The following is a guest blog by Vin Novara, Head of Acquisitions and Processing, Music Division.
2025 was another thrilling year of acquisitions for the Music Division. Our top 5 acquisitions were especially staggering in terms of breadth and impact. As always, it is not easy to select only five acquisitions or to even rank them. This year we really built on existing strengths (that is, composers, manuscripts, instruments) while expanding our holdings on notable performers. On to the list …
1. Viola by Antonio Stradivari, Cremona, 1690, Fulton, ex Baird, Tuscan-Medici
The historic 1690 Tuscan-Medici viola by Antonio Stradivari is a gift to the nation from David and Amy Fulton and the Tuscan Corporation in recognition of how the U.S. provided Amy’s mother safe harbor during the Holocaust. The contralto viola was previously on loan to the Library by the Tuscan Corporation (of the Cameron Baird family) in a collaborative custodial arrangement since December 1977. The viola joins the Library of Congress’s world-renowned instrument collection, which is anchored by the five Stradivari instruments donated by Gertrude Clarke Whittall in 1935. The viola, the second of the Library’s collection, has been renamed to commemorate its newest chapter: Antonio Stradivari, Cremona, 1690, viola, Fulton, ex Baird, Tuscan-Medici. The Tuscan-Medici viola was commissioned from Stradivari in 1690 by Ferdinando de’ Medici, the grand prince of Tuscany and patron of music in Florence, to form a Stradivari quintet with instruments previously gifted to him. By the late 1700s, the viola left Italy and arrived in England. It remained there with various owners—including the collectors Alexander Glennie, F. de Rougemont, and Avery-Tyrell—until 1924, when it was sold to the American amateur musician and Macy’s department store heir Herbert N. Straus. In 1957, Cameron Baird, violist, philanthropist and chairman of the Music Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo, purchased the instrument from the Straus estate. The viola joins a rare ensemble of Stradivari instruments housed and preserved at the Library, bringing the total to six. Gertrude Clarke Whittall donated five of those instruments in 1935 with the mandate to make them accessible through performance and research, and to ensure that they are living objects that facilitate creating new works and interpretations of classics.
Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021) is widely regarded as the most influential and innovative musical theater songwriter of the second half of the 20th century. Winner of eight Tony Awards, including a special Tony for lifetime achievement, Sondheim was a prolific creator, as evidenced by the works found in this extensive collection. The collection includes his manuscripts, music and lyric drafts, recordings, notebooks and scrapbooks—approximately 11,000 items documenting Sondheim’s creative acumen. The materials range from hundreds of music and lyric sketches of his well-known works to drafts of songs that were cut from shows or never made it to a production’s first rehearsal. There are notes about characters who would ultimately sing his compositions as well as multiple iterations of nearly each finished work, providing an evolutionary road map of inspiration. The collection also contains manuscripts for some of Sondheim’s most celebrated shows, including “Company,” “Follies,” “Sweeney Todd” and “Into the Woods,” as well as lesser-known works such as his plays and screenplays. Of a more personal nature, there are dozens of scrapbooks that hold programs, clippings, opening-night telegrams, and more.
3. Ellen Taaffe Zwilich Papers
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (1939- ) is an American composer and violinist. She studied violin at Florida State University with J. Boda and later in New York with Ivan Galamian. After enrolling at The Juilliard School where Zwilich studied composition with E. Carter and R. Sessions, she became the first woman to earn the degree of Doctor in Musical Arts (1975). Composing in virtually all media, she had her works widely performed by the leading American orchestras and major ensembles abroad. Zwilich received numerous awards and honors, including the 1983 Pulitzer Prize in Music (the first woman ever to receive this coveted award), the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Chamber Music Prize, the Arturo Toscanini Music Critics Award, the Ernst von Dohnányi Citation, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, four Grammy nominations, the Alfred I. Dupont Award, Miami Performing Arts Center Award, the Medaglia d’oro in the G.B. Viotti Competition, and the NPR and WNYC Gotham Award for her contributions to the musical life of New York City. She has been elected to the American Classical Music Hall of Fame, the Florida Artists Hall of Fame, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The collection contains manuscript and printed music, correspondence, publicity papers, photographs, and audio and video recordings.
4. Igor Stravinsky’s holograph working manuscript for the opera “The Nightingale,” 1914
By any reckoning, Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) was one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century. He achieved international prominence largely because of his ballet scores for Serge Diaghilev’s famed Ballets Russes—particularly “The Rite of Spring” and “The Firebird.” Stravinsky quickly became a pivotal figure in modernist music, and he maintained his status as a musical superstar for the remainder of his life. He was born in Russia, but he spent the entirety of his career in the international musical scene, settling in the United States in 1939 and becoming an American citizen in 1945. Stravinsky’s original piano-vocal score for his first opera, “The Nightingale” (or “Le Rossignol”), is the only known complete manuscript score for this work. A working manuscript, it shows many differences from the published score. Dated 1914, the time immediately following “The Rite of Spring,” this was an important period for Stravinsky as he began the transition into his period of neoclassicism (which is the period of the Music Division’s collecting strength on this composer). This manuscript was owned by a private collector and was not previously available for research: this acquisition ends that obstacle for scholars.
Paul Wittgenstein (1887-1961) was an Austrian American pianist who lost his right arm to a battle injury while serving as a soldier in World War I. Born into a wealthy family and looking to revive his performance career that was cut short by the war, he used his inheritance to commission more than 30 orchestral and chamber music pieces for piano, left hand. The collection consists of manuscript and printed scores and parts for most of the works Wittgenstein commissioned, as well as manuscript notebooks of his technique book “School for the Left Hand” (1957) and his library of annotated printed music. Additionally, the collection includes photographs, concert programs, letters, posters, and other documents relating to Wittgenstein and his extended family.
We hope the above materials will spark your curiosity and entice you to visit the Performing Arts Reading Room. They join the vast and diverse collections of the Music Division that span more than 1,000 years of Western music history and practice, offering many exciting opportunities to create new research and to inspire new performances.