Micrologus; An Ingenious Jesting with Art

85-02 AN INGENIOUS JESTING WITH ART

Sometime in the first decade of the 18th century, the promising young English musician Thomas Roseingrave was given a grant which enabled him to travel to improve himself. He set off for Italy; and here Charles Burney, the 18th century Music Historian, picks up the tale:

“Being arrived at Venice, on his way to Rome, as he himself told me, he was invited as a stranger and a virtuoso to an academy at the house of a nobleman where, among others, he was requested to sit down to the harpsichord and favour the company with a toccata as a specimen della sua vertù, and, says he, ‘finding myself rather better encouraged in finger than usual, exerted myself, my dear friend, and fancied, by the applause I received, that my performance had made some impression on the company’. After a cantata had been sung by a scholar of Francesco Gasparini, who was there to accompany her, 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, being asked to sit down to the harpsichord, when he began to play Rosi said he thought ten hundred devils had been at the instrument, he had never heard such passages of execution and effect before. The performance so far surpassed his own and every degree of perfection to which he thought it possible he should ever arrive, that if he had been in sight of an instrument with which to have done the deed, he should have cut off his own fingers. Upon enquiring the name of this extraordinary performer, he was told that it was Domenico Scarlatti.”

[MUSIC: Sonata in G Major, K.348, by Domenico Scarlatti, performed by Tom Pixton]

Domenico was the sixth child of Alessandro Scarlatti, the greatest Italian opera composer of the mature Baroque. He was born in Naples on October 26, 1685, and grew up amid the frenetic musical activity of that city and, particularly, of the Scarlatti household.

Considering that his reputation today is built upon his works for harpsichord, Domenico's early professional concerns are surprising: church music and opera.

His first appointment, when he was not quite 17, was as organist and composer in the Chapel Royal at Naples, where his father was Master of Music. During the three or four years he spent at that post, Domenico also began to dabble in the Neapolitan opera. In 1705, his father exerted his parental authority and sent him to Venice, where he seems not to have distinguished himself, since there is no record of his activity in that city. In 1709, he took a position in Rome at the court of Maria Casimira, the exiled Queen of Poland, and there focussed on the production of operas. He turned back to church music when he was named maestro di cappella of the papal chapel in about 1714, although just about the same time, he also began working for another courtly employer, the Marques de Fontes, Portuguese Ambassador to the Vatican. It was this Portuguese connection which was later to lead Domenico Scarlatti to fame and fulfilment on the Iberian Peninsula.

We have so few of Scarlatti's works from this period of his life that it is hard to discern a distinct musical personality. The operas, oratorios, and cantatas which we know existed are mostly lost, and the sacred music, with few exceptions, is conservative in style and not very memorable. One small group of works which survives from this early period, but which is not well known, is the collection of 17 sinfonias for string orchestra with oboe or flute, preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. One of these, No. 12 in G Major, has been identified as having served also as the overture to the 1714 opera, Amor d’un ombra (Love of a Shadow), later revived in London as Narciso (Narcissus) by that enthusiastic convert to the cause, Scarlatti's lifelong English champion, Thomas Roseingrave. Here is the first of its three movements.

[MUSIC: The first movement of Domenico Scarlatti's Sinfonia No. 12 in G major, performed by the Saar Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Karl Ristenpart]

In 1719, Scarlatti became music director to the King of Portugal, John V, in Lisbon. His duties at the court included considerable attention to sacred music, a particular passion of the King, but also the instruction on the harpsichord of the King's gifted daughter, Maria Barbara. It was this latter association which led to the composition of more than 500 keyboard sonatas, the quality and quantity of which have assured a special place for Scarlatti in the history of keyboard music.

The person who has done probably more than any other in researching Scarlatti's life, cataloging his works, and popularizing his music, is the late Ralph Kirkpatrick. In 1953, Kirkpatrick published the first full-length biography of Domenico Scarlatti, and appended a catalog of all the known keyboard sonatas, numbered according to what Kirkpatrick figured to be chronological order. The problem with dating Scarlatti's sonatas is that not a single piece survives in the composer's own hand. All are copies, sometimes datable, but made by scribes perhaps years after the actual composition of the works. While none of the three numbering systems advanced so far, Longo, Kirkpatrick, and Pestelli, can make any real claims to chronological precision, Kirkpatrick's is the most widely used today. Here is Ralph Kirkpatrick performing the Scarlatti sonata to which he has assigned the number K. (for Kirkpatrick) 380.

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One of Kirkpatrick's important innovations in the performance of Scarlatti's sonatas was the grouping of the works into pairs. He pointed out that, in the later sources, the sonatas are consistently arranged into pairs having the same key or, at least, the same tonal center (as in C major and C minor). Nearly 400 sonatas have thus been grouped into nearly 200 pairs. The pairwise arrangement has been challenged, however. The earliest sources do not use it and the pairings in the later sources may have been the idea of one of the scribes, rather than of Scarlatti himself. Also, there is rarely any discernible musical connection between the pieces, aside from the related key centers.

You should have the opportunity to judge for yourself, however. Sonatas K. 213 and 214 occur as a pair in both of their original sources. The first sonata is in D minor, marked "Andante," and the second is in D major, marked "Allegro." The performance is by Edward Parmentier.

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In 1729, Scarlatti’s illustrious pupil married the heir to the throne of Spain and left Lisbon for Madrid, with her music-master in tow. There, Scarlatti seems to have quietly enjoyed a position of privilege and security, which must have been what he needed, since he was composing sonatas at a prodigious rate. He married for the first time, in 1728, at the age of 42, and although his wife was Italian, he seems to have been drawn more and more into a Spanish way of life, even to the point of signing himself "Domingo" rather than Domenico.

You may have noticed Spanish-sounding rhythms and guitar-like figuration in some of the pieces you have heard so far. These are distinctive features in many of Scarlatti's sonatas, but one of the best examples in this regard is the Sonata in F minor, K. 239. It is performed here by Doris Ornstein.

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In 1737, Scarlatti's musical supremacy at the Spanish court began to be overshadowed by that of a newcomer, also Italian, Carlo Broschi—better known as Farinelli—perhaps the greatest castrato of all time. Farinelli had a sublime talent, which he put at the service of Scarlatti's patrons, and seems, in addition, to have been a genuinely likeable man. There is no evidence that Scarlatti became dissatisfied with this change in situation. He seems to have maintained the affection of the Queen, his perennial student, and for her benefit he continued composing sonatas up to his death in 1757.

Scarlatti's success at the Spanish court was private, rather than public. No school of Scarlatti-followers sprang up after his death. His was a personal, though brilliant, achievement. His modesty, generosity, and humor are perhaps captured best in one of the few of his utterances that have come down to us: the Preface to his Essercizi per Gravicembalo (Lessons for the Harpsichord), published in London in 1738. It will serve here as an epitaph to his works:

“Whether you be Dilettante or Professor, in these compositions do not expect any profound learning, but rather an ingenious Jesting with Art ... Show yourself then more human than critical, and thereby increase your own Delight.”

[MUSIC: Harpsichordist Tom Pixton playing Scarlatti's Sonata K. 525 in F major]

You have been listening to a program exploring the music of Domenico Scarlatti, "An Ingenious Jesting with Art."