Musical Autographs Research Articles

Pan Voyevoda by N. A. Rimskii-Korsakov. To the Creative History of Opera

In the N. A. Rimskii-Korsakov’s legacy there are operas that seem to be in the shadow of his great creations; among them is the opera Pan Voyevoda (1903) to a libretto by I. F. Tyumenev (without using any historical or literary source). The opera was the result of the composer’s long-cherished plan to create an opera on a Polish plot, so that in it “there would be no place for politics or national enmity”. Romantic events that took place in the 16th–17th centuries are presented in many respects in the traditional musical solution, which does not exclude the presence of bright dramatic situations, dramatic alignment, magnificent melodies, famous national dances. The surviving documents: letters, memoirs of both authors, as well as autographs of the libretto, clavier (partially) and scores from the archives of St Petersburg allow us to recreate the process of working on the work. The main time of work on the musical text was in the summer of 1902, when the composer left for Heidelberg to live with his son. The execution of several other creative works in parallel, including the re-interpretation of the Stone Guest by A. S. Dargomyzhsky, did not interfere with the active process of working on Pan Voyevoda. The first three acts of the four (the last act is very short) were written in less than three months, and during the winter and spring of 1903 N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov performed the orchestration. Musical autographs show how the work was carried out: the text of the libretto was clarified, sometimes expanded or shortened, the composition of the characters was determined, intonation and harmonic variants were introduced, the orchestration changed, and so on. The composer strenuously searched for optimal means of expression, creating a national color and a special “timeless aura” of Polish antiquity. It is no coincidence that the composer marked on the title page a dedication to the Memory of Frédéric Chopin.

Collectionner la musique: Érudits collectionneurs [Collecting Music: Erudite Collectors] ed. by Denis Herlin, Catherine Massip, Valérie De Wispelaere (review)

INSTRUMENTS, ORCHESTRAS Collectionner la musique: Erudits collectionneurs [Collecting Music: Collectors]. Edited by Denis Herlin, Catherine Massip, and Valerie De Wispelaere. (Collectionner la musique, vol. 3.) Turnhout: Brepols, 2015. [580 p. ISBN 9782503553276. i 100.] Illustrations, index.This book is the third volume in a series of proceedings from three successive conferences dedicated to the practice of collecting in the field of music. All three of these conferences took place at the Royaumont Foundation in France, an institution that holds the rich of musical autographs formerly belonging to the late pianist Francois Lang (1908-44). The first volume (Collectionner la musique: Histoires d'une passion, ed. Denis Herlin, Catherine Massip, Jean Duron, and Dinko Fabris [Turnhout: Brepols, 2010]), concentrated on the figure of the erudite collector of musical materials in Europe from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. The second volume, Collectionner la musique: au coeur de l'interpretation, ed. Denis Herlin, Catherine Massip, and Jean Duron [Turnhout: Brepols, 2012]), focused on performers who were also collectors, and whose collecting impulse was often an outgrowth of their historical approach to music. The third volume, like the first, is again dedicated to erudite musical collectors from the sixteenth century to the present. The eighteen articles that comprise the third volume are divided, somewhat artificially, into three parts: Assembling and Constructing Knowledge (p. 27; all translations are my own), Erudition and Society (p. 257), and Erudite Collectors: Portraits (p. 359).Although the majority of the collections described in this volume are composed of books and music scores (both autographs and early editions), some collections also include musical autographs such as composers' letters, and one article is devoted to collections of musical instruments. All articles are in French, including those by English authors on decidedly non-French topics, such as Graham Sadler's study of Charles Burney's music library.Many of the contributors to the volume share a similar methodology. The author begins with lists or catalogs of works that once made up a music library, a library that may or may not still exist. The author then proceeds to draw various conclusions from these lists in order to shed light on the collector and his possible motives. The analyses of the composition of these collections, however, are necessarily based on a certain amount of guesswork. The absence of instrumental works, for example, may indicate that the collector in question was not himself a practicing musician. But does the appearance of a book or a score in a necessarily mean that it was read, studied or used for a performance? Contributors to this volume are sensitive to this question to varying degrees.In her opening essay, Catherine Massip presents a wide survey of musical collectors, attempting to determine the moment when erudition and the necessary gathering of research materials are transformed into an actual passion for collecting. She does this by analyzing the correspondence of several collectors, for example that between nineteenth-century music publisher Aristide Farrenc (1794-1865) and the collector and music historian Gaetano Gaspari (1807-s81). Massip's considerable experience as head of the music department of the Bibliotheque nationale de France over many years is evident, as she retraces the history of collections that have enriched that library from the nineteenth century to the present, placing an emphasis on the dynamism and synergy between private and public collections. Indeed, many articles in the volume retrace the history of private collections that ended up in the Bibliotheque nationale de France, often by way of the library of the Paris Conservatoire, which merged its collections with the larger intuition in 1935. Massip ends her essay by underscoring the role of the individual collector's judgment, reminding the reader that the word collection is derived from the verb colligere, to choose. …

