The Thirty-One Works of Francesco Geminiani

A Website by Rudolf Rasch

Francesco Geminiani (1687-1762) was one of the most imporant composers of instrumental music in the first half of the eighteenth century. He is best known for his sonatas for violin and figured bass and his concertos for string ensembles, but he also composed music for other instrumental combinations and for harpsichord.

Compared to his “big” contemporaries Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel Geminiani’s music been little studied. If only for the originality that characterizes it and the fact that most of it was published by himself, his music certainly merits further study.

Depending on how one counts musical compositions, Geminiani has composed between two and three hundred musical compositions. They can be ordered in thirty-one works, each work being a series of compositions published together and with a common origin and history. In this website each of these thirty-one works will be discussed into detail, from the first one, the Sonatas of 1716 until the last one, the Second Collection of Pieces for the Harpsichord, published in 1762.

A previous version of this website counted the Violin Sonatas by Francesco Mancini, as corrected by Geminiani and published in 1728, and the Ripieno Parts added in 1758 to his Trios from his Sonatas Op. 1 published in 1757, as separate Works by Geminiani. This made a total of thirty-three Works. It seems, however, better not to do so. Which sets the number of Works by Geminiani at thirty-one.

The discussions of the thirty-one works separately is preceded by a number of texts of more general character.