Répertoire International des Sources Musicales

The “Bußpsalmencodex” of Albrecht V exhibited in Munich on 20 and 21 May

2026-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

It is too large to be considered a typical devotional book. Too precious to be used in church services. Too sophisticated in its illustrations to serve merely as a representative work, and too unsystematic in its presentation of knowledge to meet the standards of an encyclopaedia. (Andrea Gottdang in her preface to Andacht, Repräsentation – Gelehrsamkeit: Der Bußpsalmencodex Albrechts V., Wiesbaden 2020)

Image: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Mus.ms. A I(1, p. 183 (Detail). Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal

The “Bußpsalmencodex” of Albrecht V, also known as the “Mielich Codex,” is a choirbook magnificently illuminated by Hans Mielich, which Albrecht V, Duke of Wittelsbach, had commissioned between 1558 and 1570. Today it is kept in the Bavarian State Library as one of its most precious treasures. The two-volume codex contains Orlando di Lasso’s musical settings of the seven penitential psalms, and as a final treat also his motet “Laudes Domini.” The first volume of this unique codex will be on display on 20 and 21 May 2026 at the Bavarian State Library in Munich.

Cataloged in RISM as part of the Choirbook Project between 2012 and 2015, the first volume has been extensively restored and digitized since 2015, and has been available online since 2018. The restoration of the second volume (RISM Catalog | RISM Online) is also nearing completion, and its digitization is scheduled to begin around the middle of this year.

Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Mus.ms. A I(1, p.183 (Detail). Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal

As the work was classified ‘musica reservata,’ implying exclusive use by the Duke, Lasso could not publish his penitential psalms at the time; the first edition appeared only after the Duke’s death (RISM Catalog | RISM Online). As for the enormous cycle of illustrations by the Munich painter Hans Mielich (1516–1673), which comprises several thousand individual scenes, the recent digitization can be viewed as its first publication. Never before have these miniatures been made available to the public in their entirety and in colour.

For more illustration and detailed information (in German) about the exhibition as well as the “Bußpsalmencodex,” see the website of the Bavarian State Library.

Two born-digital thematic catalogs

2026-04-30T00:00:00+00:00

Two work catalogs, for composers Francesco Pollini and Luigi Cherubini, have recently been completed as born-digital publications. They supplement the growing number of digital versions of traditional thematic catalogs that can be accessed through RISM Online. These catalogs are directly linked to the RISM database that includes descriptions of musical sources, thereby establishing direct connections between works and their sources. This allows users to explore the contents or the performance locations, and to interact with the musical heritage cataloged internationally. The two born-digital thematic catalogs were created by using Muscat, RISM’s cataloging software. The essential data contained in the database is supplemented by its historical and musicological context as presented on a separate website.

The first catalog is dedicated to Francesco Pollini (1762–1846), an amateur composer, tenor, pianist, and fortepiano teacher. Pollini was a prominent figure in the Milanese music scene from the late 18th century through the early decades of the 19th century. Born in Ljubljana, and after pursuing his early studies in Italy, in the 1780s he completed his training in Vienna, where he also met Mozart. In 1793, he settled in Milan, establishing himself as an outstandingly active teacher and composer. Pollini’s oeuvre comprises 262 catalog numbers across all genres, with a predominance of piano compositions. His reputation as pianist and composer was international, as testified by the praise of Glinka, Liszt, and Schumann.

The other catalog now published is a partial catalog encompassing the theoretical and pedagogical oeuvre of Luigi Cherubini (1760–1842). This includes works such as solfège and basso continuo exercises, which are not generally considered as “compositions” but are of great importance for fully understanding Cherubini’s views on the art of composition and the teaching of music theory. There is still no comprehensive thematic catalog of Cherubini’s works. The standard reference remains the catalog of Cherubini’s estate compiled by Auguste Bottée de Toulmon (1797–1850) in 1843. It is hoped that our partial catalog will provide a stimulus for the compilation of the long-awaited general catalog of Cherubini’s works.

The new catalogs presented here are the outcome of two research projects conducted at the Bern Academy of the Arts: Francesco Pollini and the Early Italian Piano Tradition and Luigi Cherubini and Composition Teaching at the Paris Conservatoire.

