The International Mozart Foundation in Salzburg, Austria, has made all the scores of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's works available online.

And free works from a composer long dead are proving so popular, the site cannot keep up with the demand.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died at age 35 in 1791, but his music is so popular a website offering free scores is overloaded.
(Canadian Press)

More than 600 musical scores are available for download on the New Mozart Edition site, set up at the end of the year marking the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth.

The site received 400,000 hits in its first 12 hours of operation on Monday, so many visitors that it became overloaded.

The foundation is expanding server capacity to handle the load.

The foundation, which safeguards Mozart's legacy and encourages performances of his works, bought rights to the New Mozart Edition, containing work from musicologists gathered over the last 50 years.

It is said to have paid 302,000 euros ($461,500 Cdn) for the digital publication rights from German publisher Bärenreiter-Verlag.

More than 25,000 pages of music are available as PDF files through the site.

Financial support for the project came from the Packard Humanities Institute of Los Altos, Calif. The institute's music collection has more than 650 rare scores and books from the 18th and 19th centuries.

The site allows visitors to search for specific symphonies, arias or even single lines of text from Mozart's music.

A user who types in Pamina, the name of a character from The Magic Flute, will see the music for all five arias she sings, as well as critical texts about her passages.

Over the longer term, the foundation plans to develop an interactive online Mozart database, accessible to both professionals and music lovers.

"We hope we will be able to convince other people besides us to present their original materials online as well," program director Ulrich Leisinger told Reuters.