News archive – Library collections
Poland's Bibliotheca Rudolphina
The Silesian duke Georg Rudolf von Liegnitz (1595-1653) of the Piast dynasty had a remarkable library. Polish music librarians and musicologists are currently cataloging parts of its music collection. As a result of World War II, the music collection was divided and distributed among four Polish libraries: the University Library...
10 December 2015
Manuscript containing Jewish liturgical songs (1832) now in RISM
The following has reached us from Steffen Voss (RISM Germany): In 2010, a valuable music manuscript was discovered within the rooms of the Jewish Congregation of Munich and Upper Bavaria (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde München und Oberbayern): a manuscript from 1832 entitled Gottesdienstliche Gesänge der Israeliten in Wien, liturgical songs of the...
12 November 2015
Historical inventories of music online
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...
9 November 2015
Schubert Autograph Music Manuscripts in Schubert Online
All of the autograph music manuscripts by Franz Schubert (1797-1828) that are housed at the Berlin State Library (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, SBB) - numbering around 60 total - have been digitized and cataloged in the RISM database as part of the project Schubert Online. The digitized music is available through...
26 October 2015
The Royal Library of Belgium acquires the only known manuscript of "Le Retour des plaisirs" (1719) by André Vaillant
We have received this announcement from our colleagues at RISM Belgium: After his campaign in the Austro-Turkish war (1716-1718) in Hungary, Duke Léopold-Philippe of Arenberg (1690-1754) was sent back to the Austrian Netherlands and became governor of Hainaut. On the occasion of his solemn entrance in the city of Mons,...
19 October 2015
Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880) an der British Library
Heute vor 135 Jahren starb Jacques Offenbach. Aus diesem Anlass übernehmen wir einen Beitrag von Susan Halstead, der erstmals im British Library’s European Studies Blog (CC-BY) veröffentlicht wurde. Der RISM Online-Katalog verzeichnet 125 Werke zu Offenbach. Ein passendes Gericht für die Götter: 150 Jahre ‘La belle Hélène’ von Offenbach Als...
5 October 2015
Poetry of the Seventeenth Century in Music
This post is by Clotilde Angleys (Département de la Musique) and originally appeared on the Gallica blog of the Bibliotheque national de France. It is reproduced here in accordance with their Creative Commons policy. The 37 Livres d’airs de différents auteurs issued by the music publishers Robert and Christophe Ballard...
17 September 2015
Digitized Opera Scores at the German Historical Institute in Rome
We have received this report from Roland Pfeiffer: Digitization of around 180 opera scores from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has recently been completed as part of one of the multi-year research projects financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and led by Dr. Roland Pfeiffer at the Department...
7 September 2015
Cataloguing 17th- and 18th-century Manuscripts of French Music in the Ward Collection (US-CAward)
Natasha Roule, a candidate for the PhD in historical musicology at Harvard University, has spent the summer as a Pforzheimer Fellow at Houghton Library, Harvard’s principal repository for rare books and manuscripts, including rich holdings in print and manuscript music. Here is her account of her project, which saw the...
3 August 2015
Two significant Hanover collections now in RISM
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...
30 July 2015
