ABSTRACT
Maria Cavalli was identified as one of Francesco Melosio's scribes more than a quarter-century ago in the pioneering work of Peter Jeffery on Cavalli's autographs. In many cases Jeffery sees a collaboration between either Maria or Francesco and another copyist, called O2 in Orimonte; O3 in Oristeo, Rosinda, Calisto, and the Vienna copy of Egisto; and P3 in Poppea. The shape of Maria's normal G-clefs can still be identified in the tiny and narrow shape of the clefs and also by the fact that she does not finish them with the standard curl. Francesco's F-clefs present the same S-shape as Maria's, but they are very small and often simplified to the extreme, consisting of a single vertical stroke. Francesco asked Maria to copy and transpose the music and he added the text later, certainly because he didn't have it at hand at the time of the original copying since it was a later addition.
