With the closure of libraries and the cancellation of all public performance, it has been difficult to maintain momentum with Stölzel research. However, Warwick Cole's edition of the 1720 Passion Die leidende und am Creutz sterbende liebe Jesu is now published by AR Editions. Click here to access their online shop.
In other news, we still have plans to make films of selected cantatas from Jahrgang I. We have had to postpone this project twice, but hopefully we can reschedule as lockdown restrictions ease.
Update March 2021: The cantatas recording is now scheduled for May 2021.
It is nothing short of tragic that most of Stölzel's archive in Gotha was discarded in the years after his death. While investigating the limited amount of autograph material held in the library at Friedenstein, I realised that the manuscript listed under the title Lasset uns zu ihm hinaus gehen (RISM ID no. 240009231, shelfmark Mus. 2° 101/8) is in fact incomplete fragments of the two canatas written for Estomihi sunday 1721. Furthermore, they are bound in the incorrect order, so that the (complete) chorus movement which opens the cantata is bound before the remnants of the cantata Siehe, das ist Gottes Lamm (numbers I: 40 and I: 41 in my catalogue). In other words, they are bound out of chronological order.
Further research revealed that the manuscript listed in RISM under the title Siehe, das ist Gottes Lamm in Zürich (Zentralbibliothek, Musikabteilung Ms.Car XV 264 (1.); RISM ID no 400008278) is a bifolio which matches the handwriting and other characteristics of the Gotha manuscript. It is clearly a autograph composing score and which has presumably become detached from the remnant in Gotha. Because Stölzel seems to have composed the cantata Siehe, das ist Gottes Lamm before its companion piece, this manuscript has a strong claim to being the composer's earliest surviving autograph.
Comparison of these two manuscripts with a secondary (18th-century) copy in Hamburg clarifies issues of scoring and other details.
Warwick Cole March 2020