Making, Collecting and Reading Music Facsimiles before Photography

ABSTRACTFacsimiles of musical autographs are typically thought to require photography, and to have a primary purpose of clarifying composers’ intentions. But there was a robust culture of music facsimile prior to photography. Made by transfer lithography, these facsimiles served different purposes and reading habits. The activity of collecting handwriting samples was paramount, as was the idea that handwriting was a mirror of character. This article surveys ways of using and finding meaning in composer autographs in the 1820s to the 1840s, focusing especially on music facsimiles in Paris. Here, composers used facsimiles to help shape their public image, and publishers used them to entice consumers. When facsimiles reproduced documents of friendship, they crossed private and public expression in ways that could be advantageous or problematic, as seen through a look at the publication in facsimile of a Rossini waltz by the Revue et gazette musicale and the ensuing legal battles.

Five lives in music: women performers, composers, and impresarios from the Baroque to the present

Representing a historical cross-section of performance and training in Western music since the seventeenth century, Five Lives in Music brings to light the private and performance lives of five remarkable women musicians and composers. Elegantly guiding readers through the Thirty Years War in central Europe, elite courts in Germany, urban salons in Paris, Nazi control of Germany and Austria, and American musical life today, as well as personal experiences of marriage, motherhood, and widowhood, Cecelia Hopkins Porter provides valuable insights into the culture in which each woman was active. Porter begins with the Duchess Sophie-Elisabeth of Braunschweig-Lueneberg, a harpsichordist who also presided over seventeenth-century North German court music as an impresario. At the forefront of French Baroque composition, composer Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre bridged a widening cultural gap between the Versailles nobility and the urban bourgeoisie of Paris. A century later, Josephine Lang, a prodigiously talented pianist and dedicated composer, participated at various times in the German Romantic world of lieder through her important arts salon. Lastly, the twentieth century brought forth two exceptional women: Baroness Maria Bach, a composer and pianist of twentieth-century Vienna's upper bourgeoisie and its brilliant musical milieu in the era of Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, and Erich Korngold; and Ann Schein, a brilliant and dauntless American piano prodigy whose career, ongoing today though only partially recognized, led her to study with the legendary virtuosos Arthur Rubinstein and Myra Hess. Mining musical autographs, unpublished letters and press reviews, interviews, and music archives in the United States and Europe, Porter probes each musician's social and economic status, her education and musical training, the cultural expectations within the traditions and restrictions of each woman's society, and other factors. Throughout the lively and focused portraits of these five women, Porter finds common threads, both personal and contextual, that extend to a larger discussion of the lives and careers of female composers and performers throughout centuries of music history.

