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By Vivien Schweitzer
14 Dec 2006
Thanks to digital downloading, music lovers can hear Mozart's works at the click of a mouse. Now, thanks to Salzburg's Mozarteum, you can sit at your computer and (virtually) thumb through his complete scores as well.
On Tuesday (Dec. 12), the Mozarteum launched a noteworthy free addition to its website, offering the scores of Mozart's complete works (which number over 600), plus critical texts.
The project is a collaboration between the International Mozart Foundation (ISM) in Salzburg and the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) in Los Altos, California. NMA Online, as the project is called, is a digital version of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe (New Mozart Edition, or NMA), a scholarly edition of Mozart’s complete works compiled by musicologists over the last 50 years.
According to a statement, all digital rights to the NMA have been acquired from Bärenreiter-Verlag in Kassel, the publisher of the printed edition. The foundation says the NMA's 125 volumes contain "the complete text of Mozart's works based on the critical examination of all available sources." That's 24,000 pages of music, plus 8,000 pages of critical reports and commentary on source material.
And there's more to come. NMA Online represents one step towards a Digital Mozart Edition (DME), currently being developed by the ISM and PHI. According to the statement, "this long-term project aims at turning Mozart's complete musical texts from the digitized version of the NMA (NMA Online) into a digital and interactive version that can be adapted to the varying needs of users."
The endeavor seems to have been a hit thus far: a notice on the site says "We are overwhelmed by the resonance of this website" (which received more than 400,000 hits during the first 12 hours) and apologizes for delays while server capacity is expanded.
Once on the site, users can narrow their search by selecting repertoire, key and/or editor.
To access the scores and texts, visit http://dme.mozarteum.at.
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