15 August 2025
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor at 150: Overview of British Library collections
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born in London on 15 August 1875. He grew up in Croydon, where he took violin lessons and was involved in the local church choir. At the age of 15, he entered the Royal College of Music, where he switched his main focus to composition. After his studies, Coleridge-Taylor earned money as a musician and teacher in order to sustain his composing, and achieved popular and critical acclaim with his cantata Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast in 1898. He was involved in cultural and political networks in London, and collaborated with African-American musicians, civil rights activists, and authors. Coleridge-Taylor published prolifically until his early death, from pneumonia, at the age of 37. For more information about Coleridge-Taylor’s life, work, and legacy, we recommend these two online exhibitions by the Black Cultural Archives and the Royal College of Music.
As one of the most important British composers of the early 20th century, Coleridge-Taylor is represented well within the British Library’s music collections. While the single largest collection of his manuscripts can be found at the Royal College of Music, the British Library also holds a significant collection of autograph manuscripts alongside hundreds of printed scores and important early recordings of his music. On the occasion of Coleridge-Taylor's 150th anniversary, we wanted to join in the celebrations by providing an overview of our Coleridge-Taylor materials, together with brief information about how the material came to be at the Library, and why we are still making new Coleridge-Taylor discoveries within our wider archives of 20th century music.
Overview of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor material at the British Library
Published Sheet Music
The British Library’s catalogue of printed sheet music lists almost 600 scores by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. He didn’t write this many pieces: the figure includes 91 arrangements of Coleridge-Taylor’s music for other instrumental forces, around 20% of which are by the composer himself. It also includes appearances of individual pieces in compendiums for particular instruments or purposes – examples include a 1932 volume titled Music for the Home and the 2023 ABRSM Grade 8 violin syllabus – as well many reprints and later editions issued by publishers (to whom Coleridge-Taylor often handed over his copyright for low sums of money). In recent decades, there has been a gradual uptick in the number of new editions per year, including critical and scholarly editions, the creation of full performance sets for works previously tricky to perform owing to a lack of available materials, and more arrangements to make his music accessible to different instruments and ensembles. With six new Coleridge-Taylor editions added to the BL catalogue between 2021 and 2023 alone, the upwards trajectory looks set to continue as the composer’s popularity goes from strength to strength.
The pie chart above shows the top 12 publishers of Coleridge-Taylor scores (of 50 in total) in the Library’s collection, according to a basic export of catalogue data. The bar chart below shows the number of Coleridge-Taylor scores by year of publication (with disclaimers that the data itself is rough, and many records use approximate or inferred publication dates). The data indicates the enormous popularity and marketability of Coleridge-Taylor’s music in the 1890s, 1900s and 1910s. Following his death in 1912, the publications per year rapidly decreases – though publishers made the most of producing new editions and arrangements. The numbers decline markedly into the mid 20th century, until a resurgence of interest in Coleridge-Taylor’s music – thanks partly to the dedication of several key individuals and collectives – led to the steady upward trajectory present since the 1990s. Click here for a PDF showing the titles available at the British Library.
Sound Recordings
A brief look at the catalogue data for sound recordings in the Library’s collections tells a similar story. Technologies for commercial recording (at first acoustic, then electric) only really took off towards the end of Coleridge-Taylor’s life, but at least a dozen recordings of his music were made before the end of the 1920s. The Library holds important early wax cylinder and phonograph recordings of songs, instrumental pieces, and short orchestral works, which continued being made until the Second World War. The enduring popularity of the Hiawatha cantatas led to notable recordings of this landmark work in the mid-century, including a 1961 version by Malcolm Sargent with the Royal Choral Society. (Sargent and the RCS were long associated with Hiawatha, having given annual staged performances at the Royal Albert Hall from the mid-1920s up until the war). More recently, many premiere recordings have been made of Coleridge-Taylor’s chamber, orchestral, choral, and vocal music.
Most of the fragile early published and unreleased recordings in the Sound & Vision collection have been digitised for preservation reasons. More recent recordings – on formats like open reel tape and cassette – pose their own preservation challenges, and many such collections were digitised as part of the Unlocking our Sound Heritage project (2017-2022). Highlights from the unpublished archival recordings digitised during the UOSH project include a 2-hour concert of Coleridge-Taylor’s music hosted by the Black Cultural Archive in 1985, and items from a concert given by Avril Coleridge-Taylor of music by father (along with her own compositions) in 1965.
Autograph Manuscripts
The Library holds autograph manuscripts for around 55 pieces of music by Coleridge-Taylor, across 36 shelfmarks. Click here to a view a list of these. Highlights include autograph full scores of the Hiawatha trilogy, lesser-known cantatas including A Tale of Old Japan, and the operas Thelma (which was revived thanks to the research of Catherine Carr) and Dream Lovers. The manuscripts also include full scores of orchestral works such as the Ballade in A minor, many songs and piano pieces, Coleridge-Taylor’s own arrangements of his music. The composer’s handwriting is beautiful and highly legible – it is clear from annotations and signs of use that many of the autograph scores, especially of larger works, had been used in performance. These autographs came to the Library via various means, some purchased from Coleridge-Taylor's descendants, others from the archives of his publishers. The Library is currently in the process of having its Coleridge-Taylor autograph manuscripts digitised, so they will be available to view online in the future. Beyond autographs, there are also some useful copy manuscripts – annotated engravers’ copies and publishers’ proofs – which shed light on the process of publication.
