David Edelberg (1939-1989)
Montrealer David Edelberg was by profession the president of his own engineering firm and by nature one of Canada's most passionate Handelians. At the centre of his tireless devotion to Handel's celebrated musical genius lay his efforts to assemble the world's most complete collection of Handel long-playing (LP) records.
David Edelberg started collecting in the mid-1970s. Over the subsequent fifteen years the collection grew rapidly, and by 1989 comprised nearly 3,000 sound recordings. A decade into the collection's development David Edelberg chose to revise his purchasing policy to include Handel materials in a variety of other formats. These ranged from scores (including a complete Arnold edition) to ephemera, such as T-shirts and postcards.
The cataloguing of the collection posed a very specific challenge, owing to the quantity and diversity of its individual components. For the solution David Edelberg turned to Ichiro Fujinaga, a young graduate student at McGill University's Faculty of Music. Many hours of programming and data input later, a database of the LP portion of the collection was completed. More recently, Mohammed Ali Abbas, a McGill undergraduate student, converted this sound recording database for searching over the World Wide Web.
While David Edelberg's tragic death from cancer at the age of 50 brought his unique project to a premature conclusion, his legacy lives on as the David Edelberg / Handel Collection now housed in the Marvin Duchow Music Library of McGill University.
