Established alongside the Conservatoire in 1808, the Library has developed thanks to the foresight of successive administrations, which consistently considered it a fundamental resource for teaching, for the musical training of students and for the professional development of teachers, as well as a repository for the musical documents produced by the School.
The library's initial core dates back to 1809 and consists of the 12 magnificent folio volumes of the Principes Elémentaires de Musique, namely the methods for various instruments, for the study of singing and of harmony, used at the Conservatoire in Paris, and donated by Eugène de Beauharnais to the Milanese Conservatory.
Indeed, while during the Napoleonic era the Méthodes constituted representative and official elements of French musical culture, the Library's first acquisition was chosen and decided in 1808 by the Conservatory's management, and consisted of the eight volumes of the Estro poetico armonico, namely the collection of the Paraphrases of the Psalms translated into Italian by Girolamo Ascanio Giustiniani and set to music by Benedetto Marcello (1776), a work considered at the time to be a sort of archetype of music, and therefore indispensable to culture and musical education tout court.
Furthermore, it should be noted that while in the following decades some of the Méthodes were translated into Italian, in that very year of 1808 Giovanni Ricordi founded his music publishing house and began to publish the methods adopted or written by the teachers of the Conservatory themselves: for instance, by the violinist Alessandro Rolla, the singer Gaetano Nava, the pianist Francesco Pollini, and the composer and first censor of the Conservatory Bonifazio Asioli.
Regarding the preservation aspect of the Library's documents, a regulation signed by the Viceroy dates back to 7 March 1808, stating that “A copy of any composition produced by the students is to be kept in the Music Library of the Conservatoire”, a rule that is still in force today although limited to diploma examination compositions.
Over the decades, the acquisitions were then joined by numerous donations, including archival collections produced by the activities of figures variously connected to music, as well as government decrees aimed at enriching the library, such as the provision of 31 January 1816, in force until 1856, which established that theatre copyists had to deliver to the Conservatoire Library a copy of all works written for the royal Milanese theatres of La Scala and the Canobbiana. In 1850 another government decree established the transfer to the Conservatoire Library of all music copies received under legal deposit by the Braidense National Library and the Pavia University Library up to 1850.