Seville, Meinardus Ungut and Stanislaus Polonus, 3 April, 1494.

First edition of the first Spanish book to make extensive use of typeset music printing, one of the finest products of early Spanish typography.

£35000

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

[Flanders, c. 1810.]

A very grand unpublished Requiem mass by the Flemish composer and singer Pierre Emmanuel Verheyen (1750–1819).

£8000

Vienna, 1821-1833

A rare collection of Schubert Lieder in a contemporary binding, apparently as retailed by the Czech music publisher Berra, including three first editions.

£7500

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

[France (probably Paris), c. 1787].

A contemporary scribal manuscript of Johann Christoph Vogel’s opera Démophon, from the library of Christoph Willibald Gluck.

£5250

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

Paris, Boivin, Leclair, Castagneri and the author, [c. 1750].

First edition; rare. Despite a strong cast and a lavish production, Zoroastre met with only limited success (and, it seems, much bewilderment) when first performed at the Opéra in 1749. By May 1752 Rameau and the librettist Louis de Cahusac had begun an extensive reworking of the opera....

£5000

Lyons, Guillaume Rouillé, 1562. 

Annotated copy, once owned by a music book collector, of the third edition (first 1557) of a remarkable Renaissance philosophical dialogue on the nature of love which marked the culmination of the very divisive ‘questione d’amore’ hotly debated in sixteenth-century literature. 

£2800

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

[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

Paris, Editions de la Sirène, 1920.

First edition of Milhaud’s Le boeuf sur le toit, Op. 58 (The ox on the roof, or The nothing-doing bar), a surrealist ballet-farce which became extremely popular in 1920s Paris.

£2400

Milan, [Giuseppe Mazzucchelli (colophon)], 1761.

First edition of Sacchi’s first work: a theoretical study of music and acoustic from a mathematical and physical perspective built upon the most innovative eighteenth-century physics. Galilei, Kapler, Newton, Mersenne, and contemporary works on the nature of air form the basis of Sacchi’s study of...

£2250

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

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

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

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

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

Zürich, gedruckt bei J. J. Ulrich, im Verlage des Herausgebers, 1840.

First edition, the partbook issue.  The work was also issued in score.  Both are very rare, OCLC locating a copy of the 1st Bass part at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and a set at the Swiss National Library.  There are apparently no copies in Germany: KVK shows the British Library copy (in score)...

£950

[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