News archive
Stylistic Eras Meet Each Other
Pater Roman has a short report for us about how things have almost returned to normal at Heiligenkreuz Abbey (Austria) after these exceptional circumstances. Gregorian chant rings out in accordance with Cistercian and Benedictine traditions at the Romanesque and Gothic collegiate church of Heiligenkreuz Abbey (RISM library siglum: A-HE). For...
8 June 2020 – Library collections
James Hewitt at 250
James Hewitt was born on this day—June 4—in 1770 in England and died in 1827 in Boston. Two things stand out right away: first, he is a near exact contemporary of Ludwig van Beethoven, and second, he was in the United States when the United States was itself in its...
4 June 2020 – Musical anniversaries
Vicente Olmos Claver: A Spanish Chapel Master of the 18th Century
We have received the following from Ángel Marzal, who recently cataloged the works of Vicente Olmos Claver for RISM. Vicente Olmos Claver was born around 1744 in Catarroja, a Spanish town located near Valencia. According to documentation in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Valencia, our chapel master began singing as an...
28 May 2020 – New at RISM
Music Manuscripts by Richard Strauss and Hans Pfitzner Online
The following was originally published on the blog of the Bavarian State Library and is reprinted here with kind permission. For years, the Bavarian State Library (BSB) has been making music manuscripts from its most prominent composer archival collections available online, including the autograph manuscripts of Gustav Mahler, Josef Rheinberger,...
25 May 2020 – Library collections
Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient (1804-1860)
“This is a formidable woman - my ideal in art!” said Clara Schumann about the most important German singer of the 19th century, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient (born 6 December 1804 in Hamburg, died 26 January 1860 in Coburg). As the daughter of artistic parents, she seemed destined for a career as...
18 May 2020 – RISM A-Z
300 Years of "Radamisto" by George Frideric Handel
On 27 April 1720, in the presence of King George I, the opera Radamisto by George Frideric Handel with a libretto by Nicola Francesco Haym received its premiere at the King’s Theatre in London. Radamisto was Handel’s first opera for the Royal Academy of Music, a private opera company that...
13 May 2020 – Musical anniversaries
Free Access to "Fontes Artis Musicae" through June 30
Project MUSE is offering free access to a number of scholarly journals in order to facilitate the use of high-quality scholarship during the COVID-19 crisis. As a result, articles in Fontes Artis Musicae, the journal of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML, one of the...
4 May 2020 – New publications
The Franz Lehár Collection in Bad Ischl, Austria
We have received the following from our RISM contributor Sandra Föger (RISM Austria): April 30, 2020 marks the 150th birthday of Franz Lehár. His works are still very much alive on stages worldwide even today. His operettas such as The Merry Widow, The Count of Luxemburg, Gipsy Love, Paganini, Der...
30 April 2020 – Library collections
500 Years of the “Liber selectarum cantionum”
In RISM’s catalog of anthologies from the 16th century (Series B/I), we find a total of six entries from the year 1520. Four of these are motet collections, and the other two are a collection of frottolas and one of chansons. Over twenty copies from the anthology Liber selectarum cantionum...
27 April 2020 – Musical anniversaries
New RISM Tutorial in German
We are pleased to announce the release of a new tutorial in German about the RISM project and the online catalog. Musikwissenschaft: RISM – Internationales Quellenlexikon der Musik was produced by the musicology department of the Universität Tübingen as part of the series “Tübinger Tutorials zur Musikwissenschaft.” The RISM video...
20 April 2020 – RISM online catalog
