Mozart goes PDF online with complete works free of charge

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 14 December 2006 23:36

Your IT - Home IT

The website hosting Mozart’s complete works has been so overwhelmed by traffic that an apology has appeared on the site explaining that more capacity is being added. After 200 years, Mozart is clearly still a massive hit!

Forget Britney Spears, Robbie Williams, Kylie Minogue or even Borat - the biggest hit right now on the Internet is one of the world's most famous composers: Mozart. Why? Becuase the International Mozart Foundation has decided to make Mozart’s complete musical works available in PDF format to the world, free of charge, in PDF format.

In just the first two hours of the site’s launch, over 45,000 hits flooded the site causing problems for surfers wanting to visit. The site advises that: “We are overvelmed by the resonance of this website. We regret any delays in accessing this site and are working on expanding our server capacities.”

They also say that “We are currently re- indexing the whole corpus, maybe not all music is available at the moment...”

There are over 600 works available, totaling well over 24,000 pages, in a collection that has taken music scholars 50 years to assemble in its entirety, on what turns out to be the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth.

The PDFs are the sheet music of Mozart’s works, compete with commentary and critical studies – perfect for music students and anyone interested in the famous composer.

Also, there's clearly no DRM to worry about when downloading Mozart's works - the intellectual property rights must have expired long ago, hence the Foundation can make the works freely available.

If you’d like to peek into the mind of one of humanity’s greatest composers, now you can, thanks to the International Mozart Foundation, the Internet and the humble PDF. With a little more server capacity they’ll be able to pack many more keenly interested surfers into what is already a very full house.