Mozart Online

The bound volumes of the composer's works, which consist of over 24,000 pages, have been posted on the Internet by the International Mozart Foundation located in Salzburg, Austria.

The books are a digitized version of the prestigious "New Mozart Edition" ("Neue Mozart Ausgabe," or NMA) which is considered the gold standard of Mozart editions.

The edition serves as an aid to authentic performances, as well as providing music researchers with an accurate text based on available sources, such as Mozart's autographed manuscripts.

NMA-online will further aid research, as well as enabling non-experts to access the composer's scores in a user-friendly manner.

Detailed searches

Visitors to the Web site (http://dme.mozarteum.at) can search for specific symphonies, concertos or even single lines of text.

For example, if a fan of the opera "The Magic Flute" ("Die Zauberflöte") types in "Pamina," the music for the five arias sung by this female character will come up on the screen, as well as critical texts analyzing those particular passages.

NMA-online's program director, Ulrich Leisinger, told Reuters that the Edition's German publisher Barenreiter had received $400,000 (302,000 euros) for the digital publication rights.

The Packard Humanities Institute of Los Altos, California, whose music collection contains over 650 rare scores and books from the 18th and 19th centuries, provided financial support for the project.

"We hope we will be able to convince other people besides us to present their original materials online as well," said Leisinger. "We had 45,000 hits in the first two hours. We would not have expected that."