Recent findings in the Boosey & Hawkes archive
A number of Coleridge-Taylor autograph manuscripts in the Library’s collections have only come to light recently, as ongoing cataloguing of the large Boosey & Hawkes archive continues to uncover material relating to the publishing company’s history and the music of the composers it represented. Coleridge-Taylor was one of those composers, and among the manuscripts used in the preparation of printed editions are autograph scores of his violin sonata in D minor, op. 28 (which was edited for posthumous publication, in 1917, by Albert Sammons), and several songs. Of larger scale works, the archive also contains a manuscript score of the incidental music Coleridge-Taylor composed for an adaptation of Goethe’s Faust presented at His Majesty’s Theatre, Haymarket in 1908. Perhaps most excitingly, a full score of Dream Lovers, the opera he composed with the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, has also come to light. This was published Boosey & Co. in 1898, but only issued as a vocal score. This manuscript shows us Coleridge-Taylor's intentions fully realised in orchestral form.
The archive also holds various arrangements of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's music – one example transforms the ballet music from Hiawatha into a version to appear in the long-running Hawkes’s Military Band Journal. As mentioned before, arrangements provide clear evidence – if more were needed – of the popularity of Coleridge-Taylor's music.
The administrative papers that also form part of the archive don’t contain any correspondence with Samuel himself, but there is quite a bit from members of his family. These offer a clear picture of their tireless efforts to promote his music and to ensure it remained known. Letters from Jessie Coleridge-Taylor repeatedly remind Leslie Boosey about the need to renew copyright in the USA. Letters between Leslie Boosey and Coleridge-Taylor's son, Hiawatha, from 1940 reveal plans to use Samuel’s music in an unnamed film, produced by the British National Films Company. Avril Coleridge-Taylor – Samuel’s daughter, herself a composer, conductor and pianist – is the best represented of the family within this archive. Her correspondence addresses aspects of her own music and makes clear her lifelong persistence in trying to encourage interest in and performances of her father’s music.
Autograph manuscripts have recently come to light elsewhere, too: at the Royal College of Music, cataloguing work led to the discovery of a new song, which has since been recorded and digitised – more can be read about that here.
Thanks to the work of researchers and performers over the past few decades – building upon the work of his family and earlier advocates – Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s name has gradually been reintroduced to contemporary audiences. Archives and libraries are key resources for this type of work, and we hope to facilitate much more research into Coleridge-Taylor’s music in the future.
Some further online resources:
Royal College of Music accessions list, which lists their Coleridge-Taylor manuscripts and archive holdings: https://archive.org/details/manuscript-accession-list/
Photographs and census documents at The National Archives: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/explore-the-collection/stories/samuel-coleridge-taylor/ and https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/explore-the-collection/stories/photographs-samuel-coleridge-taylor/
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Foundation website https://sctf.org.uk/ with catalogue of works compiled by Dominique-Rene de Lerma: https://sctf.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/coleridge-taylor-works.pdf
Electronic copy of PhD thesis on Coleridge-Taylor’s music by Catherine Carr, Vol. 2 of which provides a source list (Vol 2): https://etheses.dur.ac.uk/2964/
02 June 2025
Frédéric Kastner’s singing flames
As a music cataloguer at the British Library, part of my job involves recording the medium of performance for which a score was intended. This can range from string quartet to brass band, solo accordion to symphony orchestra, and even, as was the case recently, pyrophone with piano accompaniment.
This unusual instrumentation was chosen by French composer Théodore Lack (1846-1912) for an arrangement of ‘God save the Queen’, published in Paris in the late 19th century. As it was my first time cataloguing a score for pyrophone, I ended up spending a few hours researching what I could about the origins and history of the instrument.
Invented by Alsatian composer and scientist Frédéric Kastner (1852-1882) in the early 1870s, the pyrophone was an innovation for its time in that it relied on combustion, as opposed to air pressure, to produce notes. Kastner was in turn inspired by Irish chemist Bryan Higgins’ 1777 discovery that a hydrogen flame positioned at the lower end of a glass tube could produce a note. This set Kastner's instrument apart from the traditional pipe organ, which the pyrophone design was based on, leading to the alternate term ‘Fire Organ’.
There are very few scores written for pyrophone at the British Library, so we can assume that the instrument didn’t take off in the way Kastner had hoped. However, a book published in 1876, Le pyrophone : flammes chantantes (British Library 8706.aaaa.1), details Kastner’s activities in promoting his invention. An excerpt from an article in The Times, published on 11 April 1876, prefaces the book. The writer describes a gathering at Kastner’s residence on Rue de Clichy, Paris, where members of the public were invited to hear a demonstration of the instrument and were “deeply moved at hearing those jets sing with extraordinary power, purity, and correctness.” They go on to state the following:
The audience was still more astounded at suddenly hearing the gaseliers placed in the centre of the room, and set in motion by invisible electric wires, execute ‘God save the Queen’ in sonorous and penetrating tones.
