The Sale Catalogue of Gottfried Finger's Music Library: New Light on London Concert Life in the 1690s

Abstract

In the winter of 1704–5 Henry Playford advertised ‘a Choice Collection of Vocal and Instrumental Musick in Italian, French, and English’ owned by Gottfried Finger and partly collected by him ‘in his Travels to Italy’. Finger had evidently sold the collection to Johann Gottfried Keller and John Banister junior prior to his abrupt departure from England in 1701 after coming last in the competition to set Congreve's masque The Judgement of Paris. The discovery of a copy of the printed catalogue throws light on Finger's collecting activities in Italy and on the reception of Italian music in England. It also includes a list of ‘Mr. Finger's Great Pieces for his Consort in York-Buildings’, providing us with valuable new information about his concert activities in London in the 1690s, and about the size and composition of groups performing at York Buildings, London's first purpose-built concert hall. The list includes many pieces richly scored with brass, woodwind and strings, evidently performed with sizeable forces: most of the sets of parts are said to have been ‘Prick’d 3 times over’. It adds a number of new pieces to the catalogue of Finger's known compositions, and enables us to attribute to him an anonymous sonata for four recorders and continuo that was published in the twentieth century as by James Paisible.