12 February 2014
Devonshire minuets
In this post, Moira Goff, Curator of the British Library's Georgians Revealed exhibition, delves into the Library's music collections in search of dances performed by upper-class Georgians.
Many of the collections of country dances and minuets published in the late 18th century included tunes named for individual aristocratic female dancers. The most famous of these was the Devonshire Minuet, composed in honour of Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire and first performed by Adelaide Simonet and Gaetan Vestris at a ridotto held at the King’s Theatre in London on 22 March 1781. The Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser for 24 March reported at length on the event, noting in particular the brief attendance of the Duchess who sat in her box rather than joining the company. For ‘her Grace was only there to pay a kind of public visit to the Vestris, for the Devonshire minuet, which was received with a very warm applause, and was no sooner over than the Duchess disappeared’. The Devonshire Minuet was subsequently performed several times at the King’s Theatre as part of the ballet Ninette à la Cour, in which the two dancers were starring. The music was published the same year in Giovanni Battista Noferi’s The Celebrated Dances Performed by the Messrs Vestris &c. at the King’s Theatre. The copy now in the British Library appears to have been used in performance, as the harmony has been filled out in places in ink. The Devonshire Minuet also appeared separately in various arrangements suitable for music-making and dancing at home.
The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire were noted for their lavish entertainments at Devonshire House in London’s Piccadilly. The ‘Devonshire Gala’ given on 21 March 1782 was reported in detail in the Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser for 22 March. The luxurious and elegant decorations of the hall and adjacent rooms were fully described. ‘The Grand Hall was fitted up in the most superb stile, converted into la Salle au Bal’, with an antique statue of Apollo and fine paintings set off by festoons of roses and a myriad candles. The ‘sopha for the Royal Family, and the rest of the furniture was rose coloured damask; a raised flooring, and temporary orchestra were constructed; the orchestra was in divisions on each side the Apollo statue’. The Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser did not comment on the dancing at the ball until 30 March:
Of minuets, at least as danced by Amateur performers, none was ever more commended than the minuet, at the Devonshire Gala, of the Prince of Wales, and the Duchess of Devonshire.
The Minuet next in point of order, tho’ not of merit, was danced by the Duke of Devonshire and Lady Caroline Spencer. His Grace is an amiable and respectable character; but dancing is not his forte.
The newspaper commented only on Lady Caroline’s beauty. The report shows that formal balls of the late 18th century still opened with a series of minuets, danced one couple at a time in order of rank, just as they had been nearly 100 years earlier.
Moira Goff
Further reading: Amanda Foreman. Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire. London, 1998.
Georgians Revealed: Life, Style and the Making of Modern Britain is on until 11 March 2014.
31 January 2014
A song in praise of music: Schubert’s ‘An die Musik’
This is the first in a new series of blog posts highlighting some of the British Library’s music treasures. We’ll be focusing in each post on a particular item or collection and looking at the story behind it. In the spotlight today are Franz Schubert, born on this day in 1797, and his exquisite song ‘An die Musik’ (‘To Music’).
Schubert composed more than 600 songs in his short life, the first at the age of 14 and the last shortly before his death, aged 31, in November 1828. ‘An die Musik’, which Schubert wrote in 1817, is one of his most famous songs, popular both for its beautiful melody and its lyrics - penned by Schubert's near namesake, Franz von Schober - about the power of music to “kindle the heart to warm love” and carry us into a better world.
Here is a classic recording of the song made for Decca by Kathleen Ferrier, contralto, and Phyllis Spurr, piano, in 1949 (British Library Shelfmark 1CS0042998):
Schubert wrote two versions of the song, and his autograph manuscript of the second version is now held by the British Library. The manuscript was formerly owned by the Austrian writer and collector Stefan Zweig, and Zweig’s delight at acquiring the autograph of this famous song is evident from his card catalogue, in which he described it as a crowning piece in the art of song and also graphically extraordinarily beautiful.
Schubert wrote out the music in brown ink on just one side of a single leaf of manuscript paper and signed it ‘Franz Schubert m[anu propr]ia’ (signed with one’s own hand). The leaf seems originally to have formed part of someone’s manuscript album, but it is not known where or for whom Schubert wrote the music out. The leaf was later removed from the album and came into the possession of a German violinist, Ludwig Landsberg, who had it mounted in a pink folder, along with a lithographed portrait of Schubert, and who presented the assemblage to the wife of the French Ambassador in 1852.