‘God save the Queen’ must have been a favourite of Kastner’s, as according to the same preface, he also performed the anthem for the Royal Society of Arts on 17 February 1875. One can imagine Kastner conjuring up a musical combination of fire, light and sound, the perfect setting for a patriotic anthem like ‘God save the Queen’. It’s possible that Theodore Lack, a French pianist and composer, was in attendance at one of these meetings and felt inspired to pen his own arrangement. Either way, Lack was one of very few composers to have written specifically for the pyrophone. His other related works include an arrangement of ‘Ave Maria’ for soprano voice, pyrophone, and piano, and a choral work entitled ‘Prière’, both available at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Elsewhere at the British Library, the only other searchable piece of pyrophone music comes from Miroslaw Koennemann (1826-1890), a German-Bohemian conductor and composer who published Paraphrase sur un vieil air d'église Italien for pyrophone circa 1879 (British Library h.1850.l.(3.)).
Kastner’s 1876 book documents an excited response from the scientific community, including the eminent Irish scientist John Tyndall, who was also experimenting within the field of “singing flames”. It was through technological innovations such as the pyrophone that listeners of the time were able to experience something beyond everyday sounds, inviting them into a more otherworldly, spiritual realm, much like electronic synthesizers were to do in the mid-20th century. An 1875 journal article from Popular Science Monthly, written by Swiss humanitarian Henry Dunant, gives a romantic description of the effects of the pyrophone:
The sound of the pyrophone may truly be said to resemble the sound of a human voice ... like a human and impassioned whisper, as an echo of the inward vibrations of the soul, something mysterious and indefinable; besides, in general, possessing a character of melancholy, which seems characteristic of all natural harmonies...
His words give some idea of how the pyrophone might have first sounded, almost 150 years ago, to listeners who were more accustomed to hearing acoustic instruments.
And what of the modern day pyrophone? The Science Museum houses a version of the instrument, which according to a blog article from 2012 lies in a dark corner of the Museum’s storage facility, unplayed. Elsewhere, on the internet, thanks to the imagination and persistence of a marginal few, Kastner’s legacy lives on.
Gail Tasker, Music Cataloguer
23 February 2025
Elgar’s musical sketches reunited at the British Library
The British Library has acquired a set of original sketches and drafts by Sir Edward Elgar for one of his best-known compositions, the Introduction and Allegro for strings. Elgar completed the work in February 1905 and conducted the first performance a few weeks later. In 1930 he tore these particular sketches out of one of his sketchbooks and gave them to a friend.
Years later, the sketchbook from which he tore them, which contains sketches for some of his other works, was donated to the British Library. We are delighted that we can now reunite the torn-out pages with the sketchbook, almost 100 years after Elgar removed them.
Identifying the origin of the sketches
Elgar often jotted down tunes and other musical ideas into a bound sketchbook. He would then expand and rewrite his ideas, sometimes copying them from one sketchbook to another, and gradually turn them into fully-formed musical works.
When we were alerted to the existence of the Introduction and Allegro sketches last year, we suspected that they came from one of Elgar’s many sketchbooks. It wasn’t clear which one, though. An initial clue came from the distinctive rubber-stamped page numbers on the sketches. The same type of numbering is found in Elgar’s ‘Sketchbook V’, now in the British Library.
Crucially the page numbers on the torn-out pages fill gaps in the pagination in this sketchbook. What clinches the connection, though, is the way that two pages from the Introduction and Allegro sketches fit exactly with stubs of the pages that were left behind in the sketchbook when they were torn out.
Elgar’s gift of the Introduction and Allegro sketches
Once Elgar had finished composing a work, he no longer needed the sketches and drafts created during the process of composition. He would sometimes give these to friends as mementoes. On 6 November 1930 he gave the Introduction and Allegro sketches to his former pupil Frank Webb. Webb recorded this gift in a faint pencil note on the first of the pages:
Given me by EWE [i.e. Edward William Elgar] Nov 6/30 (Torn out of his Sketch book) Sketches for the Introduction & Allegro
Frank Webb’s son Alan later published his own memories of Elgar, recalling that:
On occasion he [Elgar] would visit my father in his office. Once he pulled some manuscript sheets out of his pocket and said: ‘Here, would you like these?’ ‘These’ were sketches for the Introduction and Allegro for Strings.
The pages must have been folded up to fit into Elgar’s pocket, and they appear to have remained tightly folded ever since. They have now been acquired by the British Library, via Christie’s Private Sales, from the descendants of Frank Webb.
The musical content
We already held some very fragmentary sketches for the Introduction and Allegro, as well as the manuscript of Elgar’s final version. The newly acquired sketches and draft material fill a gap between these, chronologically, and shed light on how Elgar composed the work.
Many of the musical themes found in the final version are in place in the sketches, though they are mostly written in short score (i.e. on two staves) and not yet in the order in which they appear in the final version.
One particular melody in the Introduction and Allegro is known as the ‘Welsh tune’. Elgar was inspired to compose it after hearing distant singing while on holiday in Wales. This theme appears several times in the manuscript: as a single-line tune, a melody with lightly sketched harmony and fully harmonised in a setting for strings. Elgar used this string setting in the final version of the piece.
Making the material available
For preservation reasons the newly acquired pages will not be physically reattached to the sketchbook. However, researchers will be able to view all of the material together in the Library’s Rare Books and Music Reading Room. We will also be digitising it and ‘virtually’ reuniting it online.
The sketchbook has other missing pages, which were also torn out before the Library acquired it. Perhaps these will also come to light one day.
