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Sheet music of all of Mozart's works is now available online for free, following an initiative by Salzburg's International Foundation Mozarteum in honour of the 250th anniversary of his birth.
"With over 400,000 hits on the website in the first 12 hours, one can say demand surpassed our expectations," Mirjam Nellman, spokeswoman for the foundation, based in Mozart's birthplace of Salzburg, told AFP.
"The server is a little slow at the moment because of strong demand, but we are working on it," she added.
The unique initiative, entitled NMA Online -- for "Neue Mozart Ausgabe," or new Mozart edition -- was launched with the help of the Packard Humanities Institute in Los Altos, California.
"The purpose of this web site is to make Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's musical compositions widely and conveniently accessible to the public, for personal study and for educational and classroom use," the Mozarteum said in a statement.
The website draws from the original Neue Mozart Ausgabe paper version developed since 1954 by internationally renowned musicologists and comprising over 125 booklets of sheet music, whose origin has been painstakingly authenticated, the Salzburg foundation said.
The "Digital Mozart Edition" (DME) website -- http://dme.mozarteum.at -- features over 600 works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, separated into ten categories, from concertos for orchestra to chamber music and pieces for piano.
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AFPEntertainment-Mozart-music-Austria-IT
AFP 121319 GMT 12 06
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