Music Manuscripts [1 ed.] 0712301291, 9780712301299

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© 1987 The British Library Board Reprinted 1996 Published by The British Library Great Russell Street London WC1B 3DG and 27 South Main Street Wolfeboro, New Hampshire 03894-2069 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Searle, Arthur Music manuscripts. 1. Music—Manuscripts—History 1 Title II. British Library 780 ML93 ISBN 0-7123-0129-1 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Searle, Arthur. Music manuscripts / Arthur Searle. 8op. ISBN 0-7123-0129-1 (pbk.) : $10.95 1. Music—History and criticism. 2. Music— Manuscripts—Facsimiles. 3. British Library. I. Title. ML 160.S405 1987 780'.g4—dc19g Designed by Roger Davies Typeset in Monophoto Ehrhardt by August Filmsetting, Haydock, St Helens Colour origination by York House Graphics, Hanwell Printed in England by

Clifford Press Ltd, Coventry FRONT COVER see 73 303 62. BACK

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Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Mr. O. W. Neighbour in particular among his colleagues for his help and advice. The British Library is grateful for permission to reproduce particular items: Boosey and Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. (66, 67, 71, 72); Trustees of the Britten Estate (77); Chester Music (66); The Holst Foundation (69, 70); Oxford University Press and Gerald Duckworth and Co., Ltd. (73); Peters Edition Ltd., London (63); Royal Philharmonic Society (50); R.V.W. Ltd., (68, 76); Universal Edition, Vienna (Alfred A. Kalms Ltd) (64, 65).

1 This page and opposite Canon in honour of King Henry VIII A double canon for two bassus and two contratenor voices, to a Latin text celebrating the union of the houses of York and Lancaster. The two parts appear on facing pages in the original manuscript. Royal MS 11.E.X1, ff.2v,3. 487 x 680 mm. (whole opening)

Contents Introduction

page 5

The British Library’s collection of music manuscripts 5 Medieval music

7

The 16th and 17th Centuries

73

From the later 17th Century to Schubert 27 From Chopin to Brahms

43

Debussy, Mahler and the 20th Century 67 Suggestions for further reading 80

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Introduction

The British Library's collection of music manuscripts

2 ‘The Play of Daniel’ An early thirteenth-century music drama used as part of the celebration of Christmas at Beauvais Cathedral. The stupefied amazement of King Belshazzar as the hand appears writing on the wall is indicated in the rubric: ‘rex stupefactus clamabit’ (in red, like all the ‘stage directions’). Egerton MS 2615, f.97. 220 x 140 mm.

The appearance of a music manuscript will always reflect the circumstances and purpose of its creation as well as the nature of the music it contains. The agitation of the satraps at Belshazzar’s feast as the hand appears writing upon the wall is visible in the complex melismas of the music they sing in the Play of Daniel, written by the choristers of Beauvais cathedral in the thirteenth century (2). Three hundred years later, at the court of King Henry VIII of England, the four-part canon ‘Salve radix’ has a more artfully contrived visual message, with the music curling round the exquisitely drawn Tudor rose of the new dynasty (1). Another three hundred years on, and Puccini’s hasty scribble of some ofhis first ideas for the suicide scene at the end of Madam Butterfly is entirely without artistic appeal, yet conveys to the eye all of the drama that emerges in the finished opera (60).

The printed and manuscript music in the British Library together forms a collection which is among the foremost in the world. The purpose of this book is to reproduce a representative selection from the music manuscripts and to relate the chosen examples to at least some of the developments in musical history from the middle ages to our own day. Much has to be left out simply because of the size of the book. Composers can for the most part be represented by only one item; the Handel manuscripts are virtually a complete musical archive, and the Library’s Elgar collection is the largest anywhere, but only Messiah (30) and the Enigma Variations (62) can be shown. While these are probably their best-known works, on their own they inevitably present a limited view of each composer. The pattern of the book reflects the collections themselves. After showing a very few of the Library’s most outstanding medieval music manuscripts, the first main section concentrates on English sources for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is followed by a selection of important eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German and Viennese composers, examples of later nineteenth-century works, and finally the leading figures of the British twentieth-century revival, set in context with examples of some of the most important of their European contemporaries. This is the profile of the body of music manuscripts built up from the foundation of the British Museum in 1753 and still being added to by the British Library. From time to time existing large collections have been added to the holdings, often as the result of a gift to the nation. Among the most important musically are the old Royal Library, presented by George III in 1757 (and of which the choir-book containing the ‘Salve radix’ canon is part), the Royal Music Library (which includes the Handel autographs), presented by Queen Elizabeth II in 1957, and the Stefan Zweig Collection, given to the Library in 1986. George III’s fondness for the music of Handel and Stefan Zweig’s admiration for Mozart are reflected in their collections, and the Library’s own cumulative collection has benefited from the tastes of individuals at many points. The J.S. Bach manuscript (28) was treasured by the early