Josephine Lang: Her Life and Songs (review)

Reviewed by: Josephine Lang: Her Life and Songs Marie Sumner Lott Josephine Lang: Her Life and Songs. By Harald Krebs and Sharon Krebs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. [xiii, 308 p. ISBN-10: 0195173635; ISBN-13: 9780195173635. $45.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliographic references, appendices, index, compact disc. This latest book on the life and works of composer, singer, and pianist Josephine Lang contributes to a growing body of scholarship devoted to increasing awareness and appreciation of nearly forgotten artists. It will probably not surprise readers of Notes to hear that this woman composer, well known and revered in her time, has been written out of musical history since the onset of the twentieth century. This omission is slowly being corrected by the husband and wife team of Harald Krebs and Sharon Krebs, two formidable individual [End Page 278] researchers and performers, who accomplish together a significant feat in Josephine Lang: Her Life and Songs. The book is the result of several years of ongoing involvement with the documents of Lang's career, including her musical autographs, surviving letters between Lang and her colleagues and family members, published songs and piano pieces, and printed biographical studies from Lang's own time to the present. The study revisits the facts of Lang's life and career, adding some details that had previously been overlooked or suppressed, and provides many insightful commentaries on her artistic output. Illustrated throughout with copious music examples, the analysis provides a lively and engaging discussion of the composer's music. The authors also provide several essential tools for future investigators of Lang's music beyond their own text. An essential component of any reassessment of a marginalized composer is access to scores. Some of Lang's works were published in modern editions as part of the Women Composers Series edited by Judith Tick (Da Capo Press, 1982). To supplement this collection, many of the music examples in Josephine Lang provide full-length songs, and several other works are available online on a companion Web site hosted by the Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart (http://www .wlb-stuttgart.de/referate/musik/lang.html, accessed 22 August 2007). Unfortunately, whenever the site is mentioned in the book, an errant "%7Ewww/" is included in the address. (I found that omitting this typo led me to the correct site.) The Web site includes PDFs of nineteenth-century printed editions of several songs and a painstakingly detailed database of Lang's autographs. Harald Krebs has also edited a collection of songs by Lang forthcoming from Hildegard Publishing Company (Bryn Mawr, PA); when this collection is published, the majority of the songs discussed in the text will be easily available. The only other tool that one might request before launching into an investigation of an unknown composer and her works is a selection of well-performed recorded examples of the music, and by including a compact disc of thirty of Lang's songs discussed in the main text the Krebs provide just that. The captivating performances on the compact disc are a welcome addition to the discussion, even more helpful in this context, as they are rendered by the authors themselves (Sharon singing with Harald at the piano), lending special credence to their insights into Lang's works. Thus, the authors have created an entire collection of resources, appropriately packaged together, to allow the reader a comfortable entry into Lang's creative world. Having provided all the requisite tools, the authors advise the reader to keep in mind Lang's oft-repeated phrase, "my songs are my diary," and leap into the task at hand. The Krebs structure their work chronologically around Lang's biography, telling the story of her travails as a middle-class woman of weak constitution and pervasive bad luck and illustrating her emotional responses to her life with evidence from her song output. Chapter 1, "The Beginning of Josephine Lang's Compositional Career," covers her earliest musical experiences with her musician parents up to her first documented songs and her influential meeting with Felix Mendelssohn in 1830. From an early age, Lang's gift and charm led to some fame in her hometown of Munich. She performed in salons and for...

Handel and the English Chapel Royal. By Donald Burrows. pp. xxiv + 651. Oxford Studies in British Church Music. (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2005, 85. ISBN 0-19-816228-6.)

