Sonata in d minor

Beschrijving

Crown Prince Friedrich Ludwig of Württemberg-Stuttgart (1698-1731), the son of Duke Eberhard Ludwig of Württemberg, played both the recorder and the transverse flute. Around 320 works from his extensive musical library have been preserved, from which it appears that French and Italian as well as German chamber music was popular at his court. His collection includes several pieces for instrumentations including recorders, which have meanwhile appeared in print, for example Loeillet's famous quintet in b minor for two voice flutes, two traversos and basso continuo, the recorder sonata in c minor by Louis Detry, or a concerto in B major for flauto piccolo, ascribed to George Frideric Handel or Antonio Montanari.

The Crown Prince's music collection also includes a hand-written anthology of musical scores comprising six works with varying instrumentations, now kept in the Rostock University Library under the designation Mus. Saec. XVII.-51.1-6. The fourth piece in this collection is a Sonata for Flauto Solo with basso continuo, which is published for the first time in this edition. The solo part is written in the French violin clef and intended for an f1 recorder. However, the part contains numerous large steps and arpeggios, which, in combination with the continuo part, are more suggestive of a solo bassoon than a recorder part. It is probably no coincidence that the composition allows the solo part to be played on the bassoon - two octaves lower - without any problematic voice crossing with the bass part. The composition may originally have been intended for the bassoon and subsequently attributed to the recorder at the time when it was included in the anthology.1

As all works in the anthology, the sonata was written by an unknown author. Ekkehard Krüger refers to him as Part book writer C2 and lists him as author of further musical manuscripts of the Stuttgart court ensemble. No composer is mentioned for any of the works in the anthology, and no concordant source has been preserved for any of them. Ekkehard Krüger therefore assumes that they are compositions by musicians from the environment of the Stuttgart or Ludwigsburg court chapels.3 The existing sonata may have been composed by the bassoonist Louis Detry, who came to the Württemberg court in Stuttgart in 1727, following employments in Brunswick (1721) and Würzburg (1722). However, only one further composition of Detry's is known so far, a virtuoso sonata for recorder, which is also part of Crown Prince Friedrich Ludwig's library.4 As the basis for comparison in terms of style and compositional technique is very narrow, the present edition gives "Anonymous (Louis Detry?)" as composer.

For the first printed edition, the recorder part was transposed from the French to the common violin clef. The continuo realization is to be regarded as a suggestion on the part of the editor, which can be improvised upon or extended. Further additions of the editor are shown in brackets, added articulation marks are shown as broken lines.