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Domenico Scarlatti
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Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti (October 26, 1685 – July 23, 1757), son of the composer Alessandro Scarlatti, was an Italian composer who spent much of his life in Spain and Portugal. He is classified as a Baroque composer chronologically, although his music was influential in the development of the Classical style.
nico Scarlatti was born in Naples, Kingdom of Naples, in 1685. He was the sixth of ten children and a younger brother to Pietro Filippo Scarlatti, also a musician.
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Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti (October 26, 1685 – July 23, 1757), son of the composer Alessandro Scarlatti, was an Italian composer who spent much of his life in Spain and Portugal. He is classified as a Baroque composer chronologically, although his music was influential in the development of the Classical style.
Life and career
Domenico Scarlatti was born in Naples, Kingdom of Naples, in 1685. He was the sixth of ten children and a younger brother to Pietro Filippo Scarlatti, also a musician. He most likely 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 later led the enthusiastic reception of the composer's sonatas in London. 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, and in the latter year came 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 November 29, 1719. There he taught music to the Portuguese princess Maria Magdalena Barbara. He left Lisbon on January 28, 1727 for Rome, where he married Maria Caterina Gentili on May 6, 1728. In 1729 he moved to Sevilla, staying for four years and gaining a knowledge of Flamenco. In 1733 he went to Madrid as music master to Princess Maria Barbara, who had married into the Spanish royal house. When the Princess became Queen of Spain Scarlatti remained in the country for twenty-five years, where he had five children. After the death of his 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 acknowledges that Farinelli's correspondence provides "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.
Music
Only a small fraction of Scarlatti's compositions were published during his lifetime; Scarlatti himself seems to have overseen the publication in 1738 of the most famous collection, his 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 Frédéric Chopin, Johannes Brahms, Béla Bartók, Dmitri Shostakovich, Heinrich Schenker and Vladimir Horowitz. The Russian school of pianism has particularly championed the sonatas.
Scarlatti's 555 keyboard sonatas are single movements, mostly in binary form, and are almost all intended for the harpsichord (there are four for organ, and a few where Scarlatti suggests a small instrumental group). Modern pianoforte technique owes much to their influence. Some of them display harmonic audacity in their use of discords, and also unconventional modulations to remote keys.
Other distinctive attributes of Scarlatti's style are the following:
- The influence of Iberian (Portuguese and Spanish) folk music. An example is Scarlatti's use of the Phrygian mode and other tonal inflections more or less alien to European art music. Also some of Scarlatti's figurations and dissonances are guitar-like.
- A formal device in which each half of a sonata 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).
Recordings
Scott Ross recorded all 555 Scarlatti sonatas in a 34-CD set, nearly all on harpsichord, excepting the three for organ and the instrumental suites, for which he provided the continuo. In 2007 the Dutch harpsichordist Pieter-Jan Belder finished his recording of all the keyboard sonatas in sequential order for the label Brilliant Classics. Ditto Richard Lester, for the Nimbus label. The Naxos label is currently working on a project to record all of Scarlatti's sonatas on the piano - with each disc taken by a different pianist. The Italian Stradivarius label's Scarlatti sonata project, mostly recorded with harpsichordist Ottavio Dantone, currently stands at volume 10. According to an official at the label, there are talks to continue with the project.
The name of Ralph Kirkpatrick, the harpsichordist, has become closely associated with the sonatas; he was also a renowned Scarlatti scholar, and the numbering of the sonatas from his edition is nearly always used (the Kk. or K. number).
Pianist Vladimir Horowitz made several recordings of Scarlatti sonatas, performed on a modern piano. While these recordings have been the subject of critical debate and discussion (Horowitz was a pianist of the Romantic tradition), they caused a huge surge in popularity for Scarlatti's sonatas, which pianists had rarely played in public. Horowitz prepared meticulously for his Scarlatti recordings, calling on guidance from Ralph Kirkpatrick. Numerous critics (Jed Distler, Jens F. Laurson, and others) extol the virtues of a two-CD recording made on the piano by Mikhail Pletnev (Virgin Classics). A recording by Yevgeny Sudbin on the Swedish BIS label has been met with similar acclaim.
Media
External links
- - Performance of Sonata number 23 in A, andante e cantabile
- - An article on the Guardian website to mark the 250th anniversary of Domenico Scarlatti's death, with further listening suggestions
Free Scores
- harpsichord sonatas by Scarlatti
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