The catalogs created with Muscat rely on a large-scale, long-term international research infrastructure. The series Work catalogs in RISM Online was developed in accordance with FAIR principles and with an eye to long-term sustainability. In this sense, these first two publications serve both as tools for studying the works of these composers and as models for exploring the future of thematic catalogs in a digital environment.

The music collection of Anton Ulrich, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Meiningen, at the Meiningen Museums

2026-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

The Max Reger Archive (RISM siglum: D-MEIr) forms part of the Music History Collection of the Meiningen Museums and includes musical collections of various provenances. One of these formerly belonged to Anton Ulrich, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Meiningen (1687–1763). During his sojourns in Vienna (ca. 1720–1740), Anton Ulrich had more than 100 lavish volumes compiled which nowadays constitute one of the most comprehensive collections of Baroque vocal music and preserve the musical repertoire of Viennese court music – including opera, oratorio, cantata, and serenade – through compositions by Antonio Caldara, Johann Joseph Fux, and Francesco Conti, among others. This collection was cataloged for RISM by Carmen Rosenthal between 2011 and 2013. In the meantime the manuscripts became available in digital form, therefore – thanks to the RISM Editorial Center – the RISM records could be updated with links to these digitized copies (cf. RISM Catalogue | RISM online).

Image: Johann Adolf Hasse, Alfonso. Drama per musica […], excerpts, 1738, Meininger Museen, Sammlung Musikgeschichte, Max-Reger-Archiv, Sign. F 529, p. 7. (Licensed under: Deed Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International).

Mozart Treasures from Salzburg on Exhibition in New York

2026-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

The International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg owns one of the world’s most significant Mozart collections, which originated from gifts and bequests from the Mozart family. For a remarkable exhibition, a significant part of this collection has traveled to the United States for the first time. They are on display at the Morgan Library & Museum in the exhibition “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Treasures from the Mozarteum Foundation of Salzburg.” The Salzburg originals are complemented by valuable paintings, manuscripts, and prints from the Morgan Library and a major private collection.

The diversity of the artefacts paints a particularly vivid picture of Mozart’s life and work: the exhibition brings together the most significant Mozart portraits, musical instruments that belonged to him, original letters, autograph scores, and other documents. Also included are original memorabilia such as Mozart’s wallet, valuable first editions, as well as portraits of contemporaries and family members.

After Mozart’s death, several important originals were separated; some of them could now be reunited and displayed together again after a very long time. For example, the Morgan Library owns two pages containing the earliest compositions by the five-year-old Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (K. 1a–d). In the early 19th century, these were cut out of the so-called “Nannerl Music Book,” which came into the possession of the Mozarteum Foundation in 1864. These very special works by Mozart can now be admired together with the entire music book for the first time in 200 years. The volume was compiled in 1759 by Leopold Mozart for the piano lessons of Mozart’s sister Maria Anna (“Nannerl”). Little Wolfgang also learned to play the piano using this book, and soon his first compositions were jotted down in it as well.

The exhibition can be viewed at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York through the end of May.

Link to the website of The Morgan Library & Museum: https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/mozart

Image: Leopold Mozart (1719–1787), Music book for Maria Anna (“Nannerl”) Mozart. Manuscript, begun in 1759. Source: International Mozarteum Foundation, Bibliotheca Mozartiana (RISM Catalog | RISM Online).

Marking Music: The Use of Music Books in Early Modern Europe

2026-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

The acronym DORMEME stands for “Dissemination, Ownership, and Reading of Music in Early Modern Europe.” This interdisciplinary project – led by Dr. Elisabeth Giselbrecht at King’s College London – focuses on surviving copies of polyphony printed across Europe between 1500 and 1545, and poses diverse questions regarding their users. Who owned and read music books in early modern Europe? Who had access to printed musical material, how did they interact with it, and to what end? Keeping in mind that the period in question saw a decisive rise in musical literacy, DORMEME seeks to shift the scholarly discourse from the production of music books to their consumption, offering insights into diverse fields of music-making ranging from self-taught instrumental playing to participation in larger groups. At the same time, a database is also in the making to describe marks of ownership and annotations in surviving copies of printed editions from the period in question. For more information, see the project’s website.

