It does not happen very often in the humanities that two generations of a single family share the same specialisation in a particular academic discipline. This was the case, however, with Ernst Fritz Schmid (1904–1960), a researcher into Mozart and Haydn who initiated and (from 1950) directed a new critical edition of Mozart’s oeuvre (Neue Mozart Ausgabe), and his son Manfred Hermann Schmid (1947–2021), who was editor of several volumes of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe and 28 volumes of the yearbook Mozart Studien, and president of the Academy for Mozart Research attached to the Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg in the years 2010–2017.
Manfred Hermann Schmid, who for more than 30 years was head of the Department of Musicology at Tübingen University, cooperated for many years with Milada Jonášová (now at the Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences), who spent four DAAD research periods at Tübingen University. He was involved in the organisation of the international Mozart congresses held in Prague every two years from 2016, and also in the annual international conferences of the project L’opera italiana nei territori boemi durante il Settecento in Český Krumlov. His discovery of plans and drawings of the Villa Bertramka, professionally drawn up by the professor of architecture Georg Buchner from Munich and his pupils in the 1920s and 1940s, led to a project in which, together with Jonášová, he prepared an exhibition, a conference, and the extensive exhibition catalogue Die Villa Bertramka. Facetten der Geschichte einer Mozart-Gedenkstätte in Prag.
Schmid’s long-standing cooperation with Milada Jonášová culminated with his heirs making a generous gift of his library to the Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences. This extensive library contains an unusually large amount of Mozart literature by Czech standards, together with specialist literature on Joseph and Michael Haydn, Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, and other composers. Also to be found in it are works on musical palaeography and organology, which is due to the fact that Schmid was also for many years director of the Musikinstrumentenmuseum in Munich. It is planned to have the library catalogued and made accessible to the specialist public within four years at the latest.