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assistants or Mendelssohn. In other cases, not just the orchestration but the actual authorship of composers early works has been questioned on grounds of their age. The earliest work ascribed to Henry Purcell, Sweet Tyranness (Z. S69), was published in 1667 when he was eight. Franklin Zimmerman s thematic catalogue, however, places it among the spurious works, claiming that the The Marginalization of Children s Compositions of the Past 37 song must have been composed by Henry s father, also called Henry.34 Two reasons are given: first, Zimmerman notes that the work is ascribed to Mr. Henry Purcell, a title that today implies an adult; and second, Zimmerman found it hard to believe that Purcell could have written anything at such an early age. Both arguments are specious. In Purcell s day the term Mr. was an abbreviation for Master ; it bore no implications about a person s age until nearly a century later. Even then, its use was by no means confined exclusively to adults: Mozart s God Is Our Refuge was headed by Mr: Wolfgang Mozart/1765, when he was only nine; and Vaughan Williams s The Robin s Nest, written at the age of six in 1878, is headed by mr R. Williams. Moreover, Purcell s age in 1667 cannot be used as evidence that he did not compose the thirteen-bar song since there is nothing in it that precludes composition by an eight-year-old especially one with such natural ability as Purcell. Some eight-year-olds have composed far more ambitious works, as is evident from the Checklist. As for Purcell s father, although he was a musician, he died in 1664 and wrote no known compositions. Since there is no autograph score, the issue is unlikely to be resolved conclusively. But there are further reasons for believing the work to be by the younger Pur- cell. The song reappeared in print in 1673 in a version for solo voice and bass, and again in 1678 in a collection entitled New Ayres and Dialogues alongside five other songs ascribed to Henry Purcell. One could argue that all six must therefore be by Purcell Senior, but it is unlikely that so many songs would have been published so long after the composer s death in a collection of this kind, and the only likely explanation is that all six are by Purcell Junior. Thus only a blinkered view that a child could not compose songs at an early age has caused Sweet Tyranness to be marginalized as supposedly spurious. A similar situation arises with six oboe sonatas said to have been written by Handel at the age of eleven. As with many works by children, the sonatas display occasional touches of extraordinary originality: for example, No. 4 begins out of key with the oboe and violin unaccompanied, answered by the continuo alone. There is a fairly reliable story that, when a copy of the sonatas was shown to Handel in England many years later, he made a comment about his partiality to the oboe in his early days, and did not deny the authenticity of the sonatas.35 Since the sonatas do not differ greatly in style from Handel s later music, there seem no very reliable grounds, external or internal, for dis- missing the attribution to Handel, as has been done by several recent scholars. It is certainly no longer possible to argue that they are too good to have been composed by someone as young as eleven especially as Handel is reported to have composed a cantata-type work for the church every week for three years at around this period.36 Although the source of the sonatas is late and unreliable, the only other grounds for serious doubt are whether anyone could 38 Chapter 3 have composed in such an advanced style as early as 1696, for the sonatas seem stylistically far more characteristic of the eighteenth century. But it could be that they were first drafted in 1696 before being substantially revised to pro- duce the version we have today. Domenico Scarlatti is another composer whose childhood output has been doubted. There is strong evidence that he was writing chamber cantatas by the age of thirteen, for two of them are dated 1699 (20 September in one case, and he did not reach his fourteenth birthday until late October that year). A slightly earlier cantata, Belle pupille care, is dated 1697. Since this is ascribed to Scarlatti s uncle Francesco in one source, and simply to Scarlatti in the other two, this one was probably not composed by Domenico, but there is no reason to discount him on grounds of age, as is done by Malcolm Boyd: It is, at all events, unlikely that Domenico was composing cantatas at the age of eleven or twelve! 37 Boyd s exclamation mark is very revealing, for it implies an au- tomatic assumption that the notion of an eleven-year-old composing a cantata is slightly ridiculous. Such an unwarranted assumption would be a direct result [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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