News archive – Rediscovered
Manuscript found in New York
The following article by Artur Szklener originally appeared on the website of The Frederik Chopin Institut and is published here with kind permission. On the 27th October, The New York Times reported on an unknown manuscript by Fryderyk Chopin found in the Morgan Library in New York. These revelations were...
7 November 2024
Autograph Manuscript of Luigi Cherubini’s 'Cours de contrepoint et de fugue' Discovered
We have received the following from Maxime Margollé (Postdoctoral fellow, Marie Skłodowska-Curie, Norwegian University of Science and Technology): Published in 1835, Luigi Cherubini’s Cours de contrepoint et de fugue very quickly became a reference work. According to the Gazette musicale, 500 copies were sold on the day of its publication,...
7 November 2022
An unexpected find: “Le Pêcheur Catalan” WoO II.2, No. 9 by Louise Farrenc
The following is a guest post by Christin Heitmann (author of “Louise Farrenc. Thematisch-bibliographisches Werkverzeichnis” and co-editor of the Farrenc Critical Edition published by Noetzel-Verlag), Beethoven-Haus Bonn (see the full post on the German version of this page): Many can relate to the phenomenon of finding additional sources after wrapping...
9 September 2022
Revival after 267 years
We have received the following from our colleague Helmut Lauterwasser (RISM Germany): Time and again RISM cataloging brings to light compositions that have been considered lost for centuries. A case in point is the oratorio Abraham und Isaac by Gottlob Harrer (1703-1755), Johann Sebastian Bach’s direct successor as cantor of...
25 April 2022
Newly discovered collection from Sennfeld (Franconia) to be cataloged
We have received the following from Gottfried Heinz-Kronberger (RISM Germany, Munich office): Jörg Wöltche (Church Music Director, Deanery of Schweinfurt) has committed himself to cataloging for RISM a collection of handwritten music material dating between 1788 and 1812 that was discovered in 2018. The trove of 149 church cantatas and...
10 March 2022
A newly discovered recorder sonata attributed to Vivaldi
We have received the following from Inês d’Avena and Claudio Ribeiro: During an artistic residency in Venice in October 2018, we discovered a handful of eighteenth-century anonymous manuscript sonatas for recorder and basso continuo at the library of the Conservatorio “Benedetto Marcello”. In the Fondo Correr, Esposti e provenienze diverse...
8 November 2021
Sensational Discovery: Proofs for Orlando di Lasso's 'Magnum Opus Musicum' (1604) in the Archives of the Bavarian State
We have received the following from Gottfried Heinz-Kronberger (RISM Germany): An exciting discovery was made in the course of a scoping study of fragments in the Archives of the Bavarian State. This is not the first gem to be uncovered from the Fragment Collection. In 2018, parts of a sonata...
15 March 2021
Lost and Found: Gottfried Kirchhoff's "L'A.B.C. musical"
Our RISM ears pricked up at last year’s IAML Congress in Kraków when Kirill Diskin and Maksim Serebrennikov (Saint Petersburg Rimsky-Korsakov State Conservatory), delivering their paper “Foreign book rarities in the library of the S. Petersburg Rimsky-Korsakov State Conservatory,” said that their library holds a printed music edition that is...
10 August 2020
A New Elise? Discovery Sheds Light on Famous Beethoven Work
A recently discovered music manuscript dating from the early 19th century has musicologists from all over the world speculating whether they are one step closer to finding out the true identity of the dedicatee of Ludwig van Beethoven’s famous bagatelle Für Elise. The previously unknown piece, written for organ and...
1 April 2020
"In Frankfurt a/m zu haben bey Musikus Ludwig": Identifying the Copyist Johann Wilhelm Ludwig
By fortunate coincidence, a short while ago we were able to identify the previously unknown “Musikus Ludwig,” who produced custom-made manuscript copies of Italian and German vocal music at the beginning of the 19th century in Frankfurt am Main. Starting with an advertisement in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (AmZ), we...
9 March 2020
