An excellent detailed summary of the tangled history of the Handel sonatas is given by Terence Best in his preface and critical notes to Handel, GeorgeF.. The Complete Sonatas for Violin and Basso Continuo (London: Faber, 1983). The following section of this article draws upon this source.
2.
Best, p. iv. The misattribution of these sonatas is particularly glaring as some of the notes in the solo parts cannot be played within the range of the instruments to which they were assigned.
3.
Walsh did not include another early violin sonata in G major (c. 1707) from Handel's Italian period, not knowing of its existence. See Best, iv.
4.
Best, v.
5.
Best, 48–49.
6.
Best, 54.
7.
Ibid.
8.
HandelG. F.. Six Sonatas for Violin and Piano, BettiAdolfo, ed. (New York: Schirmer, 1935).
9.
Continuo in a Baroque chamber ensemble may also include an instrument, such as cello, reinforcing the bass line played by the harpsichord. Whether or not Handel intended this practice in these sonatas is somewhat controversial, the frequent rapid broken chords in the bass not being very easy or idiomatic on a stringed instrument. There is no particular benefit in reinforcing the bass when a modern piano is used in performance.
10.
It is not certain that Betti actually arranged the keyboard part. I have not been successful in definitively establishing the authorship of the traditional realizations of the Handel violin sonatas. At least one writer has ascribed them to the German violinist and pedagogue Gustav Jensen, but the latter's own editions of three of these sonatas in a series called Classical Violin Music have their own unique keyboard realizations, less romantically done than the standard version.
