Since our post last spring summarising digitised materials from our music manuscripts collection, we’ve been busy adding to this content.

From Byrd to Britten and Monteverdi to Mozart, a wealth of music manuscripts are available to browse, free-of-charge, on the British Library’s Digitised Manuscripts website.

At the time of writing, you can view no fewer than 335 music manuscripts on the site. Additional content is added regularly.

Our last digitised manuscript, published just a few days ago, was Lansdowne MS 763. Dating from the fifteenth century and written on vellum, this is a collection of music treatises by various authors.

For a full list of what is currently available, please see this file: Download PDF of BL digitised music manuscripts summer 2017.

This is also available in the form of a spreadsheet (although this format cannot be downloaded on all web browsers): Download spreadsheet of BL digitised music manuscripts summer 2017.

 

This evening’s concert at the BBC Proms is a recreation of a programme conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent on 23 July 1966 – it was in fact the 500^th promenade concert he had conducted since (literally) taking over the baton as chief conductor of the annual music festival in 1948. Sadly that 1966 season was to be his last. This year marks the 50^th anniversary of Sargent's death in 1967.

 

Regular readers of this blog might remember posts in 2012 and 2013 about cataloguing the Malcolm Sargent Collection here at the British Library. With work on the rich and varied archive well under way we thought this year would be a perfect time to celebrate Sargent and his life and work with one of our regular study day events.

Sir Malcolm Sargent: A Life in Music will introduce the Sargent archive as well as offering the chance to hear from people who worked with the conductor: his secretary Sylvia Darley OBE, clarinettist Colin Bradbury and timpanist Pat Brady. We will also take the opportunity to reassess his recorded legacy with record producer Andrew Keener and conductors David Lloyd-Jones and Sian Edwards. Musicologist Donald Burrows will present on Sargent's interpretations of Handel, while David Kidger will focus on the Courtauld-Sargent and Robert Mayer children's concerts. Richard Aldous, whose 2001 biography of Sargent drew on source material from the archive, will be interviewed by Tom Service.   

The study day also coincides with the Last Night of the Proms, an event which in many ways helped make Sargent a household name. In fact it was at the Last Night in 1967 that Sargent made his final public appearance – footage of his surprise appearance onstage at the end of that concert will also feature in the study day.

The event will be held at the British Library's Knowledge Centre, 9 September 09.30-17.30. Tickets can be booked via the British Library box office.

 

Some music manuscripts from the British Library’s collections have recently taken a trip to Kassel for this year's Documenta exhibition – the 14th of the quinquennial series that started in 1955. Displays of international contemporary art have been brought together by the artistic director (this year Adam Szymczyk ) and team of curators in venues around the city. This time a parallel exhibition is also taking place in Athens – with a spectacular ‘parthenon of books’ in Kassel bringing something of the Greek capital to Germany, in a striking visualisation of the overarching theme: ‘Learning from Athens’.  

 

The Parthenon of Books (2017), by Marta Minujín (under construction). Friedrichsplatz, Kassel. Photograph by Lesley Thomas.

 

The manuscripts on temporary loan are all scores by Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981). Cardew’s music evolved from a post-war modernist style conveyed through detailed notational intricacies, to something that leaves open decisions about interpretation of signs on the page to performers – as in his iconic 193-page graphic score, Treatise.

Cornelius Cardew, Treatise, p.47 ( ©1967 ). Used by kind permission of Peters Edition Limited, London.

 

The Great Learning, another of Cardew’s celebrated pieces, arose from the experimental music class he taught at Morley College and the ensemble connected with it, the Scratch Orchestra. With performers from a range of backgrounds and musical abilities, this communal and democratic ‘coming together’ was reflected in the instructional nature of the score; consisting of a mixture of written words, traditional notation and illustrative diagrams.

Documenta 14 features other examples of scores that represent sound (or perhaps the actions that create sound – something suggested by John Cage) in a wide variety of ways. These often have a very immediate visual appeal too and blur the boundaries between art, music, sound, poetry and other modes of performance, as in the work of Katalin Ladik .  

