Heavenly sonatas, heroic rivers and demonic dancing

Abstract

The days of believing that 18th-century musical texts should be taken literally in performance are long over. Instead, there is widespread agreement that they should be understood as musical serving suggestions, including in choices of instrumentation. For example, in 1906 musicologist Edward Dent proposed that some of Domenico Scarlatti’s (1685–1757) sonatas were not written for a single keyboard instrument, but were in fact intended for the violin and keyboard. Dent was talking about sonatas k.73 (l.217), 77 (168), 78 (75), 81 (271), 89 (211), 90 (106) and 91 (176), all of which are transmitted in ‘Libro XIV’ of a Venetian manuscript in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, dated 1742. However, it was to take almost 40 years before Lionel Salter, Dent’s student, published them for this instrumentation—see his collection of Sonatas for violin and clavier (7 vols., London, 1940–50). Further examination of the Scarlatti source materials revealed that another 16 sonatas had similar characteristics to the seven identified by Dent. These characteristics include a four-movement structure (slow–fast–slow–fast), often with a figured bass, with the ‘right-hand’ and ‘left-hand’ voices separated throughout; the right hand contains wide chords that are unplayable with one hand, but can be performed on the violin; and dots and slurs in the upper part suggest articulation with a bowed string instrument. Due to the numerous violinistic passages, it is widely agreed today that several of the sonatas from the manuscript in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana were indeed designed to be performed by more than one instrument. There is no consensus on how many works meet these criteria, though, and this is reflected in their recording history. In 2008, for instance, Tedi Papavrami recorded his transcriptions of 12 keyboard sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti for solo violin (Aeon, aecd0644, issued 2008); in 2012, violinist Paolo Perrone, harpsichordist Alexandra Nigito and members of Capella Tiberina performed movements from Dent’s pick of continuo sonatas, experimenting with various scorings (Brilliant Classics, 94325, issued 2013); and in 2022, another reading of sonatas k.81 and 88–91 was published, this time on YouTube, with Debra Fast (violin) and Sandro Ivo Bartoli (organ) (see https://tinyurl.com/3w3uyvcc).