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Caveat re NMAfs and NMArpt templates

Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2019 7:29 pm
by Eric
While the information at the New Mozart Edition represents probably some of the best Mozart scores and scholarship up to the dates on them that I'm aware of, I believe they were all published before the mid-1990s or so. After that time, the ex-Soviet Union agreed to begin to return a large quantity of works, including Mozart manuscripts (some autographs), that had been taken as spoils at the end of World War II. Whether they have in fact done so I am not at all sure, but what I read in a magazine article around that time suggested that a new NMA was under preparation taking account of manuscript evidence not available to the editors of the last one.

Re: Caveat re NMAfs and NMArpt templates

Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2019 10:10 pm
by Irishmaestro
Many NMA volumes were also published before the discovery sometime in the early 1980s (I think) of a large cache of Mozart autographs in the Biblioteka Jagiellońska in Kraków that were formerly in the Preussische Staatsbibliothek in Berlin (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin today). A small number of other items evacuated from Berlin during the Second World War have still not been discovered, and those could turn up at any stage.

A number of other autographs were also discovered after the publication of NMA, such as the fragment of the Sonata K.331 in the National Szchécheni Library in Budapest (discovered only in 2014).

Who knows what might still lurk in obscure private collections. As far as I know, one or two autographs formerly part of Johann Andreas Stumpff's enormous collection (I forget which) haven't been seen since the mid-19th century, and other items such as the autograph of the Linz symphony have been missing since 1800 or so, and others were known to Köchel in 1862 and have since disappeared. Most of these are probably still out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered.