P. Romanus Weichlein :
New findings about his biography
P. Romanus Weichlein, who was born in Linz and who became a monk in the
Benedictine monastery of Lambach, is known to us today solely by way of
his musical heritage. On the one hand, his special talent distinguishes
him from many of his innumerable brothers in the Lambach cloister, which
has existed almost continuously since 1056. On the other hand, the everyday
life of this sensitive Musician monk was anything but what one imagines
an artists life to be. It is rare today to find mention in contemporary
documents of his being a monk, whereas it is clear his main task was pastoral
and administrative. At best, his musical activities were carried out in
his free time. Weichlein's letters, almost all directed to
the abbots of the Lambach cloister, are full of melancholy and regretful
words over his supposed guiltiness. Particularly in one of his first missions
as a parish priest, in Oberkirchen in Lower Austria (around 1680), any
musical sentiments were obstructed by vocational conflicts of uncertain
dimension. The object of one conflict was his cook who apparently did
not think well of him, and when drunk threatened him with a hatchet. The
situation got so out of hand that the abbot of Lambach had to send a brother
from the monastery in order to settle thinks. The report of the monastic
inspector didn't correspond to the facts and said that Weichlein had murdered
the cook! So it was understandable that the accused would want to defend
himself and put the matter to rights. He wrote a reply to the abbot in
which he begins, "However, after many circumstances arose in which
the truth was modified, I lost control and became a different person from
who I was before. Although his declared intention was to prove his
innocence, and was able to demonstrate it, he got stuck again and again
in more letters with confessions and expressions of remorse, without naming
the cause. This has remained quite a puzzle. It seems more likely that
he was the victim of the cook's slander in that sordid dispute than that
he could be truly assessed as a bad human being, judging from the the
high praise for his services from the Nonnberg convent in Salzburg and
Säben in Südtirol. In the above mentioned cloisters, Weichlein
was chaplain and music prefect from approximately 1687 to 1705 and was
highly esteemed in both cases. The Salzburger abbess Maria Eranisea chooses
her words carefully when she writes to the abbot of Lamach, Severin Blass,
to request benevolent permission to send the honored Lord P. Roman
Weichlein to her convent. The bishop of Brixen, Caspar Ignaz, writes
a letter about Weichlein to the monastery in Lambach, saying, "To
our knowledge, he reads mass, leads an impeccable life, and is exemplary
as a monk. So we consider him to be, according to scholarship and conscience...."
Information about his music is only a spattering in the documents. From
an undated letter, we find out that for Easter he dedicated a solemn mass
(now lost) to the abbot of Lambach "as the sum of my whole capacity",
and that during his studies at Salzburg (around 1674), he wished to learn
"that musical instrument, theone commonly called bassoon, or cornetto.
Peter Deinhammer
translation: Sigrid Lee