Jan Dismas Zelenka: Psalmi Vespertini III.

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Between mid 1725 and late 1728 Jan Dismas Zelenka composed three cycles of thirty-three psalms and Magnificat compositions for Vespers. Each cycle begins with a setting of the psalm Dixit Dominus and it then develops to serve one or more sequences of psalms to serve almost every Vespers service of the liturgical year. In 1726 Zelenka began to enter these psalm settings into the Inventarium rerum Musicarum Ecclesiae servientium, his personal inventory of sacred music that began to be kept on 17 January of that year. His entries demonstrate that the thirty-three Vespers works were conceived in three cycles. These works were composed over a period of three years for the Catholic court church of Dresden, a royal chapel dedicated to the Most Holy Trinity. The unavoidable assumption is that this was a well-considered, deliberate plan. Zelenka listed his collection of thirty-three psalm settings into his Inventarium under the heading of psalms for the whole year. Surprisingly, the listings did not begin with the earliest settings of 1725, but with settings of the second Vespers cycle that Zelenka began to compose in 1726. With this current cycle the “Psalmi Vespertini” ended. This, final cycle of Zelenka’s “Psalmi Vespertini totius anni …”, originally comprised fifteen settings. Today six works are missing, as also is a setting of Beatus vir. Already in circa 1784 when the collection of sacred music held in Dresden’s Hofkirche was catalogued, the scores of each of those now-missing works were noted as missing. Thus, this third and final part of Zelenka’s “Psalmi Vespertini totius anni …” suffered great losses which reduced this section of the cycle to one Confitebor tibi Domine, one Laudate Dominum, and a cluster of psalms required as the final psalm for special occasions—works heard infrequently during the liturgical year.