Domenico Scarlatti: Style, Philosophy, Technique

By Edward Campbell-Rowntree

Originally published in the Piano Tuners Association Newsletter, April 2021. https://pianotuner.org.uk

“Few composers of the stature of Domenico Scarlatti

have been so neglected in the literature of music.”

—Ralph Kirkpatrick

Portrait of Domenico Scarlatti by Domingos António Velasco c. 1739.

Domenico Scarlatti is a strange composer. His keyboard sonatas — at least 555 of them extant —have reached us without the extramusical paraphernalia commonly attached to other eighteenth-century repertoires. For a start, we have no certainty as to when each sonata was written; their chronology was constructed posthumously by a diligent lineage of scholars who were the first to create any meaningful ordering of the composer’s works. The sources from which these scholars worked are themselves problematic. Scarlatti’s sonatas were hardly published during his lifetime and the majority of manuscripts were copied by a hand other than the composer’s. While they are rife with careless mistakes and editorial liberties, more crucial is that they hold no semblance of the composer’s ‘authority,’ an admittedly nineteenth-century anachronism but one absolutely essential for admittance into the musical canon. To this day, Scarlatti remains somewhat of an outsider, or as W. Dean Sutcliffe introduces his monograph on Scarlatti, ‘Domenico Scarlatti does not belong.’ [1]

This lack of belonging is partly an issue of style. There are the well-worn tropes of dance, dissonance, the bizarre and the Iberian, which we might apply to Scarlatti to aid our understanding of each sonata where appropriate, but in practice these topics belie a sense of conceptual unity which is not really there. ‘In the works of Scarlatti there are no sonatas that may be considered typical,’ wrote Ralph Kirkpatrick in his 1953 biography of Scarlatti, an archival undertaking now written into musicological folklore. ‘Were proof needed,’ said Kirkpatrick, ‘nothing would better prove the vitality of the Scarlatti sonatas than their resistance to systematic analysis or to classification…Those forces which shape the Scarlatti sonatas are continually influencing and counteracting one another to such an extent that it is almost impossible to establish rules that Scarlatti himself does not break, or to define the categories that he himself does not demolish.’ [2] Sutcliffe remarks similarly that Scarlatti exhibits a reluctance ‘to identify himself with any one mode of speech in the keyboard sonatas’ and a desire to ‘make a virtue out of not belonging, or not wanting to belong.’ [3] Put another way, these pieces are uniform only in their blatant rejection of uniformity. For the analytical musicologist they are the stuff of both dreams and nightmares.

Kirkpatrick was well aware of Scarlatti’s idiosyncrasies. For him, Scarlatti had long been considered ‘a freakish if not downright incorrect composer’ who, in his harmonic language, ‘anticipated to a certain extend some of the characteristic practices of Stravinsky.’ [4] Kirkpatrick set about fabricating a ‘kind of theoretical fixed point from which the sonatas themselves constantly depart.’ Recruiting his own vocabulary centred around ‘the Crux’ and ‘the Excursion’, he circumvented the issue of analytical dogma by expressing the Scarlatti sonata as a ‘varied organism’ with ‘mysterious laws governing its life and growth.’ [5] One thing in common with each sonata is their form or, more poetically, how they deal with the flow of time. Each sonata is in binary form; that is, an A section and B section separated by a double bar line, the former establishing some sort of tonality and the latter returning to it following an excursion somewhere between the two.

This subterranean formula — that of the opposition and eventual resolution of A and B — operates across Scarlatti’s vast corpus with only a few exceptions (K. 73 and K. 83, for instance, are early experiments in multi-movement form.) While Scarlatti avoided any consistency in his harmonic and thematic language to warrant an easily discernible style, his use of binary form was the only architectural plan he needed to support his ideas. To quote Kirkpatrick once more, ‘he might never have deserted the binary sonata form, but there are no indications whatever that he had exhausted its possibilities.’ [6] Scarlatti’s universe is also one of overt tension and resolution, such that his works are curiously well-suited to the postmodernist lexicon of opposition, difference, repetition and self-reference. As Sutcliffe remarks, the Sonata in C Major, K. 502, moves ‘towards something that cannot be expressed in the notation, that is quite beyond the comprehension of the world of high art.’ [7]