As well as published scores, books and articles, the British Library has three main manuscript collections relating to Cardew. The first, acquired in 1991 (Add MS 70727-70774 ), consists mostly of autograph scores. In 2010 the Library also acquired a large collection of Cardew’s papers (MS Mus. 1817) and scores - notably his annotated copy of Treatise used in early performances. In 2011 the British Library was also presented with a series of Cardew’s notebooks with sketches, jottings and writings dating from 1958-1980 (MS Mus. 1741). Complementing all of this are recordings of oral history interviews  with people who knew Cardew (C1430) and, of course, recordings of performances of the pieces themselves - searchable in our Sound & Moving Image catalogue.

 

Chris Scobie, Curator of Music Manuscripts. British Library. 

 

Today (30 June 2017) is the seventy-first birthday of the composer Giles Swayne, born in Hitchin, Hertfordshire. Swayne’s undergraduate education was at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, where he studied classics and music. This was followed by postgraduate study in composition at the Royal Academy of Music under Harrison Birtwistle, Alan Bush, and Nicholas Maw. Like most composers, Swayne’s early career featured a range of related musical activities. These include working as a répétitur at Glyndebourne in 1973–1974, and as an editor for Novello, which was also his publisher from the late-1970s to 2002, after which he switched to the publishing company he had founded in 2001, Gonzaga Music.

The British Library possesses two major Swayne holdings. The first consists of recordings made by Swayne in 1982 of Jola music in Senegal and the Gambia. Traditional musics from various African cultures are an important influence on much of Swayne’s compositional output, starting with CRY, op. 27, an eighty-minute work for twenty-eight amplified voices and electronic treatment composed in 1979 and dedicated to Messiaen, with whom Swayne had recently studied as a visiting member of Messiaen’s class at the Paris Conservatoire in 1976–1977 (one of the errands Swayne ran for Messiaen during that time was to obtain English-language ornithological books). In his programme note for the work, Swayne speaks of a fascination with a recording which he first heard in 1977 of music from the Ba-Benzele pygmies: “I played the record until it was nearly worn out, then tried to work out how the music was put together.”.

The second holding, acquired last year, is the Giles Swayne Collection, containing music manuscripts, scores, and work-books dating from 1968 to 2015. This material elucidates some of the processes Swayne deploys in his approach to composing. One recurrent process is his construction and deployment of modes. The utilisation of these modes is rendered explicit in his Bagatelles for solo pianoforte, of which Book 2 was the first to be published, in 2012. For the Bagatelles, each individual piece is allocated a particular numbered mode: for example, the eleventh uses “mode 11 on B-flat”. The mode itself is written-out in a draft of the work:

Composition draft of the opening of the eleventh of Swayne’s Bagatelles. Ff. 66v–67r of work-book 85. British Library shelfmark: MS Mus. 1808/1/25. Copyright © Giles Swayne and Gonzaga Music; reproduced by kind permission of the same.

This is part of a larger schema for the allocation of a whole family of modes across Swayne’s Bagatelles (including those not yet composed):

Grid outlining the allocation of modes among his Bagatelles for solo pianoforte. Verso of the first leaf after the front cover of work-book 81. British Library shelfmark: MS Mus. 1808/1/24. Copyright © Giles Swayne and Gonzaga Music; reproduced by kind permission of the same.

Swayne’s process for assembling a family of related modes resembles the construction of a tone-matrix in dodecaphony through processes of transposition, retrograde, and inversion. However, this modal lexicon differs from dodecaphony in that it does not seek to utilise all twelve pitch-classes. A wont for limiting the pitch-material can, arguably, be traced back to CRY and to the impact of Swayne’s first hearing of the traditional music of Ba-Benzele pygmies in 1977, after which he cultivated a compositional style with an aversion to the high density of distinct pitches often associated with dodecaphony, instead seeking, as he describes in his programme-note for CRY, “to shift the musical weight from the pitch and harmony to rhythm”.

