Domenico Scarlatti, perhaps the greatest clavier-player that Italy ever had, prefaces a collection of thirty sonatas, which appeared at Amsterdam,[44] with the following words: “Amateur or professor, whoever thou art, seek not in these compositions for any deep feeling. They are only a frolic of art, intended to increase thy confidence on the clavier. I had no ambition to make a sensation; I was simply requested to publish the pieces. Should they be not utterly unpleasing to thee, I shall all the more willingly undertake other commissions, in order to rejoice thee in a lighter and more varied style. Take then these pieces rather as man than as critic; so only shalt thou increase thine own content. To speak of the use of the two hands--D denotes _dritta_, the right, and M _manca_, the left. Farewell!” It is noticeable how here in a few words the whole essence of Italian clavier-music is summed up--the fresh, cheerful disposition of the artist; the respect for the amateur; the pleasure in mere sound and in musical construction; the thorough working-out of intellectual motives (in the manner of the Étude); and the stress laid upon the equal participation of both hands as essential factors in the “concert,” [using this word in its older sense as expressing the association of two or more vocal or instrumental “parts”]. The word “concert” was well understood in these early days to mean the combination of two viols; and music of such a kind was, in form and in content, the true precursor of clavier-music, in which the right and left hand “parts” are strictly on an equality both in difficulty and importance. These are the distinguishing marks of Italian clavier-art, and within these limits it works. But Scarlatti is especially remarkable to us in the present day, in that he occupies the position of an early writer whose pieces still play a part, though a small one, in modern public concerts. Liszt, for example, was partial to him, and arranged his “Cat’s Fugue”; while Bülow edited a representative selection from his pieces. Czerny published (through Haslinger) two hundred of his so-called Sonatas--though, by the way, the last of these pieces belongs really to the father, Alessandro Scarlatti. Before that time the remains of the master had formed no inconsiderable part of private manuscript collections, such as those of the Abbé Santini in Rome, and others.[45]