As mentioned above, Scarlatti’s minimal biography and lack of authorial presence have somewhat precluded his admission into the metaphysical tradition of European art music. Few would place Scarlatti in the same realm as late Beethoven or Schubert (‘late style’ is itself a German invention of the nineteenth century), but are Scarlatti’s sonatas perhaps an expression of the ineffable; of the sublime? Are they in fact divine inspiration in microcosm form? Certainly, the music would suggest so. But the expressiveness in Scarlatti’s sonatas resides in their weirdness. Scarlatti’s constant waywardness, juxtaposition, harmonic instability and general playfulness are never-ending sources of blissful inspiration; of spiritual ecstasy. We might go as far to invoke Friedrich Nietzsche’s opposition of Apollonian and Dionysian forces in The Birth of Tragedy. Whereas the Apollonian refers to those ‘rational, ordered, and self-disciplined aspects of human nature’, the Dionysian is that which relates ‘to the sensual, spontaneous, and emotional aspects of human nature.’ [8] If ‘the music of Apollo is architecture in sound,’ as Nietzsche wrote, ‘then Dionysiac art, by contrast, is based on play with intoxication, with the state of ecstasy.’ [9] If Bach is Apollo, the architect in sound, then Scarlatti is Dionysus, the reveller intoxicated by the realm of wonder; the jester enchanted by the power of sound itself.

Scarlatti has always been heard as mad. In his A General History of Music of 1789, Charles Burney writes of the ‘original and happy freaks of this composer in his harpsichord music.’ [10] But what was bizarre and outlandish in the eighteenth century, like many things, has now been enrolled in the liturgy of piano pedagogy (there is no time for argument that Scarlatti must only be played on the harpsichord and frankly no need.) Kirkpatrick was aware of Scarlatti’s worth for non-harpsichordists; he believed a diligent approach to the study of Scarlatti’s sonatas, both in terms of a ‘hard-headed workman’s analytical and technical approach to music’ and a ‘warm, imaginative, and even romantic willingness to transcend syntax and literal meaning,’ would allow us ‘to move humbly and fearlessly in the realm of the unexplainable.’ [11] In the appendix to his Rational Principles of Pianoforte Technique (1928), Alfred Cortot wrote that ‘Scarlatti’s pieces for the harpsichord, like the best technical studies, offer an infinite variety of problems of execution, together with real musical merits, of which the latter are too frequently devoid. We cannot sufficiently urge the studious pupil to devote an attentive study to them, for it will especially benefit clearness, precision and lightness of touch.’ [12]

Many of Cortot’s students did just that, most notably Marcelle Meyer, whose somewhat neglected recordings of the mid-twentieth century are full of Dionysian inspiration kept in check by superlative technique. With their abundant technical challenges and uncharted interpretative landscape, Scarlatti’s sonatas have become a litmus test for pianists hoping to make an impression on the international circuit. As well as Meyer, other early exponents of Scarlatti on the piano were Horowitz, Michelangeli and Cziffra; towards the end of twentieth century there was Schiff, Pogorelich, Pletnev and Zacharias. The present generation of interpreters are too numerous to count, but among them are Yevgeny Sudbin, Alexandre Tharaud, Claire Huangci and Lucas Debargue. There are few things which unify these great players; the inspiration is to be found in their differences.

[1] W. Dean Sutcliffe, The Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti and Eighteenth-Century Musical Style, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1.

[2] Ralph Kirkpatrick, Domenico Scarlatti (USA, Apollo Edition: 1968), 251.

[3] Sutcliffe, 8.

[4] Kirkpatrick, 229.

[5] Ibid., 252.

[6] Ibid., 174.

[7] Sutcliffe, 119.

[8] OED

[9] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, ed. Raymond Geuss, Ronald Speirs, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 122, 120. My reading of Scarlatti through Nietzsche was inspired by an online forum discussion which can be found here: https://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php?topic=13590.0

[10] Charles Burney, A General History Of Music: From The Earliest Ages to the Present Period, Volume 4, (London: 1789), 266.

[11] Kirkpatrick, 323.

[12] Alfred Cortot, Rational Principles of Pianoforte Technique, trans. R. Le Roy - Metaxas (Paris: Editions Salabert, 1930), 97.

Edward Campbell-RowntreeApril 10, 2021