This publication contains three single-movement, bipartite keyboard sonatas attributed to Domenico Scarlatti. The first two, in A and E major, are edited from a manuscript (M1964) in the Biblioteca de Catalunya in Barcelona and the third, in F major, appears in a manuscript (AM1881) in the archive of the monastery of Our Lady of Montserrat. They are marketed as ‘unpublished’, although the sonatas in A and E have appeared in print at least twice before, albeit not in such a convenient format. The musical texts are supplemented by a detailed study, printed in Catalan, Castilian and English, that makes a useful contribution to the ongoing debate about the transmission of Scarlatti's music through manuscripts in Spanish archives.
The attribution of the Sonata in F is, as the editor seems clearly to accept, something of a long shot. She provides relatively little information about manuscript AM1881, and there is no description of the manuscript or list of contents (a fuller study is promised in the Preface). The Sonata in F is explicitly attributed to Scarlatti in the title (‘II Sonata de Escarlati’) but appears to be a singleton, followed in the manuscript by a sonata by Joaquín Suriano. In editing this sonata Pedrero-Encabo has also made use of another exemplar given in manuscript AM1665 from the same archive. Again, no description of the manuscript or its contents is given, so it is difficult to evaluate the possible relationship between the two sources.
The editor has taken the view that AM1665 is a later source that may have been copied from AM1881. Nevertheless, there are some interesting differences between the two exemplars that she has recorded in her critical notes: in AM1665, the sonata attributed to Scarlatti is followed by one by Antonio Soler (catalogued as r115 in Samuel Rubio, Antonio Soler: catálogo crítico (Cuenca: Instituto de Música Religiosa, 1980)), and there are several places where the text has been adapted to fit an instrument with a wider compass. This feature lends weight to her view that AM1665 is a later source, but on the basis of the evidence given in her Introduction there seem to be good grounds for suspecting that the two manuscripts record independent routes of transmission.
In the case of the Sonatas in A and E, we are on much firmer ground. They both appeared in print for the first time in an anthology of twenty-six sonatas by Scarlatti ‘freely transcribed for the piano’ by the pianist and composer Enrique Granados, and published in two volumes by Vidal Llimona y Boceta in Barcelona in 1904 and 1905. The sonatas in question were numbers ten and thirteen in Granados's anthology but their authenticity has always been in question, since they were the only pieces not to appear in the major related collections at the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice (manuscripts 9770–9784, ‘Venice I–XV’) and the Biblioteca Nazionale Palatina in Parma (manuscripts AG31406–31420, ‘Parma I–XV’), or in any other known source.
Assessments of these two sonatas in the years leading up to the tercentenary of the composer's birth in 1985 were largely negative. Joel Sheveloff classified them as ‘possible’ in his 1970 PhD dissertation (Brandeis University) and provided a reconstruction of the two sonatas shorn of the pianistic effects Granados added to the other pieces in the collection. By 1985, however, he had concluded that they were ‘spurious’ (‘Domenico Scarlatti: Tercentenary Frustrations’, The Musical Quarterly 71/4 (1985), 413).
In the years immediately following the tercentenary, more information became available. In 1988, 1989 and 1992, María Ester-Sala published three articles in the Revista musical catalana, the Revista de Musicología and the Livro de homenagem a Macario Santiago Kastner that reported the discovery of the manuscript on which Granados had based his anthology in the Biblioteca de Catalunya (M1964). The second article (María Ester-Sala, ‘Dos sonatas de Domenico Scarlatti: un tema abierto’, Revista de Musicología 12/2 (1989), 593–595) contained facsimile copies of the sonatas in A and E. (See also María Ester-Sala, ‘Un manuscrit scarlattià retrobat’, Revista musical catalana 5 (1988), 221, and Ester-Sala, ‘D. Scarlatti–E. Granados: noticia sobre la localización de un manuscrito de tecla extraviado’, in Livro de homenagem a Macario Santiago Kastner, ed. Maria Fernanda Cidrais Rodrigues, Manuel Morais and Rui Vieira Nery (Lisbon: Fundação Calouse Gulbenkian, 1992), 229–252.)
Manuscript M1964 is clearly a significant source for Scarlatti scholars and one that was not available for study until comparatively recently. It is a late eighteenth-century manuscript of forty-seven folios, lacking f. 48. It is written by four hands on paper made in Catalunya in or around 1780 and was given its present binding in Barcelona between 1908 and 1910, shortly after Granados worked on it for his anthology. In the preface to his 1904 Veintiséis sonatas, volume 1, the publishers reported that the manuscript contained a ‘most interesting collection of sonatas by Scarlatti, composed in Spain and written, without any doubt, for the Spanish royal family’; and that it had recently come to their attention, was in private hands and had been made available to Granados so that he could transcribe the sonatas.
