Carl-Maria-von-Weber-Gesamtausgabe

The WeGA is a musicological edition project funded by the Academy of Sciences and Literature (Mainz) with the aim of presenting all of Weber's compositions, letters, diaries and writings in a historico-critical complete edition by the 200th anniversary of Weber's death in 2026. The edition is designed to consist of 54 printed volumes of music including critical reports as well as a digital online edition of the texts mentioned (i.e. exclusively the music texts).

The Carl Maria von Weber Complete Edition (WeGA) closes a sensitive gap in the documentation of the epochal changes in musical and cultural life in the early 19th century.

It is not just a sheet music edition, but also a text edition, because Weber's statements in letters, diaries and writings are an essential key to understanding his own music and the musical aesthetics of his time.

In the area of these text parts, the WeGA has created, through its digital edition, highly acclaimed models of a novel and at the same time sustainable development and linking of text corpora, which offer open cross-disciplinary interfaces to neighboring projects.

Through its involvement in international standardization initiatives, it has made it clear that future edition projects must also be seen in overarching contexts and implemented with a stronger exchange of knowledge between the projects.

In the field of music editions, too, the project, before which one could not speak of an actual Weber philology, had a stimulating effect in many ways:

This is due to both the source-based, documentary character of the print editions as well as the first digital „Edirom“ editions. These not only demonstrated the potential of digital editions of music in direct comparison to the printed volume and thus promoted discussions about future forms of editions, but ultimately also contributed to the further development of the music encoding standard MEI.

The WeGA can therefore be described as a driver of change in the field of music publishing.