DORMEME’s first conference will be held on 11 and 12 May 2026 with the title “Marking Music: The Use of Music Books in Early Modern Europe,” and registration is still possible through this link until 12 April. Furthermore, while the event is essentially an in-person one, taking place at the Strand Campus of King’s College London, interested parties can opt for auditing the papers remotely by contacting Louisa Hunter-Bradley at louisa.hunter-bradley@kcl.ac.uk before 13 April. The provisional program (available through the registration link above) promises nuanced insights into 16th-century musical life all over Europe, and will end with a panel also featuring Claudio Bacciagaluppi and Laurent Pugin from the RISM Digital Center.

Collaboration between the WEAVE project “Tartinians” and RISM supports the long-term preservation of project data

2026-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

The WEAVE research project Tartinians – The School of Nations and its networks, based at the Universities of Graz and Augsburg, as well as the Schola Cantorum in Basel, was launched in April 2025. It examines the pedagogical work of Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770) and his students primarily on three levels: (1) professional biographies and networks of the students, (2) musical output, and (3) pedagogical writings. All the information about Tartini’s students is summarized in a database developed specifically for the project, their musical output is also cataloged, and Tartini’s pedagogical writings – as a rule preserved in the form of notes taken by his students which sometimes differ from one another – are also edited.

The Augsburg subproject focuses primarily on the musical output of the Scuola delle nazioni, the activities of Tartini’s students at the courts of the Holy Roman Empire, and 18th-century violin pedagogy in the light of Tartini’s teachings. Most of the musical sources collected during the project will be cataloged in RISM for the first time, while existing RISM entries will also be elaborated on.

As an example, here is a description created by the project group about a manuscript copy preserved in Vienna, featuring a duo sonata by Domenico Ferrari (1722–1780): RISM-Catalog | RISM Online.

Of particular importance for the project is the documentation of incipits, which allow for the comparison of concordances and variants, as well as the examination of melodic relationships. The collaboration with RISM ensures the long-term preservation of project data and provides an ideal starting point for in-depth data analysis in relation to the project’s key research questions. Upon completion of the project, the data collected in RISM will also be linked to the Tartinians project database.

To document the current status of our work, a project blog has been set up.

Image: First page of the Basso part from an undated manuscript of Giuseppe Tartini’s Sonata in C, No. 3, for Violino Solo e Basso, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (A-Wn), Mus.Hs.12722 MUS MAG. Source: ÖNB Digital/Österreichische Nationalbibliothek

The National Library of Spain and its Music Department collaborated with RISM to disseminate its musical heritage

2026-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

Over the past 30 years, the Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE) collaborated closely with the RISM project. Through Nieves Iglesias and José Carlos Gosálvez the National Library participated in the team that translated RISM’s cataloging guidelines into Spanish – alongside other notable experts such as José Vicente, González Valle and Antonio Ezquerro from the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Institución Milá y Fontanals de Investigación en Humanidades) in Barcelona, as well as Joana Crespí from the Library of Catalonia.

The National Library of Spain first contributed to the RISM project by reporting some copies that belonged to the early A/I series, “Individual prints before 1800.” As a more recent step of our collaboration, in the years 2024 and 2025 we added more than 2,500 bibliographic records of music manuscripts to the international database directly through Muscat, RISM’s special cataloging program. RISM’s A/II series concerns “Music manuscripts after 1600,” and today in fact admits even 21st-century materials, whereas our BNE project covered historical sources produced before 1830. The inclusion of these precious manuscripts means a significant enrichment for the RISM database, while at the same time it ensures much greater visibility for the collection of the National Library of Spain on an international level. As a special advantage, the sources now searchable in RISM have also been digitized, therefore you can explore them from your own computer, wherever you are in the world.

At the same time, the National Library of Spain – represented by its Departamento de Música y Audiovisuales – has recently become an integral part of RISM’s international structure. The latter has traditionally been based on a network of more than 30 working groups representing their respective countries, and the Spanish working group now involves two centers: the Institución Milá y Fontanals de Investigación en Humanidades and – as a new host institution – the National Library of Spain. We are delighted to assume this important new role, and look forward to actively contributing to the larger RISM community. It is our hope in particular that our assistance can help to increase the number of Spanish-language sources in RISM.

