Libretti & Texts
Slider

Project Description

The Salzburg Mozarteum Foundation offers in its Mozart Libretti – Online Edition a digital edition of the textual sources of the vocal works by Wolfgang Amadé Mozart according to academic criteria. The edition appears within the Digital Mozart Edition, which is currently being developed by the Salzburg Mozarteum Foundation in cooperation with the Packard Humanities Institute in Los Altos, California.

Although the librettos of Mozart’s operas have appeared in numerous printed editions since his lifetime, there is to date no edition devoted to the scholarly evaluation of their sources. The online edition of the Mozart librettos attempts to close this editorial gap and make the texts of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart’s vocal compositions accessible to a broad public for the first time in a critical edition. Via the digital medium, the edition provides scholars, professional musicians and music enthusiasts alike with diverse possibilities to deepen their understanding of Mozart’s librettos and their sources.

As an integral component of a multifaceted genre, the text of an opera draws together multiple philological and musical dimensions. Its formation is influenced by diverse sources: the actual text set to music by the composer, the original libretto and its possible models. From a linguistic perspective, the opera text lives from historical peculiarities in the literary language of its time, which on one hand no longer correspond to modern usage, yet on the other hand, are closely related to the musical interpretation. As a text set to music, it has, through its verse form, an intricate relation to the musical notation. The online edition of the Mozart librettos takes an electronic form to present the multifaceted levels of the opera texts used in the compositions of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart in all their complexity, and in accordance to academic criteria. This is something that can be achieved editorially only in part through printed editions.

As a critical-digital source edition, the online edition of the Mozart librettos, as an “open edition”, differs from a strictly defined printed edition in relation to:

1. the sources considered relevant to the edition,
2. the edition forms in which the sources are presented,
3. the media involved.

Editorial Guidelines

(currently available only in German)

Die Online-Edition der Libretti zu Mozarts Opern bietet eine digitale Ausgabe der Textquellen zu den Vertonungen von Wolfgang Amadé Mozart nach wissenschaftlichen Kriterien.

Die Textquellen werden in zwei unterschiedlichen Formen ediert:

  1. in kritisch edierter Ausgabe (1. KRITISCHE EDITION)
  2. in diplomatischer Wiedergabe (2. DIPLOMATISCHE EDITION).

Zu beiden Ausgabeformen werden zusätzliche Daten geboten, die über die reine Textedition hinausgehen (3. FUNKTIONEN).

LICENSE / CONTACT

Project Team Libretti
Published by the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum, Salzburg within the Digital Mozart Edition (DME)

Program Director DME Ulrich Leisinger
Project Manager Iacopo Cividini
IT Development Franz Kelnreiter with the assistance of Thomas Ballmann
Assistance Italian texts:
Carolina Barazza (until 30 June 2015), Adriana De Feo (until 30 June 2015), Valentina Codognotto (since 2018)
German texts:
Agnes Amminger, Norbert Dubowy, Anja Morgenstern, Till Reininghaus
French texts:
Geneviève Geffray, Bérengère Le Boulair (till 2015), Amandine Schneebichler (till 2017)

Funder
Packard Humanities Institute (PHI), Los Altos (California/USA)
Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum (ISM), Salzburg

Contact
cividini@mozarteum.at
kelnreiter@mozarteum.at

How to quote
Mozart-Libretti – Online-Edition, published by the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum, Salzburg (https://dme.mozarteum.at/en/text-editions-2/librettos/, [date]).

Slider