Historico-Critical Edition of the Correspondence of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy

This long-term project covers the entire correspondence of the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809 to 1847) in the form a critical academic online-edition. Next to a diplomatic rendering of approx. 6000 letters written by Mendelssohn, the edition will for the first time also embrace more than 7200 letters written to the composer. This part of the edition comes with a text-critical full commentary of each individual letter. The commentary is supplemented by an index of persons, of works, by a biographical chronology of Mendelssohn and further directories. The project is based on the edition of the Mendelssohn letters (Hinbriefe) which have been edited by B?renreiter-Verlag Kassel in the form of a 12-volume book edition from 2008 to 2016. For the planned digital edition, all the available data will be marked by XML/TEI-P5 and will be made accessible for free. Parallel to this, we plan to launch a new periodical, Mitteilungen der Mendelssohn-Briefausgabe, bound to cover the progress of the edition and to circulate new findings to the community. By providing these newly edited text corpora, the project will substantially enhance our interaction with the letters of Mendelssohn, with his biography and works. The edition of the letters which he received (Gegenbriefe) has been a desideratum for a very long time. The edition will allow us to even better understand the role of Mendelssohn within German and English musical cultures of the first half of the 19th-century. Due to the large number of foreign correspondents, among whom many a publisher, musician, impresario, the edition will not only contribute to German music and cultural history, but to European cultural history in general. The large quantity of items (approx. 14.000 letters), due to its astounding complexity, does provide an in-depth glimpse of a coherent historical discourse and of a knowledge landscape for a variety of disciplinary fields ranging from music and social history, the history of mentalities, medical history, nutrition history, the history of sciences, technology and psychology, to the history of meteorology, of politics and to economic history. This digital online edition is enabled through the development of a very efficient XML/TEI system solution, consisting of an innovative integration of a XML/TEI WYSIWYG editor, of a specifically developed XML/TEI document management system. The DMS can be implemented into any content management system and will therefore and for the first time not only preserve the XML/TEI textual data, but will allow long-term and sustainable preservation of the complete knowledge and representational structure. By supplanting traditional target-oriented knowledge guidance through an intelligent knowledge managements system that entails a fully automatic semantic knowledge generation, the complex text contents of Mendelssohn’s collected letters with its immense diversity of information, meanings and relations can be accessed to users first time. The system solution makes an important contribution to professionalizing and standardization of digital editions within the XML/TEI realm.