Notes
Alan Webb’s reminiscences of Elgar, ‘Some personal memories of Elgar’, are published in An Elgar Companion, ed. Christopher Redwood (Ashbourne: Sequoia Publishing, 1982), pp. 168-174.
The sketchbook from which Elgar tore the Introduction and Allegro material has the British Library manuscript number Add MS 63157. The new acquisition has been assigned the number MS Mus. 1964. Preliminary sketches for the Introduction and Allegro are found in Add MSS 63153, 63154, 63156, 47903. The final full score is numbered Add MS 58015.
Sandra Tuppen
Head of Music Collections
08 November 2022
Nino Rota’s I due timidi - an opera for radio transmission
Introduction
On 15 November 1950 the RAI (Radio Televisione Italiana) Third Programme broadcast I due timidi, an ‘opera radiofonica’ composed by Nino Rota to a libretto by Suso Cecchi d’Amico, for the first time. It had been commissioned by the Italian public broadcasting company, which aimed to create an original repertoire exclusively intended for radio. It was the beginning of a remarkable journey: over two decades the opera would be performed across different media, languages and cultures, ranging, with appropriate adjustments, from the darkness of radio to the limelight of the stage and television, constantly reshaping to adapt to new contexts, while keeping its own poetic, aesthetic, dramatic, and musical substance. This is indeed a fascinating story, with a relevant chapter unfolding in Britain during the 1950s, which documents preserved in the British Library allow us to reconstruct.
The work
Nino Rota (1911-79) and Suso Cecchi d’Amico (1914– 2010) were invited to create a new opera for broadcasting in late 1949. They had been close friends since their youth, sharing from different sides the exciting adventure of Italian post-war cinema. Rota, a talented pupil of Ildebrando Pizzetti and Alfredo Casella, was successfully making his way as a composer of both classical and applied music, and was already known in England as the author of the score for films such as The Glass Mountain. Cecchi d’Amico, the daughter of eminent scholar Emilio Cecchi and painter Leonetta Pieraccini and the wife of the distinguished music critic Fedele d’Amico, was successfully making her way as a screenwriter, the co-author of the script for Vittorio De Sica’s film The Bicycle Thief.
Working together in perfect harmony, in a few months they conceived and created an original story that takes place over a single day in a lower middle-class apartment block in an unnamed city – a recurring setting in Italian movies at the time. A young man, Raimondo, and a young woman pianist, Mariuccia, who are in love with each other from a distance but have never met, have settled close to each other, hoping to be able one day to declare their mutual love. Raimondo lives in a boarding house held by a mature landlady, while Mariuccia resides in a modest flat with her mother, gracefully practising the piano to Raimondo’s delight. However, fate has different plans for them. An accident and a subsequent misunderstanding cause each of them to declare their love to the wrong person, which turns out to be fatal: both Raimondo and Mariuccia are too shy to express their true feelings in order to put right the difficult situation. In an elliptical, bittersweet finale, set two years later, we hear an exhausted pianist practising at night-time – it is Mariuccia, now the wife of an elderly doctor, mother of two kids - and an angry male voice: Raimondo, now the landlady’s husband and the landlord of the boarding house, who is manifestly annoyed by that disturbing noise.
I due timidi in the UK
I due timidi received a special mention at the Prix Italia 1950, where its immediate expressiveness and the fresh quality of its soundscape were greatly appreciated, including by delegates from the BBC. Within a few months the BBC Third Programme broadcast the Italian production of the opera and the operatic department at the BBC produced an English version, first aired on 5 March 1952, again on the Third Programme, under the title The two shy people. A few days later, on 17 March 1952, the opera received its world stage premiere at the Scala Theatre in London, a production of The London Opera Club in association with the Arts Council of Great Britain.
The intense British life of I due timidi during the 1950s is retraceable in detail from documents kept in a folder preserved at the British Library (MS Mus. 1743) presumably collected by David Harris, the BBC Opera Manager who was the producer of the opera’s BBC broadcast and the author of the English version of its libretto. The folder is rich in press cuttings related to the 1952 radio performance and to a new production, also curated by Harris and broadcast on the BBC Home Service on 1 April 1957, whose typewritten opening and closing announcements are preserved. The folder additionally contains a considerable number of reviews of the stage premiere, but no press cuttings referring to the BBC production of the opera for television, which adopted the English version by Harris and was first broadcast after his death, on 30 March 1961.
The vocal score
The core of the folder lies in the musical material. The vocal score of the opera, a diazotype copy of a non-authorial manuscript of the original version signed by Harris on the cover and by the whole cast of the 1952 production inside, has Rota’s autograph dedication to Harris inscribed on the front page. The playbill flyer of the stage premiere is pasted on the inside cover.
The score clearly testifies to the work undertaken to make the opera more intelligible to a British audience. The English translation is added in red ink in exact alignment with the Italian text and carefully notes slight alterations to the original version, such as the addition of a 25-bar prologue before the original opening (using the same music as the closing 25 bars of the opera) followed by a brief spoken description of the scene.
Recordings and UK revival
It is especially interesting to look at the musical material while listening to the recordings of the 1952 (Product note 1LL0011884-95) and 1957 (Product note 1LL0011487-1LL0011499) BBC broadcasts, which are kept in the Library and available for listening as audio files. There is still uncertainty over the exact identity of the recording of what seems to be a studio performance of the English piano version (Product note 1LL0012460-73, presumably dated 19 February 1961).
