‘mises dans une autre applicature pour la facilité de la main’ by Gottlieb Muffat (1736)
Although Handel and Gottlieb Muffat (1690-1770) – ‘the other Amadeus’, son of the composer Georg Muffat – never met, Muffat’s name is well known to Handelians as the source of the extensive but unacknowledged ‘borrowings’ Handel made in his Ode for St Cecilia’s Day and the Concerti Grossi Op. 6, all deriving from Muffat’s Componimenti musicali published in 1739. There are also modified quotations from Muffat in the Op. 7 Organ Concerti and in Judas Maccabaeus, Joshua, Solomon and Theodora.
The present editions aim to redress the balance by presenting Muffat’s acknowledged ‘recreations’ of Handel’s most famous keyboard publications. The first volume contains the 8 Suites (Suite des Pieces Pour le Clavecin, first issued in 1720), found in Muffat’s own autograph in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Mus.ms 9160). The second volume includes the set of 6 Fugues (Six Fugues or Voluntarys of 1735).
While these Handel originals have been well served by modern scholarship, until now this important alternative version of the suites and fugues has never been published.
