News archive – In the news
Launch of a Schubert Research Center in Vienna
We have received the following from Andrea Lindmayr-Brandl (chairwoman, Schubert Research Center): On April 1 of this year a Schubert Research Center was founded at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). The aim of the center is to uncover social networks in Viennese cultural life during the first half of...
16 September 2021
Summer festivals are slowly picking up speed
This year, rarely performed gems are also on concert programs, such as this evening as part of the Innsbruck Early Music Festival: Johann Mattheson’s opera Boris Goudenow. Mattheson set the story of the Russian tsar Boris Godunov to music in 1710 for the Gänsemarkt opera house in Hamburg. But the...
19 August 2021
The Flying Dutchman: The Dresden Performance Material for Richard Wagner's Opera
The Flying Dutchman has opened this year’s Bayreuth Festival. We will take the opportunity to look at the performance materials from the Dresden Court Opera. Just the fact that some of the parts were in use for over 100 years is alone worth mentioning: from 1842, the year of the...
26 July 2021
Music and Pandemics
A recent review of the book Plague and Music in the Renaissance by Remi Chiu caught our eye. Chiu looks at the different ways that music found expression during the time in history when the plague was basically a constant threat. Though the book was published in 2017, it takes...
20 May 2021
Charpentier, 12 points
It is this manuscript that started it all—or more specifically, the first few bars of the page. The collection of autograph music by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643-1704) gathered in a volume known as Mélanges autographes, vol. 10, contains the Te Deum (H. 146), whose opening bars we have been hearing more...
12 May 2021
The Musical Public Domain in 2021
When we said goodbye to 2020, we said hello to a host of composers whose music entered the public domain on January 1, 2021. This means that the people in question died long enough ago that copyright protection has expired for their works and there is no law prohibiting the...
22 February 2021
The Music for Richard Wagner's "Rienzi" Preserved in Dresden
This weekend was supposed to see the opening of the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. Instead, a full, alternative program is planned. We’ll take this opportunity to take a look at the music preserved for Richard Wagner’s Rienzi, which was used in Dresden over a long period of time. The music...
23 July 2020
RISM and Katy Perry
Fifteen musicologists from institutions around the world have come together to argue that singer-songwriter Katy Perry was wrongly convicted of copyright infringement. What is their evidence? Music found in the RISM database, among other things. In 2019, Perry was ordered to pay $2.8 million when a jury found her guilty...
20 January 2020
Insect of the Year 2019: Red Mason Bee
The Red Mason Bee was chosen as the 2019 Insect of the Year by the environmental organization NABU for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. It is the most common mason bee in Germany. When we think about bees, we usually think of the busy honey bee. But there are actually many...
9 December 2019
RISM on a Lark
As we enter the deep months of winter here in Frankfurt (no snow yet, though), thinking about 2019’s Bird of the Year puts us in a spring mood with thoughts of nice weather. The skylark is the 2019 Bird of the Year here in Germany, chosen by the environmental organization...
25 November 2019