A closer scrutiny of the means employed by Swayne to construct his modes can be discerned from the sketches for his Symphony no. 1, op. 112 (not to be confused with his earlier work Symphony for small orchestra, op. 37, where the label “Symphony” is intended to be ironic). These demonstrate a systematic approach, grounded in atonal theory, to the assembly of modes, one which might be compared to Messiaen’s modes of limited transposition or to Slonimsky’s Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns. However, Swayne’s methodology for assembling modes seeks neither the restrictions characteristic of Messiaen’s modes nor the exhaustiveness of Slonimsky’s collection. Rather, Swayne’s collection of modes is assembled by dividing the octave into two cells starting a tritone apart, each cell containing four notes and sharing the same Basic Interval Pattern (that is, the combination of intervals between each pair of adjacent notes, including the first note of the next cell to complete the last pair), but with different Successive-Interval Arrays (that is, the permutation between the aforementioned pairs).*

Sketches for the Symphony no. 1, op. 112, showing some of the modes. Ff. 66v–67r of work-book 80. British Library shelfmark: MS Mus. 1808/1/24. Mode I has a Successive-Interval Array of 1‒1‒3‒1‒3‒1‒1‒1 (each of the two cells comprising the Basic Interval Pattern 1113), whilst Mode III has a Successive-Interval Array of 1‒2‒2‒1‒2‒1‒1‒2 (each of the two cells comprising the Basic Interval Pattern 1122). The top line on the right shows Mode I arranged according to a particular syntax for the degrees of the mode (as opposed to ascending order), these being denoted by the numbers in circles above the stave (1, 2, 4, 7, 3, 8, 6, 5). This syntax is then applied to Mode II on the following line. Copyright © Giles Swayne and Gonzaga Music; reproduced by kind permission of the same.

The array of transpositions of Mode I present on the left is derived from the mode itself, the result being that the mode can be discerned both horizontally and vertically. Swayne equates the role of the tritone, as the bisector of the modes, to the “dominant”, a term which alludes to the vocabulary of diatonic functional harmony. This allusion is furthered by Swayne’s selection (the circled passages on the left of the “dominant” form of Mode III (with G-sharp as the root) to counterbalance the “tonic” form of Mode I (with D as the root), a procedure which could be said to parallel the role of the dominant key as a source of contrast in musical forms governed by diatonic harmony.

When it comes to situating the role of the modes in the compositional process, the lacunae offer a hint as to Swayne’s workflow:

Sketches for the Symphony no. 1, op. 112, showing a passage for which some facets have been drafted very precisely, and others yet to be determined. Ff. 43v–44r of work-book 81. Shelfmark: MS Mus. 1808/1/24. Mode I and Mode II (which has the Successive-Interval Array 1‒1‒2‒2‒1‒2‒1‒2, each cell thus having the same Basic Interval Pattern as Mode III) are combined, with the union (“Aggregate mode”) containing eleven pitch-classes and the intersection (“Common mode” — that is, the notes common to both modes) containing five. At the bottom, Swayne constructs two “Urchords” for each mode, the first chord utilising (from bottom to top) the 8^th, 5^th, 1^st, & 3^rd degrees of the mode, and the second chord utilising the 2^nd, 6^th, 7^th, & 4^th degrees of the mode. Copyright © Giles Swayne and Gonzaga Music; reproduced by kind permission of the same.

Here, Swayne has indicated the quantity of bars, their time-signatures, and the modes to be deployed therein. The near-absence of individual notes and rhythms suggests that they may not have been determined at the time that this sketch was written (alternatively, this absence may denote an abandoned attempt at a fair copy, but the context renders such a conjecture implausible). In other words, it seems that, as with the Bagatelles, the deployment of modes in his Symphony no. 1 is a structural element determined at an early juncture.

The Giles Swayne Collection affords rich insights into some of his compositional processes, although it also raises many questions. Foremost among them is the question of what Swayne will compose next. He is most prolific as a composer of choral music, and his output includes commissions from both amateur and professional choirs, and especially the choir of Clare College, University of Cambridge, where he was Composer-in-Residence from 2006 to 2014. Nonetheless, the numeration of his Symphony no. 1 seems to suggest that Swayne is open to commissions for another symphony…

 

Sasha Millwood, Doctoral Researcher (Arts & Humanities Research Council Collaborative Doctoral Partnership), Music Collections, British Library, and University of Glasgow 

 

 *A Successive-Interval Array is a means of describing of a scale, mode, or set of notes in terms of the intervals between each adjacent pair of notes, resulting in a series of numbers which denote the successive intervals, in semitones. The term is utilised by Parks in his book The Music of Claude Debussy to describe pitch-class sets in a manner which takes account of the permutation of intervals between adjacent pitches. A Basic Interval Pattern (as conceived by Forte in his book The Structure of Atonal Music) describes the combination of the aforementioned intervals present, but ordered according to size of interval rather than according to their syntax within the scale, mode, or set of notes itself.

