Musical treasures of Kedleston Hall

Kedleston Hall is an imposing eighteenth-century house a few miles north-west of Derby, now owned by the National Trust.

Exciting new research into the musical life of the Hall in the eighteenth century has brought to light a number of musical treasures.

The Hall was built in its present form by Sir Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Baron Scarsdale (1726-1804). It seems that he was musical, or at least had music lessons (undoubtedly initiated by his father), since the Hall’s library contains a small leather-bound quarto-sized manuscript book inscribed ‘Nathaniel Curzon February 26th 1738/9’. Surely this once belonged to the 12-year old Nathaniel?

It begins with a simple unaccompanied triple-time tune in C major labelled ‘Minuett for Cecely’, with the same tune transposed down a minor third to A major on the opposite page, labelled ‘Ditto for the violin’, in which violin fingering is included. There follow several other unaccompanied tunes of a simple nature including the melody from ‘The Chorus in Atalanta’, and another tune labelled ‘The Lady’s Lamentation for Senesino’.

Atalanta is an opera by Handel, first performed at Covent Garden on 12th May 1736; Senesino ‘the little Sienese’ (1686-1758) was the famous castrato singer who was engaged by Handel as primo uomo (lead male singer) in his company, the Royal Academy of Music, and who sang many of Handel’s most taxing operatic rôles in the 1720s and 1730s. He made his first appearance in a revival of Radamisto on 28 December 1720, and remained in London for many of the succeeding sixteen years.

Wendy Hancock, artistic director of Musica Donum Dei, writes:

In 1750 the younger Sir Nathaniel Curzon married Lady Caroline Colyear (1733-1812) daughter of the 2nd Earl of Portmore, who shared his delight in collecting paintings and sculpture; but may she not also have shared an interest in music-making? There is a charming portrait in the Family Corridor by the English portrait painter Arthur Devis (1712-1787) of her playing the (Neapolitan) mandolin, with Nathaniel standing, dated 1754 . As a girl from a family of quality, she would have certainly learnt music, but the mandolin was still moderately unusual in England at this time. The first wave of mandolin popularity (and almost all the first method books beginning in the 1760s) happened in Paris; so for the Curzons to portray themselves with a mandolin this early in that movement was surely a demonstration of their cosmopolitan stylishness. I am indebted to Stewart McCoy who states that “the Neapolitan mandoline was a newer type (compared with the older mandolino which commonly had six pairs of strings), with a lute-type body and four courses of metal strings tuned in pairs, and played with a plectrum. It first appeared about 1740 or so, and has the same tuning as a violin. The popularity of the violin in the 18th century led to the tuning in fifths of the Neapolitan mandolin, and it was played with a plectrum, as it is today. In the picture you can see the scratch plate between the lady's right hand and the sound hole. The scratch plate is fitted into the table of the instrument to prevent the plectrum scratching the wood. The shape of the instrument is typical for a mandolin”. Eugene Braig of the Lute Net adds that “the soundbox is portrayed a little on the large side, but this appears to be a classic, late 18th-century Neapolitan mandolin. You can also see the case on the bench behind the tree”.

Right: a page from Miss Juliana Curzon’s Songbook