Bibliophilia: an article by Howard Goodall for Portrait of the House, a compilation of reminiscences and ruminations on the subject of Christ, Church, Oxford:
I didn’t use Christ Church’s magnificent high Baroque library much in my first or second years as an undergraduate. In those days (the late 70s), Peckwater Quad had the unmistakeable ambience of an expensive boys’ public school and since I had escaped from just such a place to attend my excellent local comprehensive earlier in my teens I found its Hooray swagger evoked unhappy memories. One late summer evening in my first term I chose to write my essay in the library only to be assailed by an inebriated, pantless toff in a ‘toga’ (pillowcase) who had strayed from a party in Peck. That pretty much did it for me until Finals year, when, with proper exams looming, I fell in love with the polished tranquillity of the library and took up residence therein. An added bonus was that the woman to whom I am now married would stroll pass every afternoon on her way to her then boyfriend’s rooms, or a tutorial, or perhaps both.
I vaguely knew that the college library contained somewhere a dusty collection of manuscripts, sheet music and early music publications but assumed that it was no match for the glories of the Old Bod. I have since discovered my mistake. Twenty years after I’d left the House, whilst researching for a Channel 4 TV series, Howard Goodall’s Big Bangs, I found myself desperately in need of an original manuscript of Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo, the piece to which we more or less owe the form. The great composer’s old haunts, theDucalPalaceatMantuaand St Mark’s Basilica inVenice, where we had been filming, yielded nothing, as did the Italian State Archives and the mighty Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (the French have been ransackingItaly’s written treasures for centuries). My assistant (also a Christ Church graduate, as it happened) gleefully told me, however, that one priceless copy of the authentic 1609 edition – the one Monteverdi himself worked from – was in Christ Church library, of all places.
I booked an appointment and the carefully glooved librarian kindly left me with the amazing manuscript to peruse. It was as if the intervening 400 years simply hadn’t existed. I was looking directly – composer to composer – at Monteverdi’s own instructions, unfiltered, unedited, unchanged. My questions, for example on his use of the band, on his ‘figured’ bass lines, on how much ornamentation he offered to, or expected from, his singers were all answered within an hour. No amount of scholarship or expertise by someone else, however brilliant, can substitute for the direct contact with a composer’s own score. This extraordinary booklet of yellowing pages, still completely legible after 400 years, is opera’s Holy Grail, more significant than all of Wagner’s frenzied jottings or even Mozart and Da Ponte’s revelatory correspondence, since without Orfeo the fledgling form of opera might never have taken flight at all. If this weren’t enough, I recently noticed that Christ Church also have an original 1602 printed edition of Vicenzo Galilei’s seminal treatise, Dialogo della musica antica e moderna, which formed the intellectual ‘plan of action’ for the invention of the first operas.
The library’s music collection houses substantial amounts of work by virtually every European composer from the Early Renaissance to the Treaty of Utrecht, including Henry Purcell’s Funeral Music for the Death of Queen Mary, Handel’s Zadok the Priest , John Dowland’s Flow my teares, possibly the most famous (and beautiful) song of the entire Elizabethan and Jacobean period, and no less than five operas by Jean-Baptiste Lully, Louis XIV’s court composer and friend. Now those two really did know how to host a toga party.