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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 April 2018
1 The initial stages of this project are described in Day, David A., ‘Digital Opera and Ballet: A Case Study of International Collaboration’, Fontes Artis Musicae 61/2 (2014): 99–106 Google Scholar.
2 The Internet Archive is a non-profit library of cultural artefacts including books, audio, video, images, software and websites that are made freely available to the public. It was founded in 1996 in San Francisco and works together with numerous libraries and institutions around the world to digitize existing collections of historical materials. See ‘About the Internet Archive’, https://archive.org/about/ (last accessed 1 December 2017).
3 Reports on the progress of the digitization project appear occasionally on the special collections blog of the BYU Harold B. Lee Library. See for instance, David Day, ‘BYU Students Complete Another Summer of Scanning in Belgium’, Special Collections Blog (20 September 2013), https://sites.lib.byu.edu/special-collections/2013/09/20/byu-students-complete-another-succesful-summer-of-scanning-in-belgium/ (last accessed 1 December 2017).
4 The Index is continuously expanding. The home page of the OPBS consists of a blog that details which collections were added for the period between April 2013 and October 2015. Even though the blog has no later posts, entries are regularly being added to the database. When starting the research for this review in November 2017 the database contained 45,958 items, but when I checked again on 14 January 2018 the number had increased, with close to 1,600 new entries from the Schatz libretto collection from the Library of Congress.
5 The only entries that do not immediately lead to a digitized version of the document are items from the Library of Congress, some of which are not digitally available and need to be consulted in the Library of Congress’s reading rooms. In addition, the collection of 66 scores from the Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar are also no longer accessible, because they belonged to the project Die Oper in Italien und Deutschland zwischen 1770 und 1830. This University of Cologne project was concluded in 2001 and its accompanying internet page has since been taken offline. While this project shows the vulnerability of online databases, which can disappear when funding runs out, it also is a testimony to the importance of the OPBS Index as a compiler of sources, for the other materials that were accessible through the internet page of Cologne Opern project are included in the Index and have thus remained available and searchable for the researcher.
6 Day, , ‘Digital Opera and Ballet’, 100 Google Scholar.
7 For an institutional history of La Monnaie, see Van der Hoeven, Roland, Le théâtre de la Monnaie au XIXe siècle: contraintes d’exploitation d’un théâtre lyrique 1830–1914 (Brussels: Cahiers du Gram, 2000)Google Scholar.
8 Day, ‘Digital Opera and Ballet’, 101.
9 Libraries of the Archives of the City of Brussels, www.brussels.be/libraries-archives-city-brussels (last accessed 1 December 2017).
10 Catalogue of the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp, www.libraryconservatoryantwerp.be (last accessed 1 December 2017), and Catalogue of the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, http://catalog.b-bc.org/ (last accessed 1 December 2017). The Antwerp library is even open during the weekend and you can pre-order documents online.
11 Day, ‘Digital Opera and Ballet’, 104 Google Scholar.
12 A search limited to this period yields 22,082 items.
13 The database includes the original printed libretto for Enrico di Borgogna and the libretto for the original 1819 version of Il falegname di Livonia, as well as for that of its 1827 revival, which features significantly different scene indications.
14 For this period, 8,588 items are included in the database. Until a decade ago, music theatre from this period performed outside of Vienna and Mozart’s circle was studied by only a handful of scholars, most prominently British musicologist David Charlton, a specialist of opéra comique, and French musicologist Jean Mongrédien, the author of the seminal French Music from Enlightenment to Romanticism, 1789–1830, transl. Sylvain Frémaux (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1996). The last decade, however, has seen a marked rise in attention to a variety of repertoires performed around 1800. Besides my own dissertation, ‘Modernizing Spectacle: The Opéra in Napoleon’s Paris (1799–1815)’, which investigates operatic culture in France during the Napoleonic era, French revolutionary and Napoleonic opera has been examined by Sarah Hibberd, Mark Darlow and Michael Fend, among others. Katherine Hambridge has investigated various kinds of early nineteenth-century ‘popular’ music theatre in Berlin and Paris, while Barbara Babic is working on a dissertation on Parisian and Viennese Biblical mélodrame from this era. In the summer of 2017, Katherine Astbury concluded a four-year research project on French Theatre of the Napoleonic Era that resulted in several conferences, exhibitions and a forthcoming collected volume on Aestheticizing Cultural Policy in France, 1789–1830. See https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/research/french/currentprojects/napoleonictheatre/ (last accessed 1 December 2017).
15 Of these documents, 193 are from the special collections of BYU.
16 See http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Boieldieu,_François_Adrien (last accessed 1 December 2017).
17 To date, a total of 1,023 documents from the CAB are scanned and included in the Index. These documents encompass such extraordinary sources as the scores of the concert master and orchestral parts for several ballets as well as calendars with programme announcements for La Monnaie.
18 This collection was at the centre of Katherine Astbury’s research project French Theatre of the Napoleonic Era (2013–2017).
19 For example, the Bibliothèque nationale de France houses several collections with administrative and archival materials of the secondary theatres, such as the ‘Fonds Théâtre des Variétés’ (COL 106) and the Rondel Collection. While the former collection is now available online and is fully searchable (http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc998849), the cataloguing process of the latter is still incomplete (http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc874524). In any case, neither of these collections is digitized and studying them requires research trips to Paris.
20 Day, , ‘Digital Opera and Ballet’, 104 Google Scholar.
22 Several of these collections are subsumed in the same online repository. For example, four of the ‘internet projects’ are found on Internet Culturale: Gaspare Spontini nella Biblioteca communcale Planettiana di Jesi; Gioachino Rossini e il suo tempo; Internet Culturale; and Raccolta drammatica. The Internet Archive also is the source of 11 of the ‘internet projects’ (see Appendix).
23 See Roland John Wiley, ‘Tchaikovsky, Piotr Il’yich’ in GroveMusicOnline.com (last accessed 28 November 2017).
24 Day, , ‘Digital Opera and Ballet’, 104 Google Scholar.
25 See, for example, Charlton, David, ‘Ossian, Lesueur and Opera’, Studies in Music 11 (1977), 37–48 Google Scholar.
26 The only other link leads to the online libretto Les deux statues (1807), a one act opéra comique with music by Bernardo Porta.
27 Day, , ‘Digital Opera and Ballet’, 105 Google Scholar.
21 All figures in this document are screenshots taken on 6 December 2017. The number of entries available in the index was 46,818 at that moment, but the contents have expanded since. See Note 4, above.