Upright folio.  Approx. 10 x 15 inches (38.3 x 24.8 cm). Printed title; table and advertisement [iv]; 225 pp engraved music, woodcut initials, six illustrative head-pieces. Mottled calf binding.  Dolmetsch Library stamp and pencil shelfmark ("II D 41") to verso of title.  Ownership inscription ("Monsieur Legras de baulieu").  Splitting at joints, scuffing to covers, some damp-staining.  Overall in fine condition.  RISM L 2965. 

Arnold Dolmetsch was an important force in the 20th-century revival of interest in early music.  His scholarship and performances with his family helped to resurrect forgotten instruments such as the viola da gamba, and as an expert instrument maker he crafted a psaltery for Yeats and a lute for Joyce.  Dolmetsch is even mentioned briefly in a passage from the "Eumaeus" episode of Ulysses, and the George Moore novel Evelyn Innes was based on his life.  He accumulated an impressive circle of important and influential friends as well as a legendary library of manuscript and print scores.

King Louis XIV’s favorite of Lully’s tragédies en musique, Atys was known as “l’opéra du Roy”, the King’s opera. In a prologue and five acts to a libretto by Philippe Quinault after Ovid's Fasti, it was first performed for the royal court on 10 January, 1876 by Lully's Académie Royale de Musique (Paris Opera) at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the first public performance taking place in April 1676 at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal. The King had it performed for him again in 1678, and 1682 and 1708.  Piotr Kaminski (Mille et un opéras, Fayard, 2003) writes: “Not counting the ‘magical’ nature of the dénouement, Atys is a human tragedy, its characters fragile, subject to complex drives, without issue, inconsolable.  That the king adopted Atys even before the public recognised the merits of the work is all to his honour.”