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The Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti and Eighteenth-Century Musical Style. By W. Dean Sutcliffe.

2007; Oxford University Press; Volume: 88; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ml/gcm037

1477-4631

Barry Ife,

Diverse Musicological Studies

There can be few composers of the significance and reputation of Domenico Scarlatti, about whom so little is known for certain. If we leave aside the bare bones of births, marriages, and deaths, we know virtually nothing about his childhood and formation in Naples (1685–1704) except that in 1701 he became organist in the vice-regal chapel, where his father Alessandro was maestro, and that he wrote three operas for the public theatre and two cantatas. We know nothing at all about his visits to Rome, Florence, and Venice (1705–7) in search of employment, armed with letters of recommendation from his father. And we know precious little about his employments in Rome (1708–19) at Santa Maria Maggiore, the Cappella Giulia, and the court of the exiled queen Maria Casimira of Poland at the Palazzo Zuccari. There are only two recorded sightings of Scarlatti from this period, neither of them particularly fresh nor especially reliable. Mainwaring's 1760 account of the trial of skill between Scarlatti and Handel is full of mythographic details, one of which is shared with Burney's even later account of Domenico's encounter with the young Irish composer Thomas Roseingrave. Both writers attest to Scarlatti's outstanding ability as a harpsichordist, and Burney describes him as ‘a grave young man dressed in black and in a black wig, who had stood in one corner of the room, very quiet and attentive while Roseingrave played’. By the time Scarlatti left Italy in 1719, at the age of 34, there is very little we can say about him other than that he seems to have been a reasonably successful composer of operas (at least thirteen, of which only three survive complete), chamber cantatas (at least sixty-five), a cappella church music (of which about twenty-one works are known), and sixteen orchestral sinfonias; and that he was a good harpsichordist, well-mannered, and possibly shy or self-effacing.