Catalogus novus Wanhali – Symphonies

With the dissolution of Pendragon Press in 2022, the rights to the volumes published by the company went back to the authors or, for deceased authors, to their families. Paul R. Bryan’s catalogue Johann Waṅhal, Viennese Symphonist – His Life and His Musical Environment (1997) remains invaluable for scholars and lovers of music and would have been likely to remain so. There were therefore no intentions to include the symphonies as a part of this project. Since there is now no chance that the original volume will be reissued (at the time of writing the only commercially available version of the book is a used volume costing well in advance of 800$!), there is a real danger that his work would become unavailable to many

Paul passed away at 101 years in 2021. His family has granted us permission to use his scholarship for the new catalogue. The undersigned, who was lucky enough to communicate with Paul over several years and meet him in person in 2018, shares the family’s belief that Paul would have wanted his work to remain available, and that he would have opted for a digital model of publication if he had been a young scholar today.

We intend to present his scholarship as faithfully as possible, but with updates to the whereabouts of manuscripts (this is particularly an issue for material in the former Eastern Bloc) and the inclusion of manuscripts that he was not aware of. The material will also be reformatted to fit with the rest of the catalogue, and the highly abbreviated style demanded by such a work when printed on paper will be written out more fully. The symphonies themselves will continue to be known by their Bryan numbers, as there seems to be little gain in giving them Nokki numbers.

The undersigned, the editorial board and the Bryan estate are confident that this is the best course for keeping Paul’s scholarship alive for the future, and we will do our utmost to ensure that the result honours his memory.

Halvor K. Hosar,
Editor of the Catalogus Novus Wanhali, November 2022