Julian Marshall and the British Museum: Music Collecting in the Later Nineteenth Century
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JULIAN MARSHALL AND THE BRITISH MUSEUM: MUSIC COLLECTING IN THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY ARTHUR SEARLE IN the second volume of Sir George Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians^ which appeared in 1880, there is a descriptive list of private music libraries in the British Isles.* First, understandably enough, is the Royal Music Library at Buckingham Palace; the next two libraries listed are those of Sir Arthur Frederick Gore Ouseley and of Mr Julian Marshall. The entire Royal Music Library is now in the British Library by royal gift; the whole of Ouseley's collection passed to his foundation of St Michael's College, Tenbury. These two libraries have been catalogued in some detail and both the process of their assembly and the personalities involved have been explored.^ Only two substantial parts of Marshall's collection remain intact: his printed Handel scores and libretti, now in the National Library of Scotland, and the major part of his manuscript music in the British Library.^ Marshall's name remains almost unknown, and to many musicologists his book- plate, which is still easy enough to encounter, complicates rather than simplifies the problem of provenance. The only source for the basic facts of Marshall's life is the brief notice of him given in the Dictionary of National Biography. He was born in Yorkshire in 1836, the younger son of an industrial and political family, was educated privately and at Harrow, and, for a while in the later 1850s, worked in the family flax spinning business. During those years he sang in the choir of Leeds parish church under Samuel Sebastian Wesley and played a part in the establishment ofthe first Leeds festival in 1858. But in 1861 Marshall decided that he was not suited to business. He quickly moved to London, married, and then devoted himself to three principal interests, art, music, and games (he had been champion racket at Harrow). He collected and wrote in all three fields, and his enthusiasm for them is amply born out by the evidence that now remains of the content of his library. After living in Duke Street and in Park Lane, the Marshalls moved in the early 1870s to 13 Belsize Avenue in North London, and it was there in 1903 that Julian Marshall died. Prints and engravings occupied him most at first, to the extent that the major part of his holdings, when sold three months before his marriage in 1864, realized well over ^8,000. The twelve days' sale at Sotheby's included a formidable array of Flemish, Dutch, Italian, French, English, and German works. There is no evidence of an unusual or exceptional taste at work—as well as an album of Van Dyck's portrait engravings (fetching £400) and 67 an impression of PoUaiuolo's 'Battle of the Nude Men', there were over 1,200 lots of Nanteuil portraits—but the breadth and energy of Marshall's collecting emerges strongly."•" His publications include The Annals of Tennis (London, 1878), a detailed historical study, the result of lengthy research, which had first appeared in chapters in The Field during 1876 and 1877. There were subsequent books on racket games and, in 1895, A Catalogue of Engraved National Portraits in the National Art Library which Marshall had compiled over a number of years for the South Kensington Museum. However, music carried the main thrust of his collecting activities in the later 1860s and, on the evidence of his music manuscripts, more intensively throughout the 1870s. His wife, Florence Ashton Marshall, must have strengthened his inclination towards music. She published songs and vocal exercises and, after Marshall's death, two arrangements for string orchestra. As well as The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley^ published in two volumes in 1889, she contributed the Life of Handel to Hueffer's 'Great Musicians' series in i88i. Marshall's own writings on music were largely confined to his contributions to Grove's Dictionary. Mrs Marshall was a contributor as well, but Marshall wrote far more, and, in his principal entries, at far greater length. In all he supplied 139 articles; only J. A. Fuller- Maitland, W. H. Husk, W. S. Rockstro, and Grove himself wrote more. As secretary (for twenty-one years from 1871) of the Mendelssohn Scholarships Foundation Marshall wrote the corresponding entry. ^ Grove's letter to him of November 1879 on the subject survives—'i column or a very little more ought to serve'—and also contains part of a running discussion between the two men on the music of Handel.