1685–1757 · Baroque
Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757) was an Italian composer and harpsichordist, the son of Alessandro Scarlatti. Born in Naples, he served the Portuguese and Spanish courts for most of his life and died in Madrid. He is known above all for his 555 keyboard sonatas, which are played and recorded by pianists as well as harpsichordists.
Domenico Scarlatti came into the world on 26 October 1685 in Naples, then part of the Spanish Empire, the year in which Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel were also born. Among the ten children of Alessandro Scarlatti, a composer and teacher, Domenico was the sixth. His older brother Pietro Filippo also became a musician, and Francesco Scarlatti was Domenico's uncle.
The future composer's mother, Antonia Anzalone, came from Rome. His first teacher was most probably his father. What else made up his musical education is unclear: Gaetano Greco, Francesco Gasparini and Bernardo Pasquini are named, but nothing is certain.
In 1701 Domenico received a post in Naples as a composer and organist. His first two operas, Ottavia Restituita al Trono and Il Giustino, were staged in Naples in 1703. He also revised Carlo Francesco Pollarolo's opera Irene for the Naples stage.
Next, Alessandro dispatched his son to Venice, with a stop in Florence and a letter addressed to Fernando de' Medici. He hoped the prince would offer posts to both father and son. Nothing came of this, and for the years that followed, until 1709, nothing certain is known of Domenico's life.
Scarlatti arrived in Rome in 1709 as a musician in the pay of Marie Casimire, a Polish queen living in exile. His operas for her private theatre began with La Slivia (1710), followed by L'Orlando overo la Gelosa Pazzia and Tolomeo e Alessandro (both 1711) and Tetride in Sciro (1712). In 1713 came Ifigenia in Tauri and Ifigenia in Aulide, and the series closed in 1714 with Amor d'un'ombra e gelosia d'un'aura. He also wrote sacred music, for example a ten-voice Stabat Mater.
After the queen's money ran out and she left Italy, Scarlatti took charge of the music at the Julian Chapel in St Peter's, a post he held until 1719.
In Rome Scarlatti met the English organist Thomas Roseingrave, who would later become the chief champion of his music in England. By then Scarlatti was a skilled harpsichordist. One tale tells of a contest with Handel in Cardinal Ottoboni's palace. Later, whenever Handel's skill came up, he would make the sign of the cross out of reverence.
Around 1720 Scarlatti settled in Lisbon. There he directed the music for King John V of Portugal and taught music to Don Antonio, the king's younger brother, and to Princess Maria Magdalena Barbara.
He later returned to Italy. In 1728, in Rome, Scarlatti married Maria Caterina Gentili: she was 16 and he was 42.
In 1729 Princess Maria Barbara married Fernando, heir to the Spanish crown, and Scarlatti went with her to Seville, where he stayed for four years. He kept teaching her music and also taught the prince. In 1733 he travelled to Madrid, where he remained the princess's music teacher.
King John V of Portugal made Scarlatti a knight in 1738, an honour that mattered greatly to his family; his descendants still hold the papers. Not long afterwards Scarlatti dedicated to King John his first printed collection of harpsichord pieces, the Essercizi per Gravicembalo. Fernando and Maria Barbara became King and Queen of Spain in 1746, and music stayed a central part of life at court.
Most of the 555 keyboard sonatas that made Scarlatti best known were written for Maria Barbara; Kirkpatrick judged that they display the whole breadth of his gift. Today it is the works of his Spanish period that are best known: he spent the last quarter-century of his life in Spain.
After his first wife died, Scarlatti married a second time, to a Spaniard, Anastasia Maxarti Ximenes. He was a friend of Farinelli, the famous castrato singer, also a native of Naples, who lived in Madrid under royal patronage. Most of what is known about Scarlatti today comes from Farinelli's correspondence, which the musicologist Ralph Kirkpatrick, who published a book on Scarlatti in 1953, discovered.
Scarlatti died in Madrid on 23 July 1757, aged 71. The Salve Regina of 1756 is thought to be his final work. A plaque marks his home at 35 Calle de Leganitos, and his descendants are still in Madrid. He was laid to rest at a convent in the city, but the grave has not survived.
Few of Scarlatti's works reached print while he lived. In 1738 came the 30 Essercizi ("Exercises"), his best-known collection, which he appears to have supervised himself. Audiences across Europe welcomed it, and Charles Burney, the leading English music writer of the 18th century, championed it.
England was where Scarlatti first found recognition and supporters. Roseingrave brought out an expanded edition of the Essercizi in 1739, with a supplement to follow later, and in 1752 Dr John Worgan published 12 sonatas taken from a Spanish manuscript once owned by the organist of Madrid's Royal Chapel. Scarlatti's fame in England kept growing through the rest of the 18th century. In Italy, France and Germany his music was less well known at that time.
The sonatas that were not published in the composer's lifetime appeared in print only irregularly over two and a half centuries. Even so, they attracted distinguished musicians, among them Chopin, Bartók, Schenker and Horowitz. Chopin gave Scarlatti's pieces to his piano pupils, and Brahms carefully kept his manuscripts in his collection. Scarlatti's sonatas are also said to have had a strong influence on the Russian school of piano playing. Scott Ross became the first to record all 555 of them.
The core of Scarlatti's legacy is the 555 keyboard sonatas. Almost all are single movements, chiefly in two-part form, with a few approaching early sonata form. They were mostly meant for the harpsichord or the earliest pianos; only four are for organ, with a handful for small instrumental ensembles. A common device has each half lead to a pivotal point, sometimes marked by a pause or a fermata; Kirkpatrick called it "the crux". Before that point the main thematic variety usually sits, and after it the music leans on repeated figures, leaving the home key in the first half and returning to it in the second.
The moods range from deeply serious to light and nearly comic, and from courtly dances to street songs. Iberian folk music left its mark: the Phrygian mode, modulations unfamiliar to European art music, and repeated notes and dissonances that evoke the guitar. The harmony can also be bold, with discords and sudden jumps into distant keys.
For the player these pieces are good training. The New York music teacher Shirley Kirsten notes that the pieces demand a complex technique and are full of sudden changes of hand, trills and syncopations. In some places the hands must cross: to leap across four octaves, the player uses one finger of the left hand, placed over the right.
Sonatas are now usually numbered by the edition that Ralph Kirkpatrick produced in 1953; these are the numbers with the letter K. Before that, the numbering from the 1906 edition by the Neapolitan pianist Alessandro Longo was commonly used.
Scarlatti's works in other genres are less well known. They include 15 operas, 10 oratorios, sonatas for mandolin and harpsichord and for viola d'amore and bass, and orchestral pieces. His sacred music on widely used Catholic texts (the Stabat Mater, Salve Regina and Miserere) keeps to conservative traditions. The Stabat Mater, for example, is a fully developed piece of ten-voice imitative polyphony.
The site has four Scarlatti sonatas for solo piano. Sonata in C major and Keyboard Sonata in D Major (K.491) are marked at the "Intermediate+" level, while Sonata XI from the Essercizi per Gravicembalo (K 11) and Keyboard Sonata in G Major (K.455) are marked "advanced". Vladimir Horowitz recorded the D major Sonata K 491 on the piano.