The Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico

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THE KEYBOAD SONATAS OF DOMENI CO SCALATTI

AND EI GHTEENTH-CENTUY MUSI CAL STYLE
W. Dean Sutcliffe investigates one of the greatest yet least understood repertories
of Western keyboard music: the 555 keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti.
Scarlatti occupies a position of solitary splendour in musical history. The sources
of his style are often obscure and his immediate inuence is difcult to discern.
Further, the lack of hard documentary evidence of the sort normally taken
for granted when dealing with composers of the last few hundred years has
hindered musicological activity. Dr Sutcliffe offers not just a thorough reconsid-
eration of the historical factors that have contributed to Scarlattis position, but
also sustained engagement with the music, offering both individual readings and
broader commentary of an unprecedented kind. A principal task of this book,
the rst in English on the sonatas for fty years, is to remove the composer
from his critical ghetto (however honourable) and redene his image. In so do-
ing it will reect on the historiographical difculties involved in understanding
eighteenth-century musical style.
w. dean sutcli f f e is University Lecturer at the University of Cambridge and
a Fellow of St Catharines College. He is author of Haydn: String Quartets, Op. 50
(1992) in the Cambridge Music Handbook series and editor of Haydn Studies
(Cambridge 1998). He is also co-editor of the Cambridge journal Eighteenth-
Century Music, the rst issue of which will be published in 2004.
THE KEYBOAD SONATAS OF
DOMENI CO SCALATTI AND
EI GHTEENTH-CENTUY
MUSI CAL STYLE
W. DEAN SUTCLI FFE
St Catharines College, Cambridge
caxniioci uxiviisir\ iiiss
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CONTENTS
Preface page vii
1 Scarlatti the Interesting Historical Figure 1
2 Panorama 26
Place and treatment in history 26
The dearth of hard facts 29
Creative environment 32
Real-life personality 34
The panorama tradition 36
Analysis of sonatas 38
Improvisation 40
Pedagogy 41
Chronology 43
Organology 45
Style classication 49
Style sources 54
Inuence 55
Nationalism I 57
Nationalism II 61
Evidence old and new 68
3 Heteroglossia 78
An open invitation to the ear: topic and genre 78
A love-hate relationship? Scarlatti and the galant 95
Iberian inuence 107
Topical opposition 123
4 Syntax 145
Repetition and rationality 145
Phrase rhythm 167
Opening and closure 171
Sequence 181
v
vi Contents
Kinetics 188
Vamps 196
5 Irritations 217
Der unreine Satz 217
Introduction 217
Voice leading 223
Counterpoint 230
Cluster chords and dirty harmony 236
Rationales 247
Tempo and Scarlattis Andantes 250
Ornamentation 256
Source matters 263
6 Una genuina m usica de tecla 276
Fingermusik and mere virtuosity 276
Keyboard realism 292
Texture and sonority 297
7 Formal dynamic 320
Binary-form blues 320
Thematicism 325
Formal properties and practices 334
Dialect or idiolect? 355
Lyrical breakthrough 358
Pairs 367
Finale 376
Bibliography 381
Index 392
PEFACE
This book deals with one of the greatest but least well understood and covered
repertories of Western keyboard music, the 555 keyboard sonatas of Domenico
Scarlatti.
1
Their composer occupies a position of somewhat solitary splendour in
musical history. The sources of his style are often obscure, there are no contempo-
raries of his with whom he can be more than loosely grouped, and his immediate
historical inuence, with the exception of a few composers of the next generation
in Spain, is difcult to discern. Yet enthusiastic testimonials on his behalf have been
provided by many later musicians, whether composers, performers or writers. For
all the acknowledgement of mastery, however, the fact remains that the acknowl-
edgement is usually brief. The extreme lack of hard documentary evidence together
with Scarlattis uneasy historical position has hindered sustained musicological en-
gagement with his music, and this has a ow-on effect into other spheres of musical
life. Nevertheless, there is undoubtedly a wide gap between the general publics
and performers interest in the composer and the amount of writing available to
answer that. Thus my principal task is to remove the composer from his critical
ghetto (however honourable), redene his image, and to place him more rmly in
the context of eighteenth-century musical style. At the same time I would hope to
offer some useful thoughts on just this larger context, and indeed on the concept of
style as well.
An uncertain and sporadic critical tradition has determined my approach to the
task. Reception history and close reading constitute the basic lines of thought. Given
the lack of so many contextual and documentary resources, reception history lls
the gap not just faute de mieux but also as a way of investigating how one constructs
a composer when so many issues are oating. Chapter 2 forms the focus for this,
building on aspects outlined in Chapter 1. In view of the justied charge that
Scarlattian research has been uncoordinated, I wanted here to coordinate as many
views as possible, even at the risk of overloading the discussion. Further, I can hardly
assume a familiarity on the part of the reader with so much far-ung literature, in
many different languages. There is insufcient scholarly momentum for any views to
1
The often quoted total number of 555 sonatas is in fact something of a fabrication on the part of Ralph Kirkpatrick.
In his determination to produce a memorable gure, he numbered two sonatas K. 204a and K. 204b, for instance,
and allowed to stand as authentic several works that have since been widely regarded as dubious. See Joel Sheveloff,
Tercentenary Frustrations, The Musical Quarterly 71/4 (1985), 433.
vii
viii Preface
be taken as read. Another way in which I have plugged the gap is by incorporating
substantial discussions of recorded performances. This may be an unusual move,
but performances after all represent the business end of any reception history, the
ultimate engagement with the texts offered by a composer. I only regret that, perhaps
inevitably, I am more likely to draw attention to readings and approaches with which
I differ than those with which I am in agreement.
The case for close reading is of course more delicate nowadays. While the larger
issues relating to such interpretation will be answered both by word and deed in
the chapters that follow, there is a particular justication for its employment in the
case of a gure like Scarlatti. It is one thing to problematize close reading when a
composers craft has been established by a long tradition when there is, rightly
or wrongly, some centred notion of how the music goes. With Scarlatti, though,
there has been an almost total absence of detailed analytical writing. It therefore
seemed important to try to establish some credentials for his style, to gain a strong
feeling for the grain of his language. Indeed, many of the most special and radical
aspects of his music only seem to emerge through close attention to detail. I have
certainly missed the existence of such readings that could be used as a means of
sharpening the eld of enquiry. In no other respect has my work felt like such a
leap into the dark. And I should emphasize too that many of the readings, and
the larger arguments to which they give rise, were extraordinarily hard won. They
only arose after endless hours playing the sonatas (with many more dedicated to
playing other keyboard music of the century) and often simply staring at the printed
page, hoping for enlightenment. This process unfolded principally during the years
1993 to 1997. My study is appearing fty years after the last book in English to be
devoted principally to the Scarlatti sonatas, by Ralph Kirkpatrick. Coincidentally, as
I recently discovered, Kirkpatricks systematic stylistic examination of the sonatas
occupied an equivalent period fty years ago, from 1943 to 1947. I hope this is a
good omen.
The relative absence of sharpening material referred to above reects a broader
difculty in approaching my subject the at critical landscape of the Scarlatti
literature. There are no established leading critical issues to which one responds and
which help to create a framework for interpretation, although there are certainly
plenty of specically musicological ones. By critical I mean those ways of thinking
that try to interpret in broad cultural and artistic terms, that are readily accessible
to those who lack detailed musical knowledge. (The lack of critical engagement
is evident in the new entry on Scarlatti in the recent edition of New Grove; it
seems to me to represent a step backwards from its predecessor.) Because of this I
have not specialized within my eld a atter terrain has had to be traversed. In
another world, for instance, I might have devoted the whole study to those issues
of syntax and temporality that are tackled primarily in Chapter 4. On the other
hand, no comprehensive survey of the output is intended. There are many areas
which have been merely glanced at or for which I ran out of room. These include
the history of editions, especially those in the nineteenth century, the history of
Preface ix
arrangements (although there is some material on Avisons concerto arrangements
in Chapter 4), coverage of some of Scarlattis very talented Iberian contemporaries,
and an examination of the various new sonatas that have been unearthed in the
past generation.
There is an advantage, however, to this state of affairs. It has encouraged me to
think big when attempting to place the composer, especially since it was not my
primary concern to advance further some of the acknowledged problems of hard
evidence. The generic and geographical circumstances short keyboard sonatas
written mostly on the Iberian peninsula might not exactly encourage monumental
interpretation, yet, as will I hope be shown, there is plenty to be expansive about.
Another large-scale quantity is style. In engaging with this as a central point of
enquiry, I have had to dance around several nasty issues of denition. These are
engaged with consistently through my text, but several ought to be signalled now.
One concerns the characterization of the popular elements that loom so large in the
world of the sonatas, and the appropriateness of terms such as Spanish, Portuguese,
Iberian, amenco, even Neapolitan. The other relates to those established larger
points of stylistic reference, Baroque and Classical. In the rst case there is the
difculty of whether such terms can be used with any precision, which is addressed
particularly in Chapter 3. In the latter case, the issue concerns the utility of the
terms altogether. What is perhaps most important to note at this stage is that these
are just the kinds of difculty that have discouraged scholarly endeavour, especially
in relation to a gure such as Domenico Scarlatti. They prompt pangs of conscience
that I too have experienced in writing my account; yet they have added to the
fascination of the project.
The rst chapter of my study introduces some of the issues surrounding Scarlatti
and sets up some parameters for interpretation by dealing with four individual
sonatas. After the focus on reception in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 (Heteroglossia)
investigates the types of material found in the sonatas, the ambiguity of their def-
inition and the composers relationship to them. This is followed by the longest
and possibly most important chapter (Syntax), which deals with all the unusual
patternings, shapings and treatments of repetition which promote a sense of syntac-
tical renewal in the sonatas. Then Chapter 5 (Irritations) reveals a number of those
special details that do so much to dene Scarlattian language. These include not just
the well-known irritations of harmony and voice leading, but also apparent incon-
sistencies of ornamentation and tempo designation. An examination of the peculiar
character of many of Scarlattis Andantes follows naturally from this last category.
Following on from all the above is a consideration of the sources, the master category
of irritation. The difculty of the source situation will be evaluated through a num-
ber of case studies. Macario Santiago Kastners phrase una genuina m usica de tecla
(a genuine keyboard writing) is used as a springboard for a discussion of key-
board style in Chapter 6, isolating such characteristics as Scarlattis use of register
and doubling. I also consider the physicality of this keyboard style and how we
might understand the place of unthinking virtuosity. Chapter 7 (Formal dynamic)
x Preface
examines the thematic and formal properties of the sonatas, vital to an understanding
of Scarlattis historical position. The section entitled Dialect or idiolect? reviews a
number of the composers ngerprints and considers their possible historical sources;
this also enables us to return to the problematic notion of originality that has borne
so much weight in the Scarlatti literature. Lyrical breakthrough describes those
moments when suddenly, and generally briey, a sonata unveils more personally
inected melodic material. The nal section, although proceeding from a sceptical
position, investigates possible instances of paired sonatas and considers the status of
such connections.
The primary sources for the Scarlatti sonatas, those copies now held in libraries in
Parma (the Conservatorio Arrigo Boito) and Venice (the Biblioteca Marciana), are
sometimes referred to in the text by means of the abbreviations P and V; the same
holds for the important M unster (M) and Vienna (W) collections. A comprehensive
work list giving full source details for all the sonatas may be found at the end of
the article on Scarlatti in the second edition of New Grove.
2
Pitch designations
follow the Helmholtz system (c
1
= middle C) where specic pitches need to be
given; otherwise a neutral capital letter is employed. The sonatas themselves are
referred to according to the established Kirkpatrick numbering, while the sonatas
of Scarlattis Lisbon colleague Seixas are cited according to the separate numberings
given in the 1965 and 1980 Kastner editions. For the collection of thirty Scarlatti
sonatas published in 1739, I have standardized the spelling to the original Essercizi
rather than the modern-day Esercizi. All translations from the literature are mine
unless otherwise attributed.
Musical examples for the sonatas are reproduced by permission of Editions Heugel
et Cie., Paris/United Music Publishers Ltd. The version of the sonata K. 490 given
as Plate 1 is reproduced by permission of the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum,
Cambridge. I am grateful to both. Inevitably in such a wide-ranging undertaking,
not all discussions of sonatas have been illustrated with music examples. Especially
with some of the works covered in greater detail, there is either no example or a
partial one, for reasons of space and economy. Readers will require some access to
editions of sonatas.
I would like to thank, for their help in all sorts of capacities, the following friends
and colleagues: Richard Andrewes, Andrew Bennett, Malcolm Boyd, John Butt,
Jane Clark, Larry Dreyfus, Jonathan Dunsby, Ben Earle, Emilia Fadini, Kenneth
Gilbert, Daniel Grimley, Fiona McAlpine, Roger Parker, Simon Phillippo, Vir-
ginia Pleasants, Linton Powell, Nils Schweckendieck, David Sutherland, Alvaro
Torrente and Ben Walton. I owe a debt to the staff of the Pendlebury Library
of the Faculty of Music and the University Library, Cambridge. I also learnt much
from the Part II undergraduate seminar groups who took my course on Domenico
Scarlatti; their enthusiasm for, and sometimes their incomprehension of, Scarlattis
2
Roberto Pagano, with Malcolm Boyd, (Giuseppe) Domenico Scarlatti, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians, second edn, vol. 22, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), 398417.
Preface xi
creative practices were enormously stimulating. Many thanks to Penny Souster at
Cambridge University Press, for all her encouragement over the prolonged period
during which I wrestled with Scarlattis demons. Michael Downes copy-edited the
typescript not only with great care but with real sympathy for the project. Finally,
I wish to acknowledge the contributions of friends such as Michael Francis, Rose
Melikan and Julian Philips, my partner Geoff and my parents Pat and Bill, who all
put up with endless progress reports on the odyssey.
Cambridge, July 2002
1
SCALATTI THE I NTEESTI NG
HI STOI CAL FI GUE
1
Domenico Scarlatti does not belong. Whether we ask to whom, to where, or to
what he belongs, and even if we ask the questions with the slight difdence proper
to any such form of historical enquiry, no comfortable answers can be constructed.
