Parstorffer's inventory (1653) now online

Monday, March 8, 2021

In 1653 Paul Parstorffer, bookseller in Munich specialized in the trade of music editions, published an ‘inventory of all music works’ («Indice di tutte le Opere di Musica») available in his shop. No copies of this catalogue are preserved today. However, Johann Gottfried Walther (1684–1748) employed it as bibliographic source in his Musicalisches Lexicon (Leipzig 1732). Luigi Collarile has now published a reconstruction of Parstorffer’s inventory in the series Historical Music Inventories.

It was possible to identify 214 editions quoted by Walther from Parstorffer’s inventory. The editions mentioned in Parstorffer’s inventory refer to 78 composers, most of them Italian (68). Among the titles quoted by Walther it is possible to identify 37 lost editions (17.3% of the titles mentioned in the inventory). They mainly concern editions printed in Venice by Gardano-Magni (22 titles, more than 25% of Magni’s editions in Parstorffer’s inventory) and by Vincenti (10 titles).