?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 8,000 - $ 12,000
SACRED MUSIC RARITY MUSIC. Morales, Cristóbal de. Missarum liber primus. Title with printer's device within woodcut historiated architectural border. Letterpress music throughout with woodcut historiated and ornamental initials of different sizes. [2], 150 leaves. Folio, 420x280 mm, contemporary blind-tooled morocco, spine ends and cover corners restored; scattered repairs and restoration, mainly in first Mass, generally with minimal loss of music or text, clean tear across leaves 100 and 101. Old ownership inscriptions of the Monastery of the Holy Cross, Coimbra. From the collection of Alfonso Cassuto. Lyon: Jacques Moderne, 1546
Second edition of the first volume of a 2-volume collection of 16 polyphonic masses originally published in 1544 in Rome; second issue, with the title dated 1546 instead of 1545. The second edition of the second volume was published in 1551. Morales (circa 1500-1553) "is widely recognized as the first major composer from the Iberian peninsula and the most important figure in early 16th-century Spanish music" (New Grove). Born in Seville, he had a peripatetic career as an organist, chorister, and choirmaster, spending many years in Italy and serving in the papal choir in Rome from 1535 to 1540. His reputation grew after his death as his compositions became more widely known. Masses from the 1544 collection were the first polyphonic works copied for use in the New World. New Grove XVII, 85-91. RISM M3581 (the first volume of the Lyon edition) locates only the Eastman School of Music copy in the U.S. and 6 copies in Europe (none in Spain or Portugal, although CCPBE locates one at the University of Valencia); neither the Rome or Lyon editions have been listed in American Book Prices Current, which records only one work by Morales ever having sold at auction, in 1993 in London.
