Lisbon

Description

Provenance: Formerly part of the collection of the Count of Redondo, the third Marquess of Borba (1835-1928); later acquired by the Instituto Português do Patrimonio Cultural (1982). Since its dissolution in 1992, the musical scores under the custody of that institution – including the music collection of the Count of Redondo – were transferred to the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.

Description: A manuscript collection of sixty-one sonatas by Scarlatti. Despite there being sixty-one sonatas in total, K475 is not numbered in this volume, with K474-K475 indicated to be played as a pair (the copyist indicates ‘Siegue’ at the end of K474 rather than ‘Fine’).

Watermark: Marques 2026Marques, António Jorge. 2026. ‘The Count of Redondo Music Collection Housed at Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal’. In Storie die fondi, raccolte, collezioni musicali, edited by Bianca Maria Antolini, Annarita Colturato, and Francesco Paolo Russo. Edizioni Fondazione Levi. reports the presence of a watermark of the letters MG/GC (see MARCMUS entry).

Titles: Despite the title page referring to this volume as a ‘Libro di Tocate’, all sonatas (except K475) are headed ‘Sonatta’ followed by a Roman numeral. The copyist does not make use of the Roman numeral L (50).

Copyist: The volume is in a single professional hand throughout, most likely that of the copyist José Cláudio Henriques, who was one of the most important copyists of the Portuguese Royal House. His handwriting is found in numerous Portuguese sources dating from the second half of the eighteenth century. See also the MARCMUS entry for this copyist.

Comments: Only one sonata in this volume is not in the Kirkpatrick catalogue: KS48. This sonata is also found in the New York Cary manuscript. From a variant analysis it quickly becomes clear that these two sources are not related, which suggests that this sonata may have circulated in multiple versions.

We are grateful to Dr Cristina Fernandes for her assistance regarding this collection.

Date: Hail and O’Connor 2017Hail, Christopher, and Michael O’Connor. 2017. Scarlatti Domenico: A New Look at the Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti for People Who Use Both Sides of Their Brain. Protean Press. http://web.archive.org/web/20140911064422/http://mysite.verizon.net/chrishail/scarlatti/index.html. dated this collection to 1751 or 1752, while Marques 2026Marques, António Jorge. 2026. ‘The Count of Redondo Music Collection Housed at Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal’. In Storie die fondi, raccolte, collezioni musicali, edited by Bianca Maria Antolini, Annarita Colturato, and Francesco Paolo Russo. Edizioni Fondazione Levi. tentatively dates it to the late eighteenth century or early nineteenth century on watermark evidence. However, the identification of the copyist on this project – using the MARCMUS dataset – allows us to provide a more informed dating for the compilation of this volume: the 1770s or later (the years of Henriques’s activity). This presupposes the presence of high-quality exemplars in Lisbon during the second half of the eighteenth century which – as far as we know – have not survived.