Domenico Scarlatti was born in Naples, Italy, in 1685, the same year as two other baroque masters, Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frederic Handel. He was the sixth of ten children and a younger brother to Pietro Filippo Scarlatti, also a musician. Most probably he first studied under his father, the composer and teacher Alessandro Scarlatti; other composers who may have been his early teachers include Gaetano Greco, Francesco Gasparini, and Bernardo Pasquini, all of whom seem to have influenced his musical style.
He became a composer and organist at the royal chapel in Naples in 1701. In 1704, he revised Carlo Francesco Pollarolo's opera Irene for performance at Naples. Soon after this his father sent him to Venice; no record exists of his next four years. In 1709 he went to Rome in the service of the exiled Polish queen Marie Casimire, where he met Thomas Roseingrave who would later lead the enthusiastic reception of the composer's sonatas in London. Already an eminent harpsichordist, there is a story that in a trial of skill with George Frideric Handel at the palace of Cardinal Ottoboni in Rome he was judged perhaps superior to Handel on that instrument, although inferior on the organ. Later in life, he was known to cross himself in veneration when speaking of Handel's skill.
Also while in Rome, Scarlatti composed several operas for Queen Casimira's private theatre. He was maestro di cappella at St Peter's from 1715 to 1719, and in the latter year came to London to direct his opera Narciso at the King's Theatre.
In 1720 or 1721 he went to Lisbon, where he taught music to the Portuguese princess Maria Magdalena Barbara. He was at Naples again in 1725. During a visit to Rome in 1728 he married Maria Caterina Gentili. In 1729 he moved to Sevilla where he stayed for four years. There he got to know the Flamenco. In 1733 he went to Madrid as music master to the princess, who had married into the Spanish royal house. Maria Barbara became Queen of Spain, and he remained in Spain for some twenty-five years and had five children there. After the death of his wife in 1742 he married a Spaniard, Anastasia Maxarti Ximenes. During his time in Madrid, Scarlatti composed over five hundred keyboard sonatas. It is for these works that he is best remembered today.
Scarlatti befriended the castrato singer Farinelli, a fellow Neapolitan enjoying royal patronage in Madrid. The musicologist Ralph Kirkpatrick acknowledges Farinelli's correspondence as providing "most of the direct information about Scarlatti that has transmitted itself to our day."
Domenico Scarlatti died in Madrid, aged 71. His residence on Calle Leganitos is designated with a historical plaque, and his descendants still live in Madrid.
Only a fraction of Scarlatti's compositions was published during his lifetime; Scarlatti himself seems to have overseen the publication in 1738 of the most famous collection, a book of 30 Essercizi ("Exercises"). These were rapturously received throughout Europe, and were championed by the foremost English writer on music of the eighteenth century, Dr. Charles Burney.
The many sonatas which were unpublished during Scarlatti's lifetime have appeared in print irregularly in the two and a half centuries since. Scarlatti has, however, attracted notable admirers, including Chopin, Brahms, Bartók, Heinrich Schenker and Vladimir Horowitz. The Russian school of pianism has particularly championed the sonatas.
Scarlatti wrote over five hundred keyboard sonatas, generally single movements in binary form. Modern pianoforte technique owes much to their influence. Some of them display harmonic audacity, both in the use of discords or clusters and in adventurous use of unconventional modulations to remote keys. Scarlatti was also a pioneer in the realm of rhythm and musical syntax: syncopation and cross-rhythms are common in his music.
Other distinctive attributes of Scarlatti's style are the following:
1. The clear influence of Spanish folk music. Scarlatti's use of the Phrygian mode and other tonal inflections more or less alien to European art music is an obvious symptom of this, as is his use of extremely dissonant cluster chords and other techniques which seem to imitate the guitar. The full-bodied, sometimes tragic use of folk idioms is highly unusual. Not until Béla Bartók and his contemporaries would notated music lend folk music such a strident voice.
