‘Whoever steals this book will go to Hell’
On a music notebook that holds a surprise ‘between the covers’
Daniel Kudó
Copying music used to be a tried-and-true component of music education. This exercise fulfilled a number of purposes. Until lithography made music printing cheaper and more widely available, reproducing a musical score by hand was the best way of procuring a copy. The act of copying also developed the essential skill of music calligraphy. Moreover, it demanded that the students make sense of the combinations of signs and of their context to work faster and avoid mistakes, and it allowed them to compile a useful repertoire in a personal notebook. While the present example is, in many ways, quite commonplace, it nevertheless conceals an extraordinary statement of ownership that reveals the value it held for its creator.
Our artefact is found among almost eight thousand folios of manuscript music dating to the 19th and early 20th centuries kept in the Archivo San Francisco de Lima, within the main Franciscan convent. The collection comprises the music performed in the church of the convent as well as what was copied and studied by the Franciscan novices and by the novices of the Conciliar Seminary of Santo Toribio de Lima. This seminary operated in the convent for nearly a century until, in 1946, in the course of urban development, an eight-lane avenue split the convent in two.
The manuscript measures about 31.5 in breadth and 22 cm in height; the horizontal format was preferred for musical notation since it required fewer line breaks, which meant fewer chances of mistakes when reading it in performance. The longer staves also allowed more tolerance when distributing the bars on a page. The notebook comprises 14 folios of rough-cut paper, including the covers, bound by a simple running stitch 1.5 cm from the left edge.
On the cover of the notebook (Fig. 1) we find only two elements (apart from a shelf-mark recorded at the bottom left): the first one, at the centre-top, is an unusual cross with ornate ends standing over a crescent moon. Rarely seen in this context, the cross over a crescent has been variously associated with the Church as the ship of salvation (Mark 4:35–41), as an anchor of hope (Heb 6:19) or, in both the Iberian and the Russian Christian traditions, with the victory of Christendom over Islam. However, the latter interpretation is unconvincing, since examples of Russian Orthodox crosses with such a crescent long predate the capture of Constantinople and the adoption of the Byzantine crescent and star by the Ottomans. Thus, the symbolic meaning – the victory of Christendom over Islam – may well be a later interpretation. Most likely, the crescent is a symbol representing the Virgin Mary (Rev 12:1), as seen in many depictions, and is an instance of syncretism with former female deities. There is, however, no doubt that the cross indicates the religious character of the manuscript and/or of its owner.
The second element is a statement of ownership phrased in the first-person; the formula is commonly used and seems to confer an anthropomorphic agency to the artefact: ‘I belong to Francisco Huguet y Ribera’.
The contents of the notebook, written in an untidy hand, will certainly capture the interest of anyone with a musical inclination. They include two sets of organ versets for the mass – one in the fifth tone (Fig. 2) and another in the fourth (and the more challenging for being written in three staves) – and two sinfonías for keyboard.
Playing and, often, improvising versets – very brief pieces for the organ – was one of the main duties of an organist and something the student was expected to master. These versets replaced some verses of the mass that would normally have been sung by a choir. This practice was known as alternatim, and evolved from the antiphonal singing of some sections of the mass in which the priest would sing a verse and the choir would reply, a structure that was then applied to the whole mass. Considering that chapels had an obligation to celebrate a given number of masses on behalf of their benefactors, it became an accepted practice to replace the choir on less solemn occasions with just its accompaniment. In some regions, in smaller chapels, this practice reached the extreme of having the organ play during the whole mass while the priest would whisper the words softly to himself in what was called an organ mass. It is worth noticing that, while the words could be omitted, the music could not, because it was what gave a mass a spirit of celebration.
The keyboard sinfonías that complete this notebook are secular works closer to opera overtures than to the now conventional meaning of symphony. One of them is a work by the same composer of the first set of versets in this notebook, Mateo Ferrer y Oller (1788−1864), who was director of the main opera theatre of Barcelona from 1827 and also organist and chapel-master of Barcelona Cathedral, from 1830 and 1833, respectively. Hence, the owner of this notebook was keeping up to date with works produced by a prestigious contemporary composer while following his example by pursuing a successful career in the realms of both religious and secular music.
There is a small surprise in the bottom corner of the recto side of the last folio, where a note reads: ‘End of everything and I belong to Pablo Badía Year 1830’. This statement clearly contradicts what was written on the notebook’s front cover. However, a much greater surprise awaits us on the turn of this last folio, which results to be not one but two folios which were once glued together. Since the glue has completely decayed, a text is revealed on the original folio (Fig. 3):
Being [that] my book of versets of the fifth tone is retained in my power until it breaks because it is a very necessary thing for myself because without it I could not apply myself to study and thus whoever has it will do the favour of returning it. Here I put my name because I do not want to lose the book, if I would wish to lose the book, I would not write my name, whoever steals this book will not see Jesus Christ, because they will go to Hell, where they will be forever, for omnia secula seculorum, Amen, Paulus Badia ex patria Balagoriensys anno 1830.
This text, largely written in Spanish, confirms that the notebook did not originally belong to Francisco Huguet (see Fig. 1), but to one Pablo Badía, a student in the Catalan town of Balaguer. The fact that the initial owner refers to it as his book of versets of the fifth tone suggests that this note was written before other works were added to the notebook. The use of church Latin in his closing remark seems an attempt to confer some credibility to his threat, giving it the weight of a magic spell.
Following this discovery, a closer inspection of the front cover shows that it too consists of two folios which are still partly glued together. The recto side of the inner folio reveals many incoherent scribbles (Fig. 4), including a date from 1831 written in Catalan, which indicates that the first owner of the notebook spoke both Catalan and Spanish. This is not surprising; however, it is testimony to the permanent tension between local culture and regional power.
We do not know if this notebook was stolen – despite the threat – or if it was sold or simply passed on; nor do we know the details of its journey from Balaguer to Lima. Nonetheless, despite its poor physical condition and the fact that the calligraphy was not of the highest quality, its subsequent owners regarded it as precious. In many cases, the value a manuscript had for its owner can be deducted from its material features, especially those indicating preservation measures. In the present example, a later owner obviously took some trouble to paste new covers and re-bind the notebook, as we can see from the stitching, which goes through them. In contrast, it is very rare – and wonderful – to find such an explicit and candid expression of attachment written upon such a humble manuscript.
References
García Gallardo, Cristóbal (2010), ‘La teoría modal polifónica en el Barroco español y su aplicación en los pasacalles de Gaspar Sanz’, Revista de Musicología, 33/1: 83–100.
Kudó, Daniel (2021), ‘El proceso de catalogación del archivo musical del convento de San Francisco de Lima’, M.A. Thesis in Musicology, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.
Nelson, Bernadette (1994), ‘Alternatim Practice in 17th-Century Spain: The Integration of Organ Versets and Plainchant in Psalms and Canticles’, Early Music, 22/2: 239–259.
Saldoni, Baltasar (1868), Diccionario biográfico-bibliográfico de efemérides de músicos españoles, vol. 1, Madrid: Pérez Dubrull, 89–106.
Description
Location: Archivo San Francisco de Lima, Perú
Shelfmark: AMCSFL.716.+ (PM-364)
Date: 1830
Material: Rag paper, 14 folios
Size: 31.5 × 22 cm
Origin: Balaguer, Spain
Copyright Notice
Copyright for all images: Archivo San Francisco de Lima.
Reference Note
Daniel Kudó (2025), ‘Whoever steals this book will go to Hell’: On a music notebook that holds a surprise ‘between the covers’. In Leah Mascia, Thies Staack (eds): Artefact of the Month No. 34, CSMC, Hamburg.