Exhibition: Baroque Musical Life in Grimma, Saxony

Andrea Hartmann

Monday, May 22, 2017

This post is by Andrea Hartmann of RISM Germany–Dresden Office:

We would like to call your attention to a small exhibition that is part of this year’s festival of Baroque music in Grimma (near Leipzig), Tage Mitteldeutscher Barockmusik.

As the hart panteth after the water brooks – Music in Grimma around 1700

Location : Kreismuseum Grimma Dates : 19–28 May 2017 Opening hours : Tuesday–Friday and Sunday 10:00–17:00

The focus of the exhibition is on manuscripts and imprints from the music library of the Fürsten- und Landesschule Grimma, which bear witness to the lively culture of church music as practiced in Central Germany during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The music collection of the Fürstenschule Grimma (1550–1887), a state school connected with the court, comprises around 1,300 manuscripts and imprints and is preserved today at the Saxon State and University Library in Dresden (SLUB, D-Dl). It documents the active cultivation of music at the school and is an exemplary case of Protestant church music practice in Central Germany. The special significance of this collection lies in its completeness over a span of 300 years: collections of motets dating from the founding of the school after the Reformation, individual manuscripts that represent the development from the sacred concerto to early cantatas, and handwritten copies of church music from the Viennese Classical period, of oratorios, and of Central German church music from the late eighteenth and beginnings of the nineteenth centuries.

All of the music manuscripts are described in the RISM online catalog.

So far, around 1,000 manuscripts have been digitized as part of Saxony’s state digitization program. The scans are linked directly to the RISM entries, or you can browse them in the SLUB’s digital collections.

Category: Events