Catalogue of Printed Music in the British Museum : Accessions, Part 53 Music in the Hirsch Library

Trustees of the British Museum, London, first edition, 1951. Cloth, 4to, 29 cm,. 438 pp. Approximately 9,000 entries. From the preface: "The Hirsch Library was acquired by the British Museum in 1946.. While many of the rarest and most important musical compositions were included in Vols. Ii, iii and iv of the catalogues issued by Mr. Hirsch himself, it is not generally known that these amounted to barely one-third of the total amount of music in his library. The remainder included over 300 additional vocal scores, of which 150 were of Mozart operas; about 2,000 miscellaneous works of the late 18th and of the 19th and 20th centuries, including orchestral scores, chamber music, reprints and facsimiles ; and smaller, but notable, collections of the first and early editions of Marschner, Loewe, Berlioz, Liszt, Johann Strauss (father and son), Lanner, Brahms and Sterndale Bennett. There was also a large number of 19th-century French, German and English popular songs with pictorial title-pages. Further, each year since 1946 Mr. Hirsch has generously presented to the British Museum a number of valuable pieces as additions to his former library. The whole has been kept together as an entity and continues to bear his name. It was considered of paramount importance that emitries for all the Hirsch music should be incorporated at the earliest possible date into the working copies of the British Museum music catalogues. To this end was directed the preparation of a special Accession Part (No. 53 in the current series) devoted exclusively to the Hirsch music, on which work was begun at the end of 1947. Its completion has produced nearly 9,000 entries, which, although necessarily giving much less bibliographical detail than Mr. Hirsch's own very elaborate catalogues, have made known for the first time the whole range of this collection of music. Bookplate on front pastedown endpaper, otherwise Good.