When in Rome? New discoveries from the Münster Scarlatti manuscripts

For over fifty years the Münster manuscripts of Domenico Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas have been understood within a fundamentally Spanish framework, assumed to derive from or share exemplars with the better-known Parma and Venice collections compiled for Queen Maria Bárbara of Spain. Through detailed examination of the manuscripts, systematic collation of variant readings and analysis of watermarks and copyists, this article demonstrates that the Münster volumes were produced almost entirely in Rome around 1763 by some of the leading copyists of the time. The discovery of a carefully hidden sonata provides fundamental clues to the compilation process of the Münster volumes, while textual variants reveal that the main copyist M1 worked from high-quality exemplars remarkably similar to but demonstrably different from Parma. Palaeographical evidence links M1 and a second important copyist (M6) to Francesco Tosti, principal copyist for Rome’s Teatro Argentina and external copyist to the Vatican’s Cappella Giulia in the 1750s. These findings presuppose the existence of approximately 240 high-quality exemplars of Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas in Rome – most now lost – and establish Münster as an authoritative witness to an independent tradition.