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The Sale Catalogue of Gottfried Finger's Music Library: New Light on London Concert Life in the 1690s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Abstract

In the winter of 1704–5 Henry Playford advertised ‘a Choice Collection of Vocal and Instrumental Musick in Italian, French, and English’ owned by Gottfried Finger and partly collected by him ‘in his Travels to Italy’. Finger had evidently sold the collection to Johann Gottfried Keller and John Banister junior prior to his abrupt departure from England in 1701 after coming last in the competition to set Congreve's masque The Judgement of Paris. The discovery of a copy of the printed catalogue throws light on Finger's collecting activities in Italy and on the reception of Italian music in England. It also includes a list of ‘Mr. Finger's Great Pieces for his Consort in York-Buildings’, providing us with valuable new information about his concert activities in London in the 1690s, and about the size and composition of groups performing at York Buildings, London's first purpose-built concert hall. The list includes many pieces richly scored with brass, woodwind and strings, evidently performed with sizeable forces: most of the sets of parts are said to have been ‘Prick'd 3 times over’. It adds a number of new pieces to the catalogue of Finger's known compositions, and enables us to attribute to him an anonymous sonata for four recorders and continuo that was published in the twentieth century as by James Paisible.

Type
Original Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 2010

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Footnotes

1

This article was prepared during research leave from the University of Leeds in the spring of 2008 funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. An early version was given at the Thirteenth Biennial International Conference on Baroque Music at Leeds in July 2008. I am grateful to John Cunningham, Robert Hume, David Hunter, Harry Johnstone, Robert Rawson, Michael Robertson, Michael Talbot, Bryan White, and Andrew Woolley for assistance.

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38 Available in facsimile at <gallica.bnf.fr>. The Philidor manuscript is the source given for the edition of suites Nos. 3–5 and 7 by Johann Tuvesson, online at <www.lysator.liu.se/~tuben/scores>..+The+Philidor+manuscript+is+the+source+given+for+the+edition+of+suites+Nos.+3–5+and+7+by+Johann+Tuvesson,+online+at+.>Google Scholar

39 I am grateful to Graham O'Reilly for alerting me to these borrowings many years ago. There is a facsimile of the first two collections of Harmonia Anglicana with an introduction by Peter Holman (Alston, 2000). Modern edition of the Alexander the Great suite: Gottfried Finger, Music in Alexander the Great, ed. Brian Clark (Centelles, 2003). See also Smith, A Bibliography of … John Walsh, 22–3; Curtis A. Price, Music in the Restoration Theatre ([Ann Arbor MI], 1979), 218, 239; Rawson, ‘From Olomouc to London’, ii, 288–9, 336–7.Google Scholar

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