Those who have been looking forward to the transformation of Donald Burrows’s Ph.D. dissertation ‘Handel and the English Chapel Royal during the Reigns of Queen Anne and King George I’ (The Open University, 1981) into a book now have their patience richly rewarded. In his preface the author explains the delayed appearance of the book by referring to various ‘interruptions’—a very modest description of three major works of scholarship that he has produced in the intervening years. The first two were Handel, his life-and-works study in the Master Musicians series, and A Catalogue of Handel’s Musical Autographs, co-authored with Martha J. Ronish, both published in 1994. In the same year the Earl of Malmesbury deposited in the Hampshire Record Office the papers of his ancestor James Harris; in collaboration with Rosemary Dunhill, the Country Archivist of Hampshire, Burrows extracted from this vast archive all references to music and theatre, and presented them, with detailed commentary, in Music and Theatre in Handel’s World (2002). The beneficial effect not only of these three ‘interruptions’ but also of Burrows’s continuing work on Handel’s Chapel Royal music—notably his editions of the music and his investigation of the documentary background—is apparent throughout Handel and the English Chapel Royal. Recent research by other scholars has also enriched the book, notably that by Andrew Ashbee (Records of English Court Music, 9 vols. (Snodland and Aldershot, 1986–96)), by Ashbee and John Harley (The Cheque Books and the Chapel Royal, 2 vols. (Aldershot, 2000)), and by Graydon Beeks (his dissertation and subsequent articles on Handel’s music for James Brydges at Cannons).

Jean Cocteau, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Claudel et le Groupe des Six: Rencontres poetico-musicales autour des melodies et des chansons (review)

Jean Cocteau, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul et le Groupe des Six: poetico-musicales autour des melodies et des chansons. By Catherine Miller. (Collection Musique Musicologie.) Liege: Pierre Mardaga, 2003. [284 p. ISBN 2-87009-852-9. euro29.] Music examples, illustrations, discography, bibliography, index. Cocteau, Apollinaire, et le Groupe des Six is a revision of Catherine Miller's doctoral thesis at l'Universite catholique de Louvain. Despite the potentially misleading word order of its title, it is in fact a straightforward historical survey of the contributions of Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric, Louis Durey, and Germaine Tailleferre to the genre of the French art song: la melodie or Ie chanson. The book is richly illustrated with numerous photos of the composers and poets in various groupings and a few musical autographs, and there are enough typeset musical examples to keep the narrative from collapsing under the weight of documentary detail-of which there is an impressive amount synthesized from a wide range of sources. The book falls into three parts. Part 1, Groupe des Six et la litterature, systematically attends to each composer in turn, narrating their Rencontres litteraire, providing an annotated list of their et chansons, including those where the accompaniments are for instrumental ensemble rather than piano, and mapping out an appropriate Parcours melodique. Detours are provided in the first three chapters to assess, respectively, Milhaud's approach to l'expression poetique, Poulenc's own views of how his songs should be interpreted, and Honegger's personal method of text setting. Part 2, Collaboration des poetes et des musiciens, devotes chapters to Paul Claudel, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Jean Cocteau (in that order). These discuss each poet's general attitude towards music and his specific relationships and collaborations with the composers. There is much of interest in the chapter on Claudel, whose own views on music were a challenge to Milhaud, with whom he worked on many occasions; in the composer's words, Claudel et la musique? Probleme complexe (p. 117). In the case of Apollinaire, who died in 1918 and hence whose role was somewhat different from those of and Cocteau, Poulenc clearly saw him as one of his major muses, setting thirty-five of Apollinaire's poems. Catherine Miller singles out, quite rightly, three events around which the histories both of the individual composers and of Groupe des Six turned: Parade et l'esprit nouveau, where, with responses to the collaboration between Erik Satie and Apollinaire, the public origins of Six can be located; Le Coq et l'Arlequin, which acted as a public front for their activities, albeit unreliably and controversially; and Les Maries de la Tour Eiffel, which, even though it took place in 1921, three years before the official demise of the group, nevertheless marked the beginning of the end and revealed much about internal tensions within Six, Durey refusing to take part in it because of Cocteau's (predictably) derogatory remarks about Maurice Ravel and la Legion d'honneur. Part 3, Melodies et Chansons du Groupe des Six, contains two chapters. The first chapter, Melodie ou chanson?, is mercifully short, dealing as it does with the apparently vexing question of genre: what was meant by the various titles used by Six: poeme, melodie, chant, cantate, cantatille, and so on; and what did they imply about formal, stylistic, and generic constraints? Its second half, though, does begin the important task of assessing the national significance of the genre across, from, and alongside the heavy history of German lied composition. The other chapter in part three, Facteurs enjeu dans les melodies et les chansons, is more interesting, and starts to assess the vast output of Six. Its two final sections, on the accompaniments and on the vocal writing and prosody, contain some interesting observations. …

