The Early Keyboard Sonata in Italy and Beyond ed. by Rohan H. Stewart-MacDonald (review)

This history of the early keyboard sonata is the tenth volume in the series on Italian music history issued by the Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini, and it is also the third in the series Groppoli per la storia della musica a Pistoia. Indeed, the volume was published with financial assistance from various cultural and financial associations in Pistoia, whose cultural history is highlighted by some of the chapters.

In the introduction, Rohan H. Stewart-MacDonald writes, "The aim, in the chapters to follow, is to trace the solo keyboard sonata's origins in the seventeenth century, encompassing the genre's coalescence in the first half of the eighteenth century; to evaluate the contributions of major, mid-century composers of keyboard sonatas, to consider their possible impact on contemporary and later composers, and to explore aspects of the genre's international dissemination" (p. ix). The first part, "The Italian Solo Keyboard Sonata: Origins and Efflorescence," traces the beginnings and development of the keyboard sonata in seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century Italy, with particular attention paid to the works of Benedetto Marcello, Lodovico Giustini, Baldassare Galuppi, and Giovanni Battista Sammartini. Together, the chapters in this section weave an instructive narrative of the early keyboard sonata's development in Italy. The second part, "Beyond Italy: Dissemination of the Solo Italian Keyboard Sonata during the Late Baroque Period. Stylistic Influences, Publications, Transcriptions and Arrangements," charts the influence of Italian keyboard music throughout Europe during the eighteenth century and focuses new light on neglected keyboard repertory. The various chapters center on the keyboard works of George Frideric Handel and Johann Christian Bach, the keyboard arrangements of Francesco Geminiani, Johann Ulrich Haffner's printed compilation Œuvres melées (1755–65), and Charles Avison's concerto grosso arrangements of Domenico Scarlatti's sonatas. Finally, the third section revisits issues of performance practice and Iberian influences on Domenico Scarlatti's sonatas, adding to the copious amount of recent scholarship on this Italian composer working in Spain.

In line with current musicological discourse, the volume as a whole questions the traditional division of the eighteenth century into the late baroque and classical periods. Stewart-MacDonald sets up this query in his introduction and puts forth the notion of a long eighteenth century with a stable galant period at its core—a time span that would frame the development of the keyboard sonata in Italy and its dissemination quite nicely. The eleven chapters in the volume offer a multifaceted picture of this eighteenth-century history. The methodologies are diverse (e.g., source studies, analytical descriptions, and considerations of performance practice) as are the authors of the various contributions (musicologists and performer-scholars from Great Britain, the United States, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain). Two of the chapters are written in Italian, but all others are in English.

The first and most substantial chapter, by Gregory Barnett, traces the evolution of the term sonata from its earliest use in 1600 as a broad, generic term to its codification as a set multimovement form in Giustini's 1732 sonatas. In doing so, Barnett provides a historical framework for many of the chapters to follow. He points to the importance of Marcello's unpublished keyboard sonatas, which adopted the multimovement format of trio and violin sonatas and incorporated many galant musical characteristics. He also identifies these sonatas, disseminated widely in manuscript form, as a turning point for the genre, which up to that time had adhered to the seventeenth-century tradition of virtuosic keyboard works.

Andrea Coen's contribution on Giustini's Sonate da cimbalo di piano, e forte (1732) approaches these seminal works from the perspective of a performer who has recorded this collection on a modern reproduction of a Bartolomeo Cristofori fortepiano. Whereas some have belittled the limited dynamics and expressive qualities of Giustini's work, Coen...