Domenico Scarlatti - Biography
Domenico Scarlatti the famous composer of over 550 keyboard sonatas was born in Naples on October 6th 1685 and died in Madrid on July 33rd 1757. He was the son of the eminent composer Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725) who was during his lifetime the foremost vocal composer in Italy. Very little is known about Domenico’s musical education but by the time he was sixteen he was appointed organist and composer at the Chapel Royal in Naples where his father was music director. He composed an opera Ottavia ristituta al trumo that was first performed in Naples in 1703. He went to Rome for four years at the behest of his father but was soon to move to Rome where he entered the service of the Polish Queen Maria Casimira for whom he wrote a number of theatrical and operatic works.
By 1714 he gained the prestigious post of Cappella di Cappella at the Vatican along with a similar position to the Portuguese Ambassador to the Holy See. He may have met Handel during this period and there is an even apocryphal story of a musical contest between them. He eventually resigned all his Roman positions and moved to Lisbon where he became Master of the Patriarchal Chapel and responsible for the educating the children of the Portuguese King John the Fifth and other members of the Royal family. The King’s daughter Barbara married a Spanish Crown Price in 1728 and Scarlatti accompanied her to Madrid. He was to remain in Spain for the rest of his life. He visited his father for the last time in Naples in 1728 and he was to marry there during the same time to Maria Caterina Gentili. He spent four yours beginning in 1729 in Seville and one can surmise that some of the Spanish rhythms that appear in some of his sonatas may have been influenced by his stay. In 1733 Princess Barbara invited him back to Madrid where she was eventually to become Queen in 1746 and was make Scarlatti court music director. Scarlatti had five children, but his wife was to die young in 1742. While the renowned castrato (young boys in Italy with exceptional voices were sometimes castrated to achieve a brilliant high alto voice)singer Farinelli a fellow Neapolitan was in Madrid he became friends with Scarlatti and according to Scarlatti biographer and performer Ralph Kirkpatrick much of what we know about Scarlatti is known through their correspondence. His last years remained productive; he was to pass on his knowledge to the Spain’s next significant composer Antonio Soler. Scarlatti died short of his seventy second birthday in 1727.
Scarlatti wrote an extensive amount of operatic and religious music during the earlier part of his career but his fame lies with his hundreds of keyboard sonatas. What was a sonata for Scarlatti is not the multi movement structure as written by Beethoven but a short 3 or 4 minute piece. When we use the term keyboard what is meant was most of the sonatas where written for Harpsichord but some of the later ones may have been written for early versions of the piano like the Clavichord. The categorization of Scarlatti’s work was done by the Italian scholar Alessandro Longo early in the Twentieth Century a later edition was put out by the American Harpsichordist and Scarlatti expert Ralph Kirkpatrick. Chopin was a big fan of the sonatas as was Brahms and Bartok. Vladimir Horowitz had many of the sonatas in his repertoire and recorded them for RCA and Sony. Unfortunately some of the finest Scarlatti performances by the aforementioned Kirkpatrick on Columbia and a multi volume set on Westminster by Fernando Valenti on harpsichord have long been unavailable. A very highly thought of selection on piano was made by Mikhail Pletnev The only complete recorded edition of the Sonatas was done in the 1980’s by Scott Ross on the harpsichord on the Erato Label.
Scarlatti is a composer who has immense intellectual and technical skill in his work but is immediately pleasurable upon first hearing.