Review: A Catalogue of Handel's Musical Autographs by Donald Burrows, Martha J. Ronish

Book Review| July 01 1997 Review: A Catalogue of Handel's Musical Autographs by Donald Burrows, Martha J. Ronish A Catalogue of Handel's Musical AutographsDonald BurrowsMartha J. Ronish Richard G. King Richard G. King Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (1997) 50 (2-3): 502–506. https://doi.org/10.2307/831846 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Richard G. King; Review: A Catalogue of Handel's Musical Autographs by Donald Burrows, Martha J. Ronish. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 July 1997; 50 (2-3): 502–506. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/831846 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1997 The American Musicological Society Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

A Catalogue of Handel's Musical Autographs

Introduction to the catalogue - guide to the arrangement and presentation of the catalogue the catalogue - the major autograph collections - London, British Library, Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, miscellaneous autographs. Appendices: transcriptions of Handel's pencil sketches.

Gioacchino Rossini: the reluctant hero

Rossini is chiefly remembered for operas such as Barber of Seville and William Tell. But in the space of 20 years he wrote no fewer than 39 operas, some of which are rarely heard today, while others are being revived gradually - on CD, in opera houses throughout the world and through the annual festival at Rossini's birthplace, Pesaro. This biography looks at each of the operas, with particular attention to Rossini's treatment of the different kinds of opera current at the time, his development of their component parts, his many innovations and his brilliance as an orchestrator. The book also provides insights into the bizarre, intrigue-ridden opera industry in early 19th-century Italy. Interwoven with musical discussion is an account of Rossini's life and complex personality, his relations with contemporaries such as Verdi, Wagner and Liszt, and a study of the two contrasting women in his life - the flamboyant prima donna, Isabella Colbran, and his second wife, the reserved but dedicated Olympe Pelissier, who stage-managed his legendary Paris soirees. The narrative is accompanied by eye-witness accounts and extracts from Rossini's own correspondence, and complemented by illustrations of stage-sets, topographical and architectural engravings, musical autographs, letters and legal documents, portraits and sketches. The author has also written biographies of Britten, Vivaldi, Paganini, Gershwin and Tchaikovsky.

Berlin Latin Manuscripts Now in Cracow

In L. D. Reynolds (ed.), Texts and Transmission: a Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford, 1983), it is stated by J. G. F. Powell (p. 122) and by M. D. Reeve (p. 327 n. 4) that MS. Berlin, Deutsche Staatsbibliothek Lat. 4° 404 (s. ix), containing Cicero, De amicitia, and Publilius Syrus, Sententiae, is missing. Not so: it is currently held with numerous other Berlin MSS., including humanistic and musical autographs, at the Jagellonian Library in Cracow, where I saw it on 5 May 1992. Other classical MSS. from Berlin now held in Cracow are Lat. 4° 1 (Eutropius, Breviarium, and Victor Vitensis, Historia persecutions Africanae prouinciae, s. xi), 257 (Vergil, Bucolics 3.107–4.47, s. ix), 590 (Boethius, opuscula, s. xii), 939 (Boethius, Cons. Phil. with Remigius' commentary, s. x/xi; till 1935 Schloβ Maihingen, Fürstlich Öttingen-Wallensteinsche Bibliothek, I 2, lat. 4° 3), and 8° 102 (Statius, Achilleis, 1.375–513, 2.120–257, s. xiv).

