Template:DRM reprints
Out-of-copyright editions reproduced in their entirety. Grouped under these headings: composers, collections (i.e. within a library or a series), and sheet music (subjects variable, usually from one institution). Within each category listings are alphabetical.
Contents
- 1 By Composer
- 2 By Collection
- 3 Sheet Music Collections
By Composer
Ludwig van Beethoven
Website: Ludwig van Beethovens Werke
The first collected edition of Beethoven's music was published by Breitkopf & Härtel, in Leipzig, between 1862 and 1888. This set contains 269 titles--symphonies, concertos, chamber music, Lieder, folksong arrangements, and much more.
Johannes Brahms
Website: Johannes Brahms: Digital Archive
This website of the Brahms Institute in Lübeck (Germany) currently contains 42,000 images spreading across autograph manuscripts, early prints, photographs, concert programs, and personal documentation.
[Caption: beginning of score and clarinet part from the Clarinet trio Op. 114 (1892) from http://www.brahms-institut.de/web/bihl_digital/jb_werkekatalog/op_114.html.]
Frédéric Chopin
Chopin Editions in Poland
Website: Jagiellonian Digital Library: Chopin holdings
Website: Polish National Library: Chopin holdings
These identical websites, one under the rubric of the Jagiellonian Library in Cracow, the other under the Polish National Library (Warsaw) banner, currently featuring 17 volumes of Chopin's piano music. The sites are under development.
Chopin Early Editions
Website: Chopin Early Editions
For an easy-to-consult listing of printed music by Chopin in the University of Chicago library, it is hard to surpass the Chopin Online Chopin Online Catalog. Citations are based on the library's shelfmarks, but since the music is digitized, users will have no difficulty in locating what they seek.
Online Chopin Variorum Editions
Website: Online Chopin Variorum Editions
Not so much a single project as a whole constellation of Chopin-related research projects, John Rink's Chopin Variorum investigates such things as the work concept in Chopin's time and provides an annotated catalogue of first editions. Both are coordinated with The Complete Chopin: A New Critical Edition, printed in London (2004).
Georg Frideric Handel
Website: Georg Friedrich Händels Werke
The Handel Gesellschaft edition of the composer's works (105 titles) was published by Breitkopf & Härtel between 1885 and 1902. It contains all but a few of the major works known today, sometimes with variants of arias or choruses that were excluded in later editions. [For earlier sources see "Lully" below.]
Franz Liszt
Website: Franz Liszt Musikalische Werke
This collected edition of Franz Liszt's works (35 volumes) was published by Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig. Although the first volume appeared in 1870, the others appeared between 1900 and 1936. Symphonies, symphonic poems, works for piano and orchestra, Liszt's music criticism, and little-known arrangements are included. The picture at the left shows Liszt's residence from 1848 to 1861, while he was director of court music. Today the Liszt Haus serves as a museum.
Jean-Baptiste Lully
Website: Jean-Baptiste Lully Collection
Twenty-six scores of Lully's best-known dramatic settings are preserved in the music collection of the University of North Texas (Denton TX). Together with arrangements and variants of works by Lully in the 182 holdings of the Virtual Rare Book Room a broad basis for study of Lully's milieu is available here. Dates of works in the broader collection extend to late in the nineteenth century. Among holdings that fall outside this description are a 1743 print of Handel's Alexander's Feast, the first printed edition (1767) of Handel's Messiah, the first version of George Grove's 4-volume Dictionary of Music and Musicians, London, 1879-90, and Girolamo Gigli's original libretto (1689) for an opera called La fede ne' tradimenti, which enjoyed many settings in Italy.
Felix Mendelssohn
Website: Felix Mendelssohn Bartoldys Werke
This collected edition (162 titles) of Mendelssohn's music was issued by Breitkopf & Härtel. String quartets, quintets, chamber music for clarinet and basset horn, piano trios, works for piano and cello, a fantasy on the Irish song "The last rose of summer" (Op. 15) and many other little-known pieces of chamber music can be found here together with more familiar fare.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Website: Neue Mozart Ausgabe (NMA) Online
A fully digitized version of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe has been available online since 2006. Series and volumes follow exactly the Bärenreiter print. All elements of the printed exemplars (table of contents, score, critical report) are present. Letters, documents, and libretti will be added by the Digital Mozart Edition at the Mozarteum, Salzburg, in cooperation with the Packard Humanities Institute. This is the only recent collected edition of the works by a major composer currently offered online.
Ignaz Pleyel Early Editions
Website: Ignaz Pleyel Early Editions
The late musicologist Rita Benton made an exhaustive study of Pleyel's editions (c. 1800) of the early string quartet literature. In the library named after her more than 200 early editions and manuscripts give some sense of the scope of Pleyel's career as both a composer and a music publisher in the era of Haydn, Boccherini, and other notable composers of chamber music. In editions of chamber music for strings Pleyel also brought out piano pedagogy books and piano trios.
Franz Schubert
Website: Franz Schuberts Werke
The collected works of Franz Schubert, as published by Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig, 1884-1892. 53 volumes, including symphonic and piano works, choral works, theater pieces, piano four-hands arrangements, and song cycles.