^ The Handel entry, of ten pages, is Marshall's largest contribution. It is the work of a true collector, including a disquisition (buried in a footnote) on the paper types to be found in manuscript sources, as well as a reference to a portrait drawing in his own collection. The article on Nicola Haym draws on a document 'in the writer's possession', and in his account of Owen Swiney, Marshall quotes liberally from another letter he owned. Another of his more substantial entries is that on Handel's impresario partner John James Heidegger. His only contem- porary subjects were Sir Michael Costa, whose conducting career began with opera and went on to include the Leeds and Handel festivals, and the author and critic H. F. Chorley. The direction of Marshall's musical interests, or perhaps rather the area in which Grove considered him most competent, is evident from all this. His other articles were often less substantial, some very short indeed; the subjects of them all were singers, most Italian and all but four of them concerned with the Italian repertory. Many entries rely heavily on material in Marshall's collection, and some derive entirely from it. The evidence of this industry did not quickly disappear: the entry on Velluti, the last great male soprano, a column and a half in length, survived without alteration or addition into the fifth edition ofthe Dictionary of 1954. All this was achieved despite Marshall's sale of his printed Handel scores in the summer of 1876 to Arthur J. Balfour, from whose estate, as first Earl Balfour, they were acquired sixty years later by the National Library of Scotland.^ Apart from this sale Marshall's collection reached its greatest extent at just the time when the articles for Grove's 68 dictionary were being written, and it was also then, in October 1879, that he offered the entire collection to the British Museum. There was, though, a preliminary to his principal negotiations with the Museum. The first brush with the great institution, and more especially with its Department of Manuscripts, came early in 1878, when Marshall offered a small but outstanding collection of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English music which included major Purcell autographs.^ No doubt a man of Marshall's standing had many possible links with the Museum, through general as well as musical circles. One context for this first approach is provided by the early history of the Musical Association. Marshall and his wife were among the 'original members', having been admitted at the Association's second meeting in 1874^ (though they do not appear in the printed list of members for 1878). Another of the original members was W. H. Cummings, a musicologist, singer, conductor, and collector—his library follows those of Ouseley and Marshall in the Dictionary's list. Cummings and Marshall were also both members ofthe committee ofthe Purcell Society at its foundation in 1876.^*^ In December of that year Cummings addressed the Musical Association 'On Henry Purcell and his Family'. He read a more contentious paper, under the title 'The formation of a National Music Library', at a meeting chaired by Grove in December 1877 which Edward Augustus Bond, the Museum's Keeper of Manuscripts, attended by invitation. ^^ Both this paper and the discussion which followed it are of interest in the light of all Marshall's subsequent dealings with the Museum. After talking about printed scores and the literature of music, Cummings stressed that 'a "National Musical Library" should also be the great repository of precious musical manuscripts, particularly those by composers of our own country'. He was in no doubt ofthe right place for the library he outlined: 'At the British Museum most things find a home . .'. As a collector himself he knew that immediate action was needed, as the rising trend in prices could only continue still further and treasures become increasingly scarce: 'our cousins in America and our brothers in the Colonies are all awakening to a feeling that they must have musical art and musical libraries'. He went on to criticize the Museum for past neglect of music and for the present state ofthe catalogues, in particular for the absence of a separate class catalogue for recent acquisitions of manuscript music. He advocated that more be spent on 'the musical department', which should become 'a distinct class at once\ In finding the Trustees remiss in not taking advantage of recent opportunities to enlarge the collections, he mentioned specifically three auction sales at which both he and Marshall had been buyers. Most significantly, the first course of action he suggested to the members ofthe Association was 'to persuade... wealthy friends who have musical libraries or books to bequeath or dispose of, to give them to the British Museum'. In the discussion Bond seized on the last two points, acknowledging the help that could be given in the sale room by people like Cummings (who had recently bought and passed on some items which the Museum's agent had failed to secure), but adding that 'the thing most needed was to induce private owners to bring forward the treasures which they had'.