The manuscript then passed through the hands of a German conductor, Siegfried Ochs, before being acquired in 1940 by Stefan Zweig from the music seller Otto Haas. The manuscript was loaned to the British Library in 1981 and presented outright to the Library in 1986 by Stefan Zweig’s heirs, as part of the magnificent Zweig Music Collection. The manuscript has just been digitised and made available on the British Library's Digitised Manuscripts website. The presentation folder and portrait, a lithograph made by Josef Teltscher in 1826 and published shortly after Schubert's death, have also been digitised.
19 December 2013
The Countess of Yarmouth’s Fancy
Among the Ten New Fashionable Irish Dances published by the dancing master Alexander Wills around 1800 is the ‘Countess of Yarmouth Fancy’. Who was the Countess of Yarmouth and why should she have not just this dance but this whole collection of dances dedicated to her?
Alexander Wills had a long career as a dancing master in London. The Morning Post and Daily Advertiser for 12 April 1779 carried a notice for ‘his first ball … at the New Rooms, Hanover-square’ when he described himself as ‘late assistant to Mr. Gallini’ - Giovanni Andrea Gallini who was dancing master at the King’s Theatre, London’s opera house. Wills advertised his annual ball and his academy ‘for young Ladies only’ regularly thereafter. He was apparently still in business late in 1801, for the Morning Chronicle for 7 November 1801 advertised ‘Wills and Second’s Academy, … for Young Ladies of Distinction’. No further advertisements have so far been found, but Wills evidently had a genteel and well-heeled clientele.
The Countess of Yarmouth must surely be Maria Emily Fagnani (1770/71-1856), who on 18 May 1798 married Francis Charles Seymour-Conway Earl of Yarmouth (1777-1842), son and heir to the second Marquess of Hertford. Her mother was the Marchesa Fagnani, and it is likely that her father was the fourth Duke of Queensberry. The new Countess of Yarmouth was the Duke’s designated heiress. The marriage took place against the will of Lord Yarmouth’s parents and it did not last. The Earl and Countess of Yarmouth parted for good during a visit to France in 1802. The undated Ten New Fashionable Irish Dances must have appeared during the brief period of their marriage. The publication was registered at Stationers' Hall on 28 May 1800 and probably appeared in print shortly afterwards.
Despite her doubtful paternity and the circumstances of her marriage, the Countess of Yarmouth was worth cultivating as a patron. She had money. In 1791, she had been left more than £30,000 (several million pounds in today’s money) by her adoptive father the politician George Selwyn. She was also a member of fashionable society. Her attendance at balls, masquerades and other diversions of the bon ton was noted in the newspapers. Alexander Wills may already have attracted her patronage or had good hopes of it. ‘Countess of Yarmouth Fancy’ is the first dance in the volume and one of only three which have dance instructions as well as music.
Further reading:
Bernard Falk, “Old Q.’s” Daughter. London, 1937.
This is a guest post by Moira Goff, curator of the British Library's exhibition Georgians Revealed.
26 November 2013
Parthenia: an anniversary celebration
Four hundred years ago, the first attempt to print a book of music for keyboard was made in England. This landmark publication was Parthenia or The Maydenhead of the first musicke that ever was printed for the Virginalls. The British Library holds two copies of the first edition, and a further six copies are known to survive in other libraries around the world.
Last night we celebrated the 400th anniversary of Parthenia's publication with a lecture-recital at the British Library, hosted in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Music. It was a sell-out event, and featured performances on three instruments from the time of Parthenia: the virginals (a delicate-toned keyboard instrument, pictured on Parthenia's title-page, above), the dulcimer and the Renaissance fiddle or lira da braccio.
Oliver Neighbour, leading scholar of the music of William Byrd and former head of music at the British Library, talked about the background to Parthenia's publication and the music it contains. He also shed light on some of the social niceties of the time. While the virginals would have been played at court and in high-ranking households, the dulcimer was considered a lower-class instrument.
The music in Parthenia was written by three of the greatest English composers then living: William Byrd, John Bull and Orlando Gibbons. Each was from a different generation, Byrd having been born in about 1540, Bull in about 1562 and Gibbons in 1583. Colin Huehns, lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music, selected music by all three composers for yesterday's recital, in which the principal role was taken by Royal Academy of Music student Martyna Kazmierczak, playing the virginals.
Although all the music in Parthenia was composed for solo virginals, Colin experimented with adding a Renaissance fiddle to the texture in some of the pieces. It may not have been what the composers originally intended, but adapting music to suit all kinds of instruments was a very common practice in the 17th century, and the effect was certainly interesting.
The final two pieces, played by Colin Huehns and Elsa Bradley respectively, were performed on the dulcimer. Colin reprised Byrd's 'Preludium no. 1' from earlier in the evening, and it was interesting to hear how the work sounded on an instrument with a quite different sonority from the virginals.