The only category into which we may place the composer with any condence,
one especially reserved for such mists, is that of the Interesting Historical Figure.
Thus, although the signicance of the composers work, certainly in the realm of
the keyboard sonata, is generally agreed, just how it is signicant is yet to be happily
established. Most treatments of composers and their music may be divided into two
categories, depending on where they locate the composers image the rationale for
the treatment is either one of reinforcement or one of special pleading, according to
whether the composer lies within or beyond the canon. The normal way of arguing
a case for the inclusion of music that lies outside the canon is to demonstrate its
relevance to or inuence on music that lies on the inside. Until the music or the
composer concerned have crossed the threshold, this is effectively the only mode of
treatment possible.
This may seem far too simple an equation, but one only need bear in mind the
difculty that has always been apparent in treating musical works of art on their
intrinsic merits, as it were. Warren Dwight Allen, after surveying musicological
writings spanning three hundred years, stressed the evolutionary current running
through all of them:
Some idea of progress, it seems, was xed immovably in the ideology of musicology, and this
was true whether musicologists dealt on the broadest scale with the music of widely separated
cultures or on a narrow scale with musical events of a single culture in close chronological
proximity. At every level music was treated in terms of its antecedents and consequents, not
as a thing in itself. Music passed through elementary stages to more advanced ones. What
was more advanced was almost always seen as better.
2
Given this rather bleak prognosis, now well accepted in principle if not so easily
avoided in practice, it is understandable that the only manoeuvre available to the
special pleaders is to make a case for their subject as an antecedent of or a consequent
1
This chapter is based on a paper given rst at the University of Auckland in March 1995 and subsequently in
shortened form at the British Musicology Conference, Kings College, London, in April 1996.
2
Joseph Kerman, Musicology (London: Fontana, 1985), 130. This represents Kermans summary of Allens ndings.
1
2 The keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti
to this or that composer, school, style. The reinforcers, on the other hand, are, even
if unconsciously, busy afrming the status of their subject as an advanced stage.
The place of Domenico Scarlatti in such a scheme, as suggested at the outset, is
decidedly tricky. While he does not count as a genuine outsider in the manner of an
Alkan or a Gesualdo, equally he does not t well into any of the habits of thought
through which we could expect to arrive at some construction of his signicance. His
father Alessandro, for instance, has long had a more secure place in history, although
presumably few would claim him to be a better or more signicant composer.
3
In
fact, Domenico might be regarded as a unique test case for the nature of musicology
as it has been practised in the last few generations, offering us a chance to reect on
its methodologies and priorities.
The circumstances of this claim to exclusiveness are worth reviewing. In every
conceivable musicological sense, Scarlatti is a problematic gure. For one, we know
remarkably few details regarding his life and views. Especially from the time he left
his native Italy to serve the Princess Mara B arbara as music tutor rst in her native
Portugal, then for the best part of thirty years in Spain until his death in 1757, we
only have the means to put together the most minimal of biographies. More than
one writer has commented that the scarcity of information almost seems to have
been the result of some deliberate conspiracy.
4
Given the fact that only one single
letter from the composer survives, such remarks are not altogether in jest. Related
to this dearth of hard facts is the lack of external evidence as to the composers
personality. Much has been made in the literature of the composers alleged passion
for gambling, with Mara B arbara at least once having had to pay off his gambling
debts, but even in this instance the verdict must be likely but not proven.
In the absence of information, the sonatas themselves have had to bear a good deal
of such interpretative weight, a happy situation, one would think, in the search for
the signicance of the composers work. In reality, though, the sonatas have often
been used as evidence for personality traits as this bears on the biographical picture
of Scarlatti rather than on the musical one. If we return for a moment to the matter
of comparative ideologies, it is probably fair to say that music has long invested more
capital in biographical portraiture than have the other arts. One rationale for needing
a good control over biographical circumstances has been that it will tell us a great
deal about the music that is the product of the personality the greater the control
over the life, the more acutely can we judge the works.
3
For Cecil Gray in 1928, however, Domenico was a gure of innitely smaller proportions and artistic signicance
than Alessandro; The History of Music (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1928), 139. Writing in 1901,
Luigi Villanis stated: We will not nd in [Scarlatti] the profound musician that lived in his father; Domenico
Scarlatti, in Larte del clavicembalo in Italia (Bologna: Forni, 1969; reprint of original edition [Turin, 1901]), 166.
That such verdicts have become less likely in the more recent past tells us more about the decline of Alessandros
reputation than about any change in the critical fortunes of his son.
4
Malcolm Boyd, for instance, writes that it almost seems as if Domenico Scarlatti employed a cover-up agent
to remove all traces of his career . . . and contemporary diarists and correspondents could hardly have been less
informative if they had entered into a conspiracy of silence about him. Nova Scarlattiana, The Musical Times
126/1712 (1985), 589.
Scarlatti the Interesting Historical Figure 3
Stated thus, this equation also sounds too simple, but it is the best explanation
for the thrust of a good deal of musicological activity, whether applied to Scarlatti
or any other composer. The assumption that music is primarily an expression of
personality, of emotion, that in order to understand the music we must understand
the man and his private circumstances, is historically bound to nineteenth-century
music aesthetics, but it is a notion that has retained much of its strength through
to the present day. And it is one that colours our approach to all the art music of
at least the last few hundred years. Indeed, the notion has in the present scholarly
climate received a new lease of life, if in rather different intellectual conditions. With
the current emphasis on the situatedness of music, an engagement with its public,
social and political dimensions, the personal and emotional have been recovered for
inspection. Thus any sense of an ideally strict separation between artist and work,
or even person and persona, might be frowned upon as a species of puritanical
modernism. If investigation of the perceived historical personality of the composer
has to an extent been reclaimed as a legitimate object of study, it will naturally take
a more ideologically contingent slant than the great man approach of yesteryear.
Such interpretations must still rely, however, on an abundance of the sorts of data
which are in Scarlattis case simply not there. Given the paucity of biographical
information on Scarlatti, there has instead been the opportunity to grasp the music
in all its glory the sonatas constitute the only substantial hard facts that we have.
That opportunity has not been taken.
If this failure is due to the lack of evidence impeding the customary ow chart of
musicological procedure, it must not be construed that the holes are only biograph-
ical even more distressing is the impossibility of achieving good bibliographical
control over the composers works. The central problem is the complete absence
of autographs. The two principal sources for the sonatas are the volumes, almost
all copied by the same scribe, which are now housed in libraries in Parma and
Venice (hereafter generally referred to as P and V). Neither contains the full number
of about 550 authenticated sonatas, they contain the works in somewhat different
orders, and there is no agreement about which of the two copies is generally the
more authoritative. We cannot even be certain that the copies were prepared under
the direct supervision of the composer, although at least some input from Scarlatti
seems very likely. This lack of autographs means that no chronology for the sonatas
can be established. We can distinguish only two layers
5
amongst all the works
the rst 138 of the sonatas in the Kirkpatrick numbering
6
were copied into V or
published by 1749, thus xing a latest possible date for composition, and the rest,
copied between 1752 and 1757, may have been written earlier and/or later than
5
Joel Sheveloffs term in The Keyboard Music of Domenico Scarlatti: A Re-evaluation of the Present State of
Knowledge in the Light of the Sources (Ph.D. dissertation, Brandeis University, 1970), 196, where he avers that
the two groups of sources represent two denite though not completely separate layers of compositional activity.
6
This was rst contained in the Catalogue of Scarlatti Sonatas; and Table of Principal Sources in Approximately
Chronological Order near the end of Kirkpatricks seminal Domenico Scarlatti (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1953), 44256.
this. Following Kirkpatricks lead, a chronology has often been assumed that runs
more or less in tandem with the sequence of copying of the works.
7
Much ink,
though, has been spilt lamenting the impossibility of truly determining the order of
composition of this vast corpus.
One might ask, though, just why it is so important to establish a chronology. The
standard answer must be so that we can trace the stylistic and creative development of
the sonatas. It is at this point that we must reect on Warren Dwight Allens ideology
of progress that underlies much musicological discourse. The lack of any chronology
for the Domenico Scarlatti sonatas means that they cannot be tted into the narrative
pattern whereby earlier, immature works lead to more rened and masterful ones,
whereby certain stylistic and creative elements gradually evolve while others fade
away, where, in other words, the individual works are made to tell a story in which
they function merely as pieces of evidence. A simple example of how chronology
may be used as a prop can be found in the case of Mozarts Piano Sonata in B at,
K. 333. It was regarded as a comparatively immature and unremarkable work when
its provenance was thought to be about 1778, its signicance perhaps residing in the
hints it gave of future work, but Alan Tysons study of paper types has not so long ago
established that its date of composition was in fact late 1783.
8
Since then the work has
been credited with previously unsuspected qualities and now reects the concerns of
the mature piano concertos that were about to be written. From this perspective,
one can only hope that no dated Scarlatti sonata autographs ever come to light, since
a knowledge of their chronology can only force a further distortion on this body
of music. (Not that such distortions can be altogether avoided: without attening
out the particulars in a body of information, how can we know anything at all?)
One might have thought, again, that the absence of this information would have
driven scholars into a more direct confrontation with the works themselves, but
by and large there has instead been a good deal of hand-wringing and a retreat
into other problems of documentation, transmission and organology. Admittedly,
these are once more rather intractable. For instance, Scarlatti has traditionally been
regarded as the composer who wrote as idiomatically and comprehensively for the
harpsichord as Chopin did for the piano of his time. However, recent research has
suggested conclusions that sit uncomfortably with the idea of the composers work
representing a nal owering of harpsichord style and technique. Not only are the
majority of the sonatas playable on the pianos owned by Mara B arbara, at least
those accounted for in her will, but there is strong circumstantial evidence linking
Scarlatti with the history and promulgation of the early fortepiano.
9
Another issue
7
The dates of the manuscripts prepared by the Queens copyists seem to correspond at least roughly with the
order in which the sonatas were composed. Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 144.
8
See The Date of Mozarts Piano Sonata in B at, K. 333/315c: The Linz Sonata?, in Musik, Edition, Interpre-
tation: Gedenkschrift G unter Henle, ed. Martin Bente (Munich: Henle, 1980), 44754.
9
See for example David Sutherland, Domenico Scarlatti and the Florentine Piano, Early Music 23/2 (1995),
24356, and Sheveloff, Domenico Scarlatti: Tercentenary Frustrations (Part II), The Musical Quarterly 72/1
(1986), 90101.
concerns the possibility that the majority of the sonatas were conceived in same-
key pairs. Naturally enough, amidst the heat generated by this dispute, the question
of the artistic status of the pairings has been insufciently addressed. Occasionally
pairs have been examined for thematic connections of a rudimentary kind, which
barely scratches the surface of the matter. All that the originator of the idea, Ralph
Kirkpatrick, could really offer was the formula that the relationship between pairs
was one of either contrast or complementarity.
10
This could cover a multitude of
sonatas in the same key.
Another concern, one that Scarlatti research has mostly addressed with a bad
conscience, is the matter of Spanish folk inuence. Some have claimed that certain
sonatas amount to virtual transcriptions of amenco or folk idioms, while others have
tried to minimize its import. Italian writers have often preferred to nd in Scarlatti
an embodiment of Mediterranean light and logic. A typical sentiment comes from
Gian Francesco Malipiero: far more than the Spaniard of the habanera or malague na,
which make their transient apparitions, it is the Neapolitan who predominates with
the typical rhythms of the Italians born at the foot of Vesuvius. Domenico Scarlatti,
in fact, is a worthy son of Parthenope; mindful of Vesuvius, he loves to play with
light and re, but only for the greater joy of humanity.
11
This is just a variant of a common strain in the literature on all Latinate composers,
from Couperin to Debussy, whose achievements can only be dened in opposition
to the assumed creative habits of the Austro-Germanic mainstream: their music
lives by lightness, delicacy, precision, logic and all the rest. More surprising, on the
surface, is that Spaniards have mostly been reluctant to deal with questions of folk
inuence, and indeed with Domenico Scarlatti at all. Whether this suggests a bad
conscience or not, in a strange way this may be allied with the too easy assumption
by Italian writers that Scarlatti counts rmly as one of their own. The extent of the
Scarlatti literature in Italian is in fact not so great in its own right, suggesting that
nationalistic considerations have played a part here too. In other words, another of
the things that Scarlatti does not belong to is a country. He thus lacks the weight
of an entire culture industry behind him.
12
Nationalism is of course another of
those properties that we dene in relation to mostly Germanic and nineteenth-
century norms. We are barely aware any more of the nationalist agendas of German
writers past and present, just as it is difcult for us to hear the ethnic accents in
German music, so rmly does it constitute the mainstreamof our musical experience.
Hence when trying to make something of Scarlattis music we are not readily able
to align him, at least as a point of reference, with the art music of a particular
culture.
There are various lower-level features to the sonatas that have also proved to be
stumbling blocks in the literature. There is, for instance, a marked inconsistency in the
10
See Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 143.
11
Domenico Scarlatti, The Musical Quarterly 13/3 (1927), 488.
12
A comparable eighteenth-century case is that of Zelenka. Michael Talbot notes the cultural problem [of]
ownership of the composer in his review of Jan Dismas Zelenka (16791745): A Bohemian Musician at the
Court of Dresden by Janice B. Stockigt, Music and Letters 83/1 (2002), 115.
sources ornamental indications, so frequent that this cannot simply be put down to
scribal error. Performers (and editors) overwhelmingly correct these inconsistencies
so that parallel places contain parallel ornamentation, so tidying up their scripts well
beyond any claims for licence as understood from eighteenth-century performance
practice. Few players seemed to have stopped to consider whether it is precisely our
instinct for such symmetrical tidying that the composer is playing with. All this is by
way of re-emphasizing that almost all the effort in the Scarlatti literature has gone
into problems of evidence which will be amplied in the more detailed survey of
the literature that follows in Chapter 2 and very little into critical interpretation.