Image: Juan de Vado (ca. 1625–1691), Libro de misas de facistor (ca. 1667), Manuscript copy, Biblioteca Nacional de España, shelfmark M/1323, f. 4 Available online at Biblioteca Nacional de España, (RISM ID no. 1001313237 – RISM Catalog | RISM Online).

Music manuscripts from Cologne now linked to digitized copies

2026-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

One of the major benefits of the RISM database is the option to link the description of manuscripts and printed editions with digitized copies of the original sources, thereby allowing users to access right away the items of interest to them.

A while ago the Cologne University and City Library (RISM siglum D-KNu) provided us with a list of links to newly digitized copies, which we have promptly added to the corresponding RISM records. The collection had been cataloged for RISM in 2014; the current update significantly enhances the usability of these source descriptions by adding links to no fewer than 480 of them.

Most of the sources in question had once belonged to the collection of the Cologne musicologist Ernst Bücken (1884–1949), which the Cologne University and City Library acquired in 1950. Some of the records, however, describe sources purchased at a 1924 Cologne auction from the estate of the Bonn-based Beethoven scholar Erich Prieger (1849–1913). Overall, the most precious treasures of the collection include several manuscript scores of oratorios and sacred cantatas prepared in Central Germany in the second half of the 18th century. Among these we find Johann Georg Röllig’s Markuspassion, composed in Zerbst in 1750, which for some time was mistakenly attributed to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach RISM Catalog | RISM Online, as well as copies of Georg Benda’s Trauer-Ode (Gotha 1767) RISM Catalog | RISM Online, and the Easter cantata Der Sieg des Erlösers by Ernst Wilhelm Wolf RISM Catalog | RISM Online. Yet another outstanding treasure from Bücken’s estate is the lute tablature Livre pour le lut, a collection of 33 pieces that contains not only anonymous works but also compositions by the German lutenist Silvius Leopold Weiss RISM Catalog | RISM Online, and in conclusion it is also worth calling attention to a bulky manuscript collection of chamber cantatas by Alessandro Scarlatti RISM Catalog | RISM Online.

The links to the digitized documents are already available for research on RISM Online; from April 2026, they will also be displayed in the RISM Catalog.

Oratorio libretti in the CRAI Library of the University of Barcelona and their music

2026-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

The CRAI Biblioteca de Fons Antic at the University of Barcelona houses an extensive collection of libretti, including a group of 173 titles once performed in the Cathedral of Barcelona. However, the music associated with these texts is scattered across various libraries, some of them in Catalonia, and until recently a direct connection between the textual and musical sources could not be established in many cases. One notable exception is the oratorical output of Francesc Queralt, thoroughly examined by Xavier Daufí in his dissertation: Els oratorios des Francesc Queralt (1740-1825). Història de l’oratori a Catalunya al segle XVIII (Lledia 2004).

Any effort to reconstruct the relationship between a libretto and its musical setting raises various questions and problems, since the textual and the musical sources, respectively, often contain no clear references to each other. Therefore, their connection must be established through preliminary bibliographic enquiries enhanced by further analysis. It is usually information contained in the libretti themselves – especially the text incipits and the names of characters or actual persons – that allow for direct comparison with the corresponding information in the musical sources, and thereby clarifies the connection between them.

For the abovementioned 173 oratorio libretti from the CRAI Biblioteca de Fons Antic, this in-depth research was carried out by two students – Linus Montolio and Antonio Cruzado – of the Escola de Música de Catalunya (ESMUC) as part of a three-month internship supervised by Neus Verger, head of the CRAI library, and Oriol Brugarolas, professor at the Institute of Art History at the University of Barcelona. Their findings not only established the connection between several compositions and their respective libretti, but also clarified that, in some cases, the music for these libretti was composed by none other than Francesc Queralt. Last but not least, their investigations led to the (re)discovery of 18th-century Catalan composers such as Josep Pujol, whose biographical details remain largely unknown.

A detailed report by Linus Montolio and Antonio Cruzado was published in the Blog de Fons Antic.

To date, only a handful of works by Queralt and Pujol can be found in the RISM database. With that in mind, the cataloguing for RISM of the oratorio compositions identified in this project would be a most welcome and important addition.

