Music

The music collection of the Württemberg State Library is the largest in Baden-Württemberg in terms of the number of items, the spectrum covered by the sheet music collection, and also the range of research literature available.
With an impressive range of historical, and contemporary composition manuscripts and a large number of specimens of printed sheet music, this collection is one of the largest and most important in Germany.

The extraordinary historical collection contains medieval music manuscripts from the secularized monasteries as well as large-format choir books from the former Hofkapelle, one of the largest songbook collections in Germany, and numerous bequests from composers and musicians, which are of more than regional relevance in the field of music history.

Right from the year the library was founded, the material for performance by the Hoftheater formed the basis of the music collection. Since then, 1765, the collection has grown continuously. There are few gaps in the inventory of what now forms the major part of the collection.
Since a large proportion of German theatre archives was destroyed in the Second World War, this extensive collection of performance documentation is of outstanding significance.