The rationale for this is apparent enough, and only reects in extreme form the
customary work habits of musicology as a whole (extreme form because the amount
of evidence that can be dealt with is so comparatively slight). Back in 1949 Curt
Sachs entertained thoughts relevant to our consideration of the nature of Scarlatti
research:
Do not say: Wait! We are not yet ready; we have not yet dug up sufcient details to venture
on such a daring generality. There you are wrong. This argument is already worn out,
although it will none the less be heard a hundred years from now, at a time when specialized
research has lled and overooded our libraries so completely that the librarians will have to
stack the books and journals on the sidewalks outside the buildings. Do not say: Wait! The
nothing-but-specialist nowdoes not, and never will, deemthe time ripe for the interpretation
of his facts. For the refusal of cultural interpretation is . . . conditioned by the temperaments
of individual men, not by the plentifulness or scarcity of materials.
13
Scarlatti research may thus be seen to have painted itself into something of a corner,
virtually denying the admissibility of critical interpretation until more facts become
available.
But why relive past battles? This questioning of positivistic rigour may seem
no longer necessary; havent we established new contexts for investigation, indeed
new denitions of what knowledge we are after? Yet musicology remains highly
dependent on outside reinforcements for its assumed methodologies and for its sense
of self. A strong allegiance to scientic method has been replaced, at least at the
cutting edge, by a strong allegiance to interdisciplinarity, with particular emphasis
on literary studies. This interest has barely been reciprocated. Also uniting old and
newis the consequent skirting of what Scott Burnhamcalls our fundamental relation
to the materiality of music.
14
The very notion that the music exists as a self-evident
category for investigation has become highly compromised, of course, but what is
meant here goes beyond the usual considerations of the work concept. It means being
able to x on the corporality of the art the way, through our understanding of its
grammar and feeling for its gesture, that music incites our physical involvement and
so renews a claim to be self-determining and intrinsically meaningful.
15
There has
13
Cited in Kerman, Musicology, 127.
14
Theorists and The Music Itself , Journal of Musicology 15/3 (1997), 325.
15
Note in this respect the contention of Charles Rosen that in so far as music is an expressive art, it is pre-verbal,
not post-verbal. Its effects are at the level of the nerves and not of the sentiments. The Classical Style: Haydn,
Mozart, Beethoven (London: Faber, 1971), 173.
on the whole been a failure in the discipline to address the study of music in this most
concrete sense: we have been so busy problematizing the status and apprehension
of music that we do not square up to its sensuous material impact. The issue of
materiality, indeed, can be raised with particular urgency in the case of Domenico
Scarlatti, given some of the most striking traits of his music.
There is in any case another side of the story that must be conceded. Joel Sheveloff,
the doyen of Scarlatti sonata scholars, has often warned of the need to tread with
great caution, given the many uncertainties surrounding text and transmission.
16
The details of Scarlattis style remain so comparatively strange to us that the inability
even to establish highly authoritative texts affects our global view of the composer
far more seriously than might normally be the case; our perception of his style, after
all, is dependent on the accumulated impression of a wealth of details. When so
many of these details vary from source to source or simply remain ambiguous, then
particular scholarly care may indeed be in order. Postmodern musicology can afford
to disdain the methods of positivism when so much of the dirty work has already
been done; it still nds uses for much of the material thus created. It is another matter
altogether to launch oneself beyond such concerns when, as is the case with Scarlatti,
there is often the thinnest of documentary bases. With future progress along such
lines looking to be highly unlikely, barring a major breakthrough, it may be time to
gamble a little.
This is the dilemma facing any fresh approach to Scarlatti. Postmodern musicol-
ogy does not necessarily allow much more room for manoeuvre given the state of
knowledge than do the more traditional methods. Indeed, while the type of con-
texts sought may have changed, there is now a stronger sense that music may not
be approached in the raw. This is guided by the conviction that what we call the
music is constructed according to various perceptual and cultural categories and is
not innate; it is not simply there for universal access. Nor can one underestimate
the impact of documentary difculties. Imagine, for example, what the state of play
might be in the literature on Beethovens symphonies or Verdis operas without a
knowledge of chronology and a comforting array of documentation. What could
one write and, indeed, how could one write were all this contextualizing material
absent?
This is not to imply that there does not exist a fairly substantial body of commen-
tary on the sonatas themselves. Unfortunately, with hardly any exceptions this has
dealt with the sonatas rather than sonatas, discussed according to a few well-worn
notions. Characteristic features such as the harsh dissonances, the freakish leaps and
all the other technical paraphernalia are accounted for, Spanish elements are men-
tioned, as are other impressionistic
17
features such as the employment of fanfares,
street cries and processional material, and there is often evidence of a form fetish
occasioned by the use of the term sonata itself for these pieces. Most writings on
16
See for instance Sheveloff, Frustrations [I], 422 and 428. This article and its successor, cited above in fn 9, will
hereafter be referred to as Frustrations I and Frustrations II respectively.
17
I borrow this term from Donald Jay Grout, A History of Western Music, rev. edn (New York: Norton, 1973), 456,
without necessarily dissenting from all its implications.
the sonatas, however, fail to go much beyond this level of characteristic features and
therefore tell us little about the dynamics of the individual work. Underlying such
approaches may be the subtext that, however splendid the results, the Scarlatti sonatas
are a product of a transitional style and a mannerist aesthetic from which too much
coherence should not be expected. Accordingly the literature emphasizes freedom
and improvisation and variety rather than seeking to investigate the composers sense
of musical argument as conducted in individual works. It takes refuge in evocation.
If we want a deeper understanding of Scarlattis style, though, and of the part his
work plays in the development of eighteenth-century musical language, there is no
substitute for a detailed reading of particular sonatas, informed by a reassessment of
what constitutes a context in the case of Scarlatti.
Reference just now to the development of eighteenth-century musical language
may appear to t uneasily with the earlier dismissal of ideologies of progress, yet
there need be no injury as long as development is not taken to suggest the sort of
inexorable improvement and organic growth of a style that it all too often connotes.
Not only that, but the monsters of evolutionary ideology, labels for musical periods,
are indispensable in attempting to get closer to Scarlattis achievement. That the
composer has one foot in the Baroque and one in the Classical era is one of the
commonplaces in his reception history, and, although this very fact has ensured
marginal status for Scarlatti in all history textbooks since he does not clearly belong
to either period it can be turned to account in a more useful way than suspected.
My contention is that, due to the circumstances of his life, which involved near
incredible changes in environment and professional demands, and obviously even
more due to his creative turn of mind, Scarlatti was acutely conscious of his own
style. This in effect meant being conscious of styles, of various options for musical
conduct. After all, the composer at various points of his career found himself in
positions as different as writing operas for an exiled Polish queen, acting as chapel
master at the Cappella Giulia in the Vatican, and being music tutor within a Spanish
royal family of strange disposition in a strange environment. What these changes
may have promoted, or merely conrmed, was a reluctance on the composers part
to identify himself with any one mode of speech in the keyboard sonatas, to make
a virtue out of not belonging, or not wanting to belong. Of course all composers
are to a greater or lesser extent conscious of their own style, and the eighteenth
century saw many composers addressing the perceived stylistic pluralism of musical
Europe, but what I think makes this a distinguishing mark of Scarlatti is that none
of the styles or modes of utterance of which he avails himself seems to be called
home.
A simple example of this property can be heard in the Sonata in A major, K. 39,
shown in part in Ex. 1.1. This work has the virtue, for present purposes, of corre-
sponding to most listeners idea of a typical piece of Scarlatti. Its stylistic starting point
is undoubtedly the early eighteenth-century toccata of the moto perpetuo type. It is
not hard to understand the way in which writers can lapse into a mode of superlative
evocation when attempting commentary on such music; it seems to invite all the
Ex. 1.1 K. 39 bars 617
stock references to vitality and virtuosity. Yet it seems to me that the almost obscene
energy of the piece is harnessed to a particular end, that of taking Baroque motor
rhythms beyond the point where they can sustain their normal function. Instead of
being agents of propulsion, they take over the piece and threaten to strip it of any
other content. Only the references to the repeated-note gure of the opening hold
the piece together. Especially notable is the overlong ascending progression of the
rst half (bars 7
4
17
3
), which seems to represent a nightmare vision of sequences
without end, allowed to run riot.
18
What is typical about this sonata is its swiftness and athleticism, and for once we
must reverse the claims of stereotyping to make an important observation. There
18
Sheveloff, Kirkpatrick and Giorgio Pestelli all mention the connection between this sonata and K. 24, to the
detriment of the former. See Sheveloff, Frustrations I, 416; Pestelli, Le sonate di Domenico Scarlatti: proposta di
un ordinamento cronologico (Turin: Giappichelli, 1967), 158; and Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 1556. Surely, though, it
is only the openings and closings of the halves that are so similar. Aside from that, K. 39 has an independent
existence.
can be no doubt that a high proportion of the Scarlatti sonatas are fast and, if
one will, loud. It seems that it is the generally more responsible critics who try
hardest to mollify this fact, stressing the variety of the composers moods, his ability
to write slower and apparently more heartfelt movements as well. A good many
performers also seem conscious of not wanting to play Scarlatti up to his reputation,
and consequently they invest their performances with what seems to me a false
gravitas; by slowing the speed of execution down, they obviously hope to make the
composer sound more serious.
19
But there is no getting around the fastness of the
majority of Scarlatti sonatas.
What is wrong with speed? Once more the problem lies with our nineteenth-
century ears. Ironically for an age thoroughly associated with the so-called rise of the
virtuoso, the nineteenth century also bequeathed us a suspicion of virtuosity, which
for our purposes may be translated as a suspicion of prolonged displays of virtuosity at
high speed. Only so much may be allowed, the received opinion seems to go, before
there must be a return to real invention: the exposing and development of themes.
One senses a comparable response to the totality of Scarlatti sonatas: fast movements
are all very well, but if only there werent so many of them the composers image
might be more solid. (When Brahms sent a volume of Scarlatti sonatas to his friend
Theodor Billroth, he wrote You will certainly enjoy these as long as you dont
play too many at a time, just measured doses.
20
Too much unhealthy excitement was
evidently to be avoided.) Unfortunately, our cultural conditioning means that for us
serious is cognate with slow, or at least a moderate speed: thus the Beethoven slow
movement represents the ultimate in depth of communication, the Mahler slow
movement is intrinsically more worthy of contemplation than the Mendelssohn
scherzo. These terms are bound up with a discursive model for composition, the
highest to which instrumental music can aspire in nineteenth-century aesthetics
presumably the reason why speed kills is that it does not readily allow time for
the perception of an unfolding musical plot. While there are many Scarlatti sonatas
which could involve a possible dramatic or narrative sequence, loosely understood,
for many others we will have to nd alternative models that can satisfy us intellectually
and obviate the need to be apologists. If our conditioning suggests to us that the
business of music is above all emotional or mental expression, we can consider as
an alternative the notion of music as bodily expression. In the case of Domenico
Scarlatti, the simplest way of saying this is music as dance.
21
Dance in this sense is not necessarily meant to call to mind minuets and waltzes, and
not even the various Iberian and Italian forms that may have inspired the composer;
19
Note Christophe Roussets assumption that the performer preparing a recital will want to include a certain
number of slow movements to allow some air into the programme, where the speed and exuberance of Scarlatti
risk becoming tiring. Approche statistique des sonates, in Domenico Scarlatti: 13 Recherches, proceedings of
conference in Nice on 1115 December 1985 (Nice: Soci et e de musique ancienne de Nice, 1986), 79.
20
Cited in Eric Sams, Zwei Brahms-R atsel,

Osterreichische Musikzeitschrift 27/12 (1972), 84.
21
Compare the hypothesis of Ray Jackendoff, also proceeding from the parallel with dance, that musical structures
are placed most directly in correspondence with the level of body representation rather than with conceptual
structure. Consciousness and the Computational Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 239.
it is simply to suggest that music may function balletically as well as, or instead of,
discursively. Our inclination to place one above the other as an object for study
and contemplation may or may not have an inherent aesthetic justication, but it
seems to me to be another symptom of musics unsure sense of itself: we are happiest
when accommodating those works that suggest literary models or parallels, just as
nineteenth-century musical culture addressed itself constantly to literature.
The D major Sonata, K. 277 (Ex. 1.2), may, as we shall see, contain its own plot,
but I have chosen it for consideration in the rst instance because it will enable
us to focus on the composers awareness of style, indeed, on the construct of style
altogether. To return to Curt Sachs, we may be not yet ready for an approach to
this individual sonata and to the two that follow, but a confrontation in at the deep
end, as it were with some of the music that animates my whole enterprise may
suggest to the reader the urgency and fascination of the task.
The natural lyrical eloquence at the start of K. 277 is a quality that Scarlatti nor-
mally feels the need to shape in some overt way; he is rarely content with an idyll,
preferring to give such pieces a sense of dramatic progression. Temperament be-
comes a foil for the lyricism, with a strong sense of creative intervention in what
can in fact become quite an impersonal mode; witness for example Bachs Air on
the G string. Only in anachronistic nineteenth-century terms can we hear the
lyricism of Bachs movement as involving the expression of personal or individual
emotion. If the Air does indeed express grief or nostalgia, then it must be heard as
collective in its import; note also in this regard the measure of control provided
by the consistent movement of its bass line. Scarlatti is not at all interested in such
means or ends; to invoke our style labels once again, his starting point is the galant
notion of the individual lyrical voice. This is reinforced by many aspects of diction in
the opening material, with its small-scale, detailed inections of melodic writing
the Lombard rhythms, grace notes, appoggiaturas, and Schleifer-type gures.
22
All these, along with the very indications Cantabile and andantino, are mark-
ers of the galant. Such miniaturism helps to delineate a voice that does not speak
on the basis of collective authority or experience, but as if on behalf of the lone
individual.
A more important ingredient for the shaping of the whole work, though, it seems
to me, is folk music, and perhaps Spanish amenco in particular. K. 277 contains
nothing whatever on the surface that suggests this, but the sort of inuence meant is
more profound than the appropriation of various idiomatic features. Contact with
such a folk art seems to have made this composer acutely aware of the gap between
folk idiom and its expressive world and the way art music in contrast behaves. It is a
distinction between distance and control and what is perceived as a musical present
tense. For all that the galant may as a point of departure represent comparative
22
A Schleifer is normally a gure of three notes covering the interval of a third, the rst two rapidly played to act
as a decoration to the nal one. The classic form of the gure is found at the beginning of bar 12, but there are
many variants to be found, for instance at bars 13
4
or 8
23
.
