Basel, Peter Perna and Heinrich Petrus, 1566. 

First edition in Latin, a remarkable copy once owned by one of the preeminent music theorists and composers of Renaissance Italy, Gioseffo Zarlino.  The translation was prepared from the Greek by the German scholar Wilhelm Canter (1542–1575), author of an acclaimed Syntagma, a systematic...

£2750

London, Faber & Faber, [1957].

First UK edition.

£125

Paris, Augustin-Martin Lottin, Michel Lambert and Nicolas-Bonaventure Duchesne, 1756.

First edition. The designation ‘IIe edition, corrigée et augmentée’ on the title arises from the publication in 1755 of L’art du chant, dedié a Madame de Pompadour by Jean-Antoine Bérard, whom Blanchet accuses of incorporating his material. The two works certainly include many passages which...

£750

1864-1887

For all but five years of his long career Brown was organist at churches in Brentwood, Essex, and at Sir Anthony Browne’s School in the town. He was a fertile composer of more than 800 pieces of church music, including the hymn tunes ‘Ingatestone’, ‘Purleigh’, ‘Saffron Walden’, and ‘Tiltey...

£450

London, Printed for the Benefit of the musical Fund; and sold by T. Payne and Son ... 1785.

First edition. The Handel Commemoration Concerts of 1784, conceived the previous year by Viscount Fitzwilliam, Sir Watkins Williams Wynn and Joah Bates to celebrate the centenary of the birth of George Frederick Handel, were performances on a scale then unprecedented in England. On the morning of Wednesday...

£1250

Venice, Gabriel Giolitto, 1559. 

Second edition, published in the same year as the first with a few amendments, of the earliest Italian and most innovative treatise on rhetoric.  The author ‘builds an original account of rhetoric by adding Ciceronian and Hermogenean material to an Aristotle base’ (Mack, p. 172). 

£2250

Venice, 1746-1787.

A collection of seven libretti for sacred oratorios, to be performed in the Oratory of St Philip Neri in Venice.

£375

London, Novello & Company, 1911.

A handsome copy of the Coronation service, with choral settings of the music sung, including (among others) Parry’s ‘I was glad’, Handel’s ‘Zadok the Priest’, and ‘God save the King!’, arranged by Sir Frederick Bridge (1844–1924), organist at Westminster Abbey.

£450

London, Novello & Company, 1937.

A handsome copy of the Coronation service, with choral settings of the music sung, including work by Purcell, Handell, Byrd, and Vaughan Williams.

£275

Vienna, Johann Thomas von Trattner, 1770.

First edition of Gluck’s Paride ed Elena, which tells the story of events between the judgment of Paris and the flight of Paris and Helen to Troy. It was premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 3 November 1770.

£5000

Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, [1809–11]. 

Very rare first complete edition of Reichardt’s musical settings of Goethe’s poetry, comprising 128 settings of which thirty-nine appear here for the first time. 

£6500

A specially bound volume containing ten of Gounod’s London-published songs, all signed and inscribed in pencil on the upper wrapper to the English actor Arthur Cecil Blunt (stage name Arthur Cecil, 1843–1896): ‘To my friend Arthur C. Blunt. Ch, Gounod’. The songs, of which eight are in English,...

£2000

[Italy and Germany, c. 1815.] 

An attractive compilation of solo piano music and popular songs, gathered partly in Italy circa 1815-16 (no doubt during a Grand Tour) and bound up in England shortly afterwards. 

£2500

… London: Printed for J. Wilcox … 1740.

First edition, based largely on the Dictionnaire de Musique of Sébastien de Brossard and the musical articles in Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, with some original material. One of two variant issues, this has ‘A’ on the title-page above the ‘i’ in ‘Dictionary’.

£650

Naples, dalla tipografia del Giornale Enciclopedico, 1820.

First edition in book form, reprinted from the Giornale Enciclopedico di Napoli, with some additional material in an appendix to the second volume. The first volume is on the music and musicians of Naples, the second volume deals with Neapolitan painters up to the eighteenth century.

£150

[Leipzig, Mainzer Presse for Insel-Verlag, 1928.]

First edition of Hofmannsthal’s text for Richard Strauss’s opera – Hofmannsthal himself considered it to be his finest libretto. The opera was first performed on 6 June 1928 in Dresden, five weeks before Hofmannsthal’s death. The plot is a free adaptation of Euripides’ Helena, which introduces...

£750

Paris, l’auteur, [1734].

First edition. A luxury production, including some of the finest French baroque violin music, dedicated to King Louis XV, who had recently appointed Leclair ‘Ordinaire de la musique de la chambre du roy’

£2250

Mainz, B. Schott’s sons, 1970.

First edition of the graphic Hörpartitur to Ligeti’s ground-breaking electronic composition, with a vinyl recording of the piece, number 186 of 200 copies signed and numbered by the composer, in a striking design binding by the acclaimed contemporary bookbinder and musicologist Luigi Castiglioni....

£14000

Padua, ‘dalla Tipografia e Fonderia della Minerva’, 1821. 

First edition of Majer’s treatise on music, ‘a conservative defence of tradition as part of a backlash against the popularity of Rossini’s reforms’ (Baragwanath, p. 29). 

£185

Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, [1843].

First edition of Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ Symphony. It was first conceived when Mendelssohn visited Scotland during 1829, but the composer only began work in earnest ten years later.

£1500