ABSTRACT
In his Geschichte der weltlichen Solokantate Eugen Schmitz made the point that early cantatas survive primarily in printed form. Yet he noted in the fourth decade, by which he probably meant the years around 1650, a clear 'shift from printed sources to manuscript ones'. This view was probably too sweeping, for not a few composers from the second half of the seventeenth century are represented by cantatas surviving overwhelmingly in printed, and only marginally in manuscript, form. This is largely true of those composers whose field of activity lay directly within the orbit of the two major publishing centres, Venice and Bologna, figures such as Giovanni Legrenzi and Giovanni Battista Bassani. For the 1680s, similarly, it is instructive to make a comparison with cantata publications in other centres in order to illustrate the primacy enjoyed by Bolognese publishers.
