The University of Louisville Music Library is the repository of some 400 manuscripts and prints of music, and a number of music books, collected between about 1750 and 1860 by three branches of the Ricasoli family of the high nobility of Florence. Largely a performing collection, the scores and pedagogical books were used in the Ricasoli residences and chapels by family members and the musicians they employed. Amounting to over 1,400 compositions, there are operas, oratorios, masses, organ toccatas, sacred and secular songs, ballet music, sinfonias, concertos, violin and keyboard sonatas, sonatas, variations, character pieces, and opera transcriptions for keyboard alone, works for piano four-hands, and harp compositions. Many scores are by Tuscan composers, and a considerable number are autographs. In several of the manuscripts alterations and performance indications are visible.
Principal composers represented in the collection include Handel, Marcello, Pergolesi, Jommelli, J. C. Bach, Pleyel, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Clementi, Dussek, Guglielmi, Myslive ek, Paisiello, Rossini, Mayr, Paer, Cimarosa, Cherubini, Kozeluch, Schroeter, Vanhal, and Wagenseil, among others. Some of the Tuscan composers are Barbieri, Buccioni, Campion, Favier, B. Felici, A. Felici, Giuliani, Ligniville, Mabellini, Magnelli, Meucci, Moneta, Panerai, Pelleschi, G. M. Rutini, Gaspero Sborgi, Gaetano Sborgi, Sodi, and Valenti.
The present volume brings together important documentary studies on the Ricasoli music by Robert Lamar Weaver and a comprehensive catalogue of the complete contents, arranged by category: Secular Music; Sacred Music; and Method, Theory, and History Books. Weaver's two essays trace the history of the collection and its cultural background, and examine liturgical services and music in the Ricasoli chapels and residences. Both the catalogue and the essays draw on a wealth of contemporaneous documents from the Ricasoli archives in Florence.