The documents as a whole prove to be an invaluable source to allow a close examination of the opera in its multiple versions and to integrate with the precious autograph material relating to the opera preserved in the Fondo Nino Rota at the Fondazione Cini, Venice.
I due timidi received its Italian stage premiere on 19 January 1971 at the Teatro Petruzzelli in Bari – a city in the South, where Rota was the director of the local Music Conservatory for almost 30 years. From that moment on, it was gradually included in the opera repertoire. Seventy years after the world stage premiere, the opera returns to the London stage, presented by the Guildhall School’s Opera Department at the Silk Theatre. We would like to imagine that Nino Rota, who had a special affection for London and was happy to have some of his operas staged by students in academic institutions, would be delighted to be together with his dearest friend Suso Cecchi d’Amico in the audience.
Prof. Angela Annese
Conservatory of Music “Niccolò Piccinni”, Bari
Further reading
Pier Marco De Santi, La musica di Nino Rota (Roma-Bari, 1983).
[BL Shelfmark: General Reference Collection LB.31.b.4190]
Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Storie di cinema (e d’altro); raccontate a Margherita d’Amico (Milano, 1996; Milano, 2002).
Francesco Lombardi (ed.), Fra cinema e musica del Novecento: il caso Nino Rota (Firenze, 2000).
Veniero Rizzardi (ed.), L’undicesima musa: Nino Rota e i suoi media (Roma, 2001).
Richard Dyer, Nino Rota: Music, Film and Feeling (London, 2010).
[BL Shelfmark (2nd edition, 2019): General Reference Collection DRT ELD.DS.550948]
Francesco Lombardi (ed.), Nino Rota: un timido protagonista del Novecento musicale (Torino, 2012).
Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Suso a Lele: lettere (dicembre 1945 – marzo 1947), a cura di Silvia e Masolino d’Amico (Milano, 2016).
[BL Shelfmark: General Reference Collection YF.2019.a.15133]
Further listening
Nino Rota: I due timidi (original radio production, 1950), Twilight Music TWI CD AS 06 27 (2006)
Nino Rota: La notte di un nevrastenico / I due timidi (live recording, Rieti, Teatro Vespasiano, 2017), Dynamic DVD 57830 (2018)
Nino Rota: La notte di un nevrastenico / I due timidi (live recording, Rieti, Teatro Vespasiano, 2017), Dynamic CDS7830.02 (2019)
12 April 2022
Beethoven and Zweig
Of the exhibits in our current Beethoven exhibition, no fewer than 12 come from the collection of autograph manuscripts assembled by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, and generously bequeathed to the British Library by his heirs in 1986.
Stefan Zweig as a collector
Zweig was a keen collector of autographs from an early age and built up one of the finest collections of its kind. He particularly sought out examples which he felt showed the process of creativity in the writers, composers and other historical figures he most admired. Beethoven was certainly one such, and fitted Zweig’s image of the true creative genius, but most of Zweig’s Beethoven material in fact comprised not music manuscripts that show Beethoven the genius composer at work, but items such as letters and notebooks that shed light on Beethoven the man.
This was no doubt in part because Zweig had an equally wealthy and eager rival when it came to collecting Beethoveniana, the Swiss bibliophile Martin Bodmer, but Zweig also had a liking for ‘relics’ of great men as well as actual examples of their work. One of his happiest moments as a collector came in 1929 when he was able to purchase Beethoven’s writing-desk and various other realia once belonging to the composer, such as a lock of hair, a violin and even a compass, from the descendants of Beethoven’s friend Stephan von Breuning. (These were later acquired by Bodmer and are now in the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn.)
Exhibits from the Zweig collection in the Beethoven exhibition
Two of the items from the BL Zweig manuscripts currently on display show a very humdrum side of Beethoven’s life: a laundry list and a page of kitchen accounts. The latter gives a glimpse into Beethoven’s diet: a lot of meat, bread and potatoes, spiced with mustard and horseradish, and washed down with wine and rum. Vegetables do feature, but usually lumped together as ‘Zuhspeis’ (literally a ‘side-dish’). Perhaps this was one of the reasons for his frequent ill health, referred to with a dash of self-deprecating humour in a letter of 1817 inviting his friend Johann Bihler to visit and mentioning that ‘Dr Sassafras’ will also be in attendance – a reference to the diuretic sassafras root.
Other items show more ‘elevated’ aspects of Beethoven’s life. A notebook from the early 1790s lists expenses from his first months in Vienna, including a series of composition lessons with Joseph Haydn, the main reason he had come to the city. Another collection of notes from 1815 contains transcriptions of poems by Johann Gottfried Herder with some snatches of music and some reflections on nature by Beethoven. By this time Beethoven’s loss of hearing loss was very advanced, but he writes that this seems not to trouble him in the countryside and that “every tree seems to speak to me, saying ‘Holy! Holy!’” Despite a number of health and personal problems at this time, another piece from 1815 strikes a similar note of optimism: a short three-part canon written in the autograph album of fellow-composer Ludwig Spohr sets words from a play by Friedrich Schiller, “Kurz ist der Schmerz und ewig ist die Freude” (“Pain is brief and joy is eternal”).
