Complete Harpsichord Music

The suites, lessons and miscellaneous short pieces for harpsichord by Maurice Greene are an important and much-pirated corpus of eighteenth-century English keyboard music, complementary to the works of Handel, Thomas Roseingrave and Greene’s mentor Giovanni Bononcini.

The influence of the latter appears especially in the extended cadential ‘rhyming’ of the second halves of the many movements in binary form, a feature also found in Domenico Scarlatti’s influential Essercizi from the same period, and in the use of Alberti-bass type figurations, rarely employed by Handel.

The volume also includes a set of six overtures for the harpsichord, published by Walsh in 1745, which are arrangements of earlier orchestral originals. No. 4 can be identified as the overture to Greene’s 1739 Ode for the King’s Birthday, and it is assumed that the other five are from court odes no longer surviving.