34 21st January 2012 antiquarian books


Tuning in to the higher prices


■ Music sales give a snapshot as to who is top of the pops


Ian McKay reports


SCHUMANN’S take on Goethe’s Faust was the No.1 classical choice in an end-of- year music sale at Sotheby’s, leaving Mozart, C.P.E. Bach and Britten to provide the main supporting acts.


This was the big event in this specialist


field, but this report also includes items from other UK and US sales and an exceptional collection of autographed photographs of classical musicians and singers sold at Heathrow. Top of the charts in Sotheby’s


November 30 sale was a substantially complete draft of Robert Schumann’s mature but long neglected masterpiece, Szenen aus Goethe’s Faust, the first major setting of both Pts I & II of one of the great landmarks of German literature. Around two thirds of this 122pp


autograph composing manuscript of the 1840s, which sold at a low-estimate £600,000, focuses on Act V of Pt II


and is devoted to Faust’s death and transfiguration, culminating in the famous final chorus, ‘Das Ewig-Weibliche’. Most other composers – Spohr, Gounod, Boito, Berlioz, for example – were attracted to the more obviously lyrical and dramatic scenes of Pt I. A group of eight manuscript part-


books prepared for Felix Mendelssohn’s famous 1829 performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion, the key event in the restoration of Bach’s music and reputation, sold for £45,000 at Sotheby’s, but the real Bach hit was a letter his son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, wrote in November 1787 to the publisher Engelhardt Benjamin Schwickert. Unpublished and previously known


only from a brief summary given in a 1922 Berlin auction catalogue – and untraced since that time – the latter is an irate response to Schwickert’s perfectly reasonable request that he look over and make any necessary revisions to his essay on keyboard playing, Versuch über die ahre Art das Clavier zu spielen, prior to the publication of a third edition. Though that 1787 edition did finally


appear with the addition of “sechs neue Clavierstücken” and other revisions, this letter sees CPE reminding Schwickert that his treatise, first published in 1753, “is perhaps freer of any flaws than any book in the world and certainly does not need looking at, much less correcting”. He also points out that his age and health determine that he should leave such


Above: sold for £22,000 at Sotheby’s on November 30 was this contemporary gouache on vellum portrait of musicians and singers assembled in the ducal chapel of Mecklenburg-Schwerin at Ludwigslust. The painting, which dates to c.1770, is the work of Leopold August Abel, brother of the composer and viola da gamba player Carl Friedrich Abel, and himself the first violin of the court orchestra – so this fascinating painting is also in one sense a self-portrait. The woman in the foreground is probably Luise Friederike, Duchess of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and a keen musician.


production matters to his publishers and that he will not be undertaking the task in person, “at any price”. Catalogued as a “spectacular, rare and


long-untraced”, a single sketch leaf for two of Mozart’s celebrated vocal canons sold for a treble-estimate £300,000 in the New Bond Street sale. The works concerned are the three-


part Difficile lectu mihi mars (K.559) and the four-part Bona nox! Bist a rechta ox (K.561), both of which date from the composer’s annus mirabilis, from the summer of 1788 that also saw the composition of his three last symphonies. Just two of a group of ten canons


entered by Mozart in his own thematic catalogue less than a month after the entry for the celebrated ‘Jupiter’ symphony, No. 41, they were intended to be performed in the informal, social setting of his own circle and the comic and sometimes characteristically scatological words were doubtless his own as well. The earlier canon (K.559) uses a vulgar


German text [Leck du mi im Arsch – kiss my arse] and some ribald Italian [cujoni – balls] that, as the cataloguer explains, is designed to be discerned through a thin veil of pseudo-Latin, Difficile lectu mihi mars et jonicu. In K.561 Mozart mixes Latin, Viennese


dialect, French, Italian and even English to a text that again can be seen either as boisterously humorous or childishly crude, but when theses canons were first


“It seems that there is no complete copy [of The Four Seasons] in UK collections and the copy in the British library lacks the second cello part, containing the obligato for the ‘Largo,’ in the fourth concerto, ‘Winter’”


published by Breitkopf & Hartel in 1804, a sanitised text was substituted. In 1935, the leaf was recorded as


being in the possession of the French musicologist, J.G. Prud’homme, but it has not been available to modern Mozart scholars since that time. Printed material in Sotheby’s sale saw a


bid of £22,000 on the vocal score for Die Zauberflöte [The Magic Flute]. Following its hugely successful first


staging in Vienna in September 1791, the publishers Artaria and Kozeluch competed to bring out the more popular numbers. Artaria was first off the mark, but Kozeluch produced the more complete selection in the years 1791-93 – this present volume containing 38 separately paginated numbers. Eighteenth century paintings of musical ensembles are rare, but a 1770 gouache


Left: Cristóbal de Morales’ Missarum, a collection of 16 polyphonic masses by the most important figure in early 16th century Spanish music, was first published in Rome in 1544, but though the copy seen at Swanns of New York on October 17 comprised only the first volume (of two) of the second edition (second issue), printed at Lyons in 1546, all early editions are rare. No copies of either the Rome or Lyons editions appear in auction records and this odd volume, in a restored period binding and once in the library of the Monastery of the Holy Cross at Coimbra, sold for $28,000 (£17,690).


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