Westminster Abbey and the Academy of Ancient Music: A Library once Lost and now Partially Recovered

Abstract

As the first body anywhere to concern itself with the performance of ‘early’ music, the Academy of Ancient Music (founded in 1726) is of some historical importance. When, in 1802, the society was eventually disbanded, its famous library was broken up and dispersed via the London sale rooms. Later on, some fifty or so manuscripts and a small group of prints somehow found their way into the library of Westminster Abbey, where they have lain unnoticed ever since. Included in the collection are several anthologies of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century madrigals and motets, but also, and more importantly, a large number of orchestrally accompanied psalm settings and mass movements by a variety of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century composers, mainly Italian, chief among whom are Bassani, Bononcini, Colonna, Lotti, and Pergolesi, as well as the virtually unknown Francesco Negri, whose Gloria was hugely popular in late eighteenth-century England. Also included is the autograph of yet another Crucifixus setting by Antonio Lotti, most probably written for the Academy in 1731, and a totally unknown stile antico setting of the Credo composed for them by Fortunato Chelleri, who was briefly a member in 1726–7. This article identifies all those manuscripts (and prints) in the Westminster Abbey collection (and elsewhere) which were once in the Academy’s library or were in some way connected with that body of musicians.