[G.F. Handel] F. Chrysander. Four volumes from Chrysander's library, 1736-1883

[George Frideric Handel] Friedrich Chrysander

Four volumes from Chrysander's library

Frittelli, Fausto. Il modo di solfeggiare all'uso francese... introdotto nuovamente in Siena, Siena: Stamperia del Pubblico, 1744, 26 pages, 8vo, woodcut initials, typeset staves with manuscript notation, with final blank leaf, pink paper wrapper, stamp of the music dealer ("G.G. Guidi...Firenze")

[Pope, Alexander.] An essay on man. In four epistles to a friend. Corrected by the author. The seventh edition, London: for J. Witford, 1736 [but a pirated edition], 37 pages, 12mo, *⁴ B-F⁴ (without blank F4), half-title, typographical ornaments, later reused vellum wrapper, [Foxon P855; Griffiths 419, listed as variant a], trimmed unevenly and cut close with slight loss, half-title torn with slight loss

[Vincent, Antoine-François.] De la position de l'homme à cheval, envisagé relativement aux arts fondés sur le dessin. Cinquième letter à M. Bachelier [extract] (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1788), 56 pages, 8vo, caption title, woodcut headpiece, 3 folding engraved plates, original blue paper wrappers, wrappers slightly creased and soiled

Collectio Halmiana. Catalogue de lettres autographes et de portraits composant la collection précieuse de feu Mr Charles de Halm à Munic... vente... le 12 Mars 1883... 1^re partie, Leipzig: List & Francke, 1883, 121 pages, 8vo, printed wrappers, text block split, wrappers creased

Four volumes from the library of the great nineteenth-century Handel scholar Friedrich Chrysander (1826-1901).

Perhaps the most intriguing of the four volumes is the edition of Pope's famous Essay, given Handel's setting of a line from it in his 1751 oratorio Jephtha: in the autograph manuscript Handel substitutes Pope's line 'Whatever is, is right' (I, 294) for every appearance of Thomas Morrell's words 'What God ordains is right', in the chorus 'How Dark, O Lord, are thy decrees', which Winton Dean has described as 'perhaps the profoundest music Handel ever wrote'.  

See lots 37 and 55-57.

LITERATURE

Morris R. Brownell, 'Ears of an untoward make: Pope and Handel', The Musical Quarterly, vol.62 no.4 (1976), p.570; Winton Dean, Handel's Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (1959), p.611 and note. 

ICCU lists four copies of Frittelli's work. The Essay on Man is one of numerous recorded pirated copies, the first listed by Foxon.