When the Veintiséis sonatas were reissued in 1967 (Madrid: Unión Musical Española), reference to the ownership of the manuscript was omitted. Ester-Sala has argued, very plausibly, that this omission indicated that by then the whereabouts of the manuscript were unknown. The fact that the manuscript had lain uncatalogued in the Biblioteca de Catalunya could well indicate that it was originally placed there on deposit soon after it was rebound, either by the publishers or the owners, or even by Granados himself.
Manuscript M1964 is entitled ‘Tocatas de Scarlatí’ and contains thirty-nine sonatas by Scarlatti or attributable to him, seven by Antonio Soler, three by Josep Closells, three by Narcís Casanoves and four anonymous items (one sonata and three pieces in the earlier Spanish tiento or ricercar style). The sonatas by Scarlatti can be broadly divided into two groups. The first (fols 1r–19v) consists of Kirkpatrick numbers 520–525, 528–529, 534–537, 552–553, 540–541, 546–547, 554–555, 544–545, 306 and 519 – that is, sonatas with collations from Parma XV and Venice XIII and whose earliest sources date from 1757. The sole exception is k306, whose earliest source is dated 1753 (Parma VIII and Venice VI). The second group (fols 19v–34v) consists of k139, k48, k109–110, k211, k190, then the present Sonata in E, followed by k23 and k16, then the Sonata in A, and then k25, k27, k17, k102 and k19 – that is, sonatas whose earliest sources date from before 1752. (Note that the editor has the two new sonatas in the wrong order in her Table 1, which reflects the order in which she has printed them.)
Both Ester-Sala and Pedrero-Encabo attach particular significance to the strong correlation of the first group with later volumes from the Venice and Parma collections. The second group is much looser, with a predominance of single sonatas, unrelated (with the exception of k109 and k110) to their neighbours by key or sequence in other sources. The presence of k102 in this group may be significant, as it shares a source with k109 and k110 and appears between two sonatas from the published Essercizi per gravicembalo of 1738 (k17 and k19) that require the same compass (C/D–c3).
All of this suggests that the majority of sonatas in the second group are early works, and the stylistic features of the Sonatas in A and E are consistent with this conclusion: they are both in 3/8 time, almost entirely in running semiquavers in the right hand and, in the case of the Sonata in A, there are some moderately difficult hand-crossings, left over right. Both sonatas offer relatively mild examples of harmonic experiment and/or repetitive sequences at the start of the second half, one of the features usually associated with Scarlatti. The required compass is E–b2 and the writing suggests harpsichord rather than fortepiano.
In sum, both sonatas demonstrate features that are entirely consistent with what we know of Scarlatti's stylistic preferences from the period of the Essercizi, but neither of them demands to be attributed to him. In the long run the weight of evidence is more likely to be bibliographical rather than strictly musical. There is no doubt that the many extant manuscript sources of Scarlatti in Spanish archives really need some serious and systematic study. For too long the undoubted authority of the Venice and Parma collections has tended to marginalize the many other sources, only some of which have been properly assessed. As literary scholars will attest, there is a spurious homogeneity about an anthology, a superficial uniformity that derives from the work of the collector, copyist, editor or publisher. The trick is to get behind that uniformity and understand the diversity of sources from which the anthology was drawn.
Scarlatti's sonatas will all have started life as single pieces written on single sheets of paper, not as great volumes organized chronologically or by key. Manuscript M1964 presents a microcosm of the issues that arise from this fact. Here we have a compilation that appears to have started out as a fair copy into a ready-made booklet of forty-eight folios, initially based on a source that clearly has a strong link to Venice and Parma. After nineteen folios, the copyist turned to another source or sources that preserved an earlier, much more fragmented manuscript tradition that may well contain readings of equal or greater authority.
If the Sonatas in A and E had come down to us from the first group, we might well have concluded that the case for their attribution had been made. But because they come from the second group, attribution on grounds of proximity is less powerful. Nevertheless, these are interesting examples of a keyboard style that closely resembles that found in some of Scarlatti's earlier works, and they can provisionally remain on the list of probables. At least these two sonatas, then, merit Dean Sutcliffe's description of them as ‘promising’ (The Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 70). But beware: in a source not considered by Pedrero-Encabo, but spotted by Malcolm Boyd (Domenico Scarlatti: Master of Music (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), 193), the Sonata in A is attributed to Francisco Courcelle!
