Our team: Birgit Lodes, Elisabeth Reisinger, John Wilson

The research project The Operatic Library of Elector Maximilian Franz based at the University of Vienna plans to shed light on the operas performed in Bonn during the reign of Elector Maximilian Franz (1784-1794), promising to provide a fundamental contribution to the neglected area of Beethoven’s earliest musical experiences and his education as a court musician. Supported by a three-year grant (from January 1^st, 2013 to December 31^st, 2015) from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), this project is being carried out by Professor Birgit Lodes, John Wilson and Elisabeth Reisinger along with intensive international cooperation by the Beethoven-Haus Bonn and Juliane Riepe (Halle/Germany).

Like his older brother Emperor Joseph II, Maximilian Franz was known as a discerning musical patron with an extensive collection of scores which he made available for court performances as well as for use and study by court musicians. The kern of this project will involve identification and analysis of the scores and orchestral parts from the elector’s library that were used in operatic productions during Beethoven’s formative years, many of which are now housed in the Biblioteca Estense in Modena, Italy. Information on the sources themselves (paper types, water marks, copyists, etc.) will be systematically determined and, in line with the FWF’s open-access philosophy, will be published online for free use by other scholars. Beyond this, these sources’ contents will be evaluated, in tandem with fresh archival research in Vienna and the Rhineland, to give a fuller picture of how this music was actually performed.

With this blog we want to inform you about news concerning the project as well as about latest results and discoveries of our research and stories behind the sources. Although we’ll certainly publish a great deal of these in the coming years, it sometimes happens that we find something small for we’re not quite sure yet where it fits in, but we’d still like to document it and post some of our first reflections.