Music cataloguing had a rather shaky beginning in the British Library. In the Library's early years when it was part of the British Museum, no separate music department existed. The sheet music which did come sporadically into the Museum was regarded as a problem: it was hard to catalogue by the rules appropriate to books (this remains true today), difficult to store (this also remains true), and, as music was not yet regarded as a proper subject for academic study, not particularly valued.

From the 1820s onwards the study of music grew in importance,  and Museum library users started to complain about the lack of access to music in the collection. In February 1838, a piece in the journal Musical World expressed their frustration:

Treasures there are: but the individual in search of them is in the situation of Tantalus, hearing the gurgling, ever-living springs, but doomed never to slake his thirst. Your attendant affirms that there are piles, folios, sheets innumerable of music: but they are admitted to the bewildered enquirer to be in the most admired confusion. (Quoted in Alec Hyatt King, A wealth of music (1979), p. 29).

At the behest of Anthony Panizzi, Keeper of Printed Books, a report on the collections of music was prepared for the Trustees in 1841 by the Principal Librarian , Henry Ellis. As a result of this, it was decided to create a separate catalogue of music, both printed and manuscript. Panizzi submitted plans for the work, including eight rules to be followed by the temporary cataloguer (a fascinating smaller relative of his famous 91 rules published in the same year, and of great importance for the future development of music cataloguing). The successful candidate for this job was Thomas Oliphant, who remained in charge of the printed music collections thereafter until 1850, despite an unfriendly working relationship with Panizzi, and despite initial disapproval of his appointment from some contemporaries; the Musical World describing him as an "amateur", and a writer in The Musical Examiner referring to him as "Mr Elephant"!

The music was physically separated from the rest of the collection, and work began on cataloguing. Oliphant  separated the collection into two divisions, vocal music and instrumental music. To vocal music he assigned shelfmarks beginning with upper-case letters, and to instrumental music, shelfmarks beginning with lower-case letters. The letter indicated the height of a volume, with "A" being the smallest and "I" the tallest.

Vocal music shelfmarks (beginning with upper-case letter)  

Instrumental music shelfmarks (beginning with lower-case letters)

There were up to five components to a shelfmark; a letter, a number, a letter, a number, and often also a bracketed number. For example, H.5.g.3.(4.) indicated  a vocal music publication, in the "H" height sequence, in the fifth press (cupboard) of that sequence, on shelf "g" of that press, in the third volume on that shelf, and comprising the fourth bound item in that volume.

This system has outlived its original cases and cupboards and in its essentials (vocal/instrumental division, height, sequential allocation of letter/number, and tract number or bound item number) is still in use today. It is accommodated in our library management system which has been "tweaked" to be case-sensitive where music shelfmarks are concerned. It has lasted due to the infinite number of possibilities for adding to Oliphant's sequences, and has also enabled the Library to maximise space by placing items of a similar size together.

By 1850, Oliphant had single-handedly prepared catalogues of both the manuscript and printed music. The printed music catalogue alone contained 27 volumes. During his time at the Museum, Oliphant must have personally catalogued 24,000 titles! Cataloguing rules and library systems have changed vastly since then, but today's library and catalogue users are indebted to the ingenuity and energy of these early British Library staff members.

Caroline Shaw, Music Processing and Cataloguing Team Manager

Based on a presentation by James Clements, 2004, with information from: Alec Hyatt King, Printed music in the British Museum (London, 1979). YA.1997.a.10519

 

Today (27 May 2017) is the eighty-ninth birthday of the Scottish-American composer Thea Musgrave, born in Barnton, Midlothian, but, since the mid-1970s, resident in the USA. Following a major purchase in 2009, with assistance from the Eccles Centre for American Studies, the British Library has the world’s largest institutional collection of Musgrave archival papers, which include music manuscripts, programmes, correspondence, and photographs.

