Public domain opera scores are an invaluable resource for performers, students and anyone else who is interested in opera. In the United States, anything published before 1923 is in the public domain and therefore legal to reproduce without violating copyright law.
This means that most of the classic operatic repertory can be scanned and viewed online for free. Several sites are dedicated to scanning public domain opera scores and making them available online, in addition to other music and literature.
Internet Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)
The International Music Score Library Project is a non-profit organization dedicated to making public domain music (and new compositions published under a Creative Commons license) available for free online. The music library, which includes a large collection of opera scores, is set up as a wiki, meaning that anyone can sign up, edit information and upload scores. This makes IMSLP a useful site for people who both want to find opera scores online and upload their own public domain or Creative Commons music.
IMSLP has by far the biggest collection of online opera scores of the websites on this list, including rare and hard-to-find scores like the Der Vampyrs of both Marschner and Lindpaintner and manuscripts of early operatic works. As a word of warning, however: IMSLP's servers are located in Canada, and there are some music scores available which are public domain in Canada but not in the United States and other countries.
Variations Prototype from Indiana University
The Variations Prototype website from Indiana University includes scans of public domain opera scores from Indiana University's William and Gail Cook Music Library. Unlike IMSLP, which only offers music scores as PDF downloads, the Variations Prototype library is optimized for web viewing. Viewers can navigate through the scores using the left-hand menu, which offers links to each number in the opera, while the right-hand frame displays each page of the score as a separate image file.
The organization of the Variations Prototype library makes it ideal for music students and other people who want to read through a score while listening to the opera. The library of online opera scores, while small, provides a good overview of the operatic canon, including Mozart, Verdi and Wagner. The quick loading times make the scores easier to read online, although the low image quality makes the scores a poor choice for performance or more in-depth study.
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive stores not only older, cached versions of web pages but a library of public domain books, audio recordings, and other resources. While its focus is not on opera or even on music scores in general, one benefit of the Internet Archive over other public domain music sources is that it even has public domain recordings; for example, the early twentieth century D'Oyly Carte recordings of Gilbert and Sullivan operas.
It also features hard-to-find American operas and libretti, such as those of Reginald De Koven. Opera scores and other books on the Internet Archive can be browsed and searched online or downloaded as a PDF.
Google Books
Google Books allows users to view and search both books which are in copyright and those which are out of copyright. Like the Internet Archive, its focus is not on opera and other music scores, but it still has many public domain opera scores, libretti and other resources, such as Gustav Kobbé's The Complete Opera Book. Like the Internet Archive, Google offers options for readers to browse books online or download a PDF. (There is also an option to view a book as plain text, but this doesn't work well for music scores.) A list of opera vocal scores on Google Books is available at Art Song Central.
Taken together, all of these online opera score resources cover a wide variety of both well-known and forgotten operas from the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries. Spreading the word about these resources and contributing to them (for example, by uploading music score scans to IMSLP) will help make opera and other music available freely to this and future generations.
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