Online Catalogue of the
Marco Berra Music Prints (1811-1855)
  
 
This catalogue provides information about printed music issued by Prague publisher Marco Berra. It is based on an extensive unpublished work of Irena Janáčková, whose data are continuously updated and corrected with details from collections and sources that had not been taken into account before.
Marco Berra (1784-1853) was the most distinguished Prague music publisher of the time. He came from Northwest Italy. Trained in Vienna, he settled in Prague on the turn of the 1900s and 1910s and established there a publishing and trade house in music, art, maps, and musical instruments; in 1835, he expanded his business by lending music. Marco Berra published more than 1400 titles. Apart from editions of dance music and piano scores, he issued eminent domestic authors, such as Václav Jan Tomášek, Jan Nepomuk Vitásek, or Robert Führer, he collaborated with professors of the Prague Conservatoire, e. g. Giovanni Battista Gordigiani, or Friedrich Dionys Weber, and those of the Prague organ school, namely Karl Franz Pitsch, and he also focused on popular foreign news. He even published engravings, maps and atlases.
The most significant coherent output of the persistent effort of PhDr. Irena Janáčková (1901-2000), focused on the registered production of early Prague music publishers, is the manuscript "Marco Berra, nakladatel hudebnin v obrozenské Praze [Marco Berra, Music Publisher in Prague of the Czech National Revival]", finished in 1988. In difficult conditions and based only on research of Prague collections, period printed periodicals and excerpts from Vienna collections obtained through correspondence with Alexander Weinmann, Janáčková managed to create a catalogue of printed music published by Berra, which however, remained in the typescript version. Gradual electronic processing of the collections opened the possibility to fill numerous gaps in the catalogue, and it was similar when several period lists of Berra's production were taken into account, especially the extensive catalogue from 1850 which was not available for Janáčková.
The presented catalogue uses the possibilities of electronic database accessible online including current updates. As of the date of publishing (December 2019), the database contains all data from the manuscript of Irena Janáčková with many additions including newly found titles and other copies of already known prints. The catalog provides an overview of the publisher's range of music publishing but is not intended to provide information on reprints or re-editions of individual plate numbers. Often, a single plate number is featured in multiple editions, differing, for example, in the form of a cover sheet or title page. The detailed description of the exemplars, including the distinction of possible re-editions, is the present activity of the international organization RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales). The Marco Berra print database provides valuable starting information for processing its records.
Descriptions of printed music from the collections of the National Library of the Czech Republic and the National Museum – Czech Museum of Music are mostly complemented with reproductions of title pages (the records without a reproduction of the title page are marked with an asterisk *). Unverified information is quoted in square brackets. All records were confronted with the preserved period catalogues of Berra's production, the details of which are quoted in records; titles known only from these catalogues are also included in the database.
When quoting, use the permanent link contained in each entry: [...] Online Catalogue of Marco Berra's Music Prints, https://aleph.nkp.cz/web/berra/_35.htm, last update on 5th December 2019.
We welcome all comments and remarks as well as information about Marco Berra's unknown printed music.
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