Domenico Scarlatti

Domenico Scarlatti was born in Naples on 26 October 1685 — making him a near twin of Bach (born five months earlier) and Handel (born five months earlier still). All three composers were born within eight months of each other in 1685, a coincidence that is the closest the historiography of music has to a miraculum. None of the three ever met all three; only Handel and Scarlatti, briefly, in Rome.

His father was Alessandro Scarlatti, the most important opera composer of the Neapolitan school and a stern paterfamilias of formidable musical authority. There were ten children. Domenico was the sixth. The father pushed him into operatic composition first; the son drifted, slowly and over decades, into the keyboard music nobody had asked him to write. The complete list of his surviving stage works runs to roughly fifteen operas, almost none of which is performed today; the complete list of his surviving keyboard sonatas runs to 555, of which a remarkable proportion of the great virtuosos of the twentieth century — Horowitz, Pogorelich, Pletnev, Lipatti — have built reputations on a few dozen.

The Roman contest with Handel

In the winter of 1708–09, Domenico was in Rome — sent there by his father to make contacts — when George Frideric Handel also passed through on the long Italian Wanderjahr that defined his early style. Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, a wealthy patron of music in the Palazzo della Cancelleria, contrived a friendly competition: the two young virtuosi, both twenty-three, would play against each other at the harpsichord and at the organ. Mainwaring’s 1760 biography of Handel reports the verdict:

When they came to the organ, there was not the least pretence for doubting to which of them the superiority should be allotted. Scarlatti himself declared the superiority of his antagonist, and owned ingenuously, that until he had heard him upon this instrument, he had no conception of its powers.

— John Mainwaring, Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frederic Handel, 1760

Scarlatti, by Mainwaring’s account, won the harpsichord. Whenever the two later met in life, Scarlatti would “speak of him with great respect,” and would cross himself at the mention of Handel’s name. He never saw him again after 1709; Handel went to England, Scarlatti to Iberia, and neither came back.

Lisbon and Maria Bárbara

In 1719 Scarlatti moved to Lisbon, having been engaged as Mestre de Capela to João V of Portugal. The defining encounter of his life took place there: he was assigned as keyboard tutor to João’s young daughter Maria Bárbara de Bragança, a serious, intelligent, plain-looking girl with a deep love of music and (by all later accounts) a remarkable touch at the harpsichord. She was eight when he began teaching her. She would remain his pupil, his patron, his employer, and, for the rest of both their lives, the centre of his world.

When Maria Bárbara was married off in 1729 to the future Ferdinand VI of Spain, she insisted that Scarlatti come with her. He was forty-four and a settled court musician of Lisbon; he packed up his household and followed. The Spanish royal court was peripatetic — Madrid in winter and autumn, Aranjuez in spring, El Escorial briefly in summer, Sevilla some winters — and Scarlatti followed it for the next twenty-eight years.

Almost every one of the 555 sonatas dates from this Spanish period. They survive because Maria Bárbara had her musical secretary copy them into fifteen handsome leather-bound volumes, bound in red morocco with silver fittings, that she kept in her private apartments. After her death the volumes passed to her singer Carlo Broschi (the great castrato Farinelli, then court chamber-music director), and from him eventually to Venice, where they survive in the Biblioteca Marciana. Without those fifteen volumes, half the sonatas would be lost.

The sonatas and the guitar

The Iberian sonatas absorb sounds nobody had ever transcribed for keyboard. Listen to the rapid drumming of a single pitch on the harpsichord in K. 141 — that is the guitar’s rasgueado technique, the strummed roll, written for an instrument that cannot strum. Listen to the strange parallel fourths and sevenths that crash in unexpectedly — those are flamenco cante hondo cadences; you cannot have invented them sitting in a north European library. Charles Burney, visiting Madrid forty years after the fact, was told that Scarlatti

imitated the melody of tunes sung by carriers, muleteers, and common people. The same Father Soler … assured me that he had heard him say many things of this kind.

— Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in France and Italy, 1771

His Spanish pupil Antonio Soler — a Jeronymite monk at the Escorial — would inherit and extend the idiom; Soler’s hundred-odd sonatas are the most direct continuation of Scarlatti’s, with the Iberian colour even more pronounced.

The famous Cat Fugue (K. 30) takes its name from a tradition first printed in an 1839 edition: Scarlatti’s cat Pulcinella is said to have walked across the keyboard, sounding the awkward leaping series of notes that became the fugue’s subject. The story is almost certainly a nineteenth-century invention, but the subject’s chromatic leaps are real, and unforgettable: G–B♭–E♭–F♯–A–C — a sequence so unwieldy that no human is likely to have invented it as a fugal subject without help.

The Essercizi, the gambling, the rest

In 1738 Scarlatti permitted the publication, in London, of thirty of the sonatas under the title Essercizi per Gravicembalo — the only collection he authorised in print in his lifetime. The dedication is to João V of Portugal, Maria Bárbara’s father, and the preface is one of the most affecting documents in eighteenth-century keyboard literature:

Reader — whether you are an Amateur or a Professor, do not expect in these Compositions any profound learning, but rather an ingenious Jeu d’Esprit … Show yourself then more human than critical, and your own Pleasure will increase. Vivi felice.

— Domenico Scarlatti, preface to the Essercizi, London 1738

The closing salutation, “vivi felice” — live happy — became the salute by which musicians for two centuries afterward signed Scarlatti correspondence.

A more troubling thread runs through the same years. Scarlatti was, by the testimony of Spanish court records, a compulsive gambler, repeatedly in debt at the bisca (gambling table) and (the records say) repeatedly bailed out by Maria Bárbara from the privy purse. The Queen’s last will and testament left him a generous bequest — and an instruction that any debts owed by him at the time of her death should be paid first from her estate, before any other obligation.

Maria Bárbara died in August 1758, fifteen months before Scarlatti himself — actually his death preceded hers; he died in his apartments in Madrid on 23 July 1757, aged seventy-one, and was buried at the Convent of San Norberto. The convent was demolished in the nineteenth century. The exact location of his grave is now lost.

Legacy: the Kirkpatrick catalogue and the modern revival

For two centuries after his death the sonatas circulated only among connoisseurs. Czerny edited a few; Brahms loved them and played them; Chopin held them up as a model of pianistic invention; Tausig transcribed them into concert paraphrases. But the modern revival belongs to Ralph Kirkpatrick — an American harpsichordist and Yale musicologist — whose 1953 study Domenico Scarlatti and accompanying chronological catalogue (the K. numbers we still use) reordered the sonatas from the messy Longo numbering of the late nineteenth century and argued, decisively, that the works should be played on the harpsichord for which they were written.

By the time Kirkpatrick finished, Vladimir Horowitz had already recorded enough sonatas on the piano to give the world its second simultaneous Scarlatti revival. Both turned out to be right. The sonatas are equally at home on either instrument — partly because Scarlatti’s harpsichord at the Spanish court was already evolving into something with the dynamic range of an early fortepiano.

Of the 555 sonatas, perhaps a hundred have entered the standard recital repertory. The other four hundred and fifty wait. Vivi felice.