Wolfgang Caspar Printz (1641-1717), music theorist, music director and cantor in Sorau (Lower Lusatia), endeavoured to cultivate music as an art (ars) and at the same time to establish it as a science (disciplina Mathematica). He was able to summarise the practical musical and historical-theoretical knowledge of his time and, depending on the target group, to prepare it for publication. His early work Compendium Musicæ (1668), written in Latin, the language of scholars, describes the fundamentals of composition, including the extremely rare doctrine of the hidden hierarchy of accentuation (quantitas intrinseca), which was only thematised again in 1954 by Heinrich Besseler under the heading 'Akzentstufentakt'. With the help of the facsimile edition and an expert translation of his textbook from 1668, access to a rather problematic transitional phase from the tradition-bound early Baroque to the innovative conceptions of the mid-Baroque has now been opened up.
