Digital Dragonetti

Assembled over the course of forty years by the late musicologist and avid music collector Hans Moldenhauer (1906-1987), the Moldenhauer Collection constitutes an unparalleled collection of music manuscripts and other primary sources documenting the history of western music from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century. Today, Moldenhauer’s collections are distributed among nine institutions worldwide, including Northwestern.

Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer, 1979

Northwestern’s Moldenhauer Collection includes autograph and holograph music manuscripts (both published and unpublished), sketches, quotations, printed scores, transcriptions and arrangements, correspondence, photographs, newspaper clippings, programs, engravings, and other materials that document musicians and composers from 1683 to 1973.

Additional information about the Moldenhauer Archives, including Northwestern’s collection, may be found in The Rosaleen Moldenhauer Memorial: Music History from Primary Sources: A Guide to the Moldenhauer Archives, including a comprehensive inventory for the entire collection across all repositories.

Search the collection at Northwestern using the finding aid.

To better understand the genesis of the collection, listen to Dr. Hans Moldenhauer and former Northwestern Music Librarian Don Roberts in an interview conducted by Norm Pellagrini and recorded by WFMT Chicago in October 1971. Our sincere thanks to WFMT for providing the digital files. Please click the “play” button below in the embedded audio player.

Hans Moldenhauer obtained many original manuscripts by Anton Webern, comprising the single most important set of primary sources about this composer. Here, Moldenhauer comments on the material and his research into Webern’s life and death. The Webern material is now at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland.

This collection is housed in the Music Library, Digital Collections, and Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives of Northwestern University Libraries.