Musical Autographs of Frescobaldi and His Entourage in Roman Sources

This article reconstructs the circumstances through which the keyboard tablatures Q iv 24-9 and Q viii 205-6, now conserved among the manuscripts of the Chigi family in the Vatican Library, were acquired by this papal family. The point of departure for this reconstruction is the author's earlier studies on several of these tablatures and other Roman sources, studies that have allowed him to identify a series of autographs stemming from the entourage of Frescobaldi; among these are the first musical autographs attributable with certainty to the master himself. Following this path, it is possible to identify the principal scribe of the Chigi tablatures as Leonardo Castellani, one of Frescobaldi's favorite pupils; one can thus relate these sources to several documents from the Chigi administrative archive that name Castellani, even though they do not mention him as a professional musician. The resulting reconstruction of the transfer of Castellani's tablatures to Prince Mario Chigi has two notable results. On the one hand, it throws new light (and new shadows) on music patronage in Baroque Rome; on the other, it points toward further research possibilities in the Chigi musical archive, since other manuscripts belonging to Castellani are probably to be found there. Moreover, Castellani, a previously little-known musician, is now shown to be the link between Frescobaldi and the new stylistic tendencies that grew up in Rome in the second half of the seventeenth century.

Musical Autographs of Frescobaldi and His Entourage in Roman Sources

Musical Autographs of Frescobaldi and His Entourage in Roman Sources

British Musical Autographs

British Musical Autographs

A LITTLE-KNOWN BEETHOVEN SKETCH IN MOSCOW

SOVIET museums, libraries, and archives possess many Beethoven memorabilia letters, musical manuscripts, and complete sketchbooks.' Beethoven's circle of admirers and patrons included members of the Russian aristocracy Razumovsky, Galitzin, Browne, Wielhorsky, and even the imperial couple, Czar Alexander I and Czarina Elizabeth. It is a curious fact, however, that none of the letters and manuscripts sent by Beethoven to Russia has remained in Russian hands; these materials have been sold or given away and are now in Western collections. The present Soviet holdings of Beethoveniana consist mainly of materials acquired after the composer's death by Russian collectors and were either held in private libraries or presented to public institutions. The first to report such holdings was Vladimir Stasov, the distinguished scholar and librarian, in his catalogue of 1856, Musical Autographs in the Imperial Public Library in St. Petersburg. After the 1917 Revolution all important private collections were nationalized, and their holdings were transferred to museums, libraries, and state archives. During the transitional years some materials were misplaced and reappeared years later, almost by accident. Thus, the so-called sketchbook was discovered in the early 1920s among property left behind by Russian emigres; its previous owner is unknown. The so-called sketchbook was acquired by Count Mikhail Wielhorsky (Vielgorsky) about 1853-56 for his private library and remained in the hands of his heirs until the early twentieth century. Its last known owner, M. A. Venevitinov (Wielhorsky's grandson), died in 1901, and the sketchbook disappeared from public eye, only to be rediscovered in 1939 in a Moscow archive. At present,

The Toscanini Archives

The Toscanini Memorial Archives had its inception on May 13, 1936, when the New York Public Library announced plans to establish the Arturo Toscanini Collection of Musical Autographs. The purpose of establishing the collection of original musical manuscripts was to honor the great conductor at the time of his retirement as conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and to make possible the housing in one location, open to public, scholar, and performer alike, photographic reproductions of musical works in the handwriting of the composers. Conductors, musicians, and musical scholars in this country have had considerable difficulty in gaining access to copies of originals and early musical manuscripts. New York, center for so much musical activity, was an appropriate locality at which all available musical archival material could be brought together. With the outbreak of World War II in Europe, many priceless musical manuscripts were destroyed, a number of private collections were scattered, and very little material could be obtained for the Toscanini Memorial Archives. The idea and purpose remained,

Musical Autographs from Monteverdi to Hindemith

Musical Autographs from Monteverdi to Hindemith

Review: Musical Autographs from Monteverdi to Hindemith by Emanuel Winternitz

Review: Musical Autographs from Monteverdi to Hindemith by Emanuel Winternitz

Musical Autographs from Monteverdi to Hindemith

Musical Autographs from Monteverdi to Hindemith

Musical Autographs from Monteverdi to Hindemith

Musical Autographs from Monteverdi to Hindemith