Moldenhauer Archives, Music manuscript collection at Library of Congress, United States

The Moldenhauer Archives is a music manuscript collection at the Library of Congress containing around 3,500 original documents. The holdings span handwritten scores, letters, and other materials from nine centuries of Western musical history.

Hans Moldenhauer assembled this collection over decades and donated it to the Library of Congress in 1982. His gift shaped one of the most important repositories of Western music history held in the United States.

The collection holds original musical compositions by Bach, Bartók, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Schubert, Schoenberg, and Webern. When you look through the catalogs, you see the names of these major composers and realize how central they are to Western music history.

Researchers can access the complete inventory through an electronic database that replaced the printed catalog. The digital search option makes the materials accessible from anywhere today.

The Archives represent the largest single gift of musical documents ever received by the Library of Congress. What stands out is that portions of the collection are distributed across nine institutions worldwide.