Not surprisingly given his monumental achievements in the opera world, Richard Wagner was a bit of a control freak. We have ample evidence in his correspondence and even in the operas themselves, of back-room negotiation, power plays, and even the occasional blackmail of one kind or another. The complex performance and publication history of Tannhäuser Read More

The already immortal English contralto Kathleen Ferrier (1912-1953) has just been further immortalized in a postage stamp from the British Royal Mail in its “Britons of Distinction” series. Other Britons in the series include Frederick Delius, Thomas Newcomen and Joan Mary Fry. The image used, this gorgeous shot of Ferrier as Orfeo in Gluck’s 1762 Read More

An exciting array of materials have recently been digitized at Houghton. They include manuscript material from Joanna Baillie, George Eliot, John Keats, Charles Lamb, Percy Shelley, Robert Southey, Alfred Tennyson, Hester Thrale and George Washington. A 15th century breviary and Belgian incunable, multiple musical scores, cartoons, broadsides and more may also be viewed fully online.

One thinks of Houghton Library as a repository of the very old and the very special but it is also — in its association with Harvard Review — a publisher of the very new. For more than a decade, Houghton has been the home of Harvard’s only professional literary journal, publishing the likes of Seamus Read More

The Houghton Library recently digitized several books to be added to the digital library Los Primeros Libros de las Américas: A Digital Library of 16th Century Colonial Mexican Imprints. Starting in 1539 with the first book of the Americas, Breve y mas compediosa doctrina Cristiana en lengua Mexicana y castellana (of which no copies survive), Read More