2. The anticipation of many of the developments in style, form and texture that led to the so-called 'classical style'.
3. A formal device in which each half of a sonatas leads to a pivotal point, which the Scarlatti scholar Ralph Kirkpatrick termed "the crux", and which is sometimes underlined by a pause or fermata. Before the crux Scarlatti sonatas often contain their main thematic variety, and after the crux the music makes more use of repetitive figurations as it modulates away from the home key (in the first half) or back to the home key (in the second half).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domenico_Scarlatti
Sonata in C minor, K.99
Scarlatti obviously enjoyed having the fastest fingers in Europe, and many of his works are centered upon the visual drama of his technique. No one, before or since, has employed such extensive and varied hand crossings as he did.
He had, in fact, to invent a new way of writing music. In contrast to the C-clef notation of his time, he wrote his music on fixed treble-bass staff pairs. His notes climb all over both staves, with total indifference as to which hand they might be best played with. A harpsichordist must play with arms parallel to the keyboard, with finger action like legs walking, in order to play with hands crossed to the extent Scarlatti wrote.
There is a mystery surrounding Scarlatti's tonalities. In his time, musicians did not tune all 12 intervals of a keyboard equally, but restricted the keys they played in so that more of the musically important intervals could be in tune. They also valued the variety of characters that differing keys have when all intervals are not equal. Modern analysis has made it evident that Scarlatti did not use the sound structure of Italian tunings of his time when composing his sonatas - he used the very different one of French tunings. The tonal structure of a tuning is too complex in its effects for a composer to pick it up and drop it at will - it has to be subsumed totally in a compositional language. Scarlatti had no known contact with France, almost none with French musicians. Where did his tonal structure come from?...
Sonata in D major, K.23
Scarlatti often wrote out brief pieces, apparently as gifts to visitors. In 1738, he was knighted by Portugal, and composed a formal volume of thirty pieces in tribute. But it was not until 1752 that he truly set about putting his skills on paper. During the six years that remained to him, he composed an average of a new sonata each week each overflowing with musical ideas. In fact, they introduce ideas in such profusion that if conventional phrasing attention is paid to them, the music becomes totally fragmented. A different view is needed to understand them.
Sonata in A minor, K.175
Although Scarlatti's training was pure Italian, Spanish dance rhythms are the foundation of most of his sonatas. These rhythms are solo accents, that build structure and power upon a sustained rhythmic foundation rather than on a phrase-oriented vocal one. Scarlatti's phrases are sequences of tone colours rather than of just notes. The tonalities of these sequences multiply in the manner of Italian toccatas, while the melodic lines continually expand into multiple voices that blend into tonality. Almost none of his sonatas fit a classical key signature.
The formal structure of most of the sonatas shows two pairwise symmetries: tonalities are mirrored about a central double bar, and thematic material repeats after the double bar. And, almost all the later sonatas are written in formal pairs, several with explicit marking that they are to be played together.
The Sonata in A minor K.175 is simply incredible. Like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: first page of each one of the two parts seems “suggested†by Stravinsky 200 years before, the second page is a paradigmatic example of Scarlatti’s crystalline euphony.
Sonata in D minor, K.141
Scarlatti had access to single and double-manual harpsichords, organs and early pianos at the Spanish court. A few of his sonatas may have been composed for piano, a few are marked for organ. But, most of his sonatas can only be played on a harpsichord, unless they are heavily adapted. The dynamics of Scarlatti's music are produced by the pluck and dissonance of pure sounding strings, not by the volume dynamic of the pitch-blurred modern piano. His primary element of rhythm, the acciaccatura, sounds clumsy and thick on the piano, and must be translated into volume dynamic. Scarlatti's rapidly repeated notes may be played smoothly on a harpsichord, with one finger as if they were half a trill, a technique essentially impossible on the piano.
http://www.sankey.ws/harpsichord.html
http://www.claudiocolombo.net/Compositori/Scarlatti/scarlatt
i-161-180.htm
for further reading:
"Domenico Scarlatti", Ralph Kirkpatrick, 1953/1983.
for further listening:
"Domenico Scarlatti: Complete Keyboard Works box set", Scott Ross, 1992/2005.
for further studying:
http://icking-music-archive.org/ByComposer/Scarlatti.php
http://www.claudiocolombo.net/scarlatti.htm
