Folio. Full modern green cloth with printed title label to spine. 1f. (recto title, verso blank), [i] (table and advertisement), 38, [i] blank) pp. Engraved throughout. With foliation in pencil to many upper outer corners. Elaborate engraved title incorporating a flute, recorder, bassoon, trumpet, violin, lute, horticultural and architectural motifs, an open score with several bars of recitative without text, and the quotation "Non ante vulgatas per Artes / Verba loquor Socianda Chordis." Slightly browned; some leaves trimmed with partial loss to song titles; outer edge of title slightly ragged, reinforced with clear tape'"J. Hare" erased from imprint. First Edition, fourth issue. Smith p. 82, no. 4. BUC p. 431. RISM H389 and HH389. The title is documented in Handel's 'Rinaldo': An Outline of the Earlier Editions" by William C. Smith in The Musical Times, Vol .76, No. 1110 (August 1935), with the following translation of the quote from Horace, Odes, Book 4, No. 9: "Not through arts before made known, I speak words to be wedded to the lyre strings." The same title was used decades earlier for the first edition of Rinaldo (1711). Acis and Galatea, first performed at Cannons, Edgware in 1718, "was modelled on the English masques by Pepusch and others produced at Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1715-18 as a modest (and moderately successful) counterblast to the Italian opera; but it comprehensively transcends them with its profound evocation of tragedy in a pastoral setting, leavened by touches of grotesque humour in the characterization of the giant Polyphemus. . On 15 May [1732] an unauthorized performance of Handel's . dramatic work for Cannons, Acis and Galatea, took place at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. Handel again responded on 10 June with a new version of the same work - a combination of the Naples cantata Aci, Galatea e Polifemo with the Cannons masque and other music, sung in a mixture of English and Italian and presented as a serenata. In the space of six weeks two musical forms new to London, oratorio and serenata, had found a place in the city's theatrical entertainment, but only as an occasional alternative to opera." Anthony Hicks in Grove Music Online The final aria in the present edition, "An Additional Song Sung by the Sig.[no]r Senesino in Acis and Galatea," is drawn from Handel's Acis, Galatea e Polifemo, HWV 72. A fine lifetime first edition, documenting a dramatic moment in the masque's reception history, when, in response to an unauthorized performance of the work, the composer mobilized the celebrated castrato Senesino to offer the public a new version of Acis, embellished with supplementary Italian arias.