The virginals used in the recital was an original Renaissance instrument kindly loaned by the Royal Academy of Music from their collecton of historic instruments, while the fiddle and dulcimers were modern replicas of early instruments. On display were a copy of Parthenia and several related items and, at the end of the evening, the audience had a chance to have a close look at these and at the musical instruments.
Why is Parthenia important?
Printers in Italy, Germany, France and England became highly proficient at printing music from moveable type during the 16th century. But this kind of printing, in which each note - with its own staff lines - sits on a separate piece of type, was not suitable for the fast notes and chordal writing found frequently in keyboard music. Music for keyboard therefore continued to be transmitted in manuscript. The most magnificent example of these manuscripts is 'My Ladye Nevells Booke' (MS Mus. 1591), compiled by the scribe John Baldwin in 1591, which contains music by a single composer, William Byrd.
By the early 17th century, engraved music - created by engraving each page of music onto a metal plate and printing from this - was becoming more prevalent, and it was only a matter of time before an attempt was made to engrave complex keyboard pieces. Here is a typical page of music from Parthenia:
The above runs of semiquavers would have been very difficult to produce using moveable type.
It is somewhat ironic, as Oliver Neighbour observed during his talk last night, that by the time such an innovative publication as Parthenia appeared, the high point in the development of English Renaissance keyboard music had passed. However, interest in 16th-century keyboard music - and indeed in Parthenia - continued well into the 17th century. The music was reprinted several times - in 1651 with a somewhat more demure female performer on the title-page.
The publication was then all but forgotten until the 19th century, when the enterprising Musical Antiquarian Society produced a new edition. Since then, the music has been re-published in facsimile, in modern scholarly editions and in arrangements for other instruments, including recorders, flutes and keyboard and cello, and it has also been recorded many times. Four hundred years on, the music from Parthenia remains vibrant and engaging.
08 October 2013
Royal Philharmonic Society: 200 Years of Grand Projects
Among the various musical bicentenaries this year, one of the most widely celebrated has been the Royal Philharmonic Society's. The manuscript of their most famous commission, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, will be on display at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York until 1 December 2013, reunited for the first time since 1824 with the other copyists' manuscript overseen by Beethoven, which is now part of the Juilliard Manuscript Collection. The British Library, which acquired the RPS archive in 2002, is proud to continue its association with the RPS. The entire archive has now been digitised, and is available (via subscription or in our reading rooms) as part of Nineteenth Century Collections Online.
The story of the foundation of the Philharmonic Society in 1813 to 'rekindle excellence in instrumental music' has been told many times - most usefully in Cyril Ehrlich's book First Philharmonic (Oxford, 1995). What has not been known until now is just how dedicated the founding directors were to the project, and how grand their original plans were. In an article just published in the Electronic British Library Journal, Leanne Langley tells a fascinating tale of the complex negotiations that led to the building of the New Argyll Rooms, where the Choral Symphony and many other great works were given their first London performances.
The building was devised as an integral part of John Nash's development of Regent Street under the name of the Regent's Harmonic Institution, renamed as Royal Harmonic Institution when it finally opened in 1820, following the Prince Regent's accession as King George IV). The rooms were to be used for a wide variety of concerts and other events, and the complex included a shop selling music published in-house. The plans were to create a Royal Academy of Music, by analogy with the Royal Academy of Arts. The considerable costs were largely underwritten by the directors of the Philharmonic Society, in a personal capacity and in the hope of recouping a profit in the longer term.
Sadly, most of their plans were thwarted. The building burnt down after only ten years, and although it was insured, the costs of replacing it were too great. Meanwhile, the Royal Academy of Music had been founded by other means elsewhere. The Philharmonic Society continued, as a promoter of concerts, commissioner of new works, and supporter of all aspects of the musical world - and continues to flourish in this role to this day. But, as Leanne Langley points out, one important legacy of the sad story of the rise and fall of the New Argyll Rooms is that the area around Oxford Circus quickly became a Mecca of the musical world, and has remained so ever since: first music publishers and instrument sellers placed their shops nearby, to be followed in the twentieth century by record shops. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the BBC built Broadcasting House at the top of the same development, to sit alongside the mass of cultural organisations which began with the Philharmonic Society.
Read Leanne Langley's article, 'A Place for Music: John Nash, Regent Street and the Philharmonic Society of London' by following this link.
