article 122: FROBERGER IN SPAIN, PART 2 A footnote in an article by Terence Charlston (Journal of the Royal College of Organists, Volume 10, December 2016, pp. 5–27) alerted me to the fact that, besides pieces by Cabanilles which may have been influenced by Froberger, there are a few works by the latter in manuscripts from the Valencian’s circle. The most distinguished of them is the Hexachord Fantasy, Adler’s no. I, which appears in Froberger’s 1649 autograph Libro Secondo. It appears in the same manuscript (Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, Manuscrit M. 387) as the first of the tientos de falsas discussed in the previous article. This sprawling collection of various gatherings, some dated in the 1690s by a student of Cabanilles, had lost a number of pages before it was bound. So it is with this (anonymous) Fantasia in open score, still the notation of choice of the Valencia school. In the last two bars of the first page (f. 200v) the voices are desynchronised, which may be the reason the next folio is missing. When the piece picks up again on the present f. 201r, all is well until the end. The variants in this copy of the only work of Froberger’s ever to be printed show that it came from Book VI of Athanasius Kircher’s massive Musurgia Universalis (Rome, 1650). So did Mozart’s copy of the piece. At the bottom of p. 465 the Jesuit introduces the fantasia as follows: “Whether seen as a most perfect school of composition, and fugue, and ingenious order, or whether you observe its remarkable changes of time or its variety, nothing at all seems to be wanting. And so we have decided to offer it to all instrumentalists, as the most perfect example of this kind of composition, to be imitated.” Froberger had known Kircher in Rome, and came back to Vienna with one of Kircher’s quaint composition machines. He seems not to have feared being put out of work by this early example of Artificial Intelligence. Higenio Anglès, the editor of the first complete edition of Cabanilles (1927), didn’t know Froberger’s masterpiece, and tentatively ascribed the work to Cabanilles in his source inventory (Vol. 1, p. xlv). A little later in the same manuscript (ff. 211r-212v), again anonymously, we find an attempt to transcribe a Froberger Capriccio, no. XIII in Adler’s numbering.* The scribe, who entitled it Tocata Italiana Para el Organo, failed so miserably that a slightly later hand added a bit of doggerel at the end: Esta obra está tan errada Que no puede estar más cagada. (This piece is so full of mistakes that it could not be shittier.) Like the Fantasia VII discussed in the previous article, I don’t believe this piece is by Froberger at all. Aside from the late-17th-century Barcelona manuscript, it only appears, ungarbled, in much later sources, mostly from the circle of Kirnberger. Whoever wrote it produced a clever contrafactum of the master’s style. Its eightfold-repeated single-note theme is uncharacteristic. The piece could be by Kerll, whose “Battaglia” is erroneously attributed in M. 387 to Cabanilles. Furthermore, another non-autograph capriccio (XVIII) appears in the same Pachelbel/Eckelt manuscript as the doubtful Fantasia VII. I smell confused transmission along a Habsburg axis, with a vector to Berlin. For at least part of the third and final work to be considered, there is no room for doubt about authenticity, but all the more room for speculation about how it got to Spain. There is a foundation/museum in the village of Felanitx on the island of Mallorca named after its donor, Cosme Bauzà (1871-1959). Its library holds several manuscripts of music by Cabanilles and his contemporaries. In MS no. 173 there is found a seamless combination of fragments of Capriccios XIII and IX. The latter was published in Mainz by Bourgeat in one of two volumes (1693 and 1696) which contain some works from lost autographs. Bars 33-66 of an authentic capriccio by Froberger were thus merged (in a different key and without a closing cadence) by someone close to Cabanilles with bars 1-84 of Capriccio XIII, about which I harbor serious doubts.** Some of the Bourgeat pieces may well have come from Froberger’s lost Libro Primo. In that case, Capriccio IX could have already circulated in Rome, Kircher’s base of operations, and arrived thence in Valencia, a major port of interchange. Or manuscript copies might have been available in Vienna to Richter, Techelmann, Reutter, Pachelbel, Kerll, Poglietti or others of that time and place where keyboard music printing was practically unknown, to be passed on to colleagues and amateurs in Habsburg Spain. But it would be nice to think that Froberger spread some of his music around Spain, in person, during the visit which is only documented in the autograph mentioned at the beginning of part 1. Let us hope it sees the light of day again soon, after its brief re-appearance. November 7, 2023 * I absolutely refuse to accept the more recent FrWV numbers of the undigested “Froberger Werkverzeichnis”. * Incredible as it may seem, according to the editor of the Felanitx manuscripts (Nelson Lee, “Corpus of Early Keyboard Music” 48), the pieces by Froberger and Kerll in these Valencian manuscripts are the only pieces by German-speaking composers to be found in any Spanish source of the 17th or 18th centuries. I am in no position to check that assertion, but I do know that Handel appears in the collections of Antonio Martin y Coll (1706-9). - back -