Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti (26 October 1685 – 23 July 1757) was an Italian composer who spent much of his life in the service of the Portuguese and Spanish royal families. He is classified primarily as a Baroque composer chronologically, although his music was influential in the development of the Classical style and was one of the few Baroque composers to transition into the classical period. Like his renowned father Alessandro Scarlatti he composed in a variety of musical forms, although today he is known mainly for his 555 keyboard sonatas.
Life and career
Domenico Scarlatti was born in Naples, Kingdom of Naples, in 1685, the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. He was the sixth of ten children of the composer and teacher Alessandro Scarlatti. Domenico’s older brother Pietro Filippo was also a musician.
He probably first studied music under his father. Other composers who may have been his early teachers include Gaetano Greco, Francesco Gasparini, and Bernardo Pasquini, all of whom may have influenced his musical style. He was appointed 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 afterwards, his father sent him to Venice. After this, nothing is known of Scarlatti’s life until 1709, when he went to Rome in the service of the exiled Polish queen Marie Casimire. He met Thomas Roseingrave there. Scarlatti was already an eminent harpsichordist: there is a story of a trial of skill with George Frideric Handel at the palace of Cardinal Ottoboni in Rome where he was judged possibly 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. 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. In 1719 he travelled to London to direct his opera Narciso at the King’s Theatre.
According to Vicente Bicchi (Papal Nuncio at the time), Domenico Scarlatti arrived in Lisbon on 29 November 1719. There he taught music to the Portuguese princess Maria Magdalena Barbara. He left Lisbon on 28 January 1727 for Rome, where he married Maria Caterina Gentili on 6 May 1728. In 1729 he moved to Seville, staying for four years. In 1733 he went to Madrid as music master to Princess Maria Barbara, who had married into the Spanish royal house. The Princess later became Queen of Spain. Scarlatti remained in the country for the remaining twenty-five years of his life, and had five children there. After the death of his first wife in 1742, he married a Spaniard, Anastasia Maxarti Ximenes. Among his compositions during his time in Madrid were a number of the 555 keyboard sonatas for which he is best known.
Scarlatti befriended the castrato singer Farinelli, a fellow Neapolitan also enjoying royal patronage in Madrid. The musicologist Ralph Kirkpatrick commented that Farinelli’s correspondence provides “most of the direct information about Scarlatti that has transmitted itself to our day.” Domenico Scarlatti died in Madrid, at the age of 71. His residence on Calle Leganitos is designated with a historical plaque, and his descendants still live in Madrid. He was buried at a convent there, in Madrid, but his grave no longer exists.
The mercurial maestro of Madrid
Robert White, The Guardian
It’s the music they didn’t want you to hear – and it’s only by good fortune that most of a magical 18th-century sound world was preserved at all. When Queen Maria Barbara of Spain prevailed on her Italian-born music master, Domenico Scarlatti, to supervise the copying of his 550 or so keyboard sonatas, there’s no indication that she had publication in mind. As he advanced in years, she was probably more concerned that she would still be able to enjoy their exclusive use after his death. But at least she ensured that they were captured on paper, for otherwise the majority might well have disappeared into the Iberian air from which the mercurial improviser had first plucked them.
Although Maria Barbara and her husband Ferdinand VI surrounded themselves with great operatic, vocal and instrumental opulence, it was not to last for long. Scarlatti’s death at the age of 71 on July 23 1757 was followed by the queen’s just over a year later, and that of the totally distressed king a year after that; both were in their mid-40s. The royal music stopped, and the Scarlatti manuscripts found their way into the outside world, with some chance of eventual wider currency.
Very little is known of the character or life of the Madrid musician who died 250 years ago. The most striking observation comes from his English champion Thomas Roseingrave, who noted how the quiet, grave young man dressed in black, whom he met in Italy in or after 1710, played the harpsichord “like ten hundred devils”. However, he could be a very genial soul, too, as Handel readily acknowledged.
These judgments chime with the music historian Charles Burney’s assessment of Scarlatti’s sonatas towards the end of the century: “Original and happy freaks … the wonder and delight of every hearer who had a spark of enthusiasm about him”. They fascinate by drawing substantially on the character and chord patterns of the songs and dances of Spain and Portugal, kept respectable within elegant framing gestures from Italy. Their composer ranks alongside those down the ages – the English virginalists of the 16th century, Chopin, Debussy, Bartok and Ligeti – who shifted the horizons of keyboard music.
Thus it was at the harpsichord, organ or fortepiano that the sometimes troubled Scarlatti was at his most confident – not just carefree, but sometimes recklessly capricious. This quality shines through at the start of the second of a sonata’s repeated halves, where he often embarks in directions quite impossible to anticipate.