nineteenth-century Bach enthusiasts in England and eventually bequeathed to the Museum by Samuel Wesley’s daughter Eliza. The sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti (31) were preserved as a result of similar enthusiasm at a time when the music was little known, and the Schubert piano sonata was a gift from the pianist F.E. Perabo. The presence of important English Renaissance sources, such as the Baldwin (16), Cosyn and Forster books, in the Royal Music Library, stems directly from the archaeological interest in the music of that period fostered by Burney and Hawkins in the late eighteenth century. The interest created by their work also ensured the availability of similar manuscripts for purchase by the Museum in the nineteenth century. Factors of this kind have always created opportunities for adding to the collections. The acquisition by the Museum of a number of Beethoven sketchbooks (among them 37) in the 1880s is an outstanding example of the benefits to be gained. The expanding collection of manuscripts of twentieth-century British composers arises from a rather different set of circumstances. In the years since the Second World War it has increasingly become possible to acquire substantial collections either directly from the composers themselves, or from their families and heirs. This process was set underway by a series of generous gifts, and the manuscripts acquired over the last forty years or so now form a source for research comparable to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century music manuscripts in the Library. Examples from three of those gifts are shown here: Elgar (62), Vaughan Williams (68, 76) and Holst (69). They must represent all the other composers of those generations (among them Ethel Smyth, Rutland Boughton, Bax, and Ireland), just as Britten (77) and Tippett (78) are only the most important examples of later acquisitions. In collections of manuscripts such as those of Vaughan Williams or Tippett now in the Library it is possible to trace the growth of a single work though various stages of its composition, as well as the more general development of the composer’s methods and achievements. Only a very few autograph manuscripts survive from before the 1630s, so that the earlier sources provide quite different information, concerned with what music was played, the way it was performed, and often how the actual musical text changed when it was written down in different places or by different generations. The features of the choir-book from the court of Henry VIII with which the first main section begins (7) are to be found in almost all of the manuscripts of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: separate pieces by different composers are brought together in a single volume, their selection governed by the purpose for which the whole group was intended. Categories such as vocal music (sacred or secular), instrumental works, or keyboard pieces, can define the scope of an anthology of this sort, depending on who compiled it and where — for example, at court or in one of the great ecclesiastical foundations. The categories could change or become mixed if the purpose or ownership of the volume changed, for music manuscripts were useful objects, to be kept and added to. Equally, in some instances different kinds of music were

present from the start, at the whim of an amateur simply copying into his musical ‘commonplace book’ pieces which caught his fancy. An important and increasingly explored part of musical history is preserved in volumes like these. Comparison between such manuscripts, and,

indeed, the growing amount of printed music being issued during the period (much of it in ‘anthology’ format), makes it possible to trace the development of musical repertories, and, where pieces appear in more than one source, the transmission and authenticity of musical texts. The earliest autograph manuscripts in this book have something of the nature of the sixteenth-century sources: the pieces by Henry Lawes, Locke and Purcell (23, 22, 25) all come from anthologies, but these anthologies are the composers’ fair copy books of their own works. Like these, the later autographs chosen for inclusion have the impact of the composer’s own marks on paper; they give quite literally the composer’s own view of his music. In addition they represent a specific stage in the composition of the work in question. They vary widely in appearance, encompassing hasty sketches by Beethoven (37), Puccini (60) and Vaughan Williams (68), a composition draft in short score by Britten (77), and fair copies of their newest works which Webern in 1909 (64) and Berg in 1934 (65) wrote out for their teacher Schoenberg. Bach’s fugue in A flat from book two of Das Wohltemperirte Clavier (28) comes from a manuscript written out for performers to use. Handel worked on Messiah in the knowledge that his copyists would prepare the score and parts for performance, so that minor alterations at least could be made once their work was done. Because Mozart himself saw his six ‘Haydn’ string quartets through the press, the autographs by no means represent his final thoughts on the pieces, and there are in fact quite significant differences between them and the authoritative first edition (35, 24). When looking at manuscripts of this kind there is just as much need to consider the circumstances under which they were written as there is in the more obvious case of the medieval and Renaissance sources which precede them here.

Medieval Music

The Play of Daniel adapts the western ecclesiastical tradition of plainchant to dramatic purposes, and uses notation giving pitch but not length or rhythm. The late thirteenth-century Trouveres song (4) is also written in non-mensural notation, and is shaped in part by its secular verse; like the Troubadours in Provence, the Trouveéres in northern French speaking areas set carefully structured verses. There is a vernacular text, too, for the famous English rota, or round, ‘Sumer is icumen in’, dating from the middle of the thirteenth century (3). (It has been suggested that the alternative Latin text was added to lend respectability — the piece appears in a monastic volume.) This is a complex piece of polyphony: the main text is designed to be sung in canon by four voices, and below it is a ‘pes’, a kind of cantus firmus, for two further voices. This is the earliest surviving polyphony, and no other music for as many as six voices is known before the



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Messiah, 1742 Part of the soprano aria ‘O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion’ and of the ‘Halleluiah’ chorus. The text for Messiah was compiled from the bible and the psalms as they appear in the English prayer book, by Charles Jennens, a country gentleman of literary tastes and with a great admiration for Handel’s music. R.M. 20.f.2., ff.25, 103V. Autograph. 238 x 295 mm.

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The piano sonata by Schubert (39) is the manuscript prepared by the composer for the printer, and the engraver’s tiny markings of the points where the lines in his copying end are to be found at the bottom of the lines of music. Even so, it contains a number of autograph alterations, in addition to erased portions of an earlier version of the slow movement. By far the most striking visual evidence of a composer at work, though, is found in Beethoven’s sketches for the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony (37). This page from one of a number of his sketchbooks in the Library shows the evolution of musical ideas now familiar from the finished work.

Add. MS 31553, f.83v. 262 x 350mm.

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33 Haydn’s signature on a receipt dated 12 February 1802 for payment from the Edinburgh music publisher George Thompson, for whom he made arrangements of British folk-songs. Haydn had been given the degree of honorary doctor of music by the University of Oxford in 1792. Add. MS 35263, f.142.

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