In the past decade the eighteenth-century London music publisher John Walsh has been subject to a new evaluation with regard to his pirated editions and deliberate misattributions, especially of the music of George Frideric Handel. That Walsh's attributions were anything but trustworthy had already been recognized in the eighteenth century: a surviving copy (London, British Library, BM g.74.d) of his first edition of the Sonates pour un traversiere un violon ou hautbois con basso continuo composées par G. F. Handel (c.1730), which, as Donald Burrows and Terence Best have shown, was provided with a title-page designed to simulate that of Jeanne Roger, bears the manuscript inscription ‘NB This is not Mr. Handel's’ in an eighteenth-century hand at the beginning of the tenth and twelfth sonatas, precisely those that Walsh removed in his second edition of this collection (c. 1731–2), advertised on the title-page as being ‘more Corect [sic] than the former Edition’. In the second edition Walsh substituted two equally questionable works in their place, each of which bears the handwritten inscription ‘Not Mr. Handel's Solo’ in a copy in the British Library (BM g.74.h). Two of the sonatas attributed to Handel in Walsh's Six Solos, Four for a German Flute and a Bass and Two for a Violin with a Thorough Bass … Composed by Mr Handel, Sigr Geminiani, Sigr Somis, Sigr Brivio (1730; in A minor and B minor) are also possibly spurious, while three of the four movements of the remaining sonata attributed to Handel in this collection (in E minor) are movements arranged from his other instrumental works. And in 1734 Johann Joachim Quantz, to whom Walsh devoted four volumes of solo sonatas (1730–44), complained of the publication of spurious and corrupted works:
There has been printed in London and in Amsterdam under the name of the [present] author, but without his knowledge, 12 sonatas for the transverse flute and bass divided into two books. I am obliged to advertise to the public that only the first, second, fourth, fifth and sixth [sonatas] from the first book, and the first three from the second book, are his [Quantz's] compositions; and that he furthermore wrote them years ago, and besides they have, due to the negligence of the copyist or the printer, gross errors including the omission of entire bars, and that he does not sanction the printing of a collection that has no relationship with the present publication that he sets before the public.
