Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736)

Lot 82
08.11.2023 11:00UTC +00:00
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£ 630
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 1053196
Lot 82 | Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736)
Estimate value
£ 1 000 – 1 500
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736)
Contemporary copyist manuscript of the Mass in D major, P.46, n.p. [?Austria or Germany], n.d. [18th century].
A rare contemporary manuscript copy of Pergolesi's Mass in D. From the Talleyrand music collection.

Scored for five voices and orchestra by a single scribe in brown ink. Title + 141 pages, 295 x 230mm, contemporary pagination, paper ruled with 12 staves per page, title in Italian (‘Missa, A Cingue concerta, Del Signor Giov: Battista Pergolesi’), text otherwise in Latin with two words in German. Contemporary blue stiff paper wrappers.

Provenance:
(1) The present manuscript may have been copied in Austria or Germany: ‘pausen’ appears twice in the text (pp.87 and 107).

(2) Formerly in the Talleyrand music collection, originally assembled under Louise Fidèle Durand de St. Eugène-Montigny (1751- d. after 1776), singer, harpist and wife of Louis Marie de Talleyrand-Périgord (1738-1799), French ambassador the King of Sicily at Naples from 1785 to 1799. The collection was continued by her son –

(3) Augustin Louis de Talleyrand-Périgord (1770-1832).

(4) Bernard Quaritch, London, cat. 1390 (2009), no 57; acquired December 2009.

(5) Schøyen Collection, MS 5434/1.

Pergolesi left the Conservatorio dei Poveri di Gesù Cristo in Naples in the late summer of 1731: the Mass in D probably dates from this era and he received his first opera commission in the same year, reflecting his growing and influential patronage. Of the nine Masses once attributed to Pergolesi, only this Mass and the Mass in F major are today considered to be securely attributed to the composer.

A signed pencil note inside the upper cover by the Belgian musicologist and composer François-Joseph Fétis (1784-1871) underlines the rarity of the Mass in D in manuscript (‘Cet ouvrage n’a jamais été publié. Il en existe des copies dans plusieurs grands bibliothèques’), though his claim that it was never published may not be true.
Address of auction CHRISTIE'S
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