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LONDON - Mozart's year-long 250th birthday party is ending on a high note with the musical scores of his complete works available from today for the first time free on the internet.
The International Mozart Foundation in Salzburg, Austria has put a scholarly edition of the bound volumes of Mozart's more than 600 works on a website http://dme.mozarteum.at.
The site allows visitors to find specific symphonies, arias or even single lines of text from some 24,000 pages of music.
"We had 45,000 hits in the first two hours...we would not have expected that," programme director Ulrich Leisinger told Reuters in a telephone interview.
A user who types in "Pamina" from Mozart's opera "The Magic Flute" will see the music for all five arias she sings, as well as critical texts discussing those passages.
The version appearing on the internet is a digitised copy of the New Mozart Edition published by Barenreiter, of Kassel, Germany.
It is considered the "gold standard" of Mozart editions and Leisinger said Barenreiter was paid US$400,000 ($581,550) for the digital publication rights.
The financial backing came from the Packard Humanities Institute of Los Altos, California.
"We hope we will be able to convince other people besides us to present their original materials online as well," he said.
- REUTERS
