The importance to Handel scholarship of the music collection at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, has long been recognized. Its holdings of Handel manuscripts stem back to the library of the Museum's founder, Richard, Seventh Viscount Fitzwilliam of Merrion (1745–1816), who bequeathed his collections of books and art to the University of Cambridge after his death. According to Charles Burney, Fitzwilliam was one of three musical gentlemen – the others being Sir Watkins William-Wynn and Joah Bates – who were ‘enthusiastic admirers of that great master’ and who called for the Handel Commemoration in 1784 (Charles Burney, An Account of the Musical Performances in Westminster-Abbey, and the Pantheon … in Commemoration of Handel (London: Printed for the Benefit of the Musical Fund; and Sold by T. Payne and Son, 1785), Introduction, 3). Fitzwilliam's Handelian interests also led him to amass an extensive library of the composer's music. This included a large quantity of printed materials as well as manuscripts, one of which, an autograph of the Chandos anthem ‘O Praise the Lord with One Consent’, was acquired in 1778. A larger body of manuscript materials relating to Handel, notably most of the autographs, were acquired later and probably stemmed from an antiquarian interest in preserving them, since they had been the property of John Christopher Smith, Jr (1712–1795), the son of the composer's principal copyist, who in turn had inherited them from Handel. It is probably these materials that constituted the ‘six volumes’ which were rebound in the late nineteenth century, and which were mentioned by J. A. Fuller-Maitland and A. H. Mann in their Catalogue of the Music in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (London: C. J. Clay, 1893). Fuller-Maitland and Mann described these volumes as ‘sketch-books and miscellaneous manuscripts in the hand-writing of Handel, which have lately been rearranged and indexed with a thoroughness beyond all praise, by Dr A. H. Mann’ (vi). Indeed, in 1816 James Bartleman had catalogued six books of Handel's music under the title ‘Original Manuscripts’ according to their format (four ‘long’ [that is, quarto], one ‘small Upright’ and one ‘large Upright’), implying their miscellaneous and possibly chaotic nature, containing assemblages of material valued primarily for their historical importance (‘A Catalogue of the Musical Library of the late Lord Viscount Fitzwilliam arranged at Richmond Surry 25th March 1816 by James Bartleman’, Fitzwilliam Museum, MU MS 1452).

It is these two types of source materials that Gerald Gifford has drawn upon for the first two volumes of Fitzwilliam Handeliana. Volume 1 is a selection of Fitzwilliam's compositions for harpsichord and organ, while Volume 2 contains Handelian keyboard music taken from manuscripts that he owned. In their 1893 catalogue Fuller-Maitland and Mann attributed the contents of several manuscripts of keyboard music to Fitzwilliam, apparently regarding them all as being in the same handwriting. Recently, however, Gifford has argued that one of these manuscripts cannot be regarded as containing Fitzwilliam's work, identifying a certain hand that occurs in the other sources (MU MSS 101, 102 and 106) as that of the Bath organist and composer Thomas Chilcot (c1707–1766). He has pointed out that the musical quality of the pieces ‘equates fully with a working ascription to Chilcot’ and that the composer's name has been deleted from two groups of pieces entitled ‘Lessons for the Harpsicord [sic]’ in MU MS 106 (Gerald Gifford, ‘Some Recently Identified Sources of Handelian Keyboard Music at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge’, The Consort 65 (2009), 49). Altogether the Chilcot materials resemble the kind of collection that a composer-performer might make for personal use – for instance, MU MS 101 contains about sixty pieces in the Chilcot hand that are entirely in G major and G minor – rather than being an indication that Fitzwilliam studied with him. Indeed, Gifford has made a plausible connection between the manuscripts and keyboard music mentioned in a recently discovered catalogue of Chilcot's music library compiled after his death by the scientist and composer William Herschel. Furthermore, he has identified in the manuscripts a number of materials relating to Handel and borrowings from the composer, including what appears to be a fascinating cadenza for Handel's Organ Concerto Op. 4 No. 1. These materials await publication in a future volume or volumes of the series.

For the time being we can be content with the two volumes that have appeared to date. The real source of Fitzwilliam's compositions, MU MS 159, contains a large number of pieces, all of which are dated to the exact day. The dates indicate that most were written between 31 August 1781 and 14 February 1783, while four further compositions in A major are dated between March and May 1787. Considerably later, Fitzwilliam entered a (jesting?) three-voice reworking of the tenor solo ‘Haste Thee, Nymph’ from Handel's L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, which he dated 3 May 1799, and later still, in 1803, a group of cantus firmus exercises, one of which uses a melody from Thomas Morley's A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (London: P. Short, 1597). (This treatise was reprinted in 1771, but Fitzwilliam is known to have owned a copy in 1767.) A group of pieces by other composers, which includes Handel's original version of ‘Haste Thee, Nymph’, is collected at the inverted rear of the volume. The book was probably bound some time between 1783 and 1787, since the earliest (and largest) group of compositions was copied before binding, as is evident from some cropping of text. At this point the ordering of the pieces was slightly changed. In several instances where a piece extended over two pages that were originally adjacent verso and recto leaves, the new placement necessitated the crossing-out of the recto page and its being recopied at the new location. Gifford observes that the binding ‘resulted in groupings of individual works according to key … though it is possible that further groupings were also achieved in actual performance’ (volume 1, 49). This has prompted the editor to alter the ordering of the pieces from the way they are presented in the source, in which groupings of three or more pieces are fairly infrequent.