Musgrave studied at the University of Edinburgh, enrolling initially as a medical student, before switching to study music, under Hans Gál and Mary Grierson. An important influence during that time was the legacy of one of Edinburgh’s former Reid Professors of Music, Donald Francis Tovey: Musgrave says she “read absolutely every word of Donald Francis Tovey”. After graduating from Edinburgh in 1950, having won its Tovey Memorial Prize, Musgrave moved to Paris to study with the celebrated pedagogue Nadia Boulanger.

It is from these Paris years (1950–1954) that the earliest material in the collection originates: the manuscript for a set of five songs to poetry by Ezra Pound and Louis Macneice, premièred at the Cercle de l’Union Interallié in Paris, on 16 May 1951, with Musgrave herself as the pianist and Doda Conrad as the baritone. Although Musgrave does not use opus-numbers (with the exception of her Divertimento for string orchestra, op.15), she refers to this set informally as her opus one.

Front cover of the programme for a concert at the Cercle de l’Union Interallié on 16 May 1951

Inside of the programme for a concert at the Cercle de l'Union Interallié on 16 May 1951. The Musgrave songs are listed as the sixth item (the items are demarcated by Roman numerals). In this programme, the make of the pianoforte (in this case, a Pleyel) is specified.

Contents-page of the autograph manuscript for the set of five songs to poems by Pound and Macneice (misspelt as "Macniece"). Copyright (c) Thea Musgrave and Novello & Co Ltd; reproduced by kind permission of the same.

The programme has some evident typographical errors, misspelling Macneice (as “Macniece”) and ‘An Immorality’ (as “An Immortality”). More interesting, however, is a discrepancy in the syntax: when compared with the manuscript, ‘An Immorality’ and ‘The return’ have been swapped. Meanwhile, the title of the concert, “jeunes compositeurs et vieux maîtres anglais”, characterises Musgrave as an English composer — this is probably an erroneous conflation of English and British, rather than a belief that Musgrave were English.

Among the other performers in the concert was the pianist Luise Vosgerchian, who, although not involved in performing Musgrave on this occasion, was the dedicatee of a subsequent Musgrave composition, the first pianoforte sonata, completed in January 1952. The British Library has the fair copy for this work, which is withdrawn.

Title and dedication from the fair copy of the first pianoforte sonata (withdrawn). Copyright (c) Thea Musgrave, Chester Music Ltd, and Novello & Co Ltd; reproduced by kind permission of the same.

Musgrave also withdrew three of the five songs in the aforementioned set, resulting in a pair of songs, both settings of Ezra Pound.

Title-page of the fair copy of the two songs, both to texts by Pound, not withdrawn from the set of five songs. Copyright (c) Thea Musgrave and Novello & Co Ltd; reproduced by kind permission of the same.

Whatever Musgrave’s reasons for this partial withdrawal, the manuscript is a fascinating record of an early case of Musgrave’s wont for collecting texts from more than one author in a single song-cycle — this approach of text-setting as anthology becomes more pronounced in several of her later vocal and choral works, the most recent of which is The Voices of Our Ancestors, which was premièred, in London, on 9 July 2015.

Following her studies with Boulanger, during which she was awarded the Lili Boulanger Memorial Prize, Musgrave returned to the UK, where she was in demand not only as a composer, but also as a pianist, lecturer, and, in due course, conductor of her own work. From the late-1950s, Chester Music was her publisher, until she moved to Novello in the mid-1970s.

Yet, a number of her subsequent works remain unpublished. Of the unpublished works represented in the collection, a suitably festive example is her contribution to a set of variations on Happy Birthday.

Title-page of the fair copy of Musgrave's variation on Happy Birthday, written as part of a set to celebrate the seventieth birthday of William Walton. Copyright (c) Thea Musgrave, Chester Music Ltd, and Novello & Co Ltd; reproduced by kind permission of the same.

First page of music in the fair copy of Musgrave's variation on Happy Birthday, written as part of a set to celebrate the seventieth birthday of William Walton. Copyright (c) Thea Musgrave, Chester Music Ltd, and Novello & Co Ltd; reproduced by kind permission of the same.

