Vienna E

Description

Provenance: Fortunato Santini (1777-1861); Tobias Haslinger/Carl Czerny (acquired c1838-1839); Gustav Nottebohm; Johannes Brahms; Archiv der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien (1893).

Description: Six volumes of keyboard sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti copied by Fortunato Santini and an unknown Italian copyist based in Rome. The six volumes contain 260 sonatas in total (however the collection may have consisted of up to 320 sonatas originally). Paper size is roughly 223×285-295mm in all six volumes.

Rastrum: Stave size: 9-12mm; distance between staves: 11-13mm; total stave span: 175-188mm.

Watermarks: Only one watermark was found in an insert in Vienna B, which indicates that at least part of the collection was copied on paper produced by Pietro Miliani in the 1830s (Fabriano).

Titles: Occasionally sequential Roman numerals are used by the copyists, though several errors were made by the copyists in their numbering (which were later corrected by Brahms).

Copyists: Fortunato Santini was responsible for volumes A and E; a second hitherto unidentified copyist – who appears to be associated with the Rome-based copyist Gaetano Rosati – was responsible for volumes B, C, D, and F.

Comments: The Santini copies (Vienna A-F) were used by the Viennese publisher Tobias Haslinger for at least ninety sonatas in the first ‘complete’ edition of Scarlatti (ed. Carl Czerny, 1838-1840). The relationship between Haslinger and Santini and the compilation of the Vienna A-F volumes is discussed in a forthcoming article by Jasper van der Klis.

Date: Dates ranging from 1800-1830 had been suggested by Choi 1974Choi, Seunghyun. 1974. ‘Newly Found Eighteenth-Century Manuscripts  of Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonatas and Their Relationship to Other Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Sources’. PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin.  and Hail and O’Connor 2017. New evidence gathered during the ‘Texting Scarlatti’ project shows that c1838-1840 is more likely.