Domenico Scarlatti

Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti was born in Naples on 26 October 1685, the sixth of ten children of the composer Alessandro Scarlatti and Antonia Anzalone ^[1]. The year is a famous one in music history: Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel were born within months of him, and the three men would come to define the late Baroque from very different corners of Europe ^[2].

Naples at the end of the seventeenth century was one of the busiest musical cities on the continent, and the Scarlatti household sat near its center. Alessandro directed the royal chapel and dominated Neapolitan opera, and several of Domenico's relatives, including his uncle Francesco and his brother Pietro Filippo, worked as professional musicians ^[1]. Details of the boy's formal training are thin, but scholars assume his father supervised his education, possibly with help from Neapolitan colleagues such as Gaetano Greco ^[3].

Whatever the classroom looked like, results came early. In September 1701, not yet sixteen, Domenico was appointed organist and composer of the royal chapel in Naples, where his father was maestro ^[1]. Two operas by the teenager, L'Ottavia restituita al trono and Il Giustino, reached the Naples stage in 1703, and in 1704 he reworked Carlo Francesco Pollarolo's Irene for local performance ^[3]. Alessandro, restless about opportunities in Naples, soon sent his son to Venice. His accompanying letter to a patron survives, describing Domenico as an eagle whose wings had grown and who should not stay idle in the nest ^[2].

Little documentation survives from the Venetian years, roughly 1705 to 1708, though later anecdote places Scarlatti in contact with the composer Francesco Gasparini and the young Handel ^[3]. By 1708 or 1709 he had settled in Rome, where the most repeated story of his life took shape. At the palace of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, according to an account passed down through Handel's early biographer John Mainwaring, the two composers were matched in a friendly trial of skill: judged roughly equal at the harpsichord, with Handel preferred on the organ ^[2]. Mainwaring added that Scarlatti spoke of Handel's organ playing with admiration for the rest of his life.

Steady employment came from an exiled queen. From 1709 Scarlatti served as maestro di cappella to Maria Casimira of Poland, widow of King John III Sobieski, who kept a small court in Rome ^[1]. For her private theater he wrote a string of operas, among them Tolomeo e Alessandro (1711) and an Amleto (1715), one of the earliest operatic treatments of the Hamlet story ^[3].

When Maria Casimira left Rome in 1714, Scarlatti moved into church appointments, becoming maestro of the Cappella Giulia at St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, a post he held until 1719 ^[1]. He also served the Portuguese ambassador in Rome. One legal document from this period stands out among Domenico Scarlatti facts: in 1717 he obtained a formal decree of independence from his father, freeing the thirty one year old from Alessandro's legal authority, a telling sign of how tightly the older man had managed his son's career ^[2].

In 1719 Scarlatti resigned his Roman posts and traveled to Lisbon, where he became mestre of the patriarchal chapel of King John V of Portugal, a monarch spending Brazilian gold on sacred music at a spectacular rate ^[1]. Alongside his chapel duties he taught keyboard to the king's younger brother Don Antonio and to the royal princess, Maria Barbara of Braganza ^[3].

The princess changed the direction of his life. Maria Barbara proved a gifted and devoted keyboard player, and the teaching relationship begun in Lisbon lasted until Scarlatti's death nearly four decades later ^[2]. Most of the sonatas on which his fame rests were written for her, and the surviving manuscript volumes copied out in Spain were kept in her library ^[4].

Records from the Lisbon years are scarce, partly because the earthquake of 1755 destroyed much of the city's archives, including the patriarchal chapel's papers ^[3]. Scarlatti made return trips to Italy during the 1720s, and in 1725 he was in Naples when his father died. In 1728, in Rome, he married Maria Caterina Gentili, a Roman woman many years his junior ^[1].

When Maria Barbara married the Spanish crown prince Fernando in 1729, Scarlatti followed her to the Iberian courts, first at Seville and then, from 1733, at Madrid ^[1]. He remained in Spain for the rest of his life, attached to the royal household as the queen's music master, and he never again held a major public post. The seclusion suited him. Freed from opera houses and chapel politics, he concentrated on a single genre, the one movement keyboard sonata, and produced them in astonishing quantity: about 555 survive ^[4].

