Johann Georg Werdenstein (1542-1608)

For a professor based in Australia, Richard Charteris has for decades been an unusually indefatigable investigator of European and American libraries in the course of his researches, which have been pursued mainly, though not exclusively, in the field of Renaissance and early Baroque music. For his latest publication, he has turned to the sixteenth-century bibliophile Johann Georg von Werdenstein, much of whose collection still survives at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich. Werdenstein (1542–1608) came of an aristocratic family and entered the Catholic Church, becoming a canon of Augsburg Cathedral in 1563, and adding a further canonry at Eichstatt in 1567. Possessing both intellectual ability and financial means, he built up one of the largest private libraries of the time, running into tens of thousands of volumes, and including over 450 music editions. In 1592 Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria persuaded him to sell 9,000 volumes, including the music, and they entered the Hofbibliothek, and hence today form part of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek's collection. The duke had been steadily building up his own library, partly through acquisition of other collections, including that of Johann Heinrich Herwart, which had a similar number of music items. These two music collections together form a principal ingredient of the present library's magnificent array of sixteenth-century music prints.

Art · Art history · Baroque · The Renaissance · Classics · Diverse Musicological Studies · History