Domenico Scarlatti

Domenico Scarlatti (born October 26, 1685, Naples [Italy]—died July 23, 1757, Madrid, Spain) was an Italian composer noted particularly for his 555 keyboard sonatas, which substantially expanded the technical and musical possibilities of the harpsichord.

Early life and vocal works: Italy

Domenico, the son of the famous composer of vocal music Alessandro Scarlatti, was born in the same year as J.S. Bach and G.F. Handel. At age 15 he secured an appointment as organist in Naples. In 1703 his first operas, L’Ottavia restituita al trono and Il Giustino, were produced there. In 1705 his father sent him away from Naples to Venice, reputedly to study with the composer Francesco Gasparini. While in Venice, Scarlatti may have met a young Irishman, Thomas Roseingrave, who many years later described Domenico’s harpsichord playing to the English musicologist Charles Burney as sounding as if “ten hundred d…s had been at the instrument; he had never heard such passages of execution and effect before.” Scarlatti may have also formed a friendship with Handel while in Venice.

By the spring of 1709 Scarlatti had taken over his father’s position in Rome as musical director and composer to the exiled queen Maria Casimira of Poland. Until her departure in 1714, he composed a series of operas and occasional pieces, all of them on texts by the queen’s secretary, Carlo Sigismondo Capeci. Some of the music has survived, but, were it not for the reflected glory cast upon it by the later harpsichord sonatas, this music would inspire little interest today.

By 1713 Scarlatti had established relations with the Vatican, and from 1714 to 1719 he held the position of musical director of the Julian Chapel at St. Peter’s. Of the surviving church music that appears to date from this time, only the 10-voice Stabat Mater gives a hint of the genius that was to find its long-delayed flowering in the harpsichord sonatas.

During these years Scarlatti brought to an end his apparently never-too-successful career as an opera composer with Ambleto (1715); it had an intermezzo, La Dirindina, which, because of the liberties of its text, was withdrawn from performance in Rome. His endeavours also produced Berenice, regina di Egitto (1718), with music by both himself and Nicola Porpora. More promising for the future were his relations with the Portuguese embassy, for which in 1714 he composed a cantata in honour of the birth of a crown prince of Portugal.

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Composers & Their Music

In September 1719 Scarlatti abandoned his post at the Vatican, and by the end of 1720 he was in Lisbon, where his serenata Contesa delle Stagioni was performed at the royal palace on September 6. He had become musical director to King John V of Portugal, as well as music master to the king’s younger brother Don Antonio and to Princess Maria Bárbara de Bragança, who was to remain his patroness and for whom most of the harpsichord sonatas were later written. The production of serenades and church music continued, most of it adequate but hardly distinguished, if judged by surviving pieces. But a major change was taking place in Scarlatti’s life. In 1725 his father died; in 1728 he made his last visit to Italy to marry at the unusually late age of 43 a young Roman, Maria Caterina Gentili, who before her death in 1739 bore him six children (four more were born to his second marriage, with the Spanish Anastasia Maxarti Ximenes); and also in 1728 his pupil Maria Bárbara married the Spanish crown prince, the future Ferdinand VI, and Scarlatti followed the royal pair to Spain.

Later life and keyboard works: Spain

There he was to spend his remaining years, first in Sevilla (Seville), perhaps already listening to Spanish popular music and imitating, as Burney tells us, “the melody of tunes sung by carriers, muleteers, and common people,” and after 1733 in the royal residences of Madrid and at the nearby palaces of La Granja, El Escorial, and Aranjuez. Many links with the past seem to have been cut, and an emancipation seems to have taken place that permitted the extraordinary stylistic development of the harpsichord sonatas. Scarlatti virtually disappears as a composer of vocal music, and there is no evidence of his participation in the extravagant opera productions directed at court by his friend the castrato singer Farinelli.

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The fullest surviving record of Scarlatti’s life and character is to be found in the series of harpsichord sonatas that began with the publication of his Esercizi per gravicembalo (Exercises) in 1738, which contained 30 sonatas. The series of sonatas continued brilliantly with manuscript volumes copied out for Maria Bárbara in 1742 and 1749. She became queen of Spain in 1746, and the musical activities of the Spanish court became more lavish than ever. But the principal evidence of Scarlatti’s own activity continues to reside in the final great series of harpsichord sonatas copied out for the queen from 1752 to 1757, the year of Scarlatti’s death.

This music ranges from the courtly to the savage, from an almost saccharine urbanity to an acrid violence. Its gaiety is all the more intense for an undertone of tragedy. Its moments of meditative melancholy are at times overwhelmed by a surge of extrovert operatic passion. Most particularly he has expressed that part of his life which was lived in Spain. There is hardly an aspect of Spanish life, of Spanish popular music and dance, that has not found itself a place in the microcosm that Scarlatti created with his sonatas. No Spanish composer, not even Manuel de Falla in the 20th century, has expressed the essence of his native land as completely as did the foreigner Scarlatti. He has captured the click of castanets, the strumming of guitars, the thud of muffled drums, the harsh bitter wail of gypsy lament, the overwhelming gaiety of the village band, and above all the wiry tension of the Spanish dance.

(R. K.: Domenico Scarlatti)

There are also abundant echoes of the festivities of the Spanish court, of the wind instruments and drums of state processions, of the horns and oboes of the royal hunt, of fireworks and artillery salvos, and of the music from the royal barges that floated over the waters of the Tagus during the summer embarkations at Aranjuez.

All of this does not find expression merely in loosely knit impressionistic program music, but is assimilated and distilled with all the rigour that Scarlatti had learned from his 16th century ecclesiastical masters, and is given forth again in a pure musical language that extends far beyond the domain of mere harpsichord virtuosity. All is assimilated into an unfailing sense of the larger context. In those last five years as he wrote sonata after sonata Scarlatti was reliving his entire life, living it more intensely than ever before, bringing it to fruition.(Ibid.)