Scope and Content Note
The Moldenhauer Archives at the Library of Congress consist primarily of music (both manuscript and printed), correspondence, photographs, sound recordings, books, newspaper clippings, printed programs, drawings, and engravings. The Archives span years from the Middle Ages to the present, and include documents of composers, musicians, and literary figures, among others.
The music in the collection includes holograph scores or sketches, both published and unpublished, as well as a number of copyist’s and printed scores, transcriptions, and arrangements by composers and musicians such as Beethoven, Bloch, Brahms, Chopin, Franck, Mendelssohn, Puccini, Rimsky-Korsakov, Schoenberg, Webern, and many others. Also included is correspondence of great historical and musical interest, such as letters of Metastasio and Handel.
Some composers (Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, for example) are represented by numerous manuscripts. A sample of other composers, musicians, and literary figures that are represented by both music and non-music materials includes George Auric, Johann Sebastian Bach, Béla Bartók, Hector Berlioz, Georges Bizet, Pierre Boulez, Anton Bruckner, Charles Burney, Feruccio Busoni, Claude Debussy, Frederick Delius, Hermann Hesse, György Ligeti, Federico García Lorca, Wolfgang Mozart, Maruice Ravel, Rainer Maria Rilke, Frank Wedekind, Kurt Weill, and Gioseffo Zarlino.