Image: Queralt, Francesc: Oratorio de Sta. Ana (1778), Tiple 1.° Coro, p. 2, Biblioteca de Catalunya, M 1549/2. Available online (public domain).

Annual Report 2025

2026-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

Approaching the closure of a decades-long project for which the RISM Editorial Center received support from the German Akademienprogramm, throughout the year 2025 we were busy clarifying how the core services earlier offered by the Editorial Center (better known as RISM Zentralredaktion) could be ensured in the future. While in this regard we received fruitful feedback also from the international RISM community, among others at the copiously attended “RISM Together” session of the 2025 IAML congress, the most pragmatic discussions involved the state libraries of Munich, Dresden and Berlin, as well as the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz, as part of a planning project generously financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). The last details of how all essential editorial duties could be continued, are finalized in these months, but we are already well in the process of transferring knowledge from the Zentralredaktion to the partner libraries, so that the inevitable fading out of the former (thanks to a very last Auslauffinanzierung for the long-term project, now planned only for the summer of 2026) would present the least possible disturbance for the vast international community regularly relying on RISM’s services.

With these imminent changes in mind, it is little wonder that (in comparison to the profusion of some earlier years) the RISM database could only expand at a moderate pace: we currently offer slightly over 1,347,000 manuscript descriptions for research (i.e., about 30,000 more than at the beginning of last year), even though by adding also the printed editions we arrive at an impressive total of over 1.6 million source records. It is also worth noting that the increase in manuscript descriptions strongly depended on the consistently outstanding productivity of the German RISM working group – which, however, is now also in its final ‘run-down’ project phase, and is expected to deliver significantly fewer records in the future. Thus, in the coming years it remains a central concern for RISM to intensify its coverage in countries where cataloguing could only get started recently (as with the project in partnership with the Ukraine Art Aid Center, aimed at cataloging Ukraine’s endangered musical treasures) and in regions where RISM is just about to take its first steps (a case in point being Peru, from where the first manuscript descriptions were entered in our database in the fall of 2025).

Notwithstanding all the challenges affecting RISM’s editorial side and the future growth of our database, in these years we are fortunate to be able to rely also on our younger international anchor, the RISM Digital Center in Bern. Financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation to develop and maintain RISM as an open-ended research infrastructure, the Bern team does not simply provide technical support for the work of the Editorial Center, but contributes many ideas of its own, providing an additional impetus that several new features of our cataloging software Muscat amply testify for as well.

Overall, while the imminent closure of the Zentralredaktion inevitably marks the end of an era in which Frankfurt served as the hub of the RISM universe, so to speak, attendees of our annual reporting session at the Salzburg IAML congress no doubt left with the impression that, rather than phasing out, RISM has recently undergone a crucial phase of revitalization. Some of the new features presented there – from the RISM-specific work authorities through the updated version of the RISM Catalog and the latest developments in RISM Online – testified for the ever more intensive development of the technical infrastructure, while others – like the publication of RISM’s cataloging guidelines on our public website (at the moment in two languages: English and German) or the systematic revision of our institution authorities in cooperation with IAML’s national branches – also exemplified how RISM has recently moved toward more inclusivity and cooperation, a tendency that should certainly be further intensified in the future.

It is also worth mentioning that the user statistics of the RISM Catalog, which have been monitored for many years, seem to show no signs of declining – even though the same data can in the meantime be accessed through RISM Online as well. Meanwhile, there is also steady international interest in cataloging new sources for the RISM database: in our workshops offered on the side of the annual IAML congress (both in person and online) an impressively diverse group of participants from Australia, Austria, Brazil, Croatia, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Portugal, Switzerland, Turkey and the United States got a first introduction to RISM’s cataloging principles.

In conclusion it should be mentioned that, while nowadays most of our patrons use RISM through the internet, in 2025 our series of printed catalogs could be expanded by yet another seminal volume: Les mélodies de l’hymnaire médiéval – IXe–XVIe siècles – France, edited by Christian Meyer and published by Henle Verlag in Munich (RISM Series B/XIX,1).

The entire 2025 annual report of the RISM Editorial Center can be found on the RISM website.