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Newly Discovered Autograph Keyboard Music of Purcell and Draghi
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
A manuscript of late seventeenth-century English harpsichord music was sold to an anonymous private collector at Sotheby's in London on 26 May 1994 for £276,500, a record price paid for any British music manuscript. The 85-page oblong quarto, in its original covers, includes 21 pieces in the hand of Henry Purcell (1659–95), five of which were previously unknown, and a further 17 works by Giovanni Battista Draghi (c.1640–1708), also probably autograph, four of which were previously unknown. The manuscript is important because of the rarity of Purcell autographs: this is the first to be sold at public auction since the great collection of fantazias and sonatas (now British Library, Add. MS 30,930) was offered in 1826, and the only major source to surface this century.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1995
References
1 I am grateful to Lisa Cox for giving me access to the manuscript before it was sold. I should also like to thank Andrew Ashbee, Christopher I logwood, Peter Holman, Simon Maguire, Stephen Roe, Robert Spencer and Robert Thompson for generous help and advice. Following a successful fund-raising campaign, the manuscript is now in the British Library.Google Scholar
2 See Morrison, Richard, ‘Purcell's Notebook Revealed’, The Times (17 November 1993), 35.Google Scholar
3 The Festing manuscript, which dales from about 1732–5, is partly autograph. For a full description, see Lisa Cox's catalogue no. 27 (autumn 1993), item 132.Google Scholar
4 See Philip H. Highfill, Jr, Kalman A. Burnim and Edward A. Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses … in London, 1660–1800 (Carbondale, 1973–93), v, 235–8.Google Scholar
5 See Caldwell, John, English Keyboard Music before the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1973); and Barry Cooper, English Solo Keyboard Music of the Middle and Late Baroque (New York, 1974).Google Scholar
6 See Giovanni Battista Draghi: Harpsichord Music, ed. Robert Klakowich, Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era, 61 (Madison, 1986), vii-viii.Google Scholar
7 Bartolomeo Albrici was also a respected harpsichordist and teacher in London; see Westrup, Jack, Purcell, rev. Nigel Fortune (London, 1980), 94.Google Scholar
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9 Cooper, Barry, ‘Keyboard Music’, The Blackwell History of Music in Britain, iii: The Seventeenth Century, ed. Ian Spink (Oxford, 1992). 359.Google Scholar
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11 ‘Harpsichord Music by Purcell and Clarke in Los Angeles’, The Journal of Musico logy, 4 (1985–6), 171–90.Google Scholar
12 For an account of this aspect of Playford's trade, see Thompson, Robert, ‘Manuscript Music in Purcell's London’, Early Music (forthcoming).Google Scholar
13 Compare, for exampie, Purcell's A Choice Collection of Lessons.Google Scholar
14 See Thompson, Robert, ‘English Music Manuscripts and the Fine Paper Trade, 1648–1688’ (Ph.D. dissertation, King's College London, 1988), 69–70; also private correspondence.Google Scholar
15 I am grateful to Robert Thompson for compiling this collation, some of which is necessarily conjectural. Groupings of folios show quires; some of the missing folios have been deduced.Google Scholar
16 All the previously unknown pieces by Purcell in the new manuscript will be published in The Works of Henry Purcell, vi: Harpsichord and Organ Music, rev. Christopher Hogwood (forthcoming).Google Scholar
17 For recent studies of Purcell's handwriting, see Thompson, Robert, ‘Purcell's Great Autographs’, Robert Shay, ‘Purcell as Collector of “Ancient” Music: Fitzwilliam MS 88’, Rebecca Herissone, ‘Purcell's Revisions of his Own Works’, and Peter Holman, ‘Purcell and Roseingrave: A New Autograph’, Purcell Studies, ed. Curtis Price (forthcoming).Google Scholar
18 See above, note 17.Google Scholar
19 Accounts of Ashtead Manor, printed in Franklin B. Zimmerman, Henry Purcell, 1659–1695: His Life and Times (2nd edn Philadelphia, 1983), 228–9. Zimmerman assumes this to be Katherine Howard. Lady Annabella Howard, Sir Robert's fourth wife and the dedicatee of the first volume of Orpheus Britannicus, was also his pupil and later erected a memorial tablet to the composer in Westminster Abbey. Frances Purcell remarked that Lady Howard honoured her late husband ‘with the Title of Your Master’ and that he contributed ‘to the vast Improvements You have made in this Science’ (dedication of Orpheus Britannicus).Google Scholar
20 The Harpsichord Master (1697), ed. Robert Petre (Wellington and London, 1980). The discovery of the unique copy of this book is reported by Petre in ‘A New Piece by Henry Purcell’, Early Music, 6 (1979), 374–9.Google Scholar
21 'Harpsichord Music by Purcell and Clarke in Los Angeles“, 189.Google Scholar
22 See Price, Curtis, Instrumental Music for London Theatres 1690–1700, Music for London Entertainment 1660–1800. series A, 3 (Withyham. 1987), ix.Google Scholar
23 See Curti, Martha, ‘John Playford's Apollo's Banquet 1670‘ (Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 1977), 122–9, for identification of this elusive edition.Google Scholar
24 The abbreviation ‘Kl.’ refers to the numbers assigned lo Draghi's works in Giovanni Battista Draghi: Harpsichord Music, ed. Klakowich.Google Scholar
25 Spink, Ian, ‘Draghi, Giovanni Battista’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1980), v, 606.Google Scholar
26 Giovarmi Battista Draghi: Harpsichord Music, ed. Klakowich, ix.Google Scholar
27 See ibid., vii.Google Scholar
28 I thank Robert Thompson for this suggestion.Google Scholar