The earliest of the 15 manuscripts of Domenico Scarlatti’s sonatas kept in Venice’s Biblioteca Marciana is dated 1742. It is by far the largest (61 numbers, but including several multi-movement works) and is uniquely chaotic. It contains the remnants of his earliest keyboard production as well outstanding pieces of more recent date. His only surviving chamber music appears towards the end. Coming four years after the publication in London of the composer’s 30 Essercizi – the only print he supervised – one wonders what the point could have been, four years later, of such a catch-all – one which is so intimately bound up with the intriguing question of Scarlattian chronology. After spending a few weeks checking the sources, scans of which are all available online, here are my thoughts.
First we must place Venice 1742 in context with the two greatest sources of Spanish origin: the 15-volume collection kept in Parma, dated 1752-7 (except for Parma I, which has no date) and Venice’s series numbered I-XIII with the same dates but partly different contents. Joel Sheveloff (Brandeis University dissertation, 1970) showed that the 13-volume Venice set, opulently bound with the arms of Queen Maria Barbara, was copied from the more modest-looking Parma manuscripts. The 1742 manuscript in question has the same royal binding, as does that dated 1749, written by the same copyist and kept in the same library. Their misleading numbers XIV and XV, which persist in the literature, were given them in the early 20th century by Alessandro Longo, the first to attempt a complete edition.
Venice 1742 starts out with 15 works of high quality, 12 of which found their way into the Parma canon. Only two of the remaining 47 works received the same stamp of approval. Five pieces in Venice 1742 also appear in the Essercizi, but four of them are earlier versions.* This provides a clue as to the nature of the whole. It shows that in preparing the Essercizi, Scarlatti was engaged in editing and polishing earlier work. The preface states that the Essercizi were composed “under the auspices” of its dedicatee, King João V of Portugal. They can thus be assigned with some degree of certitude to Scarlatti’s years in Maria Barbara’s native land (ca. 1720 to 1729). This fits their style, which can be plausibly located between the Italian-period works in Venice 1742 and the post-1729 Andalusian influences.
The first 15 pieces in Venice 1742 have clearly undergone a similar burnishing. The versions in Parma are identical, except for better readings where the copyist of Venice 1742 made mistakes. This indicates that Parma was also copied from the lost autographs. Recent scholarship has determined that the entire Venice/Parma corpus was the work of a court copyist, José Alaguero.
The two Parma sonatas previously entered into Venice 1742 in spots after nos. 1-15 (no. 32 / K.69 and no. 52 / K.87) can be counted among Scarlatti’s most enduring utterances. I believe the profound grief they express must have something to do with the death (1739) of Scarlatti’s first wife, Catalina. They may have come into Alaguero’s hands as he worked through the pile of older autographs, which still included the unedited versions of four Essercizi.
The previous article on this site (117) touched on the problem of K.52, of which two versions survive in Venice 1742. The edited version (no.10) is one of the “good” first 15, but also one of the three that, for whatever reasons, were not included in Parma. The last piece in Venice 1742 (no. 61) is – inexplicably – a mutilated copy of an early version of K.52, full of incorrect octave transpositions. Further checking of the hindmost 47 pieces in Venice 1742 reveals many more such instances of Alaguero’s faulty understanding of the C-clefs he encountered in some of the Italian-period autographs he was working from, and transcribing into Scarlatti’s later form of notation. A number of these sonatas appeared as additions to Roseingrave’s pirated edition of the Essercizi (1739) in their original form, as relics of his sojourn in Italy, where he was acquainted with Scarlatti. They allow comparison with Alaguero’s work.***
The 41 sonatas of the 1749 manuscript represent a much more serious effort. Heavily weighted towards the Andalusian folklore of the Seville period (1729-33), all but two of these sonatas were inducted into the Parma canon in unaltered form. Venice 1749 consists entirely of polished specimens, continuing where the Essercizi and Venice 1742 left off. 1749 was the year Scarlatti made his will, so there might have been a health scare. Did the queen encourage him to finally get started with a proper inventory of his works? And if so, what better way to begin than with a souvenir of their years together in the Moorish Alcazar of Seville?
I think the Parma series represents a definitive selection for the composer’s own use, including many sonatas from the 1742 and 1749 manuscripts. The Venice series numbered I-XIII, copied from Parma in the same years, was a not entirely consistent attempt to complete the Scarlatti corpus in the queen’s library at a time when the composer’s health was failing.
What happened to Scarlatti’s autographs remains a mystery. They might have been inherited by one of the five surviving members of Scarlatti’s family for whom no list of bequests has come down to us, and discarded as moldering waste paper at some point; or Scarlatti might have discarded them himself after the definitive revisions had been recorded in Parma, as Beethoven often did after publication. But I think it more likely that they perished, along with Soler’s holographs, when Napoleon’s troops sacked the monk’s former residence, the monastery at El Escorial, in 1808.
October 22, 2023
*The exception comes as an afterthought near the very end of Venice 1742 (no. 59): it is actually a correction of Essercizi no. 12, which adds many signs for hand crossings which were missing in the print.
** With a few exceptions, Parma and its Venice copy all contain 30 sonatas. I think this shows Scarlatti was aiming, in his old age and ill health, for further prints of edited earlier works. But isolated, as he was at that point, in a country where music printing was almost non-existent, the project never came to fruition.
*** Here is an oddity in Roseingrave’s print: its nos. 2 and 3 are two versions of the same piece (K.8). The first is in the original Italian version with C-clefs, the other in the Essercizi’s more modern notation. The latter includes many dotted figures ending with 16th notes which are left as 8ths in the older version. This is one of the best illustrations of such notational shorthand I have ever come across. The older version was first published by Paul Dukas in 1912. There is also another possible example of an ill-considered revision by Scarlatti, like that of K.52 in Venice 1742, which led to a doubled dissonance and near-parallel octaves (see article 117). In the Essercizi, K.8’s bar 3 tenor voice has an attractive, stepwise melodic line leading to the next bar which results in the kind of blatant parallel octaves which Scarlatti avoided in such situations. In Roseingrave’s earlier version (his no. 2) the line makes a small leap which avoids the parallel. The offending note in question could have been a misprint in either edition, but I doubt it.
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