Mozart’s musical diary unlocked

Previously unheard composition to be available online

On 12 January 2006, Mozart’s Verzeichnüss aller meiner Werke (Catalogue of all my Works) will be available to internet users for the first time. This latest addition to the British Library’s Turning the Pages™ is a digitised version of the original manuscript. It contains 30 pages and 75 musical introductions to some of Mozart’s most famous compositions as well as the tantalising opening bars of a number of lost works, including a ‘Little March in D’, recorded here for the first time. Its pages can be ‘virtually’ turned and viewed on-line on the British Library’s website http://www.bl.uk/turningthepages and in the Treasures Gallery of the British Library.

Using the British Library’s award-winning Turning the Pages™ technology users can browse the handwritten pages of Verzeichnüss aller meiner Werke and magnify Mozart’s notes and descriptions as well as his compositions. Three-dimensional animation mimics the action of turning each page which can be done by using a mouse or scrolling through each page individually. An accompanying explanatory text is also included. A series of features unique to this manuscript include a transcription function that provides a readable version of Mozart’s original dates and composition descriptions and, for the first time on Turning the Pages™, users can click on each of Mozart’s compositions and listen to the first introductory bars of music performed by musicians from the Royal College of Music.

Presented to the British Library by the heirs of the writer Stefan Zweig in 1986, the Verzeichnüss aller meiner Werke gives details of 145 works written by Mozart from February 1784 until his death in December 1791. On the left-hand side of each page Mozart entered five compositions, each with the date on which it was completed, the title and usually its instrumentation. Further details such as the name of the singer, where it was composed or who had commissioned the piece were also sometimes included. Mozart divided the right hand page into five pairs of staves on which he wrote the opening bars of each work. The last 14 openings in the manuscript were poignantly left blank after Mozart died.

Mozart’s musical diary unlocked.