Historical inventories of music online

Nina Eichholz

Monday, November 9, 2015

The following news has reached us from the Hofmusik in Dresden project:

Eight historical, handwritten inventories of music from the Dresden court have recently been made available online for researchers and everyone interested in music.

The comprehensive inventories were put together between 1726 and 1780 and list both the music of the Dresden Court Church and the personal music and libretto collections of Friedrich Augusts II and Maria Antonia Walpurgis. These are valuable for music research since the entries contained therein allow the reconstruction of the repertoire and collections of the Dresden Court from this era. These inventories also serve as a basis for the project entitled The Collections of Musical Scores from the Dresden Court Church and the Royal Private Music Collection Dating to the Period of the Union of Saxony and Poland.

The catalogs include items such as three chronologically consecutive music inventories belonging to Maria Antonia, which reveal interesting information about the collection strategies of the duchess, and an Inventarium rerum musicarum of church music compiled by Jan Dismas Zelenkas, which impressively reflects the high productivity of this musician as a composer and a collector.

Seven of the inventories come directly from the holdings of the SLUB Dresden. The eighth was digitized and made accessible through cooperation with the Berlin State Library (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz).

Image: Page from the Catalogo della Musica di Chiesa, ca. 1780

Catégorie: Collections de bibliothèques