With interest in opera high at U.Va., the Music Library has begun to add to our collection of manuscripts in facsimile of well-known operas. Students in last semester’s Wagner seminar got a look at a new edition of Tristan und Isolde, and with funds from the Ernest C. Mead, Jr. Endowment, we have begun to purchase all the operas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, beginning with Don Giovanni. These high-quality reproductions come with ample critical notes and are important to the study of the compositional process.

Graduate students in musicology examine the new facsimiles of Mozart’s opera about a womanizer, subtitled “Punishment of a dissolute man.”