Given that hardly any printed collections of new keyboard music were offered in Germany in the first decades of the 18th century, Christoph Graupnerʼs eight Partien auf das Clavier, published in 1718, marked a new beginning. The suites are arranged according to an ascending sequence of notes and generally follow the scheme Allemande – Courante – Sarabande – Gigue, but this order is repeatedly broken, also by movements that are rather unusual for a suite. The focus is on the characteristics of the individual movements and the joy of playing with figures typical for the movement or instrument, as well as on challenging playing techniques, such as hand changes in runs (passaggi), wide-ranging chord breaks and the use of the thumb, which was not very common at the time. In this respect, Graupnerʼs suites offer not so much a formal advancement, but rather an expansion of the demands of playing technique.
Although several CD recordings of these suites already exist, this volume constitutes the first modern Urtext edition. Complementing her scholarly activities, the editor Geneviève Soly provides important impulses on performance practice in the preface, especially on the execution of the passaggi and the ornamentation, thus opening up the view on her activity as a harpsichordist.