Musgrave’s “variation in one minute” is third in the set, with the other composers being Richard Rodney Bennett, Malcolm Arnold, Nicholas Maw, Robert Simpson, and Peter Maxwell Davies (the latter's contribution now housed in the British Library as Add MS 71323). The set was premièred by the London Symphony Orchestra on 28 March 1972, the day before William Walton’s seventieth birthday, in the Royal Festival Hall. A recording is available in the British Library’s Sound Archive, at shelfmark C1398/0775.

Although the Musgrave collection does not include the programme for this concert, there are hundreds of other programmes relating to Musgrave — some were collected by her, and many more were sent to her by performers, promoters, and friends. These document the significant influence and reach of Musgrave’s oeuvre in various continents, and not just in the English-speaking world.

For example, in 1988, Musgrave and her husband, Peter Mark, visited Jerusalem for a tour in which each of them conducted the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. Musgrave’s concert comprised four of her own compositions from various points in her career to date, cumulatively spanning a period of twenty-three years. Conveniently, the programme is bilingual:

A page, in Hebrew, from a programme for a concert of Musgrave orchestral works in the Henry Crown Symphony Hall, Jerusalem on 27 March 1988, performed by the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Musgrave.

The corresponding page in English from the same programme.

Not all programmes have a translation into English so readily available. In respect of the world première of Orfeo III, which took place in Moscow on 9 October 1993, Musgrave annotated the programme with a translation of the key information.

Programme for a concert in the Rachmaninoff Hall, Moscow State Conservatoire on 9 October 1993, featuring the world première of Musgrave's /Orfeo III/, performed by Orchestra 2001, conducted by James Freeman. Musgrave was not present at the concert, but has annotated the programme with an outline translation. Annotations copyright (c) Thea Musgrave and Novello & Co Ltd; reproduced by kind permission of the same.

As the numeral suggests, Orfeo III, scored for flute and string quintet, is a transcription based on two earlier compositions. This transcription was written for Orchestra 2001, conducted by James Freeman. Here, Musgrave is presented as an American composer, sharing the programme with Thomas Whitman, Gerald Levinson, and Richard Wernick. By 1993, Musgrave had been permanently resident in the USA for almost two decades.

This performance in Russia is by no means the only case of Musgrave’s compositions touring continental Europe. Indeed, some of her works have received greater attention on the continent than in the UK, her country of birth. Indeed, Musgrave’s opera Simón Bolívar, completed in 1992, received its European première in Regensburg on 31 March 1995, and has yet to be performed in full in the UK.

Front cover of programme for the first European production of Musgrave's opera Simón Bolívar, at the Städtische Bühnen Regensburg in March 1995.

 

Sasha Millwood, Doctoral Researcher (Arts & Humanities Research Council Collaborative Doctoral Partnership), Music Collections, British Library, and University of Glasgow 

From Byrd to Britten and Monteverdi to Mozart, a wealth of British Library music manuscripts are available to browse, free-of-charge, on the Digitised Manuscripts website.

MS Mus. 1591, My Layde Nevells Booke (1591)

At the time of writing, you can view no fewer than 323 music manuscripts on the site. For a full list of what is currently available in PDF format, please see this file: Download BL Digitised Music Manuscripts Spring 2017.

This is also available in the form of a spreadsheet (although this format cannot be downloaded on all web browsers): Download BL Digitised Music Manuscripts Spring 2017.

Additional content is added regularly. Our last digitised manuscript, published just a few days ago, was Additional MS 29996. Dating from the seventeenth century, this is a collection of motets, madrigals and fancies, by Thomas Tomkins and others, interspersed with political verses, satires, recipes.

Additional MS 29996: a recently-digitised music manuscript, including works by Thomas Tomkins 

If you are looking for something more specific, why not consult our blog posts on the material we’ve digitised relating to Handel, Mozart, Purcell and Wagner. For more general advice on using the site, we highly recommend this blog post.

We'll be posting updated versions of these lists quarterly, so be sure to check the blog again in a few months time for an updated edition. In the meantime, to get the latest news about our digitisation projects, acquisitions and events, please follow us on Twitter: @BL_Music_Colls. 

