This looks like the title of a penny-dreadful about Mimo’s love affairs, but it is actually that of an undated, late 18th-century edition of a number of sonatas. It's even better in full:
“The Beauties of Domenico Scarlatti / Selected from his Suites de Leçons for the Harpsichord or Piano-Forte / and Revised with a Variety of Improvements by Ambrose Pitman. Volume the First.” With the name straight out of Evelyn Waugh as the cherry topping, you might think nothing could possibly be more useless to the editor of a serious publication. And you would be right except for one thing: Ambrose was the first to spot one of many glaring errors in his model, Roseingrave’s pirate edition, which was copied from the same error in the error-ridden engraving of Scarlatti’s only print, the famous Essercizi (London, 1739). Carl Czerny was the second.
The scene of the crime is the second half of bar 17, K 29 – the pinnacle of digital difficulty in Scarlatti’s progression towards the goal stated in his preface: mastery of the harpsichord. The only remaining peak to climb is the “Cat Fugue”, K 30. On beats 3 and 4 of bar 17, the bass remains stuck on d, instead of moving up to e as it should. This is clearly wrong for three reasons: 1) the bass line is too static as it stands. 2) It leaves a third inversion dominant seventh unresolved, which is very unlikely even in this savage harmonic environment. 3) A powerful pattern is repeated a dozen more times in the course of the piece; eight quavers on one note, then up (sometimes down) a (half-)step. There is no earthly reason a genius would alter that for such a weak variant. So Ambrose (and Carl) changed d, as one of his “Improvements", to e.
Ralph Kirkpartrick knew of Pitman and Czerny, but kept the error in his “60 Sonatas”. Kenneth Gilbert saw and changed it, for what reason he doesn’t say. This was far from the only time he took matters into his own hands, for better or worse.
Mr. Pitman’s main object, he tells us in his PREFACE, is to remedy the fact that knowledge of Scarlatti’s “Merit has been confined to a very limited Circle; their reception into General Practice having been greatly retarded by the many superfluous and studied difficulties with which they abound.” He therefore “divested [sonatas] of their pedantic difficulties”. “Unnatural and cramp [sic] positions of the hands, he has avoided or altered.” In plain English this means that he has flipped the hand-crossings.
Outrage! – you say?
Well…maybe so. When I looked all the way through K 29, I couldn’t help but think Ambrose was right, at least in this case. Some of the positions could hardly be more “cramp”. And while purely optical hand-crossings can be highly effective for a live audience (albeit pointless aggravations for a recording) as providing an element of suspense otherwise lacking, these seem simply perverse, and, as Milton said about rhyme, “of no true musical delight”. So, thanks to this otherwise misguided gentleman, rather than betraying my trust as an editor by following in his footsteps, I regretfully decided to replace K 29, fine piece though it otherwise is, with another of the Essercizi for my edition.
22 July 2025
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