Italian opera beyond the Alps: Leopold I's collection of scores and libretti in Vienna (1640-1705)

The project focused on the study of the private collection of Emperor Leopold I Habsburg (1640-1705): with about 700 musical sources and librettos now preserved in the Austrian National Library in Vienna, the so-called \"Leopoldina\" collection is the most extensive and important collection of musical sources in the \"Italian-style\" dramatic style ever gathered outside Italy in the seventeenth century. Through the identification of the volumes compiled in Vienna and their physical and content features, the main goal was firstly to reconstruct the consistency, character and genesis of the entire Leopoldina collection of scores and librettos, some of which were dispersed or scattered in various European libraries. Second, through the study of materials from outside Vienna, the phenomenon of cultural transfer within the music collection was investigated, with the reconstruction of the network of contacts between Vienna and the rest of Europe underlying the circulation of music that significantly influenced the musical life of the Holy Roman Empire between the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The work also enriched the framework of historical knowledge about Italian composers, singers and librettists active in Vienna in the seventeenth century, as well as the aesthetic orientations and taste trends of the Viennese court. This dataset gathers the two most important data containers for the project: these are two excel files, the first of which contains basic data for each of the volumes of music that belonged to Leopold I and now survive. It also contains data found on some of the volumes lost but whose presence can still be documented today. The second, on the other hand, collects the inventorying and cataloging of all the paper catalogs of the National Library of Vienna, with a distinction of the materials used for the present research.