to celebrate the birthday of the Saxon Elector and Polish king, Augustus II the Strong. The official publication Königl. Polnischer und Churfürstl. Sächsischer Hoff- und Staats-Calender (Hof- from 1734), which listed the members and servants of the Dresden court, listed Zelenka as a Contra-Basso & Compositeur in the editions of 1731 and 1732; in 1733, he is listed as a Compositeur only, which suggests that he was no longer playing the double bass. Instead, he most likely directed the music in his capacity as a singer. 1730s The period of the Interregnum gave birth to a number of outlandish theories on Zelenka's position at the Dresden court, and especially around his petitions from October/November 1733 for the Kapellmeister position. The fact is that before the death of Heinichen in 1729, the Dresden court was already actively looking for a well-established opera composer to take Heinichen's place. This was a part of a long-term project to re-establish the Italian opera in Dresden. In 1724, the Dresden court began training five young Italian opera singers with some of the finest vocal teachers in Italy like Nicola Porpora, a great composer in his own right and future teacher of the young Joseph Haydn. In the first week of February 1730, the young singers, the castrato alto Domenico Annibali, the castrato sopranos Giovanni Bindi (also called Porporino), Ventura Rocchetti 'Venturini' and the sister sopranos Maria Rosa Negri and Anna Negri were called to Dresden. There is hardly any coincidence that in the same week, Johann Adolf Hasse was offered the "primo" Kapellmeister position. Following the arrival of the five young singers in Dresden in April 1730, Zelenka played an important role in their continuing education. After the "compositeur de la musique italienne" Giovanni Alberto Ristori travelled to Moscow in the end of 1730, Zelenka, as the senior composer at the court, became responsible for supplying secular vocal music for the chamber concerts at the royal palace in Dresden. It is at this point in time when he began to assemble his fascinating collection of Italian opera and cantata scores, which partly still exists in Dresden and are individually numbered in Zelenka's own hand. This suggest that he wrote down a complete inventory of the secular works in his possession, and by referring to the numbers he assigned each work it was possible to reconstruct the now missing inventory. This included a number of arias