Autograph (manuscript)


An autograph or holograph is a manuscript or document written in its author's or composer's hand. The meaning of autograph as a document penned entirely by the author of its content, as opposed to a typeset document or one written by a copyist or scribe other than the author, overlaps with that of holograph.
Autograph manuscripts are studied by scholars, and can become collectable objects. Holographic documents have, in some jurisdictions, a specific legal standing.

Terminology

According to The Oxford English Minidictionary, an autograph is, apart from its meaning as signature, a "manuscript in the author's handwriting," while a holograph is a " written wholly in the handwriting of the person in whose name it appears."
In an article written by Edward Maunde Thompson, the 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica mentions "a document signed by the person from whom it emanates" as another common meaning of the word "autograph", supported by various examples from antiquity to the Middle Ages when a document, usually written by a scribe different from the author, became "signed" or "autographed" by the person who attached his seal to it. According to Thompson's article on autographs, when the entire document is written by the hand of the person from whom it emanates, it can technically also be called a holograph.
In Webster's Third New International Dictionary, the definitions are:
According to Stanley Boorman in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians:
The author of the Grove article clarifies with an example, stating that Johann Sebastian Bach's autographs include as well the manuscripts he wrote of his own compositions as the copies he made of compositions by other composers, and that the same can be said about his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, whose autographs include his holographs, and, for instance, the manuscript copies he made of compositions by his father.
According to, writing in The Routledge Research Companion to Johann Sebastian Bach, "autograph" and "holograph" can be considered synonyms, the former term being generally preferred in studies of manuscripts. Further, he writes that Bach's copies of compositions by other composers "should never be referred to as Bach's autographs, even if they are entirely in Bach's handwriting." He distinguishes two types of partial autographs: the first being written by a set of scribes, among whom the composer, the second being a copy made by a scribe other than the composer, to which the composer, in a later stage, applied editorial corrections and/or other modifications. According to this author, manuscripts of straightforward transcriptions should be referred to as "copy" or "transcription manuscript", while more convoluted arrangements should rather be referred to as "autograph" than "copy". In Bach-scholarship "original manuscript" refers to a score or performance parts written for the composer's own use.
In what follows the terms "autograph" and "holograph" are used as quoted in the sources indicated by the footnoted references. When these sources only use a description, such as "in the author's handwriting" or "written in the hand of the author", then, following Webster's, "autograph" is used for a "manuscript " and "holograph" for a "document ", and either of these terms only when the explicitly named scribe of the manuscript or document is also the creator of its content. For instance:
Autograph letters which are not in the handwriting of the person from whom they emanate, and perhaps only bear the signature of their author, such as in the Vatican usage of the term, are not further considered in this article about autograph manuscripts.

Text

Autograph text, with or without drawn illustrations, or calculations, remains from many authors, from different eras, including:
;Middle Ages
;Renaissance
;17th century
;18th century
;19th century
;20th century
;21st century
Musical autographs exist in various stages of completion:
Intermediate stages are possible, for instance Wagner's method of composition entailed several sketch and draft stages, and a first stage of the complete score before the fair copy. Other composers used fewer steps: for his cantatas, Bach apparently often started directly with the composing score, without, in the end, always transferring such score to a fair copy. Sometimes, however, he started with the transcription of an earlier work, which developed in a revision score, before being transferred to a fair copy. Or otherwise, a revision manuscript could be turned into performance material for a rewritten work: D-B Mus.ms. Bach St 112 VI, Fascicle 1, a partially autograph bundle of performance parts for the last cantata of Bach's Christmas Oratorio, contains four parts which are revision versions originally written for an otherwise undocumented cantata.
Sometimes a composer's autograph starts as a fair copy, continuing as a draft. For example, the Fantasia in the late 1730s autograph of Fantasia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 906, is a fair copy, but halfway through the Fugue the manuscript gradually shifts to a draft with several corrections.

Scholarship

Scholarly studies of autographs can help in establishing authenticity or date of origin of a composition. Autographs, and fair copies produced with the assistance of scribes, can also be studied to detect a composer's true intentions. For instance, John Tyrrell argued that Janáček's autograph score of his last opera was less authoritative as the final state of that opera than the fair copy by the composer's scribes, produced under his direction and with his corrections.

As collectable object

Bach's autograph compositions are rarely available for private collectors: the bulk of his hundreds of extant autographs resides at the Berlin State Library, while only a fourth of 40 complete autograph manuscripts outside that collection are privately owned. One of such exceptional autographs, that came up for auction in 2016, fetched over £2.5m.
Ludwig van Beethoven's autographs have, since a few months after the composer's death in 1727, been sold for considerable prices at auctions. Beethoven's autograph of the piano duet version of his Große Fuge sold for £1.1m at Sotheby's in 2005. In November 2016 the autograph score of a Mahler symphony sold for £4,546,250: no autograph symphony had ever sold for a higher price.

Holographic documents

A holograph is a document written entirely in the handwriting of the person whose signature it bears. Some countries or local jurisdictions within certain countries give legal standing to specific types of holographic documents, generally waiving requirements that they be witnessed. One of the most important types of such documents are holographic last wills.
In fiction, The Ardua Hall Holograph, handwritten by Aunt Lydia, plays a central role in Margaret Atwood's novel, The Testaments