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MS Mus. 1707
- Record Id:
- 032-001563187
- Hierarchy Root Ancestor Record Id:
- 032-001563187
- MDARK:
- ark:/81055/vdc_100000000035.0x0000de
- LARK:
- ark:/81055/vdc_100156353246.0x000001
- SLARK:
- Format:
- ISAD(G)
- Reference (shelfmark):
- MS Mus. 1707
- Title:
- Claudio Monteverdi: letter to the Marchese Enzo Bentivoglio
- Scope & Content:
-
Autograph. The letter, written from Venice, concerns aspects of the music for the festivities at the marriage of the Duke Odoardo Farnese to Margherita, second daughter of Cosimo II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, in Parma the following year. Bentivoglio had commissioned Monteverdi to write the music for five intermedi to texts by Ascanio Pio di Savoia, for performance between the acts of Torquato Tasso’s Aminta, and for a tourney on the subject of Mercurio e Marte, to words by Claudio Achillini of Bologna. Monteverdi reports that he has almost finished the music for the second intermedio, but that the musical representation of the character of Discord in the tourney may present difficulties when set beside the music for the characters of the Months. The music was performed in December 1628 but does not survive. This is one of five extant letters from Monteverdi to Bentivoglio. The texts of three others were sent to Francesco Caffi in the 1850s by Giuseppe Antonelli, keeper of the Civic Museum of Ferrara (see his Storia della musica sacra nella già Cappella Ducale de S. Marco in Venezia dal 1318 al 1797 (Venice, 1854-5), ii, pp. 135, 171, 225-6), and it is likely that the letters were separated from the Bentivoglio archive in Ferrara later in the nineteenth century.
Annotated on the top left corner of f. 1r, ‘V. Boni’ [?] (in pencil) and ‘GA’ (in ink, perhaps by Giuseppe Antonelli), and with the number ‘3187’ added in pencil to f. 2v.
- Collection Area:
- Music Collections
- Project / Collection:
- Music Manuscripts
- Hierarchy Tree:
- [{ "id" : "032-001563187", "parent" : "#", "text" : "MS Mus. 1707: Claudio Monteverdi: letter to the Marchese Enzo Bentivoglio" , "li_attr" : {"class": "orderable"} }]
- Hierarchy Record Ids:
- 032-001563187
- Is part of:
- not applicable
- Hierarchy:
- 032-001563187
- Container:
- not applicable
- Record Type (Level):
- Fonds
- Extent:
-
2 folios
- Digitised Content:
- https://iiif.bl.uk/uv/#?manifest=https://bl.digirati.io/iiif/ark:/81055/vdc_100156353246.0x000001
- Thumbnail:
-
- Languages:
- Italian
- Scripts:
- Latin
- Start Date:
- 1627
- End Date:
- 1627
- Date Range:
- 18 September 1627
- Era:
- CE
- Access:
-
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- User Conditions:
- Physical Characteristics:
- 300 x 207mm. An uncut bifolio, the watermark a crown beneath a six-pointed star, the countermark ‘F V’. In a buckram flapcase with leather label, made for Albi Rosenthal.
- Custodial History:
- By 1887 this letter was in the collection of the antiquarian dealer Dario Giuseppe Rossi of Rome (see E. Vogel, ‘Claudio Monteverdi’, Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 3 (1887), p. 388). It was subsequently acquired by the banker and museum director Alexander Meyer Cohn, and purchased at the sale of his autograph collection by the industrialist and collector Karl Geigy-Hagenbach, Stargardt, 9 Feb. 1906, lot 3119 (Die Autographen-Sammlung Alexander Meyer Cohn’s, 2 vols, Berlin, 1905-06, vol. 2, p. 275). Geigy-Hagenbach included a reproduction of the signature from this letter in his Album von Handschriften berühmter Persönlichkeiten vom Mittelalter bis zur Neuzeit (Basel, 1925), p. 242. The letter was purchased at the sale of Geigy-Hagenbach’s collection by the dealer, collector and musicologist Albi Rosenthal, Stargardt, 31 May 1961, lot 896 (Autographen aus der Sammlung Karl Geigy-Hagenbach, Basel, und anderem Besitz: Auktion am 30. und 31. Mai 1961 in Marburg, Haus der Bücher, Basel / J. A. Stargardt, Marburg, p. 151).
- Source of Acquisition:
-
From the estate of Albi Rosenthal. Purchased at a special price from an anonymous benefactor, 31 March 2009, with the aid of a grant from the Friends of the British Library.
- Information About Copies:
- Digitised copy available on British Library Digitised Manuscripts: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=MS_Mus._1707
- Publications:
- Rosenthal’s article ‘A Hitherto Unpublished Letter of Claudio Monteverdi’ in Essays Presented to Egon Wellesz, ed. by J. Westrup (Oxford, 1966), pp. 103-7 (reprinted with minor revisions in his Obiter Scripta, ed. by J. Gray (Oxford, 2000), pp. 198-208) includes a transcription, translation and facsimile; it is also published in Claudio Monteverdi: Lettere, dediche, e prefazioni, ed. by D. de’ Paoli, (Rome, 1973), pp. 282-3 (no. 107), P. Fabbri, Monteverdi (Turin, 1985), p. 269, and Claudio Monteverdi: Lettere, ed. by E. Lax (Florence, 1994), pp. 178-9 (no. 109), and in English translation in The Letters of Claudio Monteverdi, ed. and trans. by Denis Stevens (London, 1980), pp. 363-6 (2nd ed., Oxford, 1995, pp. 370-3; no. 109) and in T. Carter’s translation of Fabbri’s study (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 207-8.
- Material Type:
- Archives and Manuscripts
- Legal Status:
- Not Public Record(s)