Rare Handel opera manuscript will be displayed at Firestone

A rare manuscript of George Frideric Handel’s 1736 opera “Berenice,” purchased by the University for 44,450 British pounds at an auction last November, will be available for viewing at a special exhibition in Firestone Library until March 4. The display is part of the upcoming American Handel Society Festival hosted by the American Handel Society and the University’s Department of Music, to take place at the University from Feb. 21-24.

The opera manuscript will be joining the University’s large collection of Handel works, which includes many early printed editions of the works and some manuscripts as well. The “Berenice” manuscript should be a useful resource to scholars of Handel both in Princeton and around the world, professor of music Wendy Heller said, and will provide a valuable opportunity for students to see firsthand such a rare and historical musical document.

“To take students to the library and hand them the document and let them hold it and let them look at it and let them compare it becomes a wonderful exercise,” Heller said. “Even if — I don’t think it’s going to give us that much new information — it still is a way to teach something about how these sources work, how they’re preserved.”

The manuscript is a Handel-era scribal copy of the opera and was originally part of the collection of one of Handel’s patrons, Charles Jennens. The manuscript then changed hands many times and had not been seen for about 100 years before the auction, University Curator of Manuscripts Don Skemer said.

“There’s very little out there, and it’s a target of opportunity,” Skemer said, referring to a dearth of similar documents and explaining why the University purchased the manuscript. “You can get it now, or you can never get it.”

The opera was not one of Handel’s more famous works, Heller explained, and was not performed very often. However, she said she believes that the fewer performances were likely due to the politics of opera at the time, rather than the opera’s lack of musical quality.

“By the middle of the 1730s, there’s a lot of competition between different opera companies, and [Handel] begins writing oratorios,” Heller said. “It was not his most successful opera; it had relatively few performances, but the music is really very good.”

The University has also created a digital copy of the manuscript for online viewing as part of the Princeton University Digital Library. The decision was made in consideration of both the upcoming Handel Society conference and a request from the Händel-Gesellschaft, or German Handel Society, to view the manuscript for an upcoming critical edition, Skemer noted.

“We can only digitize a small portion of what’s here,” Skemer said. “But we decided because of the conference and because the Handel Society in Germany wanted access [to digitize this].”

The funds used to purchase the document came from endowments dedicated to the purchase of rare documents and materials, Skemer added. A portion of these funds dates from the early 20th century, and has grown greatly since its donation.

“[The manuscript] will attract scholars to come visit,” Heller said. “I think it’s likely that we will periodically be hosting this particular conference, so it kind of makes Princeton an important place for Handel studies.”