02 October 2013
A ‘potpourri’ of contradanses
The Music Collections of the British Library offer many surprises. Two small volumes in the Hirsch Collection provide unexpected insights into dancing at the court of the French king Louis XV (1710-1774) as well as some historic dance repertoire that is well worth reviving.
The two volumes are bound similarly, in leather with gold tooling on the spine. Both have the arms
of Louis XV on the front cover and the words ‘Petite Ecurie du Roy’ stamped on the back. The bindings link them to dance entertainments at the French court since the king’s music establishment formed part of the Petite Ecurie. The first volume contains a collection of individual contredanses, each with its own distinctive title. The second volume has a series of contredanses, each of which has the same title ‘Potpourri françois des contre-danse ancienne, tel, qu’il se danse chez la reine’. They are numbered in order by hand, within a cartouche engraved at the top of the titlepage for this purpose.
All these dances are choreographies for four couples facing inwards in a square formation. They are cotillons, a dance type which became very popular in the 1760s. Cotillons alternate simple ‘changes’, in which all together dance in a circle or partners take hands to circle round and back and so on, with ‘figures’, which use a greater range of steps and more complex formations. In most cotillons the same figure is repeated after each change, to the same music. They are lively and energetic and great fun to dance. In potpourri cotillons each change is followed by a different figure and the music for both change and figure is different each time. They are a challenge to memory, musicality and stamina.
These little choreographies were all published by the dancing master Landrin, active from the 1760s to the 1780s. They can probably be dated before the death of Louis XV’s queen Marie Lesczynska (1703-1768). So, we have a glimpse of the repertoire danced at French court balls around the time that the cotillon was becoming the fashionable dance. Perhaps the Library can help start a new dance craze with some old dances?
Moira Goff
References
Landrin. Contre-danses. Paris, [1765?] (Hirsch. I. 302)
Landrin. Potpourri françois des contre-danse ancienne, tel, qu’il se danse chez la reine. Paris, [1765?] (Hirsch.I.302.a.(1))
Jean-Michel Guilcher. La contredanse: un tournant dans l’histoire française de la danse. Bruxelles, 2003
Richard Semmens. The Bals publics at the Paris Opera in the eighteenth century. Hillsdale, NY, 2004
25 August 2013
Britten's Serenade
At the heart of our exhibition ‘Poetry in Sound: The Music of Benjamin Britten’ is the Serenade for tenor, horn and strings, Op. 31. Arguably more than any other work in Britten’s output, the Serenade demonstrates his acutely sensitive response to the written word, to the extent that words and music often cohere with a natural simplicity that seems to encapsulate and transform the poetic intention. The Serenade encompasses poetry by Keats, Tennyson, Blake, Cotton, and Jonson, together with an anonymous fifteenth-century text – each poem selected to fit an overall poetic conception that reflects on the approach of darkness as a metaphor for the journey from life into death. It was composed in 1943, shortly after Britten returned to England from the US, and dedicated to the critic and novelist Edward Sackville-West (1901-65). The work was first performed at the Wigmore Hall on 15 October 1943 by the great horn player Dennis Brain and the tenor Peter Pears.
The Serenade opens with a prologue for solo horn, which at once sets a haunting tone for the work and introduces the instrument as an unspoken commentator on the sung text that follows. For the first sung movement Britten selected four stanzas from the The Evening Quatrains by Charles Cotton (1630-87), which itself forms part of a cycle describing each part of the day: morning, noon, evening and night. Cotton’s words appear in the 1689 edition of his Poems on Several Occasions, published in London by Hensman and Fox, a copy of which is on display in the exhibition. The opening verse ‘The day’s grown old; the fainting sun / has but a little way to run’ sets the tone for Britten’s reflective setting, which is dominated by a descending musical theme echoed by the solo horn.
In the second movement Britten’s music conveys the rapid shifts of emotion in Tennyson’s ‘Blow, bugle, blow’ from the narrative poem The Princess. Here the sung text is punctuated by horn fanfares evoking the sound of a bugle echoing over an Arcadian landscape, an allegory for the inevitability of death followed by after-life. The evidence of Britten’s manuscript demonstrates that he changed his mind about the title of the first and second movements: the original titles were ‘Nocturne’ and ‘Ballad’, but these were crossed through in red crayon and replaced with ‘Pastoral’ and ‘Nocturne’ respectively. There were apparently no second thoughts concerning the title of the third movement, an ‘Elegy’ on William Blake’s famous ‘O Rose, thou art sick!’. In this setting, which is dominated by the simple and unsettling motif of a descending semitone, the sung text is delivered to a sustained string accompaniment. A lengthy introduction for horn and pulsating strings returns to form a suitably mournful postlude.
