Austrian National Library Marks 200 Years of Its Music Collection

The Austrian National Library is marking the bicentenary of its music collection, a vast archive whose origins cannot be reduced to a single founding day. Music was already present in the imperial library centuries earlier, but an 1826 request by its prefect, Moriz Count von Dietrichstein, is treated as the beginning of a distinct music collection.

Dietrichstein asked for 47 large-format manuscripts from the court music archive and sought to make musical holdings easier to catalogue and consult. One score named specifically in his request was the 1711 pasticcio opera Giunio Bruto, composed collaboratively by Carlo Francesco Cesarini, Antonio Caldara and Alessandro Scarlatti. Its decorated manuscript now gives the anniversary a particularly tangible link to the transfer.

The collection has since grown to about 60,000 musical manuscripts, 130,000 printed music items, 80,000 musicological titles and 22,000 audiovisual documents. More than 400 estates and personal collections are held there. Its Bruckner materials form a collection of exceptional scale, while Alban Berg’s papers are another major resource.

After many decades in the Albertina building, the music collection moved in 2005 to Palais Mollard on Vienna’s Herrengasse. Researchers can use a dedicated reading room, and substantial portions of the holdings are accessible digitally. That combination of protected originals and wider online access is central to the archive’s present role.

The anniversary programme includes free Musiksalon events. On 11 November the Chaos String Quartet is scheduled to perform newly created works and Austrian premieres linked to the collection as part of Wien Modern. A concert presentation of excerpts from Giunio Bruto follows on 9 December, returning listeners to the score singled out in Dietrichstein’s request.

The bicentenary is therefore both retrospective and practical: the library is displaying what it holds, while inviting musicians to make new work from the evidence of the past.