The Six Duos pour deux Violons ou deux Mandolines by Emanuele Barbella. Liner notes

The Six Duos pour deux Violons ou deux Mandolines avec une Basse ad libitum by Emanuele Barbella were printed in Paris at the beginning of the 1870s. Biographers of the Neapolitan composer have suggested that Barbella himself visited Paris and London at some point in his life. In any case, the Six Duos, together with other works by Barbella printed in Paris and London in the same years, account for the European circulation of his compo- sitions, among which those dedicated to the so-cal- led Neapolitan mandolin stand out, the new instru- ment that was finding maximum diffusion in many European cities and capitals.An exemplar of the Parisian edition, without the bass part, is currently preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris (Figure 1). Some exemplars of the facsimile (Plucked String Editions, c1983) are kept in the Library of Congress in Washington DC and, in Italy, in the libraries of the Conservatory of Genoa and the Foundation Pierluigi da Palestrina. I recently identified a manuscript of the Six Duos in the Library of the San Pietro a Majella Conservatory in Naples, whose title, diffe- rent from the Parisian one, indicates only the violin: Sei duetti caratteristici per violino e basso (Six cha- racteristic duets for violin and bass). The last page of the bass part, however, shows the full title of the French edition (Figure 2).