The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia

Neue Mozart-Ausgabe (New Mozart Edition). Shortly after the publication of the third edition of Ludwig Ritter von Köchel's Mozart catalogue (edited by Alfred Einstein and published in Leipzig in 1937), and more than fifty after the completion of the main part of the so-called Alte Mozart-Ausgabe – the first ‘complete’ edition of Mozart's works, issued between 1877 and 1883 (with additional stray volumes appearing until 1910) – calls arose for a new Mozart edition, initially planned in connection with the Mozart year 1941 and with a ‘directive’ from the highest ranks of the Nazi regime. For obvious reasons, the project was never launched, and it was only following the Second World War that there was renewed discussion of the project within the newly reinstituted Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum, Salzburg. As a result, a plan for a new, complete edition was announced in the Mozart-Jahrbuch for 1953.

Within a remarkably brief period, the Joseph Haydn and Mozart scholar Ernst Fritz Schmid established philological foundations for scholarly work on the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe (NMA) and the inaugural volume, with works for two pianos (edited by Schmid himself), was published in 1955.