An unknown Mendelssohn autograph

Two volumes of music which once belongedto Queen Victoria have recently been acquiredand reunited with the Royal Music Library.They are uniformly bound in half moroccowith marbled boards. This simple style hadbeen widely popular for music since the lateeighteenth century. As usual, a label on thefront names the owner—in this case 'TheQueen'. The lettering on the spines shows thatthe volumes occupied 14th and i8th place ina series devoted entirely to piano duets. As thisseries was not deposited in the British Museumwith the main music collection in 1911, it waspresumably not housed with it but kept tohand for domestic use. The fate of the bulk ofthe volumes is unknown, but the two that havenow come to light passed into the possessionof the Queen's youngest daughter. PrincessBeatrice.

Volume 14 seems to have been the moreheavily used; it consists of arrangements ofsacred music by Handel, Rossini and others.But the chief interest of the discovery centreson volume 18. Here a neatly inlaid autographfair copy of some hitherto unknown arrange-ments hy Mendelssohn has been bound up witha group of printed editions of his music.With it is preserved the following dedicatoryletter, addressed to the Prince Consort andwritten from the house of Karl Klingemann,an old friend employed at the HanoverianLegation with whom Mendelssohn frequentlystayed when in London:

Your Royal Highness,You have permitted me to make for you a four-

hand arrangement of the fifth book of my Songswithout Words. I therefore make so bold as to lay thesame at the feet of Her Majesty the Queen and YourRoyal Highness. I have done my best to follow thesuggestions about the easy manner of Czerny'sarrangements etc., and in order to outdo my pre-decessor in at least one respect I have added an asyet unpublished seventh Song in a four-handversion. May the composer be excused for anymistakes that the copyist may have made here andthere—and vice versa! May Your Royal Highnessoccasionally play from these pieces and considerthem as an earnest of sincerest gratitude for thegracious reception and the unforgettable hours inwhich you have allowed me to participate onceagain during my present visit in the past weeks.

Always Your Royal Highness's most devoted

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.

London, 4 Hobart Place, Eaton Square,9th June 1844.

Mendelssohn had first visited BuckinghamPalace two years previously. In a detailedaccount of the occasion which he sent to hismother he describes how he accompanied theQueen in two songs—one of his sister's andone of his own—and finds much to praise inher singing; but there is little informationabout his later visits. The request that heshould arrange the fifth book oi Songs withoutWords^ op. 62, which contains the popularSpring Song^ suggests that these pieces hadfound favour very quickly at the Palace, forthe English edition had appeared only two orthree months earlier. The seventh piecementioned in the letter became the first onein the sixth book, op. 67, which was notpublished till the following-year.

O. W. NEIGHBOUR

NOTES ON OUTSIDE CONTRIBUTORS

GILES BARBER: Librarian of the Taylor Institution and Fellow of Linacre College,Oxford.

DAVID L I N D L E Y : Lecturer in English at the University of Leeds.

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Autograph letter from Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy to Prince Albert. R.M. 2i.f.24