London: John Johnson, 1757. 8 volumes. Large folio. Nineteenth-century half black calf with textured cloth boards with gilt rules to corners and spine, spine in compartments with titling gilt, marbled edges, marbled endpapers. Titles and music engraved; privilege, subscribers list, advertisement, preface, memoirs, remarks, index, proposals typeset.
Subscribers include composers Charles Avison, Dr. William Boyce, and John Stanley, as well as city organists, various lords and ladies, etc., for a total of 125.
Vol. I
1f. (recto title, verso blank), 1f. (recto dedication, verso blank), 1f. (recto privilege, verso blank), [ii] ("Subscribers
(truncated) to this Work"), 1f. (recto "Advertisemet"[!], verso blank), [vi] ("Preface to the Original Work"), [iv] ("Memoirs of the Life of Benedetto Marcello, N. H.*), [iv] ("Remarks on the Psalms of Marcello"), 130, 1f. (recto "Index," verso "Proposals For Publishing by Subscriptions, The Remainder Of This Work. Conditions") pp. including four blanks.
Vol. II
1f. (recto title, verso blank), 1f. (recto dedication, verso blank), 1f. (recto "Preface to the Original Work," verso blank), 131, [i] (blank), 1f. (recto "Index", verso "Proposals ...") pp.
Vol. III
1f. (recto title, verso blank), 1f. (recto dedication, verso blank), 1f. (recto privilege, verso blank), [1]-4 ("Preface to the Original Work"), 1f. ("Subscribers to this Work"), 144, 1f. (recto "Index," verso "Proposals ...") pp.
Vol. IV
1f. (recto title, verso blank), 1f. (recto dedication, verso blank), 1f. (recto privilege, verso blank), 1f. ("Subscribers to this Work"), 1f. (recto "Preface to the Original Work," verso blank), 154, 1f. (recto "Index", verso "Proposals ...") pp.
Vol. V
1f. (recto title, verso blank), 1f. (recto dedication, verso blank), 1f. (recto privilege, verso blank), 1f. ("Subscribers to this Work"), 1f. (recto "Preface to the Original Work," verso blank), [i] (blank), 2-123, [i] (blank), 1f. (recto "Index," verso "Proposals ...") pp.
Vol. VI
1f. (recto title, verso blank), 1f. (recto dedication, verso blank), 1f. (recto privilege, verso blank), 1f. ("Subscribers to this Work"), 1f. (recto "Preface to the Original Work," verso letter from Johannes Mattheson to Benedetto Marcello), [i] (blank), 127, [i] (blank), 1f. (recto "Index," verso "Proposals ...") pp.
Vol. VII
1f. (recto title, verso blank), 1f. (recto dedication, verso blank), 1f. (recto privilege, verso blank), 1f. ("Subscribers to this Work"), 1f. (recto "Preface to the Original Work," verso blank), 148, 1f. (recto "Index," verso "Proposals ...") pp.
Vol. VIII
1f. (recto title, verso blank), 1f. (recto dedication, verso blank), 1f. (recto privilege, verso blank), 1f. ("Subscribers to this Work"), 1f. (recto "Preface to the Original Work," verso blank), 150, 1f. (recto index, verso blank) pp.
On final "proposals" page of first volume, printed overpaste of the word "Seven" in first condition "I. That the remaining [Seven] Volumes will be published, one every Year, till the Whole is completed."
Bindings worn. Occasional foxing and soiling and dampstaining, mainly to blank margins; some minor browning; occasional small marginal tears. Vol. I: lower portion of spine partially detached; bump to upper edge of typeset material. Vol IV: small portion of lower spine detached. Vol. VIII: large stain to recto of preface leaf;. First English edition. Selfridge-Field B601-651, p. 394. BUC p. 647. RISM M426.
Marcello's psalms were first published in Venice in 1724-1726.
This edition was conceived by Charles Avison, who translated the prefaces and testimonials of the original print and provided additional biographical information about the composer." Selfridge-Field p. 394.
John Garth (ca. 1722-ca. 1810) was an English composer and organist from Durham and a friend of Charles Avison, who assisted him in the present publication.
"It is not easy to segment the musical continuum of Marcello’s life, since he held no regular appointments of a musical nature and the majority of his musical works are undated. This demonstrates how severely separated in social experience dilettante composers were from the common ranks of musical maestri. Nonetheless, Marcello’s cultivated intellect exerted, particularly through his psalm settings and cantatas, a major influence on Italian musical thought and performance throughout the 18th century and, to various degrees, on the musical practices of many other European countries until the end of the 19th century. After a perfunctory involvement with instrumental music, his main interests as a composer, particularly between 1710 and 1720, were the cantata and the chamber duet. Thereafter, his attention turned to works on a larger scale: the 50 Psalms of David, the serenata and the oratorio. The claim that Marcello forwent composition after 1728 cannot be entirely true since two of his oratorios neatly circumscribed his years in Pula.
Marcello’s intent in his Salmi ... was to restore dignity to devotional music by reviving musical practices of antiquity. ... They are set in texturally differentiated sections and are for the most part through-composed. Numerous testimonials (by Gasparini, Antonio and Giovanni Bononcini, Sarri, Mattheson and Telemann) were included in each of the eight volumes. Caldara, who found the music ‘eccentric’, was one of Marcello’s few detractors. Later Italians, in particular Padre Martini and Giovenale Sacchi, revered Marcello’s Salmi as models of contrapuntal writing. Still more accomplished examples are the six-voice canon In omnem terram, published with the psalms ...
Marcello’s legacy was greatest for those who lived between 1750 and 1875, when recognition of his Salmi led to their translation into many other languages (French, German, Swedish, English, Russian) and their performance, as liturgically generic sacred works, in a host of different liturgical contexts. It was during this period that a great number of the manuscripts in which Marcello’s secular works are now preserved seem to have been copied. In the 19th century the Salmi were sometimes divided into short ‘motets’ or ‘songs’, or stripped of their texts and offered as instrumental works, or retexted and offered as ‘new’ works. Such varieties of psalm progeny seem to number well beyond 10,000 (arrangers included Paer, Mayr, Rossini and Bizet; Verdi was a great enthusiast). nother work of the same period, the oratorio Joaz, is reckoned to have anticipated the reforms of Gluck many years later. Marcello’s call to restore the classical virtue of ‘noble simplicity’ in music, found in the preface to his Salmi, anticipates the analogous invitation of the German archaeologist Winkelmann (who spoke of sculpture) by 30 years. Although little noted today, Marcello’s role in formulating the values of classicism and promoting their musical implementation was his most significant contribution to cultural history. His influence was enormously, if subtly, pervasive.
Differing national values coloured perceptions of Marcello’s music: the English revered its ‘harmony’, the Germans its ‘melody’ and the Italians its ‘counterpoint’. It was only in the 20th century that Marcello’s name started to fall from grace in lists of important composers in the past. Even as this change occurred, however, the influence of his Salmi was regenerated in ethnomusicology: the materials Marcello quoted from Judaic and Hellenic traditions in the 1720s are frequently requoted (often without attribution) in studies of ancient and oriental music. He undoubtedly would have been amused by the reflexive nature of the esteem that accrued to his work after his death." Eleanor Selfridge-Field in Grove Music Online
Marcello introduces selected psalms with chants in Hebrew drawn from Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jewish liturgical tradition, notated in musical notation read from right to left. The composer has included these in an apparent attempt to represent the ancient tradition of the psalms as carried on into his own time by its living cultural heirs.
The first English edition of a seminal and highly influential work in Western musical history.
(Inventory #: 40364)
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