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Lot 472: PURCELL, HENRY.

Est: £1,500 GBP - £2,000 GBPSold:
Sotheby'sLondon, United KingdomMay 27, 2004

Item Overview

Description

Orpheus Britannicus. A Collection of all the Choicest Songs for One, Two, and Three Voices [...The Second Book, which renders the First Compleat.]. J. Heptinstall (volume 2: William Pearson), for Henry Playford, 1698-1702

Artist or Maker

Condition Report

folio (318 x 199mm), first editions, 2 volumes in one, portrait frontispiece by White after Closterman in volume 1, titles in red and black, dedications, epistles, verses and advertisements to each volume, type-set music throughout, early eighteenth-century panelled calf gilt, lettered "William Denison", spine elaborately gilt in compartments, some browning to preliminaries and occasionally thereafter, red-gilt label to spine slightly chipped, rebacked retaining original spine,

Literature

Day & Murrie 166 & 200; Hoboken xvi, 210-211; RISM P 5979 & 5983; Wing P 4218

Provenance

"Chr[?] Beal", contemporary inscription on endpaper. The binding may have been made for William Denison, the mid-eighteenth-century Principal of Magdalen Hall in Oxford.

Notes

This famous publication contains one hundred and fifty-three songs by Purcell, including first editions such as "Hark! Hark! each tree" (from the Ode on St Cecilia's Day, 1692, in full score) and "Music for a While". The printing of "Ah Belinda" (volume 1, page 193), is the only contemporary source for the music of Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas (1689), the earliest surviving manuscripts dating from after 1750. Copies of this work with the volumes bound separately commonly have the portrait present in both.

Auction Details

The Library of John R.B. Brett-Smith

by
Sotheby's
May 27, 2004, 12:00 AM EST

34-35 New Bond Street, London, LDN, W1A 2AA, UK