Ex. 1.2 K. 277 bars 140
freedom of action, in the context of the whole work its claims to just that freedom
are undermined. The musical present tense referred to enters when the normal style
of melodic speech disappears, at bar 27; this is particularly marked given the detailed
inections of the previous writing as described before. At bar 27 the melodic voice
seems to stop, to be replaced by undifferentiated rhythmic movement in consistent
four-part crotchet chords, with unpredictable and complex harmonic movement.
The top line does not of course lose all melodic character, but in this context it
seems like a skeleton. The most expressive part of the sonata is therefore the most
Ex. 1.2 (cont.)
plain, the least mediated stylistically in the terms of the rest of the piece, it may be
regarded as primitive.
If the harmonic movement from bar 27 is the most striking feature of this passage,
this may protably be compared with the opening. Part of the delicacy of the idiom
here is the lack of decisive bass movement; instead the bass moves in small steps. The
rst two bars express the tonic by means of neighbour-note formations, and indeed
the rst strong perfect cadence does not occur until the end of the rst half. In this
respect and in its high tessitura, leaving the conventional bass register largely vacant,
it seems to be formed in deliberate opposition to the solid, continuo-like bass lines
of the Baroque. The rst break to the idyll occurs at bar 16, with the unexpected
repetition of the cadential unit. After the undidactic freedom of organization of the
earlier music, with melodic ideas shifting in and out of focus,
23
the sudden square
formality of the repetition at 16 arrests our attention. The resumption of the material
of this repeated bar at 20 strengthens the sense of the intervening passage (bars 1719)
as a minore insertion. It casts a shadow without proving too disruptive. That it does
represent a break with the uid galant diction, however, is remarkably conrmed
at the outset of the really signicant interruption. The rst beat of bar 27 picks up
on precisely the pitches that began bar 17, c
2
, b
1
and e
1
, here verticalized into a
thoroughly characteristic dissonance. It is also signicant that the rst beat of bar 17
contains the last Lombard rhythm of the piece.
The opening of the second half may seem reassuring enough, but it is disruptive in
its own way. The answering unit of bar 2 has now become an opening gambit. The
expressive weight of bar 2 is helped in context by the registral isolation of the G-F
progression in the right hand, followed as it is by a jump to a
1
in bar 3. Bars 256
in fact exploit this feature by their turn to B minor, featuring As. The interrupting
passage then seems to energize the unit beyond its previous manifestations. At bar 31
the melodic range is wider, as is the whole tessitura, and the texture is heavier. After
this the gure is made to settle down until it resumes the likeness of the opening.
Thus bar 33 is identical with bar 2 (and bar 24), but now with a more unequivocal
closing function; in conjunction with this, the c
2
-d
2
succession in the right hand
of bar 32 suggests the same pitches as in the very rst bar.
It is almost as if we have turned full circle, although such an expression sug-
gests a satisfying dramatic symmetry that is not present. The rupturing force of the
outburst note especially the crude voice leading of bar 28
34
, which is so remote
from any notion of galanterie may allow the return of the opening gures, but these
could be understood as remnants. All the most characteristic aspects of the melodic
writing fail to reappear at all, creating a binary form that is very far from being bal-
anced. Instead of such a resumption, frombar 34 we hear continuous melodic triplets
that are a far cry from the rather small-scale diction of the rst half, but this style is
equally remote from the plain crotchets of the interruption. Materially, it takes its
cue from elements in the rst half bars 34 and 37, for instance, allude once more to
bar 3 but the melodic triplets almost seem like a means of regaining equilibrium
after the unexpected outburst.
This stream of song seems to inhabit a different sphere, almost as if it is a com-
mentary on both the preceding vehement expression and the galant gestures of the
rst half. What are we to make of this sonata as a total structure and what can we
compare it with to comprehend it? We hear a succession of three radically different
23
Note, for example, the parallelism of descending units at 3 (from g
2
), 8 (f
2
), 12 (e
2
), then 18 (from d
2
, with the
preceding e
2
functioning in this light as a quasi-appoggiatura). This parallelism does not coincide with structural
or phrase boundaries and hence may be heard as a free association of material, personal in organization.
rhythmicmelodic types with barely any interaction between them galant nicety,
plain crotchets that would deny any melodic nesse,
24
and then an endless melody.
Both latter types are preceded by three bars of the opening gesture repeated, as if
to give a point of comparison. From this perspective, the material of the opening
two bars could be conceived as a kind of frame, a sort of ritornello that provides
the cement for an out-and-out progressive form. Rather than the question mark
provided by this reading of the structure, with the composer reviewing various styles
and forms of expression without committing himself to any of them, a more opti-
mistic interpretation is possible. Bars 34ff. may be heard as a kind of liberation: the
brutal interruption of the galant melodic style, a codied and socially determined
expression of the individual voice, allows for the entry of a purer form of song,
which we are to understand as a more genuinely personal voice. No matter which
interpretation is nally more congenial, one must repeat that the essential genius of
the structure may well owe its provenance to an engagement with folk music, and its
implications for the means chosen by art music. This, I contend, lifted Domenico
Scarlatti right out of all notions of expressive routine and settled styles, encouraging
the sort of fruitful creative schizophrenia on display in K. 277.
In spite of the evidence of this and many another sonata, received opinion is that
Scarlatti was either unconnected with the galant as a style or extremely indifferent
to it. His one surviving personal letter, written to the Duke of Huescar in 1752,
is often cited in support of this contention.
25
In it he makes a familiar lament on
the poor compositional standards of the younger generation, claiming that few of
them now understand [la] vera legge di scrivere in contrapunto- the true laws of
writing counterpoint.
26
The letter has always been taken at face value; it seems
somehow indicative that one of the few pieces of hard evidence we have has been
so objectively interpreted in other words, misinterpreted, in my view. Not only
does the musical evidence disprove the notion that Scarlatti was out of sympathy
with or uninterested in newfangled styles like the galant K. 277 cannot be heard
simply as a besting of the idiom but a calm acceptance of the composers ringing
words on counterpoint is contradicted by the reality of the sonata texts themselves.
Such a contradiction can be found in the C minor Sonata, K. 254.
This sonata, written almost entirely in two parts to an extent actually very rare
in Scarlatti, may be thought of as a skit on counterpoint, or an invention gone
wrong. A good many Scarlatti sonatas do in fact begin with imitation between the
hands, but in the majority of cases this has no larger consequences for the texture of
the work. Here, however, the opening, suggesting the learned style in its use of a
24
In his recording of the work (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi: 05472 77274 2, 1992) Andreas Staier adds a trill at
29
1
and splits the right-hand thirds of bar 30
24
into unfolded quavers, as if uncomfortable with the nakedness
of this passage.
25
For example by Eveline Andreani, Autour de la musique sacr ee de Domenico Scarlatti, in Domenico Scarlatti:
13 Recherches, 99; Francesco Degrada, Tre Lettere Amorose di Domenico Scarlatti, Il saggiatore musicale 4/2
(1997), 300301; and Sebastiano Arturo Luciani, Domenico Scarlatti. I: Note biograche, Rassegna musicale
11/12 (1938), 469.
26
The original text is contained in Luciani, Note I, 469, and Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 121, offers a translation.
Ex. 1.3a K. 254 bars 1524
typical contrapuntal tag,
27
is taken as a pretext for the examination of various types
of counterpoint, mostly of a fairly bizarre sort. From bar 10 we hear in the left
hand an alla zoppa, or limping, gure, counterpointed against a straight-crotchet
right hand in a concertina-like pitch construction. The effect of this is indeed rather
lame, especially after the decisive opening and energetic continuation. From bar 17
the contrary motion between the parts is replaced by imitation, which goes badly
wrong, with the consecutive fourths at 19 and 23 having an obviously ugly effect
(see Ex. 1.3a). Even worse, the rst of each is an unresolved tritone. Slightly more
hidden are the parallel fths that follow on from these fourths in the same bars. The
true laws of writing counterpoint are not much in evidence here.
From bar 33 the previous methods of parallel and contrary motion between
the two parts are combined, but the result is much messier than this sounds. The
real relevance of this passage is more that it continues the ways of unsuccessfully
combining independent and notionally equal parts. The right hand especially here
has the avour of a voice in species counterpoint or a conventional ller motion
in a contrapuntal texture. Note too the staggered parallel fths at 335. Altogether
the passage sounds distended well beyond any functional basis. The right-hand part
moves down an octave before reversing its direction, as if to avoid a continuation
of the consecutives; meanwhile the left hand strides pompously down nearly three
octaves in an unchanging dotted rhythm. The literal repetition of the whole phrase
only emphasizes its uncertain import. The piece in fact seems to be going around
in circles.
28
One almost wonders whether the work has a specic target, whether
in fact it is a satire. Certainly the inconsequentiality of the contrapuntal textures
and the signs of mock ineptitude are hard to miss. At least one would think so;
27
This tag is virtually identical with that which opens K. 240, where it is, however, just one element in a very
heterogeneous sonata. Compare also the start of K. 463.
28
Note also the unexpected and awkwardly timed return of bars 6ff. at 25ff.; in addition, the cadential bar 32
recurs at 39 and 46, the passage from bar 10 is reworked from 29, and the left-hand line at this point recurs in
toto at 369 and 436.
Ex. 1.3b K. 254 bars 92101
in his recording of the complete sonatas, Scott Rosss version of the work is not
only soberly paced in the manner discussed before but nds a number of ways to
soften the harsh prole of the piece.
29
This is symptomatic of the embarrassment
that the composer often induces in the contemporary performer, who prefers to
retreat into the sort of good taste that may be rather more appropriate for various
contemporary keyboard repertories.
This softening is particularly unwelcome since the composer himself attempts
something of the sort shortly after the double bar. From bar 57 we hear a far more
acceptable form of imitative texture; even though the parallel fourths remain at
bars 58 and 60, they grate much less than those heard in the rst half.
30
At bars
612 we again hear earlier material that is contextually sounder and more directed;
the material from bar 10 is limited to two bars in duration and acts as a successful
transition. Another solution of a sort follows, when from bar 63 the opening tag is
reused four times in succession, as at the start of both halves of the piece. Here the
tag is transformed into a little galant episode; it is put into a homophonic setting and
becomes cadential rather than enunciatory. The change in texture is signicant, with
a striking move to three parts instead of the two associated with the would-be strict
style. The purpose of this transformation would seem to be to mock the pretensions
of the opening more directly than the intervening matter has already done.
This improvement in technique does not last, though, and the passage from bar
85 sounds even more confused than its rst-half equivalent. The right hand changes
direction more unpredictably, and the repetition of the phrase from bar 89 is now
29
For instance, he changes manual in the repetition of bars 339, to create an echo effect, and adds a number of
ornaments which to me suggest a civilizing inuence (Erato: 2292 45309 2, 1989). This complete recording
was made in 19845, and so nished in time for a tercentenary presentation on Radio France, in a series of more
than 200 broadcasts. Commercial release then took several more years.
30
This of course depends on the performance of the ornaments here if one realizes the appoggiatura and its
resolution in a minimcrotchet rhythm, then parallel fths will result! The very fact of the newnotation, however,
with the leeway in performance it allows compared to the original at bar 19, seems to signify some mollication.
staggered to begin halfway through the bar. From bar 94, though, we have one of
the composers most striking inspirations. With any reasonable agreement among
the parts and hands obviously doomed to fail, here unanimity and coordination are
explicitly achieved in each hand successively (see Ex. 1.3b). Here nally there is
perfect imitation between the hands, but in a context that is clearly not contrapuntal
in any standard way. The change of texture and use of parallel sixths are enormously
striking in such a context, as is the change to stichomythic units after the prevailing
long-windedness of the syntax. The passage has a strong avour of elbowing out of
the way the previous nonsense. The repeated right-hand line from 98 also seems to
be part of the attempt to block the annoyances of previous material. In effect the
composer dramatically abandons the textural and syntactical premises of the piece.
In defence of the Ross recording, it must be said that such a work, like many others
by Scarlatti, is rather exhausting for the listener and performer to cope with. Alain de
Chambure has written of the slightly chaotic charm of the sonata,
31
which makes
it sound gentler than it really is. The intermittent ugliness and sprawl, even if to
parodistic ends, ask hard questions of what we are to prepared to accept in the name
of art music.
K. 193 in E at major also begins with an imitative point, but one that is rather
more problematic in execution (see Ex. 1.4a). The imitation in the second bar
immediately goes wrong, the left hand imitating at the seventh, without an initial
small note, which is then restored in bar 3 in both hands. The parallel tenths of
bar 3 also correct the very exposed parallel fourths of the previous bar, echoing
those we heard in K. 254. Bar 2 once again raises the issue of Scarlattis attitude to
counterpoint, and therefore, by implication, to the traditional musical values with
which it is associated. The composers tendency to abuse common practice in this
way exemplies what Giorgio Pestelli refers to as a quality of disdain in the sonatas.
32
Scarlatti often uses worldly trappings as a starting point for his structures here the
respectability of proceeding from an imitative point, in K. 277 a cantabile line of
the purest galant pedigree and then skews or discards them, often showing them
up by the passionate prole of later material. As well as a simple disdain for certain
conventions, the quality may also be dened as an unwillingness on the composers
part to be heard to be spelling out any creative intentions, and a reluctance to give full
elaboration to an affect (suggesting a strongly anti-Baroque orientation). It also seems
that the composer is not seeking approval through musical good behaviour. The
pride and delight in technique shown by Mozart, for example, are foreign to Scarlatti;
he is not so much a pragmatist as hostile to customary notions of craftsmanship. And
so artistically, as well as indeed historically, the composer seems to prefer not to
31
Catalogue analytique de loeuvre pour clavier de Domenico Scarlatti: guide de lint egrale enregistr ee par Scott Ross (Paris:
Editions Costallat, 1987), 99. He also writes, perhaps less acutely, that this uncomplicated little sonata appears
to be an experiment in the staggering of imitation voices.
32
See The Music of Domenico Scarlatti, in Domenico Scarlatti: Groe Jubil aen im Europ aischen Jahr der
Musik (Kulturzentrum Beato Pietro Berno Ascona: Ausstellung 24 August30 October 1985), second edn
(GermanEnglish) (Locarno: Pedrazzini Editions, 1985), 84.
Ex. 1.4a K. 193 bars 149
belong to the club. This can be seen too in the shaping of the rst ve-bar unit.
Given that Scarlatti does reuse its characteristic rhythm throughout the piece, can
this unit be described as a theme? It comprises just a scrambled opening and then
a cadence.
This question of terminology is again relevant to our immersion in nineteenth-
century models for musical conduct. We are used to understanding theme as being
cognate with idea. Of course, we would never expect the two to be identical, but
in practice we would expect an opening theme to have a good deal to do with
the creative idea of a work. In Scarlatti, on the other hand, we have a composer
who is almost uniquely offhand about his openings; only Haydn can compete in this
Ex. 1.4a (cont.)
respect. (With Haydn, though, obstacles are generally set up as a creative challenge
to overcome. While this applies often enough to Scarlatti too, there can be another
sense that the obstacles are there to throw us off his trail.) The ideas behind the music
seem often to have nothing to do with any theme that we can recognize, yet our
intellectual habits tell us that any opening must be taken seriously and regarded as
some sort of denitive or purposive creative statement.
Scarlatti in fact provides his own commentary on the opening theme. At bar 6
he immediately moves away from the tonic, as if he wants to leave the mess behind.
Tellingly, the syntax becomes very square and solid, with prefabricated units moving
sequentially and by the circle of fths. The parallel sixths of bars 1012 and 1820
seem to represent an explicit correction of the parallel fourths of bar 2, this being
emphasized by the rhythmic identity of the respective units. This passage is succeeded
at bar 22 by an overt evocation of folk style. Barbara Zuber has nicely described the
subsequent material as a modal island;
33
diatonic progression is replaced by static
modal coloration, the prior duple organization is replaced by very distinctive three-
bar units. The harmony here should perhaps be understood less as V of B at minor
than as F Phrygian, with the left hand emphasizing the semitone of the descending
minor tetrachord BAGF. The form taken by this tetrachord, with raised third
and attened second, is, according to Jane Clark, typical of the Moorish version of
the Phrygian scale as commonly found in Andalusian folk music.
34
The right hands
alternation between raised and lowered forms of g
2
and a
2
is also a common property
of Andalusian chromaticism.
35
However, for all their extreme contrast, these three-
bar units also contract the pattern of the two previous eight-bar units: a scalic rise
leads to a fall followed by an appoggiatura ending.
As if thrown off course by such a rupture of musical style, the harmony in bars
345 retreats to VI of the tonic, E at major. These bars almost function as an
ironic echo of the modal scale activity. Compare for instance 345 with 234:
1. The right hand of bar 34 replicates the descending contour of 23 but takes its
rhythmic form from the preceding bar 22.
2. The right hand of bar 35 replicates the appoggiatura shape and rhythm found in
the right hand of bar 24.
3. In bar 34 the left hand contains the same repeated-note cell as 23 (and 22), but the
previous biting dissonance of a semitone, f
1
g
1
, is softened to a more standard
major seventh, Ba.
4. The bass motives in bars 35 and 24 are identical.
A fundamental difference, however, lies in the return to two-bar phrase units. Or
so we assume; but the sequential progression continued by bar 36 is cut dead by the
advent of a new phrase in 37, yielding another three-bar unit from 34 to 36! On
the other hand, the harmonic motion does continue to the expected F, yielding a
four-bar unit of BECF from 34. Technically, therefore, we have an overlap,
one that is given particular point through the play of stylistic properties to which it
itself contributes.
A more fully realized riposte to the exotic scale pattern ensues from bar 37. The
two-bar rise and fall patterns of 3742 sound like parodies of the modal passage,
here transformed into a lilting galant idiom. The chromatic tightness and clus-
tered harmonies are replaced by airy arpeggios and registrally isolated diatonic scale
33
Wilde Blumen am Zaun der Klassik: das spanische Idiom in Domenico Scarlattis Klaviermusik, in Domenico
Scarlatti (Musik-Konzepte 47), ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (Munich: edition text +kritik, 1986),
30.
34
Domenico Scarlatti and Spanish Folk Music: A Performers Re-appraisal, Early Music 4/1 (1976), 20.
35
See Zuber, Blumen, 28; Clark also mentions the ever-present chromatic hovering between the two versions
of

3 in Clark, Spanish, 20.
progressions. Scarlatti thus seems to be working by a process of distortion, as each
new unit produces its commentary on the previous one. This process continues to
the end of the half, with the isolated tenor comment at 456 recalling the melodic
fragment of 234 in both pitch and rhythm.
36
What is most striking about this pattern is that here the composers disdain
seems to extend to the folk-like material as well; the Andalusian material cannot be
regarded as being any less mediated than the rest. Nevertheless, the second half of the
piece does concentrate on elements of the disruptive modal island. Zuber hears the
rst two phrases of the half (bars 5065) as the composers version of the melismatic
formulas of cante jondo (literally deep song), specically those that are heard before
the song proper begins. The vocal intoning of Ay is represented in bars 5053,
followed in 547 by an equivalent of the ornamental vocalizings known as salidas.
37
Is the odd rhythm at bars 5051 an attempt to capture the vocal inections of this
style? Several concrete instances of this feature from amenco song may suggest so.
In a ton a grande sung by Pepe de la Matrona, a ton a sung by Ramon Medrano and a
martinete sung by El Negro, contained in the recorded collection Magna Antologia del
cante amenco, one nds just this treatment of the initial Ay.
38
In the rst instance in
particular, with its marked crescendo to and accent on the end of the note, one hears
a marked correspondence to what seems to be suggested by Scarlattis notation.
Whether or not these phrases in K. 193 can have such specic folk models, they
are well integrated with earlier aspects of the sonata. They emphasize the neighbour-
note pitches of the modal island, the E and G that circle around F, with the G
here enharmonically treated as F. The recollection of the modal island as a unit
from bar 66 leads to a considerable change in its function. It is much more diatonic
in orientation, being clearly poised on V of G minor (with the F ( =G) being
placed in a functional context), and various changes of detail give the whole unit a
far less abandoned avour. Incredibly, the composer follows this with the exact three
bars that occurred after the original modal island: bars 724 are identical with 346.
Bar 72 sounds like a real harmonic non sequitur, but note that the new ornaments
found at bars 68 and 71 pre-echo those that will return from 73. The melodic
diction of the two passages is thus brought closer together, while this ornamental
link also helps to get us over the harmonic jolt.
39
This time, however, the passage
from bar 72 is not interrupted, as it was so disconcertingly at bar 37
1
, and is allowed
36
Note how unobtrusively the composer works in the basic cell of the opening. The neighbour-note basis of its
rst beat is heard both in its original shape, in the chain of gures in 43, and in inversion at the start of bars 45
and 47. The complete rhythm of the rst bar is present at bars 44, 46 and 48, now absorbed into the form of a
standard cadential closing gure.
37
Zuber, Blumen, 36, 38.
38
Magna Antologia del cante amenco (Hispavox: 7 99164 2, 1982), vol. 1 (7 99165 2), tracks 9, 14 and 19 respectively.
The obviously conjectural basis for such comparisons will be discussed in Chapter 3.
39
This harmonic juxtaposition is discussed by Joel Sheveloff, who notes the use of the pivot note (common tone)
to move from one chord to another. In this case it is the D that is barely heard in bar 72. He adds: It is normal
for Scarlatti to disguise the surface signicance of the common tone in this sort of situation; nineteenth-century
composers, on the other hand, tend to accentuate this detail. See Sheveloff, Keyboard, 3667. The composers
avoidance of best voice-leading behaviour, as thus elucidated, could be read as a perfect example of disdain.
Ex. 1.4b K. 193 bars 85101
to pursue its sequential course. This further emphasizes the corrective sense of the
second half, that it is an attempt to retell the story of the rst half in a more functional
manner.
The harmonic argument of the sonata, which has been tied up with the contrasts
of material, reaches a climax from bar 78. The attempt to project an unequivocal
dominant is clouded by the G from the modal island, and a vamp arrives from bar
86 to act as a musical melting-pot (see Ex. 1.4b). Vamp is a term coined by Sheveloff
to describe those apparently non-thematic, obsessively repetitive passages that occur
frequently in the sonatas.
40
The right-hand part makes continual reference to the
GG/EE axis around F, as if in an attempt to mediate between the modal and
tonal. The left hands role is unusually clear for a vamp; it features a big unfolding
between B and D in the bass, lled in by passing notes, in an attempt to establish
the dominant more securely. The vamp may also be conceived of as an effort to
overcome the sectionalized syntax of the work, with all its repeated units, either
sequential or at pitch. The passage does consist of course of endless repetitions of
the one cell, but precisely because of this we may also listen beyond the surface, to
one large phrase that will seemingly last for ever.
The right-hand line of the vamp is unusual in that, contrary to most similar passages
in Scarlatti, it is explicitly thematic, taking its cue fromthe opening cell. But, although
in sound and sense it clearly forms a climax to the other exotic suggestions found in
K. 193, the vamp still seems to issue from another world. There would seem to be
40
The vamp is christened as such in Sheveloff, Keyboard, 364.
a basis in repetitive melismatic chant, which is what leads to the distinctly oriental
avour; but then, the location of an external source of inspiration is much more
comforting than ascribing such a passage to the mad genius of the composer alone.
To put this differently, the meaning of the passage is not exhausted by its possible
relationship to amenco song. We still have to ask what something so apparently
raw is doing in a nished art work. We must also remind ourselves that, if this does
come from the source suggested, then Domenico Scarlatti chose to listen.
Thus the vamp is integral yet separate to emphasize only its functionality and
compatibility on the large scale would be to swallow up what makes it so strange
along the way. Specically, this includes the sense of harmonic free fall, which
we can only grasp retrospectively from the standpoint of bar 100. We should note
also the clouding caused by the cluster of neighbour notes around the pivotal F.
That the grounds for the chromatic alterations in the right hand remain somewhat
obscure may be judged from several attempts to rationalize the passage. First of all
there are the corrections of Alessandro Longo, editor of the rst complete edition of
the Scarlatti sonatas in the early years of the twentieth century.
41
Among other things
he retains the G for several bars after bar 85 so as to avoid the abrupt resumption of
G in 86; he also cuts bars 9091 completely so as to shorten the endless reiteration.
These changes may be heard in the recording by Anne Queff elec, who applies a
dynamic arch shape to the vamp, fading away nearly to nothing by bar 99. This
treatment tells a familiar tale of nessing when I would argue for naked insistence.
Christian Zacharias substitutes E for E at bars 868 and 936, thus creating a
neatly consistent line of Es all the way through to bar 97. This attempts to clear up
the modal confusion that has been read as central to the argument of the piece.
42
From bar 100 the gesture towards greater continuity of syntax results in an al-
most uninterrupted stream of triplet semiquavers, like a release of energy after the
damming-up represented by the vamp. In this connection it is noticeable that the
rhythm of the opening bar of the piece is nowhere heard explicitly in the second
half, just as in K. 277 the most marked galant material disappeared for good be-
fore the second half had even begun. This is why Zubers (guarded) suggestion of
a seguidilla basis to the piece, with its rhythm being reminiscent of castanets,
43
is not ultimately of rst importance. That several other sonatas, such as K. 188 and
K. 204b, share both the repeated use of this same rhythm as well as exotic harmonic
coloration make a folk-dance basis for the material relatively likely. However, what-
ever the material origins of the opening of K. 193, it should be more than clear that
we cannot hear the whole as a dance form pure and simple.
The whole closing section of our sonata achieves its greater continuity by a radical
rewriting so as to maintain the momentum. The move towards harmonic clarication
41
Opere complete per clavicembalo di Domenico Scarlatti (Milan: Ricordi, 190610). K. 193 = L. 142.
42
Erato: 4509 96960 2, 1970 (Queff elec); EMI: 7 63940 2, 197985/1991 (Zacharias). Zacharias also alters the
Gs of bar 22 and so forth to Gs, although this might conceivably be a misreading.
43
Zuber, Blumen, 278. She also reports Alexandru Leahus belief that the similarly shaped material of K. 188
represents a malague na.
is made in earnest from bar 100, where the totally diatonic scurryings trump those
of the modal island. Note that all the high points of the right-hand runs occur on
f
2
, g
2
and e
2
, thus continuing the vamps business. In this sonata for once we may
claim that the composer does not in fact hold himself aloof from the various styles
and possibilities he introduces: in the end the work represents a decisive victory
for the diatonic and for the uent syntax it can generate.
44
In this conjuring with
eighteenth-century styles, the composer thus continues to elude any attempt to
schematize his artistic approach. This early confrontation with several sonatas should
have indicated some of the challenges involved in establishing a critical apparatus
adequate to Scarlattis stature and signicance. The following chapter reects in
more detail on the patterns of reception of this enigmatic gure.
44
This is meant from a rhetorical more than grammatical point of view, since in pure harmonic terms a victory
for the diatonic is the only possible outcome.
2
PANOAMA
PLACE AND TEATMENT I N HI STOY
Writing about the sonatas, says Jane Clark, is a eld so full of pitfalls that anyone
willing to risk an opinion, however tentative, about the form, the chronology, the
Spanish inuence, the origins of the style or indeed anything else, is risking a great
deal.
1
The depth of uncertainty and, indeed, disagreement about what might in
normal circumstances be basic givens even about what the boundaries for en-
quiry are is surely unmatched among famous composers of such relatively recent
vintage. The wringing of hands has become more frequent with the progressive
institutionalization of musicology in the twentieth century and the perceived need
for accountable methodologies. Yet the uncertainties were felt before this, at least
in the negative sense that so little of substance was written about Scarlatti. It would
be wrong to suggest that Scarlatti had been neglected; the nineteenth century was
certainly familiar with Domenico, especially through the work of pianist-arrangers.
In 1898 Oskar Bie could write Scarlatti is especially remarkable to us in the present
day, in that he occupies the position of an early writer whose pieces still play a
part, though a small one, in modern public concerts.
2
While playing activity kept
the composer alive during this time, scholarly activity had to wait. The rst com-
plete edition, by Alessandro Longo, appeared in 190610.
3
The rst monograph on
Scarlatti, though, did not arrive until 1933. Perhaps not surprisingly, this honour fell
to a German scholar, Walter Gerstenberg. Books followed by Sacheverell Sitwell in
1935 and Cesare Valabrega in 1937.
4
It was not until after the Second World War, though, that the problems surround-
ing Scarlatti were fully confronted. Ralph Kirkpatricks 1953 volume marked a point
of arrival for its subject.
5
It was warmly received at the time and has continued to
attract acolytes up to the present day; indeed, most of the common currency about
1
Review of Domenico Scarlatti: Master of Music by Malcolm Boyd, The Musical Times 128/1730 (1987), 209.
2
A History of the Pianoforte and Pianoforte Players, trans. and rev. E. E. Kellett and E. W. Naylor (London: Dent,
1899), 69.
3
Opere complete per clavicembalo di Domenico Scarlatti (Milan: Ricordi, 190610).
4
Gerstenberg, Die Klavierkompositionen Domenico Scarlattis (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1969; second reprint of rst
edn, 1933); Sitwell, A Background for Domenico Scarlatti (London: Faber, 1935); Valabrega, I l clavicembalista Domenico
Scarlatti: il suo secolo la sua opera (Modena: Guanda, 1937).
5
Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti.
26
Panorama 27
the composer still derives from Kirkpatricks thoughts and theories. Two subsequent,
fundamental texts, both taking issue with many of Kirkpatricks ideas, are unfortu-
nately not in general circulation. Joel Sheveloff s doctoral dissertation of 1970 rep-
resents the most important detailed work on the sources but was never published.
6
Giorgio Pestellis book of 1967, likewise based on a dissertation, remains the most
sustained aesthetic commentary on the Scarlatti sonatas.
7
No translation has ever
appeared; just as crucially, its great merits were obscured by controversy over its
nominal subject matter. Pestelli offered a replacement for Kirkpatricks chronology,
based roughly on the order of copying of works, by one based on stylistic analysis.
If this was speculative, its daring generality virtually placing its author in a no-win
situation, critics should perhaps have recalled that Kirkpatricks order was also specu-
lative. However, Kirkpatricks evidence was hard while Pestellis was soft, a reveal-
ing distinction in terms of the development of musicology outlined in Chapter 1.
If Pestellis approach was awed in principle, for example in its assumption of a linear
development of Scarlattis style or in its reliance on the Longo text, and certainly
debatable in its detailed realization, he nevertheless made a memorable attempt to
dene the artistic climate of this vast production of sonatas.
All of the above works equated Scarlatti with the Scarlatti of the keyboard sonatas,
leaving little room for the consideration of all his work in other genres and often
implying that much of this was not worth detailed consideration. This well-worn
opinion was nally contested by Malcolm Boyd, in his 1985 book that gave relatively
equal weight to all stages and products of the composers career.
8
By then the rst
complete edition of the sonatas in the modern era had appeared, edited by Kenneth
Gilbert;
9
the nal volume appeared in 1984. That this should have had to wait until
so relatively recently tells its own story. A second edition, edited by Emilia Fadini,
published its rst volume in 1978; it remains incomplete, with eight of the projected
ten volumes having now appeared.
10
The Gilbert edition was neatly completed just
in time for the tercentenary of the composers birth in 1985, which gave particular
impetus to Scarlatti studies, producing several volumes of conference papers and
stimulating some long-overdue Spanish interest in documentary issues. There also
appeared in this year Sheveloff s two-part article Tercentenary Frustrations, which
is the best concise introduction to the uncertainties that have hampered Scarlatti
research.
11
While Scarlatti has arguably been lucky to attract so many ne minds to his cause,
not just in the landmark publications mentioned above but in many smaller-scale
operations, the wider picture is not so happy. Within the universal set of musico-
logical endeavour he has received scanty treatment for a composer of his stature. All
our potential pitfalls have no doubt warned off many specialists; in generalist terms
the principal factor has probably been his unclear historical and stylistic position.
6
Sheveloff, Keyboard.
7
Pestelli, Sonate.
8
Domenico Scarlatti: Master of Music (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986).
9
Domenico Scarlatti: Sonates (Paris: Heugel, 197184), 11 vols.
10
Domenico Scarlatti: Sonate per clavicembalo (Milan: Ricordi, 1978).
11
Sheveloff, Frustrations I and II.
Another obstacle to discussion is the lack of outward differentiation to Scarlattis
keyboard output. It is not only the lack of any rm chronology but also the elusively
standard appearance of the sonatas that makes any basic mental ordering difcult,
for professionals as much as amateurs. How can one keep track of such a production
when trying to draw comparisons between various sonatas? It would be like trying
to maintain discipline among a family of 555 children all demanding attention; and
so it is quite understandable that so much Scarlatti scholarship has been dedicated
to reducing the clamour in various ways, so that one can hear oneself think. Longo
ordered the sonatas into families of ve, calling them suites and thus aligning these
with a familiar Baroque principle of multi-movement organization. Before this, in
1864, Hans von B ulow had edited eighteen pieces in three groups of six, justifying
his conversion of the works by alluding to their terseness and brevity. He also
gave titles to all but two of the sonatas, which mostly referred, once again, to the
suite (Sarabande, Gigue, Capriccio, Courante and so forth). On this matter he
declared: Characteristic titles for the individual pieces were also called for, since the
generic title sonata . . . gives a faceless boring avour that could easily turn the public
off, whereas a harmless external change . . . may help sustain interest.
12
Another logistical deterrent is the existence of four separate numbering systems,
by Longo, Kirkpatrick, Pestelli and Fadini. This points to a fundamental aspect of
Scarlatti studies: the strange symbiosis that obtains between the state of knowledge
on Scarlatti and the efforts in dealing with it. Our piecemeal knowledge of cir-
cumstances and sources has been paralleled by scholarly activity which has likewise
been uncoordinated and partial. Above this lurks the fact that a collected edition
of Domenico Scarlatti has yet to be attempted, let alone completed. More notable
than the lack of such a monolith, though, is the absence, for example, of an edition
of the complete cantatas, especially given claims for their relevance to the keyboard
works.
13
As pertinent here as all the specic problem areas is the fact that the com-
poser is uncomfortably situated culturally. Where after all would the natural home
for a collected edition be, or have been?
Equally, Scarlatti has not done very well out of the early music movement. For
all the advocacy of Wanda Landowska, the composer has not altogether been em-
braced by harpsichordists as fully as one might have expected. Paul Henry Lang
connects this with the purely musical humour that he believes makes its rst ap-
pearance in Scarlatti. He continues: These arrowshafts of wit, nicely calculated to
penetrate stuffed hides, were one of the reasons why the rst generation of modern
harpsichordists, well groomed, proper and enamoured of the bonbons of the res-
urrected French harpsichord repertory, were at rst puzzled and uncomfortable.
14
12
Preface to Achtzehn ausgew ahlte Klavierst ucke von Domenico Scarlatti, in Form von Suiten gruppiert (Leipzig: Peters,
1864), i.
13
For consideration of the relationship of the cantatas to the keyboard works see in particular Degrada, Lettere,
and Kate Eckersley, Some Late Chamber Cantatas of Domenico Scarlatti: A Question of Style, The Musical
Times 131/1773 (1990), 58591.
14
Scarlatti: 300 Years On, The Musical Times 126/1712 (1985), 588.
Panorama 29
One wonders in fact whether Langs wicked sociological assessment is yet obsolete.
A certain spiritual antiquarianism may still obtain; in such a context Scarlatti brings
an unwelcome ambience of rock and roll. Once again, this does not amount to a
claim for outright neglect;
15
it is more an attempt to determine why so many in
our various musical subcultures have chosen, no doubt often unconsciously, not to
engage with Scarlatti. Langs suggestion that, in the composers lifetime, neither
professional musicians nor experienced amateurs quite knew how to make peace
with this unusual music
16
might also be extended up to the present day.
Given all the circumstances outlined thus far, the possibility of any sort of
denitive and monumental study of Scarlatti seems remote.
17
Barring the bene-
cent intervention of a deus ex machina, the material will never be in place to allow
this to happen, even were such a study still felt to be desirable.
THE DEATH OF HAD FACTS
This lack of the appropriate material hard facts has often been mused on
by commentators, producing theories that bring almost the only colour to what
Sitwell called the blank canvas of Scarlattis life.
18
In fact any biographer is forced
to speculate. What we might call the modal verb tendency a liberal helping of
must, should and could have is indispensable for such activity.
When invoking this absence of information, writers have naturally favoured dark
imagery: Scarlatti is characterized as an obscure, shadowy gure. It is easy to take this
obscurity as a given without realizing how extraordinary it was in the circumstances.
Not only was the eighteenth century an age of (musical) gossip, but, more specically,
our interest does not lie in a journeyman musician working at a provincial court.
Scarlatti was a celebrated composer (and player), the son of an even more celebrated
composer, who throughout his life was associated with people of the highest rank.
Once more a strange symbiosis seems to be in operation, between the disdain
identied by Pestelli as a fundamental aspect of the composers artistic personality
and the disdain for the sensibilities of historians that seems to preside over the
biographical situation.
The dark imagery that dominates these assessments of the state of affairs is, of
course, itself a form of colouring applied to the blank canvas. Nowhere is this
clearer than in Gerstenbergs assertion of the aristocratic obscurity surrounding the
15
An instructive example of relative neglect may be found in The Harpsichord and its Repertoire: Proceedings of the
International Harpsichord Symposium, Utrecht 1990, ed. Pieter Dirksen (Utrecht: STIMU Foundation for Historical
Performance Practice, 1992). In these entire proceedings Domenico Scarlatti receives one passing mention, in
contrast with the plenteous references to such gures as DAnglebert, C. P. E. Bach, Chambonni` eres, the
Couperins and Froberger, while a whole section is devoted exclusively to J. S. Bach.
16
Lang, 300 Years, 589.
17
Peter Williams, Review of Domenico Scarlatti: Master of Music by Malcolm Boyd, Music and Letters 68/4 (1987),
372.
18
Sitwell, Background, 166.
composers life.
19
This suggestion of aristocratic reserve, a common enough strain
in the reception of the composer, puts a more positive spin on a situation that
has seemingly frustrated and enticed in equal measure. For Massimo Bontempelli,
Scarlatti has had the good fortune for almost all trace of his everyday life to have
disappeared, which he described as an enviable fate.
20
He was certainly correct in
his implication that this would help the poetry if not the prose of Scarlatti biography.
Gilbert Chase has poured historical cold water on all speculation by reminding us
of the disparity between the worldly appreciation of vocal and of instrumental music
at the time. It is certainly true that it is difcult for us to grasp the supreme position
of opera, in particular, in eighteenth-century musical life, when the instrumental
works of such gures as Bach and Haydn still bulk so large for us. Further, Chase
contends that this disparity may be seen by comparing the position at the Spanish
court of Farinelli the castrato who arrived in 1737, retired from public concert
life and became, amongst other things, a great operatic impresario with that of
Scarlatti. Scarlattis relative obscurity is indicated by the paucity of information that
has come down to us concerning his life in Madrid.
21
Such a at explanation would
seemto be borne out by the fact that Scarlattis name appears only two or three times,
always insignicantly, in chronicles of life at the Spanish court.
22
We must also bear
in mind the theories that Queen Isabel kept her stepson Fernando and his wife Mara
B arbara in the background as much as possible, with clear consequences for the role
of their employee Scarlatti at court.
23
If such factors might help us come to terms with the apparent lack of worldly
appreciation Scarlatti received in Spain, this would still not help us with the circum-
stances elsewhere. Scarlatti was hardly written or talked about in Italy and Portugal
either, when he was, it would appear, primarily a composer of vocal music. The
conspiracy of silence in fact extends well back. An early performance of Scar-
lattis opera Tolomeo et Alessandro in 1711, put on especially for members of the
Arcadian Academy (whose numbers included Alessandro Scarlatti) at the residence
of the exiled Polish queen Maria Casimira, prompted the chronicler of the Arcadian
nymphs and shepherds, Giovanni Crescimbeni, to extol the virtues of the produc-
tion. Although he mentioned that the music was very good indeed,
24
Scarlattis
name remains unmentioned.
25
This is curious yet somehow typical.
From the evidence contained in an inventory of Farinellis instruments and scores,
drawn up in 1783 and recently published for the rst time,
26
it would now appear
19
Review of Domenico Scarlatti by Ralph Kirkpatrick, Die Musikforschung 7/3 (1954), 343.
20
Verga LAretino Scarlatti Verdi (Milan: Bompiani, 1941), 125 and 1256.
21
The Music of Spain (London: Dent, 1942), 109.
22
See Pestelli, Sonate, 181.
23
See for example Clark, notes to recording by Jane Clark (Janiculum: D204, 2000), [1]. This would only apply
to the period up to 1746, when Fernando ascended the throne.
24
Boyd, The Music very good indeed: Scarlattis Tolomeo et Alessandro Recovered, in Studies in Music History
Presented to H. C. Robbins Landon on his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Otto Biba and David Wyn Jones (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1996), 10.
25
26
See the Appendix to Sandro Cappelletto, La voce perduta: vita di Farinelli evirato cantore (Turin: EDT, 1995),
20921.
Panorama 31
that Scarlatti may well have been in any case a more active composer of vocal music in
Spain than previously allowed. As well as the many solo cantatas he almost certainly
wrote in Madrid, there is the possibility that some of the unidentied serenades
mentioned in the inventory were also written during this period.
27
If so, one might
have expected these to have received some worldly appreciation.
Another, more reliable at explanation for the absence of source material, partic-
ularly musical scores, has often been sought in such disasters as the complete destruc-
tion of the Alba Library in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the Lisbon earthquake
of 1755 and several res at the Escorial. Such possibilities may also account for the
absence of sonata autographs from three other very important eighteenth-century
Iberian keyboard composers Carlos Seixas, Sebasti an de Albero and Antonio Soler.
A means of uniting the dark imagery with the lack of information on Spanish
circumstances would be to invoke the Black Legend (leyenda negra). This term,
coined by Juli an Juderas at the beginning of the twentieth century, symbolizes
the image and historiographical treatment of Spain as an outsider within Europe,
certainly once its Golden Age was past. Judith Etzion suggests that Charles Burney,
for example, probably knew more about Spanish music than he chose to disclose
in his writings, and, more specically relevant to our case, that Farinelli probably
told him far more about the musical life of the Spanish court than is transmitted in
The Present State of Music (17713). This would reect the wider eighteenth-century
assumption that Spain was musically backward and peripheral.
28
The uncertainties reviewed thus far primarily concern absence of information.
Just as characteristic, though, are leads which only invite further detective work,
tantalizing fragments that raise more questions than they answer. To add a few more
ecks to the blank canvas, here are some additional questions and issues that have
been entertained by Scarlatti commentators.
1. The circumstances of the ofcial publication in London in 1739 of the Essercizi,
the only edition of sonatas published by the composer in his lifetime. Why was
there a rival, and much more successful, publication of the works by Thomas
Roseingrave, and why did Farinelli lead Burney to believe that the Essercizi had
been published in Venice?
29
2. Did Scarlatti play his own works as a young virtuoso?
30
3. How did the young Scarlatti receive his musical training?
31
27
See Degrada, Lettere, 31415. For now the Salve regina of 1756 and the Madrid Mass (possibly written in
Spain) are being left out of consideration.
28
Spanish Music as Perceived in Western Music Historiography: A Case of the Black Legend?, International Review
of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 29/2 (1998), 1045.
29
See Clark, His own worst enemy. Scarlatti: Some Unanswered Questions, Early Music 13/4 (1985), 543.
30
Compare Eva Badura-Skoda, Domenico Scarlatti und das Hammerklavier,

Osterreichische Musikzeitschrift 40/10
(1985), 525, suggesting that this must have been the case, and Clark, Enemy, 544, where the author stresses
that the reports of Scarlattis playing never suggest he was playing his own music.
31
See Sheveloff, (Giuseppe) Domenico Scarlatti, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 16, ed.
Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1980), reprint in The New Grove Italian Baroque Masters (London: Macmillan,
1984), 327, where, as an antidote to our modal verb tendency, Sheveloff states atly that this is unknown.
4. What were the circumstances in which Scarlatti lived while in the service of the
courts of Portugal and Spain? And what were his exact working conditions and
duties at court?
5. Under what circumstances were the sonatas written; how many of them actually
originated as teaching pieces?
6. Why were so relatively few of the sonatas published in the composers lifetime
( just seventy-three, none in Italy or Spain)
32
and why have so relatively few
contemporary copies turned up? It has been suggested that Scarlattis situation
may have been similar to that of Jan Zelenka at the court in Dresden, whereby
any publication and copying of his works was forbidden; Mara B arbara had thus
claimed sole ownership. We should also note the later situation of the symphonist
Gaetano Brunetti (174498), who was forbidden from distributing his music
outside the royal court in Madrid.
33
7. Who was the scribe of the Parma and most of the Venice volumes? The initials
S or SA found at the end of several sonatas in the last two Parma volumes
seem to provide a clue. Was it Sebasti an de Albero, Antonio Soler, one Andres
Solano, or even, as Roberto Pagano fantasizes, the ghost of our composers father,
Alessandro Scarlatti?
34
8. Were the Scarlatti sonatas performed at the Spanish court?
35
If so, where, when,
by whom?
36
9. Did Domenico Scarlatti become Fatty Scarlatti? Since the reappearance of the
Velasco portrait of the composer at Alpiarca in Portugal it has mostly been assumed
that Scarlatti was constitutionally slim, but Jane Clark nds in the representation
a distinctly visible tendency towards corpulence. For her, this shows the danger
of taking anything at face value with Scarlatti.
37
CEATI VE ENVI ONMENT
Anumber of the issues outlined above concern the creative environment inhabited by
Scarlatti at the Spanish court. Many writers stress that it was an exclusive and isolated
32
Boyd, Master, 1589. All but the Essercizi would seem to have been unauthorized publications.
33
Macario Santiago Kastner, Repensando Domenico Scarlatti, Anuario musical 44 (1989), 151; David Wyn Jones,
Austrian Symphonies in the Royal Palace, Madrid, in Music in Spain during the Eighteenth Century, ed. Malcolm
Boyd and Juan Jos e Carreras (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 137.
34
Scarlatti Alessandro e Domenico: due vite in una (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1985), 45960.
35
Harvey Sachs reminds us that there is no general agreement among experts . . . whether or not the sonatas were
played publicly at court. Notes to recording by Ralph Kirkpatrick (Deutsche Grammophon: 439 438 2, 1971
[notes 1994]), 2.
36
See Boyd, Master, 165. The nal sentence of Scarlattis dedication in the Essercizi would certainly suggest, even
allowing for hyperbole, that Mara B arbara performed his sonatas on certain court occasions: the mastery of
singing, playing and composing with which she, to the astonishment and admiration of the most excellent
masters, delights princes and monarchs. See Boyd, Master, 140. Ralph Kirkpatrick notes the abundance of court
communiqu es reporting musical evenings in the apartments of Mara B arbara before she became queen and states:
At these evenings Domenico Scarlatti was undoubtedly present and active. It is difcult to dispute this, but for
all that it is quite remarkable that we have no records that are explicit on the matter. Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 87.
37
Clark, Boyd Review, 209. The portrait is reproduced on the cover of Boyd, Master.
Panorama 33
one that helped to determine the character of the sonatas. These two perceived
properties have led to highly determinist equations. The apparent isolation has been
used to explain Scarlattis originality,
38
but this is no more adequate an explanation
than it is for Haydn, with whose situation Scarlattis has sometimes been compared.
39
Admittedly, it was Haydn himself who offered the line that in his isolation he was
forced to become original, but it has been far too easy for traditional musicology to
take such a remark (born at least in part out of Haydns famously modest persona) at
face value, to ground the historically problematic category of originality in localized
circumstance. Isolation, after all, is not an absolute any more than originality is.
Other composers placed in similar circumstances would not have been able to react
in the alleged manner. At best we can say of both cases that an opportunity was
grasped because of certain creative proclivities.
The second equation suggests the production of exclusive music for exclusive
surroundings.
40
Howcan we square the notion that Scarlattis music was an upmarket
luxury item with the abundance of popular and ethnic elements in the sonatas? Most
of the commentators who stress the aristocratic nature of Scarlattis keyboard art are
also those who minimize the popular side, often for nationalist reasons that we will
contemplate later in this chapter.
In any case, it is debatable whether this environment was characterized by great
renement or equilibrium. Surprisingly little capital has been made in the literature
of the instability of the two Spanish monarchs Scarlatti served under; perhaps this
was one hypothetical step too far for most commentators. The fragile mental state
of Felipe V, for instance, reached a crisis in 1728, not long before Scarlattis arrival in
Spain. The King would bite his arms and hands and spent the night screaming and
shouting; he believed he had been turned into a frog; he was afraid of being poisoned
by a shirt and would only put one on that had been worn by the Queen; he ate vast
quantities and would then spend entire days in bed in the middle of his excretions.
41
Although far less disturbed than his father, Fernando VI was also prone to depression
and notorious for his sexual appetite; he then behaved in extraordinary fashion after
the death of his consort.
42
If we wish to pursue such connections between creativity
and locality, surely Scarlatti would have been at least as affected by such an atmosphere
as by the apparently exclusive, elite environment evoked above he had, after all,
known little else throughout his career. Might the compulsive, repetitive, unstable be-
haviour of the vamp sections not owe something to such royal example? In fact, only
38
For example in Philip G. Downs, Classical Music: The Era of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (New York: Norton,
1992), 49.
39
See for example Frederick Hammond, Domenico Scarlatti, in Eighteenth-Century Keyboard Music, ed. Robert
L. Marshall (New York: Schirmer, 1994), 178, and Anne Bond, A Guide to the Harpsichord (Portland: Amadeus,
1997), 180.
40
See Kastner, Introduction to Carlos Seixas: 80 Sonatas para instrumentos de tecla (Lisbon: Fundac ao Calouste
Gulbenkian, 1965), xxxiii, and Degrada, Lettere, 315.
41
See W. N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley, Eighteenth-Century Spain 17001788: A Political, Diplomatic and Institutional
History (London: Macmillan, 1979), 64. Further gruesome details may be found in John Lynch, A History of
Spain: Bourbon Spain 17001808 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 6772.
42
Kirkpatrick has addressed such connections, but came to the opposite conclusion
that the sonatas functioned as an antidote to melancholy and madness.
43
Occasionally more particular environmental linkages have been sought: for in-
stance, that the sonatas echo the different attractions of the four royal palaces around
which the Spanish court moved on an annual basis the Pardo, Buen Retiro,
Aranjuez and the Escorial.
44
If this suggests a certain biographical desperation (quite
understandable of course in our circumstances) and a pictorialist reception of the
music that issues from the Kirkpatrick tradition, it is hardly to be dismissed in princi-
ple. It has been noted, for example, that Felipe V, the French grandson of Louis XIV,
tried to soften the rugged Castilian landscape he found himself in with the adorn-
ments of Italian and French art and architecture.
45
This is arguably reected in the
landscape of the sonatas, in their topical play of high and low, in the contrast be-
tween international and local musical images. This is not to suggest a direct causal
connection from one set of physical circumstances to another set of musical ones,
since again we must emphasize the element of choice. Scarlatti could have remained
as unaware as most at court apparently were of the cultural incongruities of the living
environment; but he seems at some level to have chosen to reect or accommodate
these in his work.
One other matter involves us again in contemplating an absence the fact that
Scarlatti took no part in the opera craze
46
which began after the arrival of Farinelli
in 1737. (Nor, curiously, did he play any part in the grand festivities at Aranjuez
masterminded by Farinelli.) This may be interpreted as a straightforward matter it
was not within the terms of Scarlattis job or seen as a further puzzle. The younger
Scarlatti had after all written a good number of operas and consequently had had
plenty of contact with the operatic world, if in the mostly sheltered form of private
commissions and performances.
47
EAL-LI FE PESONALI TY
Contemplating this puzzle brings us within range of another set of speculations
concerning Domenicos real-life personality. The consensus of opinion would offer
43
Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 120; see also 91. Kirkpatricks melancholy includes not just the circumstances at court
which the sonatas had to ward off but the entire baggage of Spanish gloom. In Domenico Scarlatti, written
and narrated by David Thompson, devised and directed by Ann Turner (BBC television documentary: broadcast
20 April 1985), we are told that the composers music was an antidote to Mara B arbaras disappointed life.
44
See Hammond, Scarlatti, 161.
45
Barry Ife and Roy Truby, Introduction to Early Spanish Keyboard Music: An Anthology, Volume III: The Eighteenth
Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 4.
46
This is Ifes term. Echoing the comments of Jane Clark, he believes that human malevolence on the part of
Queen Isabel may explain the composers non-participation, pointing out that, while Farinellis was a crown
appointment, Scarlatti was the personal servant of Mara B arbara and Fernando. Domenico Scarlatti (Sevenoaks:
Novello, 1985), 16. Since Fernando was not Isabel Farneses child and she was a notorious schemer on behalf of
her own children, to have allowed Scarlatti to participate, according to this line of thought, would have been to
lend unwanted prestige to the Prince and Princess.
47
Scarlatti only wrote two operas for a public theatre Ambleto of 1715 and Berenice regina dEgitto of 1718. See
Degrada, Lettere, 272.
Panorama 35
that he was not cut out for the theatrical world, perhaps even that he actively resisted
recruitment to the cause. This line of thought takes its cue from the words of John
Mainwaring, Handels biographer, who wrote that Scarlatti had the sweetest temper,
and the genteelest behaviour;
48
it is another way of making positive sense of the
absence of information we are faced with, suggesting an obscurity determined by
shyness. One version of this by Lang reveals the larger contradiction implied by
this portrait: Perhaps . . . there was something in the whirlwind lifestyle of Italy that
he found uncongenial; Domenico seems to have been a rather private person who
avoided publicity.
49
If this were the case, there would be an enormous contrast
between the alleged retiring nature and the artistic products whirlwind lifestyle
would describe a lot of the sonatas perfectly!
Indeed, were we to speculate on Scarlattis character from the evidence of the
music, we might imagine it to have been unstable or even schizophrenic. Some have
in fact hinted at such a possibility.
50
The danger with all such snapshots is, naturally,
one of circularity, as one moves too effortlessly from work to life and back. Yet it
would not quite be fair to ascribe the collective efforts to sketch the real Domenico
Scarlatti simply to a certain Romantic ideology. The music, after all, projects itself
so strongly and characteristically as positively to demand active curiosity about its
creative source. This is not always the case with composers of whose circumstances
and characters we are relatively ignorant.
The methodological problems inherent in such sketches are multiplied when
attempting a biography of the composer. Information is so thin that a biography
cannot really work. Ralph Kirkpatrick did an astonishing job, though, of making
us forget that there was little tale to tell, if at the expense of what have been chided
as creative excesses.
51
The most inuential of these was the overinterpretation of
Scarlattis relationship with his father. Subsequently the patriarchal bogeyman has
stalked many accounts of Domenicos life.
52
In fact, the looming gure of the father
is as tedious a historical leitmotiv as the rise of the middle classes. He is central to
biographical studies of Mozart, Kafka and Beethoven, to name but a very few. For
such a device to become a convincing argument, one has to prove that the father
was more than usually inuential. And dont all sons rebel yet also perpetuate certain
attitudes and modes of behaviour?
Roberto Pagano continues this line in his romance biography of 1985, Scarlatti:
due vite in una (two lives in one). In the name of his avowedly fantastic thesis that
Alessandro and Domenico merge into a single ideal character he formulates such
48
Cited in Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 33.
49
Lang, 300 Years, 585.
50
See Hermann Keller, Domenico Scarlatti, ein Meister des Klaviers (Leipzig: Peters, 1957), 86, and Clark, Enemy,
5467.
51
Sheveloff, Frustrations I, 399.