Robert Schumann
Website: Robert Schumanns Werke
The works as edited by Clara Schumann and others. This series was published in Leipzig by Breitkoft & Härtrel between 1881 and 1893. The illustration shows the start of "Die Minnesänger" for four male voices, No. 2 from Schumann's Sechs Lieder.
By Collection
Denkmäler deutscher Tonkunst, 1st series
Website: Monuments of German Music, Series 1
This 53-volume anthology of German music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries greatly increased familiarity with the music of Buxtehude, Telemann, J. Ch. F. Bach, Melchior Franck, Hasse, Scheidt, Stoltzer, and many others.
Denkmäler deutscher Tonkunst, 2nd series (Bavaria)
Website: Monuments of German Music, Series 2
The second series of this well-known anthology, focused on Bavaria, emphasizes music associated with the Bavarian courts resident in Munich and (through composers such as Dell'Abaco) in exile in Brussels. Also represented are Stamitz, Haßler, Pachelbel, Pez, Steffani, Toeschi, and others. Published in 36 volumes (1901-1926).
Eastman School of Music/Sibley Music Library
Webpage: Sibley Music Library (U. Rochester)
The constantly growing digital collection of the Sibley School of Music is heterogeneous. It includes printed scores, manuscripts, and books--all of them in the public domain under U.S. copyright law. A large percentage of its holdings (currently 22,500 items) come from 19th- and early 20th-century America. Many items are unique. Access requires an account (free).
Gaspari Online (Bologna Conservatory)
Website: Gaspari Online (Bologna Conservatory)
The Gaspari Catalogue of holdings in the Bologna Conservatory is a resource well known to students of Italian music. It describes the heterogeneous holdings of what is now formally called the Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna (the International Museum and Music Library of Bologna). Composed of multiple underlying libraries and collections, its holdings range from early liturgical sources to music of the twentieth century, from correspondence to musical instruments from earlier centuries to 4,000+ opera libretti (the Corago Project), most searchable from this start site. Under the same umbrella one can also find c. 400 portraits of musicians, mainly from nineteenth-century lithographs (as with Maria Malibran, shown at the right) and the voluminous eighteenth-century correspondence of Giambattista Martini, also edited in book form by Anne Schnoebelen.
Printed Music in the Bavarian State Library
Website: Printed Music in the Bavarian State Library
This collection of 3,379 titles includes a large number of works from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Krebs, Türk, Danzi, Mendelssohn, and others). It also holds impressive early printed music, including Pierre Attaignant's seminal collection of Trente e six chansons musicales (1530), use of which is restricted to study. Clemens non Papa, Croce, Lassus, Rore, Vecchi, Wert, and Willaert are much in evidence, as are the publications of Pierre Phalèse the Elder.
Sheet Music Collections
Sheet music denotes single pieces that were published prolifically in the US in parallel with the rise of the recording industry. Many large collections survive in university libraries, and among them several are fully digitized. Redundancies in single-title listings are common, but in general each collection represents nearby publishers disproportionately.
African American Sheet Music
Website: African American Sheet Music
The browsing facility for Brown University's online collection (1454 titles) is very easy to use. Some of the material (e.g. "Music Theater, 1865-1910) is also accessible at the Library of Congress "American Memory" website. Some uses are restricted.
American Vernacular Music Manuscripts
Website: American Vernacular Music Manuscripts
Murfreesboro, TN, the home of what is now called Middle Tennessee University, was a nexus of popular music-making before jazz established itself in Nashville. This collection of manuscript resources (c. 1730-1910) is full of miscellany but also offers documentation not available anywhere else. For most users the archive.org link given above will be more accessible than the university's Center for Popular Music server. To date 333 shelfmarks (many of them collections) have been uploaded. George Allen's "Reels, Clogs, Hornpipes, Jigs" is representative.
Historic American Sheet Music
Website: Historic American Sheet Music (HASM)
Duke University's Historic American Sheet Music collection (3,000+ titles) spans the time-period 1850-1920. It includes a song-lyrics index, has tabbed browsing, and provides helpful background on the sheet-music printing industry in the US. HASM is also linked to the Library of Congress's American Memory project. It has particular value for matching references in early film music, ragtime, and piano-rolls, that is for repertories that were known principally by ear. Searchable by subject, instrumentation, and illustrator as well as more usual parameters.
Nineteenth-Century California Sheet Music
Website: 19th-Century California Sheet Music
The original holdings consisted of 2,700 pieces published in California between 1852 and 1900. A further collection of 700 pieces was added in 2007. The project is maintained at the University of California, Berkeley. The pieces represent a wide range of Western US and native American traditions. Some sound, video, and MIDI files are also available.
Nineteenth-Century American Sheet Music
Website: Nineteenth-Century American Sheet Music (NcASM)
This University of North Carolina website holds almost 7,500 digitized pieces from 1815 (music from the opera The Devil's Bridge to 1945 (an edition of Chopin's Polonaise Op. 53) as well as letters pertinent to holdings. The online catalogue search offers many options. Holdings include songs with piano accompaniment to duets, trios, and four-part glees.