The Düben Collection

The Düben Collection contains ca. 2,300 musical works in manuscript from the 17^th and early 18^th centuries and at least 150 prints. It was donated to the Uppsala University Library in 1732 by Anders von Düben.

The collection derives its name from the family Düben whose members served as Hofkapellmeister at the Royal Swedish Court from 1640 to ca. 1726 (Anders Düben 1640-62, his son Gustav Düben 1660-90 and his sons Gustav, 1690-98 and Anders 1698-ca. 1726).

Gustav Düben the elder (1628-90) is generally regarded as the main assembler of the collection, which contains vocal and instrumental works by more than 300 composers from Germany, Italy, France, Poland, England, the Baltic countries and Sweden, besides a large number of anonymous works. It is most llikely that the collection represents what remains of the music library from the Swedish Royal Court during the reign of Queen Christina (1644-54), Charles X Gustav (1654-60), Charles XI (1660/1672-97), and Charles XII (1698-1718).

The Düben Collection was first catalogued in the 1880s by the librarian Anders Lagerberg, who assigned the library signatures still in use. The importance of the collection for 17^th-century European music history was soon recognized, and many of its works have since been published in modern editions and discussed in the scholarly literature. Folke Lindberg prepared a detailed catalogue of the vocal works (1946) and Erik Kjellberg catalogued the instrumental works (1968), but neither was published. Bruno Grusnick began a chronological catalogue of the vocal works (Svensk tidskrift för musikforskning, 1964 and 1966), but it finished in 1680. Jan Olof Rudén catalogued all music preserved in manuscript at Uppsala university for RISM and produced a detailed study of the watermarks in the collection (1968). Despite all this research, a published catalogue of the Düben Collection did not exist until the Düben Collection Database Catalogue first went online in 2006.