The sonatas absorbed the sounds around him. Guitar strumming effects, hammering repeated notes, sudden dissonant crushes, flamenco tinged rhythms, and melodic turns from Andalusian and Portuguese popular music all found their way into pieces of formal clarity and wild invention ^[4]. The English music historian Charles Burney, writing in the eighteenth century, reported that Scarlatti himself said he imitated the melodies sung by carriers and common people ^[2]. Technically the sonatas demanded a new athleticism: rapid hand crossings, wide leaps, and brilliant passagework that pushed harpsichord playing beyond anything his contemporaries printed.

Only one collection appeared under his supervision, the thirty Essercizi per gravicembalo published in London in 1738 or 1739, with a preface inviting the reader to expect ingenious jesting with art rather than profound learning ^[4]. The following year an expanded English edition arranged by Thomas Roseingrave spread his name through Britain, where a durable cult of Scarlatti playing took root ^[2]. In 1738 King John V of Portugal made him a Knight of the Order of Santiago, and the Essercizi were dedicated to the king in gratitude ^[1].

Scarlatti married twice and raised a large family. His first wife, Maria Caterina Gentili, bore him five children before her death in Madrid in 1739; around 1742 he married a Spanish woman, Anastasia Maxarti Ximenes, with whom he had four more ^[1]. None of the nine children became a professional musician.

Contemporary glimpses of the man are rare but consistent on one point: he lived quietly. The Irish tenor Michael Kelly recorded a family tradition that Scarlatti had a weakness for gambling, and that Queen Maria Barbara discreetly covered his losses, though the story cannot be verified ^[2]. The one surviving portrait, painted in the 1730s by Domingo Antonio Velasco and now the standard likeness, shows a composed, dark eyed courtier wearing the cross of Santiago ^[5].

His circle at the Spanish court included the castrato Farinelli, the most famous singer in Europe, who had been employed to soothe the melancholy of King Philip V and stayed on under Fernando VI and Maria Barbara ^[3]. It was Farinelli who later safeguarded the two great manuscript sets of the sonatas, thirteen volumes each, copied for the queen in the 1750s; they eventually passed to Venice and Parma, where they remain the principal sources for Scarlatti's keyboard music ^[4].

The last decade of Scarlatti's life was his most productive. The great bound volumes of sonatas prepared for Maria Barbara are dated between 1752 and 1757, and although some pieces certainly originated earlier, the sheer pace of copying suggests continued composition into old age ^[4]. Alongside the sonatas he left sacred works, including a Stabat Mater for ten voices written in his Roman years and a late Salve Regina often considered his final composition ^[3].

He also left a trace as a teacher beyond the royal family. The Spanish organist Antonio Soler, whose own sonatas carry the Scarlatti manner into the next generation, is generally described as his pupil at the royal residences ^[3]. Through Soler and through the queen's circle, Scarlatti's keyboard style seeded a distinct Iberian school that outlived him.

Domenico Scarlatti died in Madrid on 23 July 1757, at seventy one, and was buried at a convent on the Calle de Leganitos; the site of his grave no longer survives ^[1]. Maria Barbara, who died the following year, remembered him in her will. His estate was modest, and Farinelli was said to have assisted the family he left behind ^[2].

For a composer of his stature, Scarlatti's afterlife began slowly. Only a fraction of the sonatas circulated in print during the eighteenth century, and full appreciation waited for the collected edition prepared by Alessandro Longo around 1906 and, above all, for the 1953 study and catalogue by the American harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick, whose K numbers are now the standard way of identifying the sonatas ^[4]. Kirkpatrick's biography remains the foundation of modern Scarlatti scholarship.

Performers kept the flame alight in the meantime. Muzio Clementi collected and published Scarlatti in London, Chopin and Brahms admired the sonatas, and the pianist Vladimir Horowitz made them a signature of twentieth century recital programs ^[2]. Harpsichordists from Wanda Landowska onward reclaimed the music for the instrument it was written for, and complete recorded cycles by Scott Ross and others have made all 555 sonatas widely available ^[5].

Any summary of Domenico Scarlatti achievements begins with those sonatas. In them he worked out binary structures whose balanced halves and dramatic contrasts anticipate elements of Classical sonata thinking, decades before Haydn, while their harmonic audacity still sounds startling ^[4]. A Domenico Scarlatti biography is finally a study in late blooming: an obedient son who wrote conventional operas into his thirties, then, in the privacy of a Spanish palace, invented a keyboard language nobody had heard before and that nobody has imitated convincingly since ^[2].