The Morgan Library & Museum recently acquired a bound volume of copyists' manuscripts containing 339 pages of keyboard works principally by Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757), penned during the lifetime of the composer. Containing some eight dozen known pieces by Scarlatti, the collection also includes about a dozen sonatas by Antonio Soler (1729–1783), in addition to some three dozen unidentified works and possibly two by Alessandro Scarlatti (Domenico's father).
Scarlatti left his royal post in Lisbon to follow the Infanta Maria Bárbara of Portugal, his talented pupil, to Madrid when in 1729 she married Crown Prince Ferdinand, who would accede to the Spanish throne in 1746 as Ferdinand VI. Scarlatti was part of the entourage that followed the royal family for their annual autumn retreat to El Escorial.
In 1752 Soler was appointed organist at El Escorial and became Scarlatti's pupil. Because no autograph manuscripts of Scarlatti's or Soler's music survive, copyist manuscripts that can be shown to be linked with the composers assume great significance. Both the fact that the manuscript is written on paper identified by Luis Antonio González Marín as consistent with that used by the Royal Court and the fact that the volume bears the date 1756 bolster its authenticity. Of particular interest is a sonata in A major found on fols 64v–65r of the manuscript. As W. Dean Sutcliffe has informed us, this is the same as a piece in A major (Lx25) found in the Lisbon Libro di tocate, published in facsimile with an introductory essay by Gerhard Doderer (Lisbon: Instituto Nacional de Investigação Científica, 1991). All of the other sixty-one sonatas found in this Lisbon manuscript appear elsewhere under Scarlatti's name. The reappearance of the A major piece in this new source strengthens the case for its being regarded as a genuine work by the composer.
The acquisition, which has been digitized and is available on the Morgan's Music Manuscripts Online webpage <www.themorgan.org/music/manuscript/316355>, was once owned by Mallorcan musicologist Antonio Noguera. It is hoped that the accessibility of the source will stimulate research on the works of these composers, provide clues about chronology and perhaps reveal new keyboard works by these two eminent musicians.
