Soler, Antonio: 8 Preludes

from “Llave de la Modulacion”

(Madrid 1762)

In 1716, François Couperin published in Paris “L’Art de Toucher le Clavecin”, that brief and famous method containing eight Preludes, all extraordinarily beautiful, as well as technically very useful. Less than fifty years later, in 1762 in Madrid, Padre Antonio Soler published through Joachin Ibarra a weighty treatise of 272 pages (”Llave de la Modulacion”), which includes – in the tenth and final chapter – eight Preludes for keyboard instrument This kind of Prelude, according to what emerges from the thorny and at times ambiguous language of Padre Soler, while maintaining its undoubted basic executive value, stands on the one hand as a study of composition and on the other as an exercise in improvisation. Both these categories are more than pertinent to the period in which this work was conceived and to its aesthetics. In this sense, the term “arbitri” itself, so widely used in the musical text, is perhaps the most representative of a type of training that is actually centred more on practice procedure than on merely theoretical study.