Stockholm 3

Description

Provenance: Christian Hammer (1818-1905) to the library of the Royal Music Academy [Kungliga Musikaliska Akademiens Biblioteket] Stockholm, thence to its successor body, the Music and Theatre Library of Sweden [Musik- och teaterbiblioteket], Stockholm in 1981.

Description: manuscript collection of 22 of the sonatas from XXX Sonate per il clavicembalo (K1-K30) published by Gerhard Fredrik Witvogel, Amsterdam, 1742 (see Contents). 16 sheets heavy-duty paper, no watermark, folded into a single quire and bound into purple speckled paper cover, 32 x 19.5 cm. Pre-ruled with a 1 cm rastrum, fourteen staves per page, unpaginated. The physical structure of this MS is complex – see Comments below.

Front cover: label top lh edge, wrapped around onto reverse of cover: ‘30 Sonate da Dome / nico Scarlatti’, either in error or indicating that some items, previously included and possibly laid in, have been lost.

Inside cover: library label top lh corner; ‘P-R / Scarlatti, D., / [Sonat, Piano-.] 30 Sonate / per il Cembalo… / K[ungliga]. M[usikaliska]. A[kademiens].’ Remaining lower half of torn ex libris showing three horses towing a chariot, with the legends: (left) ‘Bibl. Hammer Stockholm’, (right) ‘En avant, toujours en avant!’, thought to be the ex libris of the Norwegian court jeweller and art collector Christian Hammer (1818-1905), former owner of the Hammer Stradivarius that sold at Christie’s in May 2006 for $3.54 million.

Title page: ‘No 9 / 30 Sonate / per il Cembalo / dedicate / alla Sacra Real Maesta di Giovanni / quinto, il giusto Re di Portogallo. / d’Algarve, del Brasile etc etc etc / da / Don Domenico Scarlatti, / cavaliero di S. Giacomo, e Maestro / de Serenissimi Principe e Principessa / delle Asturie etc / Opera Prima / Messo e dato a Luce / per / Gerhardo Friderico Witvogel / adesso stampate a spece / di Gioanni Cóvens / a Amsterdam / No. 73.’ Further note in Norwegian at foot of page, presumably in the hand of Christian Hammer: ‘Sonaterne 1 og 2 fines på andre lösu papirer’ [Sonatas 1 and 2 are found on other loose sheets]. Text begins on reverse title (p [2]) to allow standard disposition throughout. There is a note in Norwegian at the top of page [23], in the middle of K25: ‘tilhörer Scharlatti sonater’ [belongs to the Scarlatti sonatas] implying that at some point this sheet had been mislaid.

Copyist: single (amateur?) copyist, rather inelegant hand, unlikely to be that of Hammer himself.

Comments: the title page is a rather scribbled transcription of Witvogel (although the word ‘junior’ is omitted after ‘Cóvens’), but the order of the sonatas, and the fact that eight of them are missing (K2, K5, K7, K9, K10, K11, K13, and K21), would suggest that this collection is not directly modelled on the Amsterdam print but has been assembled from one or more intermediate witnesses, now lost. The copyist comments at the foot of the title page that sonatas 1 and 2 are to be found on loose sheets, but it is unlikely that these two sonatas were K1 (or K2?), as K1 appears at the very end of this set. The binding of the 16 sheets into a single quire and the fact that the first sonata starts on the reverse of the title page and page [64] is blank, suggest that there are no pages missing and that other sonatas, now lost, would have been laid in.

However, as the table of contents below makes clear, the MS in fact consists of two fascicles [A and B], the second of which was assembled in at least two phases. Fascicle A consists of the eleven outer sheets (22ff, pages [1] to [22] and [43] to [64]) that contain K3, K6, K8, K16, K18, K20, K23, K24, K26, K27, K28, K29 and K1 in that order. Fascicle B consists of the five inner sheets (10ff, pages [23] to [42]) that contain K25 (pages [42] and [23] in that order), K4, K12, K14, K15, K17, K19, K22 and K30. Fascicle B evidently began life with K25 written on one side of a single sheet of paper. This sheet was then reversed to form the outer sheet of fascicle B, resulting in the two pages of K25 being in the reverse order (ff21v and 12r, pages [42] and [23]). At some stage, fascicle B was mislaid, recovered and the note ‘tilhörer Scharlatti sonater’ [belongs to the Scarlatti sonatas] was written at the top of what was then the first page of this bundle (now page [23]). Fascicle B was then inserted into fascicle A, between pages [22] and [43], which resulted in the first page of K24 (now on page [22]) being separated from the other three (now on pages [43] to [45] and the two pages of K25 being in the reverse order, 18 pages apart. The error may have been compounded by the fact that K24 and K25 have the same key signature of three sharps.

Contents: