Domenico Scarlatti

Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti was an Italian composer and harpsichordist born in Naples in 1685, the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Friedrich Handel. He was the sixth of ten children in a prominent musical family and the youngest brother of musician Pietro Filippo Scarlatti. His earliest teacher was most likely his father, Alessandro Scarlatti, one of the most renowned composers of the time. Other influential teachers may have included Gaetano Greco, Francesco Gasparini, and Bernardo Pasquini, each contributing to the development of his distinctive compositional voice.

Scarlatti began his professional career early, becoming composer and organist to the viceroy of Naples in 1701. By 1704 he was revising operas for performance in Naples, including Carlo Francesco Pollarolo’s Irene, after which his father sent him to Venice. Little is known about the next four years, but by 1709 he had settled in Rome, entering the service of the exiled Polish queen Maria Kazimiera. During this period, he met English organist Thomas Roseingrave, whose admiration would later help bring Scarlatti’s sonatas to fame in London.

In Rome, Scarlatti gained recognition as a brilliant harpsichordist. In a famous musical duel at the palace of Cardinal Ottoboni, he was judged superior to Handel on the harpsichord, though inferior to him on the organ. He continued to speak reverently of Handel throughout his life. While in Rome, Scarlatti composed several operas for the queen’s private theatre and served as maestro di cappella at St. Peter’s Cathedral from 1715 to 1719. In 1719 he traveled to London, where his opera Narciso was staged at the King’s Theatre. In 1720 or 1721, he traveled to Lisbon, where he taught Princess Maria Magdalena Barbara, an association that would shape the remainder of his life.

After returning briefly to Naples in 1725 and marrying Maria Caterina Gentili during a visit to Rome in 1728, Scarlatti moved to Seville in 1729. Here he spent four years immersed in the musical language of flamenco, a significant influence that would later shape the character of his keyboard sonatas. In 1733 he relocated to Madrid as teacher to his former pupil Maria Barbara, who had become queen of Spain. He spent the final quarter-century of his life in Spain, fathering five children and producing the largest and most influential body of his work.

Following the death of his first wife in 1742, Scarlatti married the Spanish woman Anastasia Maxarte Jiménez. In Madrid he composed more than five hundred keyboard sonatas, the works for which he is best remembered. The 1738 publication of his Essercizi, a collection of thirty sonatas, received enthusiastic praise throughout Europe and helped establish his reputation as a revolutionary keyboard composer.

During his Madrid years he formed a close friendship with the celebrated castrato Farinelli, whose correspondence later provided scholars with much of the direct biographical information about Scarlatti. According to Farinelli, Scarlatti owned numerous harpsichords from different countries and named each after a famous Italian painter, his favorite instrument being called “Raphael of Urbino.” His house at 35 Calle de Leganitos in Madrid now bears a commemorative plaque, and his descendants continue to live in the city.

Scarlatti’s music attracted the admiration of major musicians and scholars for generations. His sonatas were prized by Johannes Brahms, who kept Scarlatti manuscripts in his collection, and by Frédéric Chopin, who assigned them to his piano students. Béla Bartók, Heinrich Schenker, and Vladimir Horowitz were also among those deeply influenced by his work. His innovations additionally resonated with later composers such as Muzio Clementi and Pietro Domenico Paradisi, and modern honors include the naming of a minor planet after him.

Many of Scarlatti’s sonatas demonstrate bold harmonic experimentation, featuring dissonances, clusters, unexpected modulations, and the frequent use of the Phrygian mode, reflecting the influence of Spanish folk music. He sometimes quoted folk melodies nearly verbatim, an unusual practice before the twentieth century. His approach to form, texture, and rhythm anticipated many features of Classical-era music, including the structural device that scholar Ralph Kirkpatrick termed “the crux,” a pivotal moment in each half of a sonata often emphasized by a pause or fermata.

Although best known for his keyboard music, Scarlatti also composed operas, oratorios, church music, and chamber works. His sacred compositions, including Stabat mater, Salve Regina, and Miserere, are generally considered part of his early output and reflect conservative contrapuntal traditions. A number of his operas, such as Tolomeo e Alessandro and Amor d’un’ombra e gelosia d’un’aura, are now known only in part or through documentation, as many scores have been lost. His legacy has been preserved through extensive recordings by harpsichordists and pianists, including Wanda Landowska, Gustav Leonhardt, Ralph Kirkpatrick, Vladimir Horowitz, and many others.

Scarlatti died in Madrid in 1757 at the age of seventy-one. Though his original grave no longer survives, his influence endures in the keyboard repertoire, and his music continues to inspire performers and scholars worldwide.

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