Britten’s inspiration for the fourth movement was an anonymous fifthteenth-century poem, the Lyke-Wake Dirge, which continues the underlying theme of the Serenade by charting the journey undertaken by the soul from earth to purgatory. Written in an old form of the Yorkshire dialect, the repetitive structure of the poem gave Britten the opportunity to create a setting that contrasts the jaunty rhythms of the vocal lines with an increasingly complex orchestral accompaniment – rather like a set of variations on a given theme.
For the fifth movement Britten chose words from Cynthia’s Revels by Ben Jonson (1572-1637), a play first performed in 1600 which depicts Queen Elizabeth I as the virgin huntress Cynthia (elsewhere known as Diana). Britten selected the hymn, ‘Queen and huntress, chaste and fair’, from Act V (shown on the right in the edition published in London in 1601), allowing him to deploy the solo horn in hunting style, thus providing the work with a lively scherzo movement. The final movement, however, marks a return to the reflective and intensely lyrical tone that pervades much of the work, with a setting of John Keats’s sonnet To Sleep. Britten’s masterpiece ends with the strains of the solo horn, now off stage, its melancholy fanfare gradually disappearing into silence.
17 July 2013
Music and Monarchy
'Music and Monarchy' is the theme of a new four-part television series, presented by Dr David Starkey, which 'reveals how British kings and queens shaped the story of the nation's music: as patrons and tastemakers, and even as composers and performers'. The series promises a refreshing approach, looking at the role played by music in some of the great moments of British history - but always primarily from a historian's point of view.
As with many of his earlier series, Dr Starkey draws heavily on the British Library's collections when telling his 'history of England written in music'. This post draws attention to some of the British Library manuscripts which feature in the first programme, all of which are freely available online.
Two pieces of music in the Old Hall Manuscript are attributed to 'Roy Henry': they are settings of the 'Gloria' and 'Sanctus' of the Mass, both composed in three parts. There has been a great deal of discussion about the true identity of this King Henry, much of it taking place while the manuscript was owned by St Edmund's College at Old Hall Green in Hertfordshire, from where the manuscript gained its modern name before entering the British Library's collections in 1973. Earlier scholars identified the composer as Henry VI or Henry IV, but the consensus is now firmly in favour of Henry V. The manuscript was compiled between about 1415 and 1421, but it is quite possible that Henry composed these pieces before acceding to the throne in 1413.
Images of the complete Old Hall Manuscript are available to view on the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (diamm.ac.uk), together with a detailed description, list of contents and extensive bibliography about the manuscript. (This link leads directly to the Old Hall page.) DIAMM requires users to set up a user account before accessing high-resolution images, for reasons of copyright licensing, but this is a simple process.
A later king whose musical predilections are more widely known is Henry VIII. As with 'Roy Henry', music survives which is apparently composed by the king himself: the Henry VIII Songbook was probably compiled around 1518, and includes twenty songs and thirteen instrumental pieces ascribed to ‘The Kynge H. viij’, as well as 76 pieces by other musicians associated with the court. It is most likely that Henry composed this music while still a prince, though some pieces may date from the early years of his reign. The manuscript is not written by Henry himself, and was never part of the royal library: it appears to have been compiled for Sir Henry Guildford (1489-1532), controller of the royal household. It is now numbered as Add. MS 31922, and a description and images are available on DIAMM at this link.
Two other important music manuscripts presented to Henry VIII survived in the king's own library, which now forms part of the British Library's collections. One of them is a magnificent choirbook produced in the workshop of Petrus Alamire, a famous Flemish music scribe who made several similar choirbooks for other European courts. He also acted as a spy, informing Henry of the movements of Richard de la Pole, exiled pretender to the English crown. The opening pages are the most richly decorated, with various Tudor symbols as well as Catherine of Aragon’s pomegranate. This manuscript, Royal MS 8 G VII, is available on DIAMM at this link.
The other grand manuscript was prepared for Henry VIII in 1516 by a successful Flemish merchant named Petrus de Opitiis. It includes a canon (or round) for four voices: two voices sing the music as written and another two sing the same melody a perfect fourth higher, beginning when the first singers reach the points marked with a sign. The words praise the root that has brought forth the scarlet rose of the Tudor dynasty, and it may have been composed to commemorate the reunion of Henry and his two sisters for the first time in 13 years. Royal MS 11 E XI is available on DIAMM at this link, as well as on the British Library's Digitised Manuscripts website here.
David Starkey's series will be screened on BBC 2 starting on Saturday 20 July 2013. Future posts will feature some recent discoveries that shed light on the relationship between music and monarchy in later periods.
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