The Riemann Musiklexikon, often abbreviated as RML, is a music encyclopedia founded in 1882 by Hugo Riemann.
History
The Riemann Musiklexikon is the last undertaking of an individual to write a comprehensive encyclopedia in the field of music. The first edition of the encyclopaedia was published in 1882 under the titleHugo Riemann Musik-Lexikon. Theorie und Geschichte der Musik, die Tonkünstler alter und neuer Zeit mit Angabe ihrer Werke, nebst einer vollständigen Instrumentenkunde. In the following editions the volume was constantly expanded; e.g. the seventh edition already had 1598 pages compared to the first with 1036 pages. The last edition published by Riemann is the eighth, but he completely reworked the lexicon for the ninth edition, which was published after his death. The last one-volume tenth edition still contains a large number of biographical articles, which Alfred Einstein then deleted for the eleventh edition : Lebensdaten uns völlig entfremdeter Musiker aus der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunerman have been eradicated - artists who are now partly regaining importance again and about whom hardly anything can be found in other encyclopaedias. Einstein supervised the work from the ninth to the eleventh edition. Through his emigration, it was known he was a Jew, "the Riemann" became known and popular in the Anglo-American world. An edition under the musicologist Joseph Müller-Blattau, which was to bring the work into line with National Socialist standards, did not get beyond three deliveries. The Riemann Musiklexikon 1958-75 in three volumes and two supplementary volumes edited by Wilibald Gurlitt, Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht and Carl Dahlhaus, in Schott Edition Mainz appeared, became the most widely used and profound music encyclopaedia of the post-war period. The Brockhaus Riemann, a paperback edition in five volumes from 1989 and 1995, which was intended to meet the demands of both experts and music lovers, is, compared to the Riemann Musiklexikon, on the one hand highly compressed, but on the other hand brought up to date. Based on this, the 13th revised and updated edition of the Musiklexikon was published by Schott at the beginning of 2012; the editor was Wolfgang Ruf. The lexicon comprises five volumes with more than 9400 articles on subjects and persons from music theory and practice as well as bibliographies and catalogues of works.
Literature
Preface. In Wolfgang Ruf, Annette van Dyck-Hemming : Riemann Musiklexikon. 13., new revised and updated edition. Vol 1: A–Domh. Schott, Mainz 2012,, p. 5 f.
