Music Makes A Place at Georgetown

Autograph manuscript of Donizetti's "Troppo e vezzosa la ninfa bella"

Music's place at Georgetown, while an honored one, has not been particularly prominent. The library has long had modest collections of books on the history of music, biographies of composers and musicians, and recordings in various formats. The Special Collections Division could point with pride to a copyist's manuscript, dated 1825, of the opening two movements of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and, more recently, to brief manuscripts written by Aaron Copland and William Grant Still as well as printed scores autographed by Ferrucio Busoni, Percy Grainger, and R. Nathaniel Dett.

From the library's point of view, all that changed remarkably late last December, when University President Leo O'Donovan, S.J., signed an agreement with Leon Robbin (L'22) whereby Mr. Robbin's extensive collection of musical manuscripts and letters written by composers would ultimately come to reside in Lauinger Library. In 1990 Mr. Robbin presented to the university an eighteenth-century copy of a manuscript by Palestrina, bound with an as yet unidentified manuscript Requiem. That manuscript was joined, on the occasion of the signing of the agreement, by autograph manuscripts by Gioacchino Rossini (1826, with a presentation inscription) and Gaetano Donizetti (1816 and not dated).

The Robbin collection comprises approximately 350 musical manuscripts in all, among which are examples by Schubert and Beethoven, together with a similar number of letters written by composers, including a sizable number by Gabriel Faure. Thanks to the collecting acumen and generosity of Mr. Robbin, music's place in the library will be a prominent one indeed.