Historical-Critical Online-Edition of the Correspondence of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy

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The edition of the Gegenbriefe (=the letters that Mendelssohn received) satisfies a long-standing desideratum. In addition to the actual texts of the letters, the online-edition provides critical philological commentaries that highlight the contents and context of the letter as well as directories of persons, institutions, musical works and other hermeneutically relevant directories.While in the project stage 1.926 Gegenbriefe were edited, complementing his own letters from childhood, youth and his early travels (1816 to the autumn of 1833), as well as from his early professional career and the founding of a family (autumn of 1833 to the end of 1838), the present project stage will be devoted to the letters and Gegenbriefe from the period 1839 to the end of 1841. This period embraces Mendelssohn`s fourth to seventh season as Gewandhauskapellmeister, a variety of music festivals under his supervision, the birth of two of his children, the initial negotiations for a contract in Berlin, which led to his transfer to Berlin for a “probationary year” in 1842. The second project stage builds upon the results of IT-solutions developed during stage 1, primarily on a highly efficient XML/TEI integrative solution. It consists of a middleware which was genuinely developed for the purpose of this project, with integrates a document management system (DMS) and complex processing of versions, a genuine data bank system with rich search options (facets), the innovative integration of an Oxygen-XML/TEI editor into the middleware, a genuine Oxygen-Java-Plug in which allows the Oxygen editor complete access to all integrated directories with all data sets, amounting to 21.974 sets as of now. With a genuinely developed Jason-API and extension, the middleware can be seamlessly implemented into any CMS. For the Oxygen editor, an extensive framework has been developed, consisting of 140 commands, accompanying tool tips and an online tutorial. With the help of the latter, users, without any familiarity with XML/TEI procedures, can represent, annotate and comment any feature of a given letter of the correspondence and link this letter with other letters and directories and respective meta data, by way of menues and short cuts on a WYSIWYG-surface. Erroneous entries are thus avoided.By implementing an intelligent semantic search system, the multi-layered textual contents of the Edition of the Mendelssohn Correspondence and its apparatus, can be made fully accessible for users for the first time. An innovative data storage system allows an easy transfer of the whole corpus existing in XML/TEI coded form and all accompanying XML/TEI data such as directories, comments, links etc. into an archive. It also secures their long-term storage and capability to reactivate them irrespective of any specific platform configuration. The XML/TEI text data as well as the complete knowledge structure and representational format can thus be universally secured in a sustainable manner.