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I have a book of songs in German and English by Joseph Haydn. It is an urtext edition published in 1982 by G. Henle Verlag in Munich. It seems to only contain original, period texts, and is largely a resetting of the 1960 edition of Haydn's complete works, put out by the Joseph Haydn Institute.

It's clearly outside the voluntary 25 year rule, but I'm not well versed on the particulars of urtext editions, or whether this qualifies, as it seems to only include minor edits from a previous edition.

It is over 25 years old and urtext. Therefore eligible for EU server. If they dropped the ball on the 1960 edition (notice and/or renewal) it might even be free in the USA.

I found this record in the 1960 copyright catalog.

JOSEPH HAYDN WERKE; hrsg. vom Joseph
Haydn- Ins ti tut, K61n, unter der
Leltung von Jens Peter Larsen.
Mttnchen, 0. Henle Verlag, 1959.
Contents separately reg. : EFO-71649-
71650.

This seems to be the original copyright registration of the source score.

If the original urtext score was published in 1960, it would have been renewed in 1974, right? To be safe, I checked the 1973 and 1974 copyright catalog on archive.org. When I searched for "henle", I found no renewal for the work above, and no renewals for any songs. I found a couple renewals for Haydn string quartets, but that was it. If the 1960 score is PD in the US, does that make this 1982 score based on it also PD?

A couple of points:

1. The 1960 volume had to be renewed 28 years later (1988). Checking the 1973 and 1974 volumes will do no good. The good news is that all renewals made 1978 and later are online at the copyright office. I just checked the online DB and found no renewal of the 1960 volume

2. For the 1982 volume, what new matter is Henle claiming copyright upon? Merely reprinting - or even re-engraving - the 1960 score with no new material would not qualify for copyright at all in the USA. A new preface would be sufficient, however.

There is a new preface. The preface states that "this edition of Haydn is essentially a reproduction of the musical text contained in the volume published by Henle in 1960... However, it contains a number of source based alterations." Reading the rest of the preface, most of the alterations seem to be things like omitting songs that were attributed to Haydn, but later found to have been written by someone else, or using the first line of the song as the song title.

There are also some musical elements in parentheses and brackets. Parentheses are for things from secondary sources, and brackets are for markings inferred by the editor. For the most part, it seems to only be a handful of elements added to each song. One song had three dynamic markings added by the editors. Another had one slur and one rest added from secondary sources and one courtesy accidental added by the editors.

Would it be possible for me to send you the preface so you can make a better judgement?

I hope the fact that there is a new preface is not enough to grant full copyright to the new typesets of public domain music. I can understand where the preface and any accompanying original materials would be under copyright, but not the sheet music itself.

No need to send anything. There's nothing the editor did in the 1982 score apart from the preface itself (which must be omitted) to qualify for a new copyright. The 1960 score was not renewed and 1982 is old enough to pass muster under our 25-year rule as it stands. Adding things from other early (public domain) sources does not qualify as original, and it is unlikely that the bracketed items are anything original enough to qualify either.

Awesome. There are only a handful of Haydn songs available on IMSLP at the moment, and those editions are a bit sad. It will be nice to have clean, modern editions.