The development of modern styles of elite music education played a crucial role in entrenching Werktreue as the dominant practice within classical music performance. Focusing on Germany’s first conservatory, the Leipzig conservatory, which was founded in 1843, this article analyzes how Werktreue , understood as a set of tacit competencies and sensibilities that must be learned by musicians, was produced at a single historical site. Archival documents of the institution, as well as the correspondence and writings of teachers and students like Felix Mendelssohn, William Rockstro, and Ethel Smyth, show that the central objective of musical pedagogy was the faithful interpretation of musical works. Isolated as a discrete subject of training, performing musical works also functioned as the principal mode of student assessment through semesterly examinations. To transmit the necessary skills for this paradigm of performance, pupils’ bodily capacities ( Technik ) and ability to understand and interpret canonic compositions ( Vortrag ) became essential targets of conservatory pedagogy. Ubiquitous visibility among students, and the intense competition that this visibility engendered, went hand in hand with institutionalizing styles of musical expertise that continue to this day. In exploring these developments, this article asks how the productive power of modern conservatory training contributed not only to Werktreue ’s rise over a wide geography, but also to the remarkable stability with which it has pervaded performance practice across multiple generations.

Isaac's Virgo prudentissima , composed in 1507 for the Reichstag in Constance that confirmed Maximilian I as Holy Roman Emperor, is one of the composer's most complex and extended works. It is also a self-consciously constructivist piece that looks back to the repertoire of tenor motets pioneered by Guillaume Du Fay, Jehan de Ockeghem, and most prominently by Iohannes Regis. Yet its construction is markedly different from similar motets by his contemporary Josquin Des Prez, who used a nearly schematic construction in Miserere mei Deus , and ostinato techniques in Illibata Dei genitrix . This article takes a close look at Virgo prudentissima in order to show how Isaac achieves both a great deal of variety in textures and sonorities and a remarkable degree of motivic and thematic unity in the piece. The unity in Isaac's motet is largely due to an interplay of two basic textures and two kinds of motivic construction that are exposed in the first few sections of each pars and then fused in the concluding section, and to a judicious choice of which phrases of the cantus firmus—an antiphon for Vespers of the Assumption—he chooses to paraphrase in the free voices. The motet's mensural structure—one section with all voices in ◯, and one with the tenor continuing in ◯ but the other five voices switching to ◯ 2 , with semibreve-minim equivalence with the tenor—has been ignored entirely in all modern performances of the work that have been recorded in the last thirty years, usually with disastrous consequences for the performance of the secunda pars of the work. Isaac's notation is implausible until one realizes that he is using it for symbolic purposes and at the same time pointing to a correct tempo relationship between the partes by his organization of the phrase structure and the imitation at the beginning of the secunda pars . Isaac thus places this motet in what can be called a mensural tradition, which has its beginnings in the motets of Du Fay in the 143 0s and in the wholesale adoption of the “English” relationship between triple and duple meters in the second half of the fifteenth century.