Sunday, September 17, 2017

Finding Piatti

I have been thinking about Boccherini lately.

When he was in his twenties, Luigi Boccherini wrote six cello sonatas for cello with an accompanying bass line. They were first published in London 1770 in an edition that was not authorized by the composer (you can see it, a later edition, and a transcription for violin on this page of the IMSLP). None of the early publications have figures below the bass line, which would indicate to me that Boccherini either intended them as works for two cellos rather than as works for cello and basso continuo, or that he didn't intend to publish them at all.

It seems that the first person to make a full piano accompaniment from one of Boccherini's bass lines was Alfredo Patti (1822-1901). Luigi Forino (1868-1936), an important cello historian and composer, who served as the director of harmony and counterpoint at the National Conservatory in Buenos Aires, also had a hand in the piano part that Pablo Casals used for his recording of the Adagio and Allegro of the A major Sonata in the 1920s. It was published in 1946 by the International Music Company (designating Piatti and Forino as editors), and it was published in 1948 (without designation) by Carl Fischer as the "Feuermann" edition six years after Emanuel Feuermann's death.

I came across a reference to Morton Latham's 1901 book Alfredo Piatti: A Sketch while trying to learn something about piano part of the Boccherini sonatas. I found a difficult-to-read copy in Google Books, and was thrilled to find a lovingly transcribed edition presented by Lonely Peaks Records in an appropriately illustrated format. There is a lot of musical history in this portrait. It is teeming with famous composers, famous performers, and famous instruments. I imagine that Latham would have gotten all the stories directly from the cellist's mouth.

Here's a story about Piatti and one of the Boccherini Sonatas (as an example):



You can start reading here.

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