Following the revival of Handel’s music that took place in the mid-20th century, there are probably no more ‘authentic’ Handel operas to be rediscovered. This is not the case with his pasticcio operas, however.  In these ‘concoctions’ (or pasticcii), Handel put together a show by taking an existing libretto and recycling popular Italian arias written by other composers. English audiences of the time were no more proficient in Italian than today’s, but they enjoyed hearing a good tune and seeing a favourite diva perform.

Opera Settecento is a London-based company that brings to life forgotten 18th-century opera seria (that is, Italian operas on heroic or tragic subjects). Fittingly, the company takes its name from the Italian for “18th century”, “Settecento”. Recently, musical director Leo Duarte created a new performing edition of Handel’s pasticcio opera Ormisda drawing on several sources from the British Library’s extensive music collections.

Ormisda is the second of three pasticcii resurrected by the company, starting with Elpidia (1725) in 2016 and concluding with Venceslao (1731) in 2018. It is a tale of power, love and unhappy families. A wicked stepmother, Palmira, is determined to elevate her own son to the throne of Persia. She displaces his elder half-brother and disregards the feelings of the Queen of Armenia who is in love with the younger brother but destined to marry whoever becomes King of Persia.

Ormisda was first performed in 1730 at the King’s Theatre Haymarket under the direction of the composer himself. Although it has been assigned an HWV number, meaning it is officially part of the catalogue of Handel’s works, the piece contains hardly any of Handel’s original music. The busy and entrepreneurial composer wrote the work as a “quick win” to keep up his profile, whilst at the same time giving himself time to concentrate on two new operas, Partenope and Lotario.  Interestingly, neither had the box-office success of the crowd-pleasing Ormisda.

Inspired by musicologist Reinhard Strohm’s work on Handel’s pasticcio operas, Duarte came to the British Library to assess whether neglected pieces such as Ormisda were worth performing and had something to say to today’s audiences. At the centre of his research was Additional MS 31551, a manuscript score of Ormisda dating from the 18th century. He converted this into a digital form which he could use to create a performing score and orchestral parts.

Handel’s Ormisda (18th century). British Library Additional MS 31551, folio 1 recto

Duarte also made use of the word-book (or libretto) dating from 1730 (11714.aa.20.(1)).

Word-book for Handel’s Ormisda (1730). British Library 11714.aa.20.(1.), title-page

Digitised as part of the British Library’s partnership with Google Books, the word-book is likely to have been sold as a souvenir. Theatre lighting of the time would have made it unreadable in situ, and opera plots of the period are notoriously difficult to navigate. The extra help provided by the word-book suggests audiences then had attention spans – and linguistic skills – about the same as now. The Italian text was rendered into English by an uncredited translator; the translation is quite poetic, especially the arias, with rhymes and in metre.

The libretto is by the Venetian Apostolo Zeno (1669-1750) and the musical material has been identified as coming from Leonardo Leo, Orlandini, Hasse, Conti and others, with five arias as yet unidentified. “There is hardly a note of Handel’s in there – maybe the odd recit,” says Duarte. Handel’s contribution was to delete sections that were superfluous to requirements. He understood how to import Italian repertoire and make it attractive to London audiences.

Although it is a beautiful copy and easy to read,  the manuscript contains some crossings-out and sections that have been covered over.

Handel’s Ormisda, with passages covered over. British Library Additional MS 31551, folio 23 verso

The word-book provides clues as to why that might be, since it contains crossings-out that match the score. These are complemented by manuscript annotations in an unknown hand such as “in score”, “not in score, but instead is the additional song… [sung by] Sig^a Merighi (C^o) [contralto]”.

Manuscript annotations in the word-book for Handel’s Ormisda. British Library 11714.aa.20.(1.), page 15

Having access to the British Library’s score and word-book side-by-side enabled Duarte to recreate a work that is not Handel’s, but has his stamp on it. This in turn provides a fascinating insight into Handel the showman and his understanding of what his audiences wanted.

 

Ruth Hansford

Grants Portfolio Manager, Endangered Archives Programme, British Library, and freelance opera surtitler