Provenance: Unknown. Acquired by the RCM from the library of the Sacred Harmonic Society.
Description: A collection of ‘Lessons’ by Dr Greene [Maurice Greene], Scarlatti (ten sonatas), and other pieces.
Titles: All Scarlatti sonatas are titled ‘Lesson’ followed by their order of appearance, i.e. ‘1st’, ‘2nd’, etc. Lesson 10 (K40) is untitled. The first sonata (K36) additionally includes the heading ‘Lessons by Domenico Scarlatti’.
Copyist: A single copyist copied out the entire collection.
Comments: Above Lesson 4 (K24) is written ‘R signifies the right hand, L the left’. Sheveloff 1970Sheveloff, Joel Leonard. 1970. ‘The Keyboard Music of Domenico Scarlatti: A Re-Evaluation of the Present State of Knowledge in the Light of the Sources’. PhD dissertation, Brandeis University. notes that the ‘grouping of six of these pieces into pairs is particularly interesting since no other source containing any of the pieces in Kirkpatrick’s catalogue from No. 1 to 42 arranges them similarly’.
Date: A note left by Harry Diack Johnstone tells us that all of the Maurice Greene pieces appear in ‘A Collection of Lessons for the Harpsichord’ published by Johnson c1750, but in a different order. Based on the fact that all of the Greene is ‘obviously copied from the published text the manuscript must be from the second half of the 18th century’. Likewise, the Scarlatti may have been copied from the Roseingrave collection.
Full Data and Manuscripts
Study the complete collated data and manuscripts in our dedicated Google Drive spreadsheet.
