Current statusDresden Opera Archive digital collection

Description The Dresden Opera Archive contains around 1,200 manuscripts of approximately 650 operas from the years 1765 to 1900. These are music manuscripts (scores, parts, choral and soufflé excerpts) of the first performances of the Electoral/Kingly Saxon Opera. 94 percent of the sources were given to the SLUB by the Dresden State Opera between 1920 and 1980, the remaining material is in the State Opera's music archive. The content focuses on the Italian-language operas performed until 1831 as well as on stage works of the German, Italian and French repertoire that have been performed in German since 1817. A detailed catalogue funded by the DFG was already published in 2002; the catalogue records, which were refined on a case-by-case basis in the course of the current project, are freely accessible via RISM-OPAC, among others. A total of 834,117 scans were produced during the project (96.7% of the predicted total of 862,959 opera archive pages). The fascinating collection of one of Germany's great opera houses, based on detailed catalogue records, has thus been fully digitised and presented in a structured way on the internet, providing a globally accessible source base for international music and theatre research. The presentation takes place in the collection "Dresdner Opernarchiv digital" of the Digital Collections of the SLUB, the digital copies are available to the German Digital Library, Europeana and other platforms.

Duration 2012-2014

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