Giuseppe Tartini - Lettere e documenti / Pisma in dokumenti / Letters and Documents - Volume / Knjiga / Volume I

79 INTRODUCTION 1.3 The Martini-Tartini correspondence preserved at the Museo internazionale e biblioteca della musica of Bologna: cataloguing, transfers, exchanges and sales In the Museo internazionale e biblioteca della musica of Bologna approximately 10,000 letters, mainly from the 18th and 19th centuries, are preserved. The principal core of the collection is formed by the correspondence of Martini, founder of the original nu- cleus of the museum’s musical collections, which were originally stored in rooms in the monastery of San Francesco. The roughly 6,000 letters from or to Martini bear witness to his relations with almost one thousand people, mainly musicians and theorists of the time (including Tartini). A catalogue of this correspondence has been published (A. Schnoebelen, Padre Martini's collection of letters , New York, Pendragon, 1979), and the online database of the Library makes reference to it. A second group of letters consists of the correspondences of the librarians of the Liceo Musicale of Bologna, including Gaetano Gaspari (1807-1881), Luigi Torchi (1858-1920) and Francesco Vatielli (1877-1946). 66 The third group consists of vari- ous correspondences and individual letters acquired by Martini or later by the Liceo Musicale. As can be read on the home page of the online database, “for the letters by Giambattista Martini and Gaetano Gaspari we have begun to enter all the letters that are known, lost (marked by “++++” or by “+” at the end of the probable original shelf number) or preserved today in other collections (“----”)”. In the study of the Tartini correspondence preserved in Bologna, we also come across letters that are known but not possessed. While in some cases the place in which the letter is preserved is known to the compiler of the catalogue, in others all trace of the document has been lost. Here, therefore, I would like to try and retrace, insofar as is possible, the movements of these lost or transferred sources. The correspondence, like the rest of Martini’s library, was donated by Stanislao Mattei to the Liceo musicale of Bologna in 1816. Mattei, Martini’s successor as maestro di cappella at San Francesco, was forced by political events to hide a large part of the collection in his own house for some time before being able to redirect it as a gift to the city of Bologna. Unfortunately, at the time of Mattei’s donation, the municipality made no provision for cataloguing the collection, thereby inaugurating a long period during which the precious correspondence was practically ignored. In the course of the first half of the 19th century, Francesco Barbieri (1804-1828), Agostino Barbieri (1829-1839) and Stefano Antonio Sarti (1784-1855) succeeded one another as librarians of the Liceo musicale, which was established in 1804. Despite the new orders given to the collection first by Francesco Barbieri and later by Sarti, who also compiled a two-volume catalogue organised alphabetically by author, the organisation 66 The letters date from around 1850 until the start of the 20th century.