Beethoven’s admiration for Schiller’s work would culminate of course in the setting of the ‘Ode to Joy’ in his Ninth Symphony, but he also set works by the other literary giant of the age, Goethe. Zweig was particularly pleased to acquire the manuscript of the song ‘Die Trommel gerühret’ (‘The drum is beaten’) from Beethoven’s incidental music to Goethe’s play Egmont as it combined the work of both men. In the play the song is sung by Egmont’s mistress Clärchen, who dreams of dressing as a soldier to follow her beloved to war. It is one of the pieces that forms the soundtrack to the exhibition, along with another work owned in manuscript by Zweig and on display, the 1808 Sonata for Piano and Cello in A major.
The last Zweig items displayed relate to Beethoven’s death and funeral. A book of sketches by Josef Teltscher includes two studies of the composer on his deathbed. Teltscher was in attendance and his moving images of an exhausted Beethoven are no doubt more realistic that the legend that Beethoven died shaking a fist in defiance. A list of expenses for Beethoven’s funeral shows what a costly affair it was, with details of money spent to pay the priests and to provide candles and roses. It was one of the most lavish funerals ever granted to a commoner in Vienna and the streets were packed with onlookers. Access to the service was by invitation only; the invitation on display is thought to have belonged to Stefan von Breuning. Finally there is a list of donors to a fund to help Beethoven’s servants after his death, something that brings us back to the household accounts and laundry list and reminds us of the people behind them who ran Beethoven’s various households in Vienna.
Some of Zweig’s contemporaries – and more recent critics – may have been cynical about the relic-hunting aspect of Zweig’s collecting, something nowhere more obvious than in his Beethoven holdings. But these items can help us to see a more rounded picture of Beethoven and his world rather than just the genius at work.
Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Collections
References/further reading:
Arthur Searle, The British Library Stefan Zweig Collection: Catalogue of the Music Manuscripts (London, 1999).
Oliver Matuschek (ed.), Ich kenne den Zauber der Schrift: Katalog und Geschichte der Autographensammlung Stefan Zweig, mit kommentiertem Abdruck von Stefan Zweigs Aufsätzen über das Sammeln von Handschriften (Vienna, 2005).
Oliver Matuschek, Three Lives: a Biography of Stefan Zweig (London, 2011).
Michael Ladenburger, Das “kollektive Sammler-Empfinden”: Stefan Zweig als Sammler und Vermittler von Beethoveniana: Begleitbuch zu einer Ausstellung des Beethoven-Hauses Bonn, 12. Mai-4. Oktober 2015 (Bonn, [2015]) (A brief PDF guide to the exhibition that this book accompanied can be found here:)
02 February 2021
Update on Music E-resources
We are pleased to announce a number of new subscriptions to our Music e-resources offer this year, as well as changes to remote access for some of our existing subscriptions:
Remote access to RILM and RIPM (full text)
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text contains more than 200 full-text journals, many of which are not available anywhere else online, with content spanning 50 countries and 40 languages. The full-text content encompasses all disciplines related to music including: Ethnomusicology; Jazz studies; Musicology; Pedagogy; Performance; Popular music and Theory. It also covers interdisciplinary subjects, such as: Archaeology; Dance studies; Dramatic arts; Literature; Philosophy; Psychology; Therapy.
Thanks to a kind offer by RILM we are pleased to offer this resource to our users until 30 September 2021.
The resource is available in all reading rooms (please note our reading rooms are currently closed) as well as via remote access to registered readers, and can be accessed via Explore.
RIPM Preservation Series: European & North American Music Periodicals (Full Text)
This new RIPM series is a collection of unique and rare full-text music titles, which complements RIPM Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals, which the Library also subscribes to. The resource includes over 100 titles of music periodicals published in Europe and North America ranging from the early 19th century to the middle of the 20th century.
This is a new subscription which is available in all reading rooms. The resource is also available via remote access to registered readers until 30 September 2021, and can be accessed via Explore.
BabelScores
This is a new subscription which offers access to an online Library of contemporary music. The BabelScores catalogue contains music in full score by composers of the last 40 years and includes audio and video content for some of the music scores, and also short composer biographies and work descriptions.
This resource is currently only available in our readings rooms but we are working towards making it available remotely in the future.
Our existing subscriptions to the Index of Printed Music and Music Index are now also available remotely to registered readers.
For any enquiries on how to search and use these e-resources please contact our Music Reference Team.
05 July 2019
The Susan Bradshaw Papers: Archive of an Insightful Communicator
The archive of Susan Bradshaw (1931-2005) is now catalogued and available for consultation in the Library’s Rare Books and Music Reading Room. Proceeds from the British Library's purchase of the archive went towards the Royal Philharmonic Society's establishment of the Susan Bradshaw Composers’ Fund, as arranged by Brian Elias, composer and Bradshaw's close friend.
(BL MS Mus. 1755/6/1, f. 30)
Susan Bradshaw pianist, teacher and writer on music, was born in Monmouth on 8 September 1931. After spending time in India and Egypt during her childhood, where her father’s work in the army had taken their family, Bradshaw embarked on learning piano and violin. She later studied at the Royal Academy of Music with Harold Craxton (piano) and Howard Ferguson (composition). Then, in 1957, Bradshaw seized the chance to expand her musical world, taking up a French Government Scholarship to study composition with modernist figurehead, Pierre Boulez, and Max Deutsch in Paris.