In Britain there has always been a following for these single movements, rarely more than five minutes long, and sometimes played in pairs. The 30 published as Essercizi in London in 1738 benefited from the native love of the quirky: Scarlatti’s note to the reader points to “an ingenious jesting with art” that appealed to London harpsichordists till Clementi took the works up on the piano.
More appeared in Vienna in the first half of the 19th century; from Liszt onwards, virtuoso performers – particularly from Russia – have programmed them. Among composers, Chopin, Brahms and Bartok, all fascinated by the historic and the popular, were particular admirers.
In 1953 the American harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick produced his groundbreaking Scarlatti biography and a catalogue of the composer’s complete works – hence the “K” used on the number of each one. Long-playing records provided scope for the hour-long Scarlatti recital that is all too rare in concert life, and in 1985 the late Scott Ross recorded all 555 of the works listed by Kirkpatrick on 34 CDs.
The harpsichord’s awakening from its 19th-century slumber coincided with the recognition that Spanish musical nationalists, led by Falla, gave Scarlatti in capturing the country’s traditional sounds. It didn’t deter them that he came from Naples, where his family had relocated after leaving the Sicilian capital of Palermo. Both cities lay in Spain’s then extensive Italian territories, and the great Scarlatti of the day was the celebrated vocal composer Alessandro. Domenico, the sixth of Alessandro’s 10 children, started his career with music for the stage and the Vatican. In 1719 he went to Lisbon as the composer and music director to King John V.
It was in Lisbon that Scarlatti perhaps obtained the idea of incorporating folk elements into his keyboard music from a 16-year-old student, Carlos de Seixas. Teaching another student, the king’s daughter Maria Barbara, proved so agreeable that Scarlatti continued in her service for the second half of his life, and in 1729 she married Ferdinand, heir to the Spanish throne.
So the Neapolitan master and Portuguese pupil entered the tempestuous world of Spanish court life. For the first four years, they were based in and around Seville, as courtiers sought diversion for Ferdinand’s father, the deeply melancholic Philip V. Scarlatti thus got to know the colourful, major-to-minor music of Andalusia, influenced, like that of Portugal, by the centuries-long domination of the Moors, and applied his highly inventive ear to harmonies from beyond the conventional palette of the baroque.
Hindsight holds Scarlatti aloft with Handel and Bach, both also born in 1685, as that era’s great composer triplets. While he met Handel, Scarlatti may have known next to nothing of Bach. The comings and goings at the highly musical court of Dresden are likely to have made Bach aware of the composer of the 30 Essercizi, and it remains an open question as to whether they could have prompted him to produce the relatively flamboyant, if altogether weightier, 30 Goldberg Variations.
Still, when Scarlatti arrived in Madrid at the end of 1733, he might have hoped for the sort of platform appropriate to a leading musician of the age. In the event, he was kept to the sidelines in an extraordinary fashion that does much to account for his biographical obscurity.
Everything was thrown into the shade by Philip V’s manic depression. He decreed that each court day should start at 5pm, with dinner at 3am. His queen, Elisabetta Farnese, could not leave him on his own, in case he found a pen and tried to abdicate; and all the while she had to govern on his behalf. In 1737, at her wits’ end, she hatched a plan for her husband to overhear the visiting Farinelli (stage name of the Italian castrato Carlo Broschi), whose singing overcame his normal indifference to music.
Schooled by Elisabetta, Farinelli insisted that the only reward that he sought from the king was that he should be shaved and dressed, and attend the council of ministers. The singer retired as an operatic superstar, and sang Philip the same four or five arias each night for the remaining 10 years of his reign.
Ferdinand and Maria Barbara sought solace from the troubles of Philip’s court in the musical evenings that Scarlatti devised for them, with the universally popular Farinelli also taking part. After Philip’s death, the new monarchs promoted opera under the direction of the singer, but no opportunity went to Scarlatti to revive the theatrical career of his youth. Maybe he had no financial alternative but to focus on his sonatas, since he had gambling debts that were paid off by the queen and Farinelli. As soon as Ferdinand was succeeded by his half-brother Charles III, Farinelli retired to Italy with instruments left to him by Maria Barbara and her volumes of Scarlatti sonatas.
The harpsichordist Jane Clark has suggested that Scarlatti’s empathy with folk material, striking but melodically fragmentary, points to why his operas never took off. The sort of tunes that the audiences of the day wanted did not come to him so easily. It should be no surprise that he was drawn to the extremes of the Iberian, especially Andalusian, psyche: its music could express both elation and despair, and provide distraction through the spinning of fascinating patterns.
If such a combination of circumstances was needed to enable just one great composer to put the harpsichord before all else, and so develop its single most distinctive voice, then we can only be thankful. This once royal music came from everyday roots – and now it’s truly everyone’s.
Link to Christopher Hail website
Domenico Scarlatti 