Questions about music in St Mary’s Church in Cracow in the frst half of the sixteenth century and the role of Jan of Lublin

Elżbieta Zwolińska

Abstract

Gathering information about musical settings to liturgy celebrated in St Mary’s Church in Cracow during the first decades after the completion of Veit Stoss’s masterpiece altar is fraught with difficulties in the absence of strictly musical sources. However, documents preserved in Cracow archives: the National Archive, the Archive of the Metropolitan Curia, the Archive of St Mary’s Basilica, and in the Jagiellonian Library throw some light on the conditions of performing music in this church. The article discusses such issues as the construction of the pipe organ, the activity of organists employed there, the singing duties imposed on the college of mansionaries and the cantor and his inferiors, and the activities of the patrician Brotherhood of the Holy Virgin Mary. Also, the author draws our attention to a mansionary and altarist named Jan of Lublin, offering a tentative hypothesis that he is to be identified with the owner and creator of one of the most important monuments of early Polish music: the organ Tablature of Jan of Lublin.
During this period, St Mary’s Church was under the patronage of Cracow’s municipal authorities, which paid the salaries of organists and cantors, supervised the finances of the mansionaries’ college, as well as paid for the construction and maintenance of the pipe organ.
As a result, the church was an excellent setting for integrating music and liturgy and the surviving records confirm that the instruments and the performers were taken care of. The analysis of this material made it possible to supplement and verify some facts or names, but the crucial questions are still a matter of speculation: the sources are not sufficient to determine whether singing – as an indispensable component of liturgy – was in this temple limited to chant monody, or whether figurative music sounded there on certain occasions, which would have been justified by the status of the church. It can only be speculated that the musical setting of liturgy consisted mainly of alternate singing and pipe organ performance within the framework of the then-current alternatim technique, in which the organist was responsible for the polyphonic arrangement of liturgical chants.