New Head of the Music Department of the Berlin State Library
Press release from 02/01/2008
From 1 April 2008, Dr Martina Rebmann will take over the management of the music department of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz, one of the most important collections of its kind in the world. This decision was taken by the Board of Trustees of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation at its meeting in December 2007, with Dr Martina Rebmann succeeding Dr Helmut Hell, who retired at the end of 2006.
Martina Rebmann, born in 1965 in Böblingen (Baden-Württemberg), completed her studies in musicology, modern German literature and medieval studies (Tübingen, Heidelberg) in 2001 with a doctorate and successfully completed a traineeship for the higher civil service at academic libraries. In 1998, she took over the management of the music department at the Badische Landesbibliothek in Karlsruhe, which has an extensive old collection and its own reading room. Since then, she has been responsible for the music collection, the academic book collection, the sheet music and music reference collection and their academic cataloguing. As a subject librarian, she is also responsible for the subjects of modern German literature and linguistics. Lectures and extensive publishing activities, as well as the exhibitions, readings and concerts she has organised, have highlighted her outstanding ability to communicate the treasures in her care to a wider audience. Her work also focuses on digitisation projects and the indexing of the collection via databases.
For the music department of the State Library, she is striving for a stronger interlinking of science and special collections and intends to intensify the dissemination of the holdings by using modern electronic techniques in the catalogue area as well as in content indexing.
In future, it will be responsible for the largest music collection in Germany and one of the most important in the world. 80 per cent of all surviving autographs by Johann Sebastian Bach, the Symphonies Nos. 4, 5, 8 and 9 and the Missa solemnis by Ludwig van Beethoven, the London Symphonies by Joseph Haydn, the Jupiter Symphony and almost all master operas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as well as major works by Carl Maria von Weber, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms are part of the collection. The library's extensive restoration and digitisation projects relate to the treasures of the music department (Bach autographs, Beethoven's 9th Symphony). The extensive holdings of music autographs and copies, bequests, letters, portraits, books, printed music, libretti and sound recordings focus on the 18th and 19th centuries. The archive of the Mendelssohn family in Berlin is also affiliated to the department. Among the important estates are those of Georg Philipp Telemann and Luigi Cherubini, from more recent times those of Ferruccio Busoni and the archive of works by Ruth Zechlin. In addition, the music department has an excellent specialised library with almost 90,000 volumes of international musicological literature and is the central collection point for music printed up to 1945. Several special catalogues provide access to the holdings.