[Infowarrior] - Mozart's entire musical score now free on Net

Tue Dec 12 10:12:18 EST 2006

Mozart's entire musical score now free on Net

By Reuters
http://news.com.com/Mozarts+entire+musical+score+now+free+on+Net/2100-1027_3
-6142845.html

Story last modified Tue Dec 12 05:43:25 PST 2006

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's year-long 250th birthday party is ending on a high
note with the musical scores of his complete works available from Monday for
the first time free on the Internet.

The International Mozart Foundation in Salzburg, Austria, has put a
scholarly edition of the bound volumes of Mozart's more than 600 works on a
Web site.

The site allows visitors to find specific symphonies, arias or even single
lines of text from some 24,000 pages of music.

"We had 45,000 hits in the first two hours...we would not have expected
that," program director Ulrich Leisinger told Reuters in a telephone
interview. CNET News.com was not able to reach the site Tuesday morning,
perhaps due to a traffic overload.

A user who types in "Pamina" from Mozart's opera "The Magic Flute" will see
the music for all five arias she sings, as well as critical texts discussing
those passages.

The version appearing on the Internet is a digitized copy of the "New Mozart
Edition" published by Barenreiter, of Kassel, Germany.

It is considered the "gold standard" of Mozart editions, and Leisinger said
Barenreiter was paid $400,000 for the digital-publication rights.

The financial backing came from the Packard Humanities Institute of Los
Altos, Calif.

"We hope we will be able to convince other people besides us to present
their original materials online as well," Leisinger said.