52
See for instance Hammond, review of Scarlatti Alessandro e Domenico: due vite in una by Roberto Pagano, Music
and Letters 69/4 (1988), 520, and Roman Vlad, Bach, H andel e Scarlatti nella storia della musica, in Metamorfosi
nella musica del novecento: Bach, H andel, Scarlatti (Quaderni Musica/Realt` a 13), proceedings of conference in Cagliari
on 1214 December 1985, organized by the Associazione Spaziomusica with Musica/Realt` a, ed. Antonio Trudu
(Milan: Edizioni Unicopli, 1987), 15.
statements as only after the death of his father could Domenico begin to become
properly himself and Domenico obey[ed] an obscure need not to lose completely
the state of uncertainty and unease to which his relationship with his father had
habituated him.
53
The main thesis in fact provides a rather thin rationale for a
narrative in which Domenico plays a statistically minor part, as Pagano has the grace
to acknowledge at one point.
54
The same is evident in the 1985 BBC television
biography of Scarlatti, in which the personage of the composer disappears more and
more as the lm progresses and the facts become fewer and fewer. In the latter
part the facts of the royal lives (of Fernando and Mara B arbara) are used to create
a phantom biography for the composer.
55
In both these stories Scarlatti leads of
necessity a vicarious life through others. Both in fact point to the same difculty
that Scarlatti is incapable of emerging as a fully formed and independent historical
personage through non-musical data alone.
THE PANOAMA TADI TI ON
If the literature has had difculties creating an independent logic to the sequence of
biographical events, the same has been true when trying to make sense of the vast
sequence of individual sonatas. One of the commonest strategies for overcoming the
lack of outward differentiation highlighted before has been to see the sonatas as an
all-embracing panorama. This subsumes the claims of the individual pieces under
the banner of a meta-work. Each sonata becomes a miniature, a spot of colour
contributing to the complete canvas.
56
Sometimes the resulting panorama is casually
construed, as in this typical formulation from Stephen Plaistow: There are dances
and estas and processions here, serenades and laments, and evocations of everything
from the rudest folk music to courtly entertainments and churchly polyphony; and
as the kaleidoscope turns you marvel at the composer who could embrace such
diversity and shape it and put it all on to the keyboard.
57
This nice list of musical
styles and avours represents the more innocent side of the panorama tradition. After
all, isnt this just a function of such a large quantity of works in one genre, an honest
response to sheer weight of numbers? With comparable cases, though, such as Haydn
symphonies, Bach cantatas or Schubert songs, the problems of comprehension have
not led to what we often nd in the case of Scarlatti the suggestion of a more or
less deliberately coordinated whole. This implies a controlling world view behind
the entire production of sonatas.
53
Pagano, Vite, 462, 409, 461.
54
Besides, the attention given to monarchs and ministers has distracted me from the events of Domenicos life.
Pagano, Vite, 407.
55
Thompson, Scarlatti.
56
John Gillespie writes of a multitude of exquisite miniatures, Cecil Gray of a delicate, miniaturist, epigrammatic
style. Gillespie, Five Centuries of Keyboard Music: An Historical Survey of Music for Harpsichord and Piano (New
York: Dover, 1965), 69; Gray, History, 140.
57
Review of recording by Mikhail Pletnev (Virgin: 5 45123 2, 1995), Gramophone 73 (1996), 72.
Panorama 37
This is what Giorgio Pestelli complained of at the outset of his 1967 book: that the
sonatas had been treated as an undifferentiated block, like a single continuous poem
in more than ve hundred verses.
58
In fact, quite specic poetic analogies have been
made, with the sonnets of Petrarch and Belli; these too are held to accumulate into a
larger whole.
59
Bontempelli, who was one to offer a comparison with Petrarch, also
saw Scarlatti as a representative of pure music. Hence he found it enigmatic that
when we think of the [555] sonatas in their totality, what remains in our memory
is not a musical particular, but a panorama, a spell, of a nature that one would
today call metaphysical.
60
These analogies all have the virtue of responding to a
crucial aspect of Scarlattian art: the democratic openness, the sense that any and all
sounds may be incorporated in the name of music. But they are also transparently a
mechanismfor avoiding detailed contact with the sensuous particularity of the music,
the tendency described as endemic in the opening chapter. While in principle this
approach appears to celebrate diversity, to use a current phrase, and to emphasize
the comic variety of the surface, in reality it abstracts us from it.
Sometimes this approach is couched in more historically plausible terms: that the
sonatas summation of a world of musical possibilities embodies the encyclopedic
spirit of the Enlightenment.
61
Yet this also brings prescriptive associations that do
not ring true. Perhaps a more useful working concept when trying to move be-
yond notions of an even-handed, programmatic diversity is that provided by Piero
Santi, who allies Bontempellis metaphysical spell with the magic realism that is
the quintessence of twentieth-century Italian art.
62
Magic realism captures per-
fectly the alchemy of Scarlattis pluralistic appropriations. This formula also helps
us approach the synaesthetic genius of the sonatas, which the panorama tradition
illuminates in its frequent turning of sound into visual image.
A sideshoot of the panorama tradition is the procedure of evoking the world of
the sonatas by means of parataxis, of expressively loose syntax. One of the earliest
examples in the literature, with its obligatory collocation of characteristic features,
come from Oskar Bie:
It is a spectacle of reworks. Deep bass-tones are suddenly introduced; high thirds y off;
thirds and sixths are darted in; close arpeggios swell into monstrous bundles as they are lled in
with all possible passing-notes; octaves are vigorously introduced; the hands steer in contrary
motion, to one another, away from one another; they are tied into chains of chords; they
release themselves alternately from the same chords, the same groups, the same tones; unison
passages in the meanwhile run up and down; chromatic tone-ladders dart through, then
slowly moving phrases or still-standing isolated treble notes are seen confusedly dotted over
the changing bass as it runs up and down, in a kind of upper pedal point; harsh sevenths one
after another; repeated notes, syncopated effects, parallel runs of semiquavers with leaping
58
Pestelli, Sonate, 2.
59
See Luciani, Domenico Scarlatti creatore del sinfonismo, Musica doggi 8/2 (1926), 43, and Hammond, Scarlatti,
186.
60
Bontempelli, Verga, 128.
61
See Ife, Scarlatti, 21.
62
Domenico Scarlatti fra i due nazionalismi, in Metamorfosi nella musica del novecento, 53.
side-notes, such as we know so well in Bach; sudden interchanges from major to minor,
a device of which the Neapolitan operas are so fond; bold characterisation by means of
sudden pauses; startling modulations by means of chromatic passages; embellishments rarely
introduced; a delicate arrangement of tones from the severest fugues to the most unrestrained
bourr ees, pastorales, or fanfares such is the world of Scarlattis clavier-music.
63
On a purely syntactical level, too, this passage correlates with the panorama tradition.
Note how everything is contained within the one superabundant sentence, just as
all the sonatas are held within a single picture.
This superlative straining prose that Scarlatti attracts, while underpinned struc-
turally by the guiding critical image of the panorama, also has a technical counterpart
within the music. It seems to be a recreation of or response to the frequently fever-
ish, supercharged syntax of the sonatas themselves. Bies sentence, with its wealth
of strongly physical metaphors of movement, has the additional virtue of respond-
ing in kind to another vital feature of Scarlattian style its pronounced sense of
materiality.
ANALYSI S OF SONATAS
The alternative to the poem described by Pestelli, examination of individual sonatas,
has proved much less attractive. There has been an extraordinary if understandable
reluctance to engage with individual works. By training and inclination most histori-
cal musicologists have avoided such activity anyway. Analysts are in the same position
as historians unsure of the rules of the game, they have collectively kept well clear.
A simple example of the sort of analytical issue that would act as a deterrent is phrase
duration. If we nd phrase units of irregular length, such as the rst ve bars of
K. 193 (see Ex. 1.4a), should we assume that this is a marked deviation or incidental?
An adequate answer cannot be found purely by contemplating the individual work
alone, since we are reliant for our working assumptions on the historical concept
of style. In this case, the problem hinges on the duality of Baroque and Classical,
and the very different syntactical ideals we associate with the two style-periods. My
reading of K. 193 presumed that the irregular opening was indeed supposed to stand
out, but such an assumption must be more provisional than it would be were we to
analyse a piece by, say, Clementi.
What almost all the few existing analytical readings have in common is that they
are not integral.
64
Nevertheless, such contributions are at least refreshing in their
63
Bie, Pianoforte, 889.
64
For examples see Eytan Agmon, Equal Division of the Octave in a Scarlatti Sonata, In Theory Only 11/5
(1990), 18; Peter Barcaba, Domenico Scarlatti oder die Geburtsstunde der klassischen Sonate,

Osterreichische
Musikzeitschrift 45/78 (1990), 3869; Downs, Classical, 52; Carl Schachter, Rhythmand Linear Analysis: Aspects
of Meter, The Music Forum 6 (1987), 459; Heinrich Schenker, Domenico Scarlatti: Keyboard Sonata in D
minor [K. 9] and Domenico Scarlatti: Keyboard Sonata in G major [K. 13], from Das Meisterwerk in der Musik,
vol. 1 (1925), trans. Ian Bent, Music Analysis 5/23 (1986), 15185; Janet Schmalfeldt, Cadential Processes: The
Evaded Cadence and the One More Time Technique, Journal of Musicological Research 12/12 (1992), 710;
Panorama 39
novelty value. Carl Schachters discussion of K. 78, for instance, is a nice reminder of
Scarlattis art at a level almost unknown in the general literature. His reference to the
fantastic motivic references that enliven the foreground of this tiny masterpiece
65
may seem too characteristic of analytical rhetoric but still carries some force if
we want to take seriously Sheveloffs claim that Scarlattis style is composed of an
abundance of tiny, special details.
66
Janet Schmalfeldts study of the use of evaded and
elided cadences in K. 492 is refreshing for another reason: the relevance of a crucial
aspect of Scarlattis technique is placed straightforwardly in an eighteenth-century
context, with a clear implication that the composer is post-Baroque.
67
Heinrich Schenkers analyses are born from his conviction that, on the evidence
of his keyboard works alone, Domenico Scarlatti is Italys greatest musician.
68
If
this was a radical stance for 1925 (just as it would be now), his use of two Scarlatti
sonatas to demonstrate his principles of voice leading and tonal coherence would
have been seen as eccentric. While his demonstration of a tempestuous unfolding
of purely musical sonorities
69
again makes (and, even more then, would have made)
a bracing change from the normal critical preoccupations, his choice of K. 9 and
K. 13 is a little disappointing. These very contained and controlled numbers from
the Essercizi were obviously appropriate to Schenkers demonstrations of unity and
logic. One longs to know how he would have coped with the clusters of K. 119,
the eternal reiterations of K. 317, the stylistic ruptures of K. 402. We know he
had access to Czernys edition of two hundred sonatas, and he certainly knew the
arrangements of Tausig and B ulow, since he goes out of his way to comment on
their gross barbarities.
70
It may that he was another Scarlattian who wished to avoid
the prevalent image of the composer as sprightly buffoon.
71
The only sustained reading of a Scarlatti sonata is of K. 296 by Peter B ottinger,
and it is quite a model for future emulation. It begins in unexceptionable fashion,
then becomes more and more fantastic, as normal discursive syntax breaks down,
to be replaced by fragments, quotations, unusual arrangements of music and text
on the page, burblings as if out of Beckett, and an obsession with the mechanics
of the keyboard and the hand movements needed to stir it into life. This is clearly
designed as an analogue to B ottingers view of the sonata (and Scarlattis style), in
Sheveloff, Keyboard, 41529; and Sheveloff, Uncertainties in Domenico Scarlattis Musical Language, in
Domenico Scarlatti e il suo tempo (Chigiana 40), proceedings of conference in Siena on 24 September 1985,
sponsored by the Accademia Musicale Chigiana Musicologia and the Universit` a degli Studi in conjunction with
the Societ` a Italiana di Napoli (Florence: Olschki, 1990), 14550.
65
Schachter, Rhythm, 48.
66
Sheveloff, Keyboard, 258.
67
Joseph Kermans term, used in Musicology (London: Fontana, 1985), 53.
68
Schenker, Meisterwerk, 153. For an account of Schenkers general treatment of Scarlatti see Ian Bent, Heinrich
Schenker, Chopin and Domenico Scarlatti, Music Analysis 5/23 (1986), 13149, especially 13940.
69
Schenker, Meisterwerk, 154.
70
Schenker, Meisterwerk, 176. Compare the reaction of Sebastiano Luciani, writing a year later than Schenker:
B ulow did not hold back from contaminating and weighing down . . . the airy grace of Scarlattis compositions.
Luciani, Sinfonismo, 43.
71
Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 281.
which everything sounds multilevelled and unreal.
72
If the author goes too far in
pursuit of this ambiguity, he clearly intends to go too far. One can glimpse here a
distant cousin of the ecstatic prose of the panorama tradition.
B ottinger makes the composer almost too unutterably strange for words, too
sensational, but many of his formulations are welcome the description of Scarlattis
unreiner Satz,
73
the concept of irritation as a formal principle
74
and represent a
rare attempt to square up to the ambivalent and enigmatic side of the composers art.
If the essay is unhistorical in some senses, in another it has the true historical spirit
of trying to recapture what was new about a given phenomenon. In addition, it is
prepared to take risks and may stand as a polemical corrective to those who imply
that all the difculties around Scarlattis keyboard output are factual, practical and
logistical.
I MPOVI SATI ON
A very different type of meaning is assigned by two other global rationales for the
sonatas improvisation and pedagogy. These might seem to be mutually exclu-
sive categories, one suggesting the sonatas issue straight from the composers n-
gers, the other that they were carefully written to aid the technical development of
Mara B arbara. Nevertheless, they both fall under the category dened by Pestelli as
technical-manual.
75
While neither seems an unreasonable angle of approach to the
sonatas, both have been overplayed, and not just in Scarlattis case. Their covert pur-
pose, I believe, is to explain an embarrassingly large output froma later point of view
that of the work-concept that became fully established in the nineteenth century
and which is effectively as dominant today as ever. They are a way of justifying the
apparent fact that composers did not give such individual attention to their works, by
appealing to historical circumstance; but they skirt all questions of artistic creativity.
Improvisation is one of the commonest elements of the Scarlatti litany. It is a
problematic rationale because it implies that, whatever other supreme merits the
uvre possesses, considered thought is not one of them. This becomes explicit in
Boyds comparison of the sonatas and cantatas. First we read: Much of the keyboard
