Like the collection, the book itself is beautiful.
Richard Beattie Davis (1922-2008) was an English musicologist and collector. His collection is now in Florida Atlantis University - the Davis Music Collection.
Book Review
A lifetime’s dedicated research has gone
into Richard Beattie Davis’s magnificent book, The Beauty of Belaieff.
Describing Mitrofan Petrovich Belaieff as ‘more an enabler than a
creator’, Davis documents the impressive music publishing house that this
wealthy timber merchant established in middle life. Belaieff’s publishing output is in itself a
record of an epoch in Russian music, and Davis’s book devotes chapters to each
of the 18 composers that Belaieff promoted.
The publication in colour of over one
hundred and fifty title pages makes this volume handsome enough to merit the
epithet, ‘coffee-table book’ as well as being a serious study, for these
illustrations both enhance and inform the extensive text. Music title pages are a rather unique
art-form, and although this volume is not a history of Belaieff’s commissioned art-work
per se, it goes without saying that Davis does provide commentary on them.
Davis systematically collected Belaieff
publications on a grand scale, and his research embraced published histories,
reference works, a vast amount of correspondence between Belaieff and his
composers, not to mention extensive library visits. It is gratifying, and humbling, to consider
that Davis's initial researches in Westminster Music Library, and then in other
libraries, were to bear fruit in such an admirable monograph. Books of this stature are a welcome
endorsement of the importance of specialist music libraries to music-lovers and
researchers, and underline not only their important function of retaining old
and perhaps forgotten music for posterity, but also the ‘enabling’ role that
their staff are able to offer.
Dr Karen E. McAulay
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