TRIOS AND QUARTETS, PUBLISHED AND IMPORTED
NAPIER, William, publisher and music-seller.
Three part-books of trios (complete) and three (of four) of quartets (lacking the secondo part), published by Napier and others, and assembled for retail by him c. 1775.
Mostly London, 1769–1775.
6 vols, folio, comprising sixteen collections of trios (in total 96 works) and thirteen collections of quartets (78 works), bound in parts; manuscript Index to the Primo parts within a large stippled engraved border signed ‘Mango sculp’ and with the note at the foot ‘These Books made up at William Napiers Music Shop Corner of Lancaster Court, Strand’; a few scattered spots and stains, withal in very good condition, bound in worn but original half calf and marbled boards, red morocco labels to covers, spines very dry, chipped and splitting.
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Three part-books of trios (complete) and three (of four) of quartets (lacking the secondo part), published by Napier and others, and assembled for retail by him c. 1775.
An impressive collection of string trios and quartets, including compositions by Giordani, Boccherini, J. C. Bach, Abel, and the virtuoso Maddalena Sirmen, as well as the first publication in England of any work by Haydn (the quartets Op.1 and 2).
The volumes were bound and indexed for retail by the Scottish violinist and music publisher William Napier (c. 1740–1812), who in 1772 opened a music shop in London at the ‘corner of Lancaster Court, Strand’. To his own editions of 1772–75 of works by contemporaries active in London like Pierre Vachon (1738–1803), William Cramer (1746–1799), Frederic Schumann (fl. 1760–80, best known as a performer on the musical glasses), and Tommaso Giordani (1730–1806), Napier has added a fine selection of publications published in recent years in London by Peter Welcker and Robert Bremner, including trios by Stefano Galeotti (1723–1790), Jacob Herschel (1734–1792, the elder brother of the astronomer and composer William Herschel), Carl Friedrich Abel (1723–1787), Antonín Kammel (1730–1784), and Luigi Boccherini (1743–1805); and quartets by Abel, Kammel, Johann Christian Bach (1735–1832), and Josef Haydn – unauthorized printings of his earliest quartets (as well as two spurious attributions). Bremner’s printings of Opp. 1 and 2 were preceded only by editions printed in Amsterdam, and were the first works by Haydn to appear in print in the British Isles – his reputation grew steadily from that point until his arrival in London in 1791.
Also included is the Paris-printed first edition of six quartets by Maddalena Sirmen (née Lombardini, 1745–1818); unusually for the age she was not from a family of musicians, but studied under Tartini, and was evidently highly esteemed as a violinist. She was ‘one of the first women who composed music for string quartet’ (her husband’s name also appears on the title-page) and ‘oversaw the publication of her own works’, (E. Wiesbauer, Introduction to Lombardini Sirmen’s Six string quartets). She performed in London in 1771 (as a violinist) and 1772 (as a singer), and Napier was to publish a reprint of the current quartets as well as several other works by her.
A full list of contents is available on request.