraph on Pinzger. And that was the start of my search."

What followed was a musical adventure which involved everything from struggling to decipher hieroglyphic pencil marks on manuscripts to trying to get into men-only monastery libraries in Bavaria and Switzerland. "I had never done any research before," Doherty says. "And really didn't intend to, to be honest with you - I thought life was too short to be spending it in a library."

Researching Pinzger, however, wasn't all about dusty books and dark archives. "I've been to Seeon as well. It's almost exactly halfway between Munich and Salzburg, so it was on the route for Mozart when he was on his travels as a child prodigy - and in fact he did stop there several times, and wrote several pieces for the monastery of St Lambert. The monasteries in Bavaria were secularised in 1803 and it's a convention centre now. A wonderful place. I swam in the lake, and the ducks were popping up and down with their little bits of fish right in front of my face."

It sounds almost as idyllic as it was in the days when Romanus Pinzger lived and worked there. For all Doherty's research, however, the composer remains something of an enigma. "The abbot at the time, Rufis Mayr, kept a diary which had a one-page entry for every priest in the order. It says that Pinzger was born on April 13th, 1714 'of legal and honest parents', and that his father was a musician. In the state library in Munich I found his death cert, which said that he died at 2am on October 4th, 1755, of some kind of convulsions." He was 41.

Of the man himself, there is little direct evidence - except a cryptic remark, in the introduction to his second set of Masses: "I hope these Masses will find better favour than the first set, because they're shorter."

When music emerges from the dustbin of music history like this, someone is bound to ask: is it worth hearing? Doherty is convinced that it is. Even if Mozart didn't catch a Pinzger Mass during one of his visits to the monastery at Seeon, she says, the music of Pinzger and other "everyday" composers of the period formed the soundtrack to the young genius's early musical life.

"Every monastery would have had its own in-house composer," says Doherty. "They were all overshadowed by Mozart and Haydn, but they're all part of our musical history. But more than that there is something truly magical about playing music which has not only lain silent, but has lain scattered in pieces all over Europe and America, for two and a half centuries."

Marion Doherty will conduct the choir Enchiriadis Treis at the Helix on May 7 in a concert which includes Mozart's Requiem and Vivaldi's Nisi Dominus