Two significant Hanover collections now in RISM
Helmut Lauterwasser
Thursday, July 30, 2015
This post comes to us from Helmut Lauterwasser of RISM Germany:
Cataloging historical manuscripts in RISM has recently been completed for two important music institutions in Hanover, the capital of Lower Saxony. Though these collections are relatively small, they contain sources that are of great historical interest and significance. Both institutions loaned their items to the RISM Germany office in Munich for several months while cataloging took place.
Hanover, Forschungszentrum Musik und Gender (D-HVfmg)
The Research Center for Music and Gender was founded in 2006 and is financed by the Mariann Steegmann Stiftung, which supports women in music and the arts. The center is based at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien in Hanover. A significant collection of historical printed music and music manuscripts from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries is housed there in addition to numerous other documents from the field of music and gender. Items in the collection are usually acquired on the antiquarian market or through gifts. One example is a collective manuscript (see top image) that was owned by Juliane Benda, a daughter of Franz Benda, who later married Johann Friedrich Reichardt. In this collection (RISM ID no. 450115681), as well as in others, the composers of some (if not all) anonymous works could be identified in the course of cataloging (see RISM ID nos. 450116005, 450115923, 450116049). Items from the Center that are currently still absent from the RISM online catalog include a few handwritten additions to prints as well as several RISM-relevant printed editions (before 1800). In the course of this year, these will all be cataloged directly at the Center in Hanover.
Hannover, Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien, Hochschulbibliothek (D-HVh)
The music manuscripts at the library of the Hanover University of Music, Drama, and Media do not form a typical unified collection or one that has grown over time, but rather the collection brings together what remains of the holdings from a number of cultural institutions in Hanover and Lower Saxony: the Hannoverscher Künstler-Verein, the Königliches Hoforchester and Königliches Hoftheater, the Liedertafel zu Hannover, and the library of the publisher Hermann Moeck in Celle. For the sake of completeness, some printed editions from the nineteenth century have also been cataloged, including some rare first editions.
The library holds several very interesting music manuscripts that were bought from antiquarians in the 1950s and 1960s. One example is an autograph collective manuscript by the music lexicographer Ernst Ludwig Gerber (1746-1819) with 67 works for harpsichord and organ (RISM ID no. 450116566; see middle image above).
Also of special importance is another autograph collective manuscript, this one entitled “Sämmtliche Clarinett-Compositionen” by the Munich court musician Heinrich Joseph Baermann (1784-1847), who was very famous in his day and friends with Carl Maria von Weber. The 57 works in this collection (RISM ID no. 450116647) comprehensively and uniquely document Baermann’s oeuvre, despite the fact that only the clarinet part is notated throughout (see bottom image). Compare this with Baermann’s entry in the MGG from 1999, which states that ca. 26 of the composer’s works are are available today of the “nearly 40” that were originally published.
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