>> David Plylar: All right.
Good morning everybody.
Thank you so much
for being here.
It's just really nice to have,
this is just the right amount
of people I think to do just
a bit of an more intimate look
at some of the manuscript
acquisitions that we've gotten
in the music division in
the past about three years.
My name is David Plylar.
I'm in the concert office
of the music division,
but I have a great interest in
particularly in keyboard music,
but also in music of the 19th
century, and 20th centuries.
And it just so happens that a
lot of our recent acquisitions
in the music division had been
a very significant pieces mostly
out of the 19th century,
but some from the 18th
century, and beyond.
So initially the idea for this
talk was going to be to speak
about a whole wide range of
them, and now what I found is
that we have so many amazing,
interesting new things
that there's really, you know,
five or six talks in there.
[Laughs] And so I don't --
we don't have enough
time to hit everything.
So I decided to whittle it
down to just the keyboard
music from recent years.
So, you know, stay tuned
for another time when one
of our curators might
speak about some
of our other amazing
acquisitions, including songs
or [inaudible] works
and other things.
I'm probably going to
stay seated a bit more
than usual today just because
of my back is acting up a bit,
so please forgive me for that.
But what I'd like to do is
introduce you to a number
of these manuscripts, and
show just a few things
about each one.
What they tell us
about the piece.
What they tell us
about, you know,
maybe the circumstances
surrounding its composition,
and also just anything else
that might be of interest.
It's not comprehensive
whatsoever.
Every time I glance at these
manuscripts, I keep finding new
and interesting things.
So they're really -- this is
really kind of an invitation
for scholars to come and take
a look, but also for the public
to come and take a look at
these really interesting pieces
of music.
So we're going to go
in chronological order
between the things that
we have with us today.
So what we'll have on the
tasting menu, as it were,
we'll have a Haydn Capriccio,
an early, probably one
of the best known of his early
keyboard works from 1765.
We'll then have Beethoven
sketches
after the Hammerklavier
Sonata, 1817, '18, I think.
And this is -- these are
new sketches that we have
that supplement our older
sketches that we already had
in our [inaudible] collection.
So this is also a
recent purchase.
We'll take a look at those.
Then we'll look at two
Mendelssohn's songs
without words, and
then we'll look
at three pretty interesting
Liszt of pieces.
Two of which you may know.
One of which you probably don't
unless you're a real Liszt nut,
but one of them is from
the constellations.
One of them is one of the Lebis
Traume or an early version
of one of the Lebis Traume.
And then the other
one is an elegy.
And then lastly, we'll hit we
just recently purchased numbers
two and three of
Opus 119 by Brahms.
And so we'll focus
more on the second one,
and you'll see the reason why
I'm choosing these particular
pieces as we get to them.
So let's start with the Hadyn.
One of the things that's nice
about this particular manuscript
as it gives us a lot
of interesting material
on the front page.
So first of all, you'll notice
that title is spelled with one C
for Capriccio, whereas
typically it's with two,
but that's just one
of those things.
And then there's almost
indecipherable something written
underneath it.
And then there's some other
indecipherable [laughs]
that seemed to be there.
They are decipherable,
and we'll talk about that.
So oftentimes we'll
look at when looking
at these manuscripts we'll
be discussing how do we come
to get them.
How do we know they're
authentic,
those types of things.
In this case is kind of almost
a case study in one of the ways
that we might determine that
it's an authentic type of thing.
I should say that I'm
not an expert in this.
So this is just what I'm
gleaning from the page.
You do see a signature there
that says Del Giuseppe Haydn,
and then M-P-P-R-I-A,
which means Manu Propria.
So meaning ih his own hand,
and then 765, meaning 1765.
So that's, you know,
that's something,
and then underneath it says
in somebody else's
hand Handschrift.
We then look at the
what's written
at the bottom of the page.
And it's somebody saying,
the guy who wrote
Handschrift I know him.
He's the [inaudible] and
he's the one who wrote this.
He was a friend of
Haydn's and knew him.
And so we can take his word
that this was in Haydn's hand,
because he said it was, and
I knew that he's the one
who wrote the word
Handschrift there.
So that's also on this title
page of the manuscript.
And then if you go to the
upper right corner of the top
of this title page, you'll
see a very interesting thing.
This is -- it's supposed to
be in Tobias Haslinger's hand,
and he was a major
publisher and composer.
And so this was number
39 from his collection
of manuscripts that he had.
So we knew that he had it at one
point, and stamped on the front.
Owners tend to write on
these things quite a bit,
as you might notice.
So then we start to look
at these, there's kind
of this history of different
people who have owned it,
not necessarily in
this order actually,
it's slightly out of order.
But an interesting thing
about this manuscript is
at one point it was
actually at the Library
of Congress before now.
And this was when it was part
of Casella Saltinggolf's
collection.
It then left to the
library to our dismay,
and only now is returning,
and is actually now a part
of our Saltinggolf's
collection on its return.
So that's just a kind of
a quick, brief overview
of what you get from
this title page.
So underneath that title page,
or sorry, underneath that title
of Capriccio, it's a
little bit hard to read,
but it says [foreign language].
And so basically that means
it takes eight butchers.
And so what this is
referring to is this is based
on an Austrian folk tune.
And so Haydn is, you know,
one of the things I
don't think you'd get --
he does get credit
for it, but not enough
as he had a really
good sense of humor.
And so he basically wrote a
Capriccio about castrating hogs.
And so that's kind of
what this is about.
Just a couple of
other things that come
through on this manuscript,
and you'll have to take a look
at this up on stage
after this talk.
There are places
where there is copying
over with what is
clearly a different ink.
It looks like at first it might
look like it was a second dip
in the inkwell or
something like that,
but it's deviates quite
a bit from the sepia tone
that you'll see with
the particular ink
in this manuscript.
So it's tracing over
is what I think,
because there's enough places
where there's double stems
and things like that.
So I'm not sure if this
was Hadyn doing it.
I suspect maybe it was,
because it seems pretty close
to what was there,
but I don't know.
But that would be something
that may be somebody would
be able to look into that.
But that's sometimes
something that people will look
for on manuscripts are these
points of deviation between,
you know, what's kind of
established as a norm,
and when it changes, because
it can also be in addition
to showing potentially
another person's hand involved,
that type of deviation can
also delineate a timeline
when somebody is making changes.
So you'll see this especially
in a publisher proofs,
and things like that,
that they'll be different
colors used, like in crayon
or other things to kind
of show different types,
either different types
of edits or edits
that happen in one pass.
So it's kind of an interesting
thing to start to see, you know,
three or four different
colors that are pencil
or different colors of ink
on the same manuscript,
because you might be able
to reconstruct, you know,
with some degree