Provenance: Mid-eighteenth century French provenance, now part of a private collection in New Jersey. Photocopies formerly in the possession of Joel Sheveloff, now in the Mugar Memorial Library (Boston University).
Description: A manuscript collection of at least 97 pages containing various keyboard pieces. Five sonatas are explicitly attributed to Scarlatti.
Titles: ‘Del Seig.r Dominico Scarlatty’ (K37); ‘La Milanoise. Del Seg.r Scarlatty’ (KS5); ‘Del Seg.r Scarlatty’ (K2); ‘Sonata per il Cembalo del Signor Dominico Scarlatty’ (K68b); ‘Del Signor Dominico Scarlatty’ (K6).
Copyist: A single French hand, likely that of a professional (or a music master).
Comments: On the second page we find a ‘Prélude composé par Fédéricq’ – a virtuosic unmeasured prelude – which might be a clue to who the original owner of this manuscript was. The prelude may have been written down by a music master based on what their student had improvised/composed.
K68b was first referenced in Sheveloff 1985Sheveloff, Joel Leonard. 1985. ‘Domenico Scarlatti: Tercentenary Frustrations [Part 1]’. Musical Quarterly 71: 399–436., who called the New Jersey version of K68 a ‘wild card … that greatly complicates the [source] situation’. In fact, we have found it so troublesome to collate K68b using Venice 1742 as a baseline text that we decided to catalogue New Jersey’s version as K68b similarly to K8b and K33b. Like these two sonatas, K68b, as Sheveloff mentioned, must stem from a stemmatic ‘limb far removed from V/1742 [Venice 1742] or L-1 [London Worgan]’.
Date: Dated to the mid-eighteenth century in Sheveloff 1985Sheveloff, Joel Leonard. 1985. ‘Domenico Scarlatti: Tercentenary Frustrations [Part 1]’. Musical Quarterly 71: 399–436..
Full Data and Manuscripts
Study the complete collated data and manuscripts in our dedicated Google Drive spreadsheet.