(BL MS Mus. 1755/4/3, f. 259)
That year in France proved a catalyst for melding musical partnerships and alliances. Bradshaw formed a piano duo with her close friend Richard Rodney Bennett, and the Mabillon Trio with Philip Jones (oboe) and William Bennett (flute). However, the year in France signalled the decline of her activity as a composer, and on her return to the UK, Bradshaw moved her energy to accompaniment and performance.
Bradshaw was an ardent advocate of new music. She helped contemporary composers by including them in ensemble programming, promoting new works with first performances and using broadcasts to share what she recognised as important and progressive about such music. Concert ephemera, cuttings from radio show advertisements and draft programme scripts in her papers record her efforts and enthusiasm.
Inside Bradshaw’s Archive
Bradshaw’s archive reflects the breadth of her own musical experience and contains:
- Draft scores of over thirty of Bradshaw’s compositions, largely from the period 1951-1958
- Drafts of her writings on music, on individual composers/works/musical aesthetics
- A collection of printed materials compiled by Bradshaw into composer information files
- Scrapbooks and collected programmes, tracing Bradshaw’s musical career
- Select correspondence from composers and friends
- A box of 60th birthday tributes: musical compositions, letters and cards
- Publicity photographs and documents relating to her wider musical involvements.
Related Resources at the British Library
Many items in the British Library Sound Archive complement and enhance the vibrant resource of Bradshaw’s paper archive. Examples include:
- A recording of Bradshaw’s Eight Hungarian Folksongs, broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 1978. Catalogue reference: M7663.
- Susan Bradshaw’s talk with recorded illustrations, In search of Pierre Boulez, given at the National Sound Archive in their Spring Lectures, 1985. Catalogue reference: B627/1.
- A recording of an event dedicated to the music and literary work of Lord Berners, Lord Berners: an entertainment in words and music, 1972. Susan Bradshaw and John Betjeman both performed at this. Catalogue reference: T706, M5087.
- William Bennett and Susan Bradshaw performing Boulez’s Sonatine for flute and piano. Catalogue reference: 2LP0048923; 1LP0073897.
Translating the ‘Shapes and Sounds’ of Composers’ Imaginings [1]
Bradshaw was well-positioned to act as a mediator between composers and audiences. She had a deep understanding of musical composition, performance and analysis, and used her knowledge of all three to interpret the works she encountered and to bring composers’ imaginings to life. Bradshaw believed that these three strands of musical endeavour were inter-related, and mutually nourishing. She appreciated that each was essential for advanced musical understanding, and furthermore, that the true product of this understanding was the communication of meaning. Whether that communication was musical (in performance), linguistic (for example, in academic writing), or pedagogical, Bradshaw saw the need to balance emotional experience with enquiry:
Passionate involvement precedes – must precede – cool appraisal; but when narcissistic pleasure starts to cancel out enquiry, when the sense of striving to understand and to reveal ceases to be the outcome of delight, when wonder becomes complacency, then great art becomes commonplace in the mind of the beholder and creation and recreation lapse into mere repetition. [2]
Bradshaw’s influence on the musical world can be seen in the archive. To trace it, one might begin with her scrapbook programmes (signalling, for example, her involvement with the Darmstadt International Summer Courses) and move to the exchange of ideas with fellow musicians in her correspondence, before visiting the vividly-expressed opinions in her writings.
New Ways of Hearing: “Untuning the Tempered Scale” [3]
The catastrophic destruction brought about by two world wars permeated all aspects of social existence; many composers felt that the old musical systems were inadequate for the development of the art. In a parallel to the destruction of societal structures through war, it was as if the hierarchies of the diatonic tonal system had to be broken down also. Composers looked to expand the resources available to them – the boundaries between music and noise blurred, and the number of notes in the conventional system increased with experiments in microtonality.
As musical modernism turned from the tradition of western diatonic tonality, it wrenched audiences from their familiar sound worlds. To the modernist composers, the rules and patterns of diatonic harmony represented predictability and constraint. Bradshaw’s broadcasting demonstrates her use of radio as a medium to promote modern music but also to challenge audiences to question the nature of listening: Why do we listen to music? What function does it have in our lives? She strove to help listeners navigate contemporary music, pointing out features and techniques, and highlighting composers’ search for truth in music.
As an individual whose influence and reach in the contemporary classical music scene was extensive, and well-evidenced in her archive, it is fitting for her papers to sit alongside those of many composers and musicians who so appreciated her support, here at the British Library.
Sarah Ellis, Archivist and Cataloguer of the Susan Bradshaw Papers (MS Mus. 1755)
---
[1] Susan Bradshaw, untitled (London, British Library, MS Mus. 1755/2/3, f. 152, undated).
[2] Susan Bradshaw, draft letter to the editor of Music Analysis journal (London, British Library, MS Mus 1755/2/3 ff. 45-46, undated).
[3] Susan Bradshaw, untitled (London, British Library, MS Mus. 1755/2/3, f. 152, undated).
10 October 2018
William Byrd, catholic composer
William Byrd, one of the most prolific English composers of his time, was born in 1543 (or possibly late in 1542) and died in 1623.
