A Wesleyan Musical Legacy Graham Pont For Arthur Searle, on his 70th Anniversary During 1986-7 Novello and Company presented The British Library with fourteen volumes of musical manuscripts which were incorporated and catalogued as the ‘Supplementary Novello Collection’ (Additional Manuscripts 69851-69864). The collection, formerly part of the firm’s business archive, was begun by Vincent Novello (1781-1861) and added to long after his death. Volume IX of this collection (Add. MS. 69859) is an album of miscellaneous keyboard music in various hands of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The oblong quarto of 77 folios1 was compiled by Rosalind Eleanor Esther Glenn (1834-1909),2 daughter of London organist Robert Glenn (1776-1844) and his wife, Rosalind Wesley. The major part of the collection consists of copies in ink and pencil made by Ms Glenn of original compositions and arrangements for keyboard by Jonathan Battishill (1738-1801) and Samuel Wesley (1766-1837); but it also includes some older copies of music by Corelli, Domenico Scarlatti, Porpora and Handel, as well as a few unidentified movements – all composed or arranged for harpsichord or organ. The earlier part of the collection was presumably inherited from Robert Glenn, one of Battishill’s last professional pupils. Some of the oldest leaves probably came to Glenn from Battishill himself. Battishill also presented his pupil with a volume of Handel’s overtures for harpsichord or organ, with the title page calligraphically inscribed ‘Robt. Glenn April 19th. 1795’. This extraordinary document was purchased in London during the 1890s by Friedrich Chrysander and is now held by the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Hamburg (M B/1657). It is a copy of Handel’s Overtures from all his Operas and Oratorios Set for the Harpsicord or Organ… (London: Wright, c.1785), with no fewer than 93 pages of elaborate professional annotations and alterations in ink to some or all movements of 26 overtures. To this someone (Robert Glenn? or, possibly, his executor William Bawtree) has added a manuscript index, at the head of which is inscribed a revelatory memorandum by Ms Glenn: From the library of R Glenn Esq.r – one of the most talented pupils of J. Battishill Esqr NB – The additional notes & alterations to many in this Collection of Overtures are by the pen of Jonn Battishill, intending thereby to instruct his pupils how Handel (whom he had many time’s heard) rendered the playing of them – . This is unquestionably the most important eye-witness record of Handel’s mature style of keyboard playing.3 The annotations were made by Battishill himself and his pupil – apparently working together – and they were copied, in part at least, from older annotated 1 There is a preliminary description of the contents of this album by Arthur Searle in Music and Music-related Manuscripts Acquired and Incorporated 1956-1998, Vol. 3: Descriptions 1986-1990 (Additional MSS 63650-70633), pp. 243-4. This refers to ‘a modern list of contents (ff. iii-iv)’ which is now missing. 2 I thank Charles Farthing for locating and supplying a copy of Ms Glenn’s death certificate. She was a grand- daughter of Samuel Wesley and shared the tastes, talents and religious leanings of a great musical family which included several professional and amateur organists. 3 G. Pont, ‘French Overtures at the Keyboard: “How Handel Rendered the Playing of Them”’, Musicology, vi (1980), pp. 29-50. 1 eBLJ 2008, Article 4 A Weslyan Musical Legacy pages. One of these copy-texts, with annotations by Battishill, has been preserved in the Hamburg volume: it is the first movement of the overture to Faramondo, in a much worn copy from an earlier edition of Walsh’s seventh collection of Handel’s keyboard overtures (first published c. 1749 and reprinted for the last time in this format c. 1770). Ms Glenn was only eight years old when her father died in 1844 and the Hamburg volume presumably passed to the care her guardian, William Bawtree (whose bookplate it once bore). Bawtree eventually passed on to his ward a collection of manuscripts by Charles, Samuel and Samuel Sebastian Wesley, the transfer being recorded in an undated note written by both parties.4 Whether or not the Hamburg volume was similarly transferred to Ms Glenn is not known but it was certainly part of her cherished musical legacy: it was her care in conserving this legacy and the traditions of its provenance that made it possible to identify the critical associations of the Hamburg volume with the playing and teaching of one of the last and most gifted of Handel’s direct disciples.5 Like her father, Ms Glenn was an admirer of Battishill and she made careful copies of