The result undoubtedly presents this music in the best light, providing players with a selection of pieces conveniently arranged into performing units, but there is an inevitable arbitrariness to such an approach. Several of the pieces now grouped together were not composed in the same period and are widely separated in the manuscript, such as an [Andante] in D major (No. 13), composed in August 1782, which is followed by an Allegro and Andante from the previous January (Nos 14 & 15). This same [Andante], furthermore, appears closer in the manuscript to two other pieces in D major, which are omitted here; this is one of a number of cases in which not all pieces found together in the source are included. The editor may be justified in this approach, since the composer himself brought some pieces together in a similar fashion to form what appear to be two-movement organ voluntaries. This is apparent from the two datings of the Andante and Allegro in C major (No. 16), and it may be the inspiration behind several of the other groupings, such as the D major one, which also functions as an organ voluntary (consisting of two weighty movements followed by a minuet-like piece). Nevertheless, a presentation allowing more flexibility might have been warranted. For instance, the editor could have selected compositions in just three or four keys, chosen on the basis of overall quality, inviting the user to make a selection in performance (in addition, perhaps, to a few other noteworthy pieces meriting inclusion as singletons). The effect of the arrangement is also somewhat cosmetic, necessitated by the occasional short-windedness of Fitzwilliam's composing style. Nevertheless, the edition shows the interesting attempts of an amateur getting to grips with the main compositional forms of his day and his fascination with canon and invertible counterpoint.

One of the highlights of Volume 2 is a previously unpublished autograph version of a piece in C major called ‘Sonata’ (hwv578), which is related to the Concerto Grosso from Alexander's Feast, and which is taken from a miscellany of Handel autographs (MU MS 261). The source has the appearance of a ‘draft’ in which textual details, especially in the bass part, are being worked out on the page, but the piece would probably have been treated as a finished product and suitable for copying. We can now compare this version, and another autograph version published by the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe, with an arrangement for solo keyboard of the Concerto Grosso apparently owned by Fitzwilliam in 1767, which has been included in the edition as No. 1. A piece taken from a similar composite manuscript, containing the work of a number of identified Handel copyists (MU MS 265), is an arrangement of the ‘Dead March’ from Saul. It has been paired with a fragment (completed by the editor) of another movement from Saul, but taken instead from a manuscript that Fitzwilliam may have acquired for performance or study purposes, being bound up with MU MS 106. A fascinating collection that is made up mainly of keyboard music and which was evidently assembled over a lengthy period, MU MS 106 arguably deserves closer study. A [Sarabande] in D minor (No. 8) has been selected from this source because of stylistic affinities with Handel's music. It is probably by Joseph Kelway, since earlier in the manuscript two works called ‘Sonata p Cembalo / Joseph Kelway’, and signed ‘Composed for Lord Fitzwilliam / J K’, appear to be in the same hand, and are presumably autographs (although the [Sarabande] is labelled in the edition as ‘unascribed’). According to pencil inscriptions, this piece and the two ‘Sonatas p Cembalo’ were copied out by ‘S [presumably Samuel] Wesley’ in the 1820s, which may indicate that the leaves upon which they appear were kept together (or at least were in closer proximity) at that date. Another two pieces from MU MS 106 (Nos 6a and 6b) have been included because one of them is an arrangement of the menuet from the overture to Tamerlano and because they are in the same unidentified hand. The Tamerlano menuet was popular as a keyboard piece, and other arrangements are found in harpsichord sources (for example GB-Lbl, Add. MS 31467). Another piece included that evidently achieved ‘popular’ status is the arrangement of ‘O cara spene’ from Floridante (No. 4), which appears in a different key and is called ‘Opera Lesson’ in one keyboard tutor (GB-Lfom, Coke MS 1576).

All in all, these are generally well edited volumes presenting music of interest to anyone working in the field of eighteenth-century organ and harpsichord music. Under the umbrella title ‘Fitzwilliam Handeliana’, and with their varied contents aptly in the spirit of Lord Fitzwilliam's eclectic musical interests and occupations, it is to be hoped that they will help to bring English music of this period to wider attention.