The Performance Material for Richard Wagner's “Tristan and Isolde” in Dresden

Tonight, the Bayreuth Festival opens with Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. A good opportunity to take a brief look at the sources of this work described in RISM. The composer prepared his first sketches as early as 1857, and an autograph album leaf, written in Paris in 1860, can now...

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‘The Seven Last Words of Christ’ by Haydn and Barbieri

An ambitious digitization project targeting the musical heritage collections of the National Library of Spain has provided access to 31,000 musical sources that were long accessible only in the reading room, thereby inspiring both musicians and scholars to new discoveries. In the following we reprint from the library’s blog –...

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What an anniversary year is good for

The following text by Eberhard von Oppen originally appeared on the Carus-Blog and is reproduced here with the publisher’s kind permission. The tendency to focus on “round” time intervals according to the globally dominant decimal system and celebrate the respective anniversaries is as widespread as it is justifiable, since the...

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A Musical Guide to the European Football Championship

On 14 June the European Football Championship 2024 started in Germany. 24 national teams had qualified for it; in the meantime two thirds of them have been eliminated. Now we look forward to the quarter- and semifinals, culminating in the final on Sunday, 14 July 2024. In the two-day break...

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New RISM Sigla for South African Institutions

The IAML Congress in Stellenbosch, South Africa, is underway. In anticipation of the congress, we have used the Directory of South African Music Collections by Santie de Jongh to update our sigla for South Africa. As part of our work to document musical sources worldwide, RISM assigns an abbreviation, called...

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