A devout Roman Catholic, Byrd was also a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal with a secure position at court. Well known among the Catholic nobility, with whom his ties were naturally close, Byrd also enjoyed a wealth of connections across Protestant society, including major cultural figures such as Sir Philip Sidney.
This post explores Byrd's music for the Roman Rite.
The Masses
William Byrd. [Mass for three voices] Cantus. London: Thomas East, 1594. Cantus. British Library R.M.15.d.4.
In 1593 Byrd moved from Harlington in Middlesex, where he had lived since the 1570s, to Stondon Massey in Essex. This was only a few miles from Ingatestone, the seat of his friend Sir John, afterwards Lord, Petre. It was almost certainly for clandestine Mass celebrations at Petre’s house that Byrd composed his three Masses, issued separately without title pages, dedicatees or any indication of the printer (Thomas East), but with Byrd’s name placed courageously at the top of every page. The four-part work was printed (and composed) first, the three-part next (shown above) and the five-part last, all between about 1592 and 1595. Second editions of the three- and four-part Masses appeared about 1600.
Gradualia Book I, 1605
William Byrd. Gradualia, ac Cantiones Sacræ, quinis, quaternis, trinisque vocibus concinnatæ, Lib. Primus
Excudebat Humphrey Lownes. Londini: Impensis Ricardi Redmeri. Superius. 1610.. British Library K.2.f.7.
Byrd followed the publication of his three settings of the Ordinary of the Mass with an even more daring venture. His Gradualia is one of the most comprehensive provisions of Mass Propers and related music for the Roman church’s year ever attempted by a single composer. When the first book appeared in 1605 he evidently felt that the times were less dangerous, for it was printed with a titlepage and a dedication to the Catholic Privy Councillor Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton.
But the moment proved ill chosen: it was the year of the Gunpowder Plot and anti-Catholic sentiment was rife. Despite having been approved before its publication by Richard Bancroft, Bishop of London and an ecclesiastical censor of books, Byrd’s Gradualia became dangerous currency. The Frenchman Charles de Ligny was arrested merely for having a copy of the ‘papistical books’ in his possession. The image above shows the communion sentence from the Corpus Christi mass and Ave verum corpus, a Eucharistic prayer in the version printed in the Primer, for private devotions.
Gradualia Book II, 1607
William Byrd. Gradualia: seu cantionum sacrarum quarum aliæ ad quatuor, aliæ verò ad quinque et sex voces editæ sunt.
Liber secundus. London: Thomas East, assign of William Barley, 1607. Bassus. British Library K.2.f.6.
Despite the hostility shown to Book I of Gradualia, Byrd went ahead and published Book II in 1607, openly declaring that the music had been composed for use in the house of its dedicatee, Lord Petre. But he may have found it necessary to withdraw both books until 1610, as the sheets were reissued then with new title pages. The partbook of Book I shown here has the substitute title page of 1610, but those of Book II are from the only surviving set with the original 1607 title pages. On the wrapper of the bassus part the unknown first owner has written ‘Mr William Byrd his last Sett of Songs geven me by him Feb. 1607.’
William Byrd. Gradualia: seu cantionum sacrarum quarum aliæ ad quatuor, aliæ verò ad quinque et sex voces editæ sunt.
Liber secundus. London: Thomas East, assign of William Barley, 1607. Bassus. British Library K.2.f.6.
Byrd’s handwriting: Certificate concerning an annuity granted to Dorothy Tempest.
The letter below, a similar copy of which is also in the British Library (Egerton 3722), along with the two signatures to his will are the only known examples of Byrd’s handwriting.
One of those implicated in the Catholic plot of 1570 in favour of Mary Queen of Scots was Michael Tempest, who was convicted of treason but managed to escape to France entering the service of Philip II. His wife Dorothy and their five children were left without means of support, and Queen Elizabeth granted her an annuity of twenty pounds a year, to be paid quarterly. On 17 October 1581 Byrd wrote to his friend William Petre (son of Sir John, discussed above), an official at the Court of Exchequer, reminding him that a payment was due, at the same time sending the letter below to certify that she was alive and well.
William Byrd. Autograph certificate on behalf of Dorothy Tempest, 25 June 1581. British Library Ms Mus. 1810/26
Music blog recent posts
- Samuel Coleridge-Taylor at 150: Overview of British Library collections
- Frédéric Kastner’s singing flames
- Elgar’s musical sketches reunited at the British Library
- Nino Rota’s I due timidi - an opera for radio transmission
- Beethoven and Zweig
- Update on Music E-resources
- The Susan Bradshaw Papers: Archive of an Insightful Communicator
- William Byrd, catholic composer
- Welcome to Discovering Music
- Chopin First Editions available online
Archives
Tags
- Acquisitions
- Africa
- Americas
- Classical music
- Contemporary Britain
- Digital scholarship
- Digitisation
- East Asia
- eResources
- Events
- Film
- Georgians-revealed
- Germanic
- Humanities
- LGBTQ+
- Literature
- Manuscripts
- Medieval history
- Middle East
- Music
- Newsroom
- Philatelic
- Popular music
- Printed music
- Projects
- Rare books
- Recordings
- Research collaboration
- Russian Revolution
- Slavonic
- Sound and vision
- South Asia
- Visual arts
- World and traditional music
- Writing