Virtually reunited: the complete critical edition of Mozart's Oeuvre in the Digital Mozart Edition

At his death, Wolfgang Amad & eacute; Mozart bequeathed to posterity a complex corpus of sources relating to his oeuvre, the turbulent transmission of which posed particular challenges for a philologically reliable edition of his works. In the nineteenth century, when most of the sources were still directly available, attempts to print his compositions failed to meet modern scholarly criteria, as the development of the historical-critical method was still in its infancy. After the Second World War, a complete printed edition was initiated according to higher philological standards, but many of the original sources, now scattered around the world, were thought to be lost, so that many editors had to resort to less reliable copies and prints. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Salzburg Mozarteum Foundation, in cooperation with the Packard Humanities Institute in Los Altos, California, launched the Digital Mozart Edition (DME) with the aim of using the advantages of the digital format to bring together in a virtual space all the sources relating to Mozart's oeuvre and make them freely accessible via the internet in a critical edition that captures them in all their ramifications, encompassing historical documents beyond the compositional output, such as the family correspondence and the libretti to his operas. The article presents the editorial principles and first results of the new edition in its main interconnected projects DME::Music, DME::Letters & Documents and DME::Librettos & Texts, which aim to provide scholars, musicians, and laypersons with a comprehensive platform for deepening their knowledge of Mozart's music.