Dripping tap threatens cathedral archive
A dripping tap has damaged thousands of sheets of music in St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. A team from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna has painstakingly rescued the archive.
For a long time, a dripping tap had soaked through the historical holdings of the cathedral music stored in an archive room without anyone noticing. Several centimeters of water had accumulated on the floor. The historical sheet music presented itself with mold stains, washed-out ink and curled paper when it was first recovered.
Musicologist Elisabeth Hilscher from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and her students from the University of Vienna worked for two semesters on the restoration of the historical sources, which were expertly examined, professionally cleaned, documented and cataloged. This means that all of the music will soon be moved to their new location in the cathedral archive, where they will be professionally stored and made accessible again for research and musical practice.
Among the most valuable items now restored are hymns from the late 17th and early 18th centuries as well as copies of works by Georg Reutter the Younger, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Joseph Haydn and his brother Michael Haydn from around 1800, which were in use in the cathedral for several decades.
