Current Mozart and Clementi Projects

Thursday, September 20, 2018

The high point of every summer for RISM is the annual IAML congress, which as you may know was in Leipzig this year (you can read our reflections on the congress). One session in particular sponsored by the IAML Bibliography Section focused on three current bibliographic projects that are sure to be of interest to RISM users. A full report of the session, which this post is partially based on, will soon appear on the Bibliography Section’s page.

“The ‘new’ Köchel catalogue – from the librarian’s perspective”
Ulrich Leisinger (Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum, Salzburg) shared news about the project to update the Köchel catalog (the 6th edition, from 1964, is cited throughout RISM). The new edition will be published by the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum and Breitkopf & Härtel and will be edited by Neal Zaslaw. It will be in English and German and will be published online first and then later in print.

“The project ‘Mozart Nachlass’: a cooperation between the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum and the Archiv der Erzdiözese Salzburg”
Eva Neumayr (Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum / Archiv der Erzdiözese Salzburg and RISM contributor) reported on a digitization project that is about to reach a major milestone. We reported on this project when it was first initiated: the “Mozart Nachlass” is a collection of materials donated by members of the Mozart family for the “Dommusikverein und Mozarteum” (Society for Music at the Cathedral and Mozarteum). This society split into two institutions in 1881 and the holdings were likewise divided. The manuscripts are already in RISM. An online presentation at digibib.mozarteum.at, in which the RISM records were used as a basis, will launch in the fall. A printed catalog is in preparation.

“Boosting the core: revision and expansion of Muzio Clementi’s Thematic Catalogue. New evidence”
The paper by Luca Sala (Université de Montréal) gave us a taste of the new Clementi thematic catalog that is in progress. Alan Tyson’s thematic catalog appeared in 1967 and was a major step forward at the time (it is cited in RISM over 400 times). New sources have emerged since then—some in RISM (such as the manuscript in the image above), some not (yet)— and the Italian National Edition of Muzio Clementi’s complete works is currently underway. One of the goals of the new catalog is to list all known sources relevant to the primary and secondary dissemination of a work, many more than Tyson included, and to reflect new knowledge about sources, attributions, and recent scholarship.

Image: Muzio Clementi, Sonate a quarte mains pour le Piano Forte, in the hand of C. F. Kindermann, 1801. Sing-Akademie zu Berlin, Notenarchiv (D-Bsa) SA 4140. RISM ID no. 469414000. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - PK. http://resolver.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/SBB0000B6DF00000000. CC 3.0.

Category: In the news