the uncle and nephew performed these sonatas together.  Musicians will be able to write out the figured basses, and thus form some idea of the music.  The figures are an outline of what was in the composer’s mind; but these basses, like those of Bach and Handel, so simple, so clear to the composers who penned them, will always remain more or less a crux criticorum.  It will be noticed that the three movements, as in some of Corelli’s sonatas, are all in the same key.

We now give the opening bars of the three movements of the piece for one or two cembali:—­

[Music illustration]

All the other sonatas are more or less after the pattern of the one given.  The other two volumes contain suites, airs with variations, arias, and a quantity of short figured basses, apparently as studies.

Before closing this short chapter we will add a word or two about Italian music for the harpsichord at the beginning of the eighteenth century.  A recent writer remarks that “Domenico Scarlatti seems to spring full-armed into the view of history.”  But his father, the renowned opera-writer, Alessandro Scarlatti, wrote music for the harpsichord, also his pupil, Gaetano Grieco, who succeeded him as Professor at the Conservatorio dei poveri di Gesu Cristo (Naples) in 1717.  The influence of the master can be clearly traced in the music of the pupil; and, if one may judge from the simpler character of Grieco’s music[55] as compared with that of D. Scarlatti, he, too, was a predecessor.  Grieco is said to have been born about 1680; D. Scarlatti was born in 1683; but this, of course, decides nothing as to the dates of their compositions.  The harpsichord music of G. Grieco has both character and charm, and it is indeed strange that none of his pieces have been included either in the Tresor des Pianistes, the Maitres du Clavecin, or Pauer’s Collections of old music.

This chapter is headed:  “A Contemporary of Kuhnau.”  The latter published all his known sonatas by the year 1700, while the dates assigned to the Pasquini sonata volume are, as we have seen, 1703-4.  But at that time Pasquini was over sixty years of age; it is therefore more than probable that he was really the predecessor of the German master as a writer of clavier sonatas.

CHAPTER IV

EMANUEL BACH AND SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES

Carl Phillip Emanuel, third son of J.S.  Bach, was born at Weimar, 8th or 14th March, 1714, and died at Hamburg, 14th December, 1788.  He studied composition and clavier-playing with his father.  His brother, Wilhelm Friedemann, his senior by four years, went through a similar course, but learnt, in addition, the violin under J.G.  Graun.  Emanuel’s attention, however, was concentrated on the one instrument; and to this we probably owe the numerous clavier sonatas which he wrote, and which paved the way for those of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.  In his twenty-first