Dear Matanya, I would very much like to know more about the other lute manuscript.
> During this visit, he told Arthur > the same story he has been telling me, as well as Colin Cooper, the editor > of Classical Guitar magazine, that the manuscript was taken from > Koenigsberg to Vilnius by the KGB, together with _another_ lute manuscript, > and then deposited in the Biblioteka Akademia Nauk. According to Silinskas, > the other lute manuscript was still in the KGB archives in 1991. Until manuscripts are copied in some form, be it Graham hand-copying Straloch, Chilesotti transcribing and publishing his "Da un Codice" in staff notation, microfilms of Hirsch, or photographs of Welde, the existence of that precious, irreplaceable music is utterly precarious. Of course originals are important in their own right, but Minkoff, SPES, Boethius, and yourself with Editions Orphée, have all provided a safety net. If the original is destroyed, at least we still have the music safely tucked away in our facsimiles and transcriptions. It is desperately sad that you and Arthur, who worked together to produce the Koenigsberg facsimile (and have thus guaranteed the preservation of its contents) have fallen out. I very much appreciate what you have both done over the years, together and separately, to help the rest of us in our tiny world of lutes. There is a time to work together, and a time to go separate ways. Whatever your differences now, I hope you will both regard that particular project as a success. Original manuscripts - our sources of lute music - are a finite resource. Sooner or later everything which happens to have survived over the centuries will have been discovered. It is possible that we have already found all we can in Western Europe, but I suspect there are still sources of lute music yet to be discovered in Eastern Europe. It would be tragic, if, having survived for three or four hundred years, they should now vanish for good. The Etwall Hall Lute Book was mentioned in the 19th century, but no-one knows where it is now. Will that be the same fate for the other manuscript you mentioned in connection with Koenigsberg? Best wishes, Stewart McCoy.