his music for her personal use – she was also an organist but it is not known if she practised professionally.6 Add. MS. 69859 preserves a significant remnant of Battishill’s production for the keyboard – a collection of original compositions and Handel arrangements, all unpublished and most of them otherwise unknown. Near the end of the volume are nine pieces preserved in Battishill’s own hand, two of them fragmentary. The only other attested Battishill autograph in a publicly accessible collection is a brief chant held by St Paul’s Cathedral Library7 – too brief (and apparently too early) to be of any use in verifying Battishill’s mature hand. The problem was complicated by clear evidence that the annotations of the Hamburg volume were made not by one but two hands – so similar as to be virtually indistinguishable. The resemblances are so close that the German Handel authority Dr Hans-Dieter Clausen once suggested that they could be two ‘chronologically different stages of the same hand’. My profound debt to him and several other experts I consulted has been duly acknowledged; but it is only with the knowledge of hindsight that the immense difficulties of the task put to them can be fully appreciated. One of the subtle differences noticed by Dr Clausen is the slope of the ‘tr’ sign: Robert Glenn’s notation of the ornament usually inclines to the right, whereas Battishill’s is generally more upright, inclining sometimes to the left. Another distinction is the form of the bass clef, which Battishill writes inconsistently, with the stroke sometimes moving clockwise and sometimes anti-clockwise. Glenn’s bass clefs are penned consistently in an anti-clockwise movement and the tails usually cross over the bar-line and brace, whereas Battishill’s bass clefs generally stay to the right of the brace. An exception is Glenn’s copy of the Scarlatti ‘Lesson’ at ff. 55r-56v (No 55, below): Glenn’s hand here forms an uncanny resemblance to Battishill’s, even in the formation of the bass clefs, which stay within the brace. But the surest way of distinguishing these two hands is the form of the crotchet rest: Battishill’s notation is a ‘barbless hook’ or inverted ‘L’, whereas Glenn’s is a ‘barbed hook’. 4 Add. MS. Ms 35039, f. 1. I remember with pleasure how Arthur Searle first recognized the significance of this note in November 1984, while standing over my shoulder in the old Music Reference Area of the former British Library. All in a day’s work for a busy librarian! 5 G. Pont, ‘Battishill’s Arrangements of Handel’s Keyboard Overtures’, Göttinger Händel-Beiträge, iii (1987 [1989]), pp. 139-53. 6 Robert Glenn, but not his daughter, is listed in Donovan Dawe, Organists of the City of London 1666-1850 (the author, 1983). Glenn served as organist at St Margaret Pattens (see Dawe, p. 50) and as deputy to Robert Hudson and R .J .S. Stevens at Christ’s Hospital before being appointed Music Master there in 1810 (see Dawe, pp. 70-1). 7 St Paul’s Cathedral Library, MS Tenor 1, p. 264 [Chant in E]. 2 eBLJ 2008, Article 4 A Weslyan Musical Legacy This latter form appears in his copy of Battishill’s changes to the first movement of the Overture in Scipio (fig. 1) and the second movement of the Overture in Theseus. Such small but significant differences of notation suggest that some of the ‘Old Mss.’ copied by Ms Glenn were actually Battishill’s autographs, while others were more likely to have been copies made by her father. Though the handwriting of Battishill and Glenn can now be reliably distinguished by their respective crotchet rests, the similarities are such that Ms Glenn could easily have misjudged the scribe: her identification of Battishill’s autographs must, therefore, be treated with care. See notes to Nos 9, 25, 38 and 42, below. The positive identification of Battishill’s hand remained an intractable problem until the British Library acquired Add. MS. 69859 and its contents were collated with Hamburg M B/1657. The survival of Ms Glenn’s album was both fortunate and fortuitous: on the inside of the front cover is affixed a note in ink (f. 1), ‘Found outside/ No 1 Berners St/ by R. Neale,/ March 30th 1893’. Since this was then the address of Novello’s, one might infer that the volume was tossed out in an office clean-up and then restored to the firm’s archive through the timely intervention of R. Neale. It is not known how and when the volume passed from Ms Glenn to Novello’s; but it appears that Ms Glenn disposed of some or all of her music collection c. 1890 (see n. 14). By then she may have been suffering from health problems for, according to her death certificate, dated 21 December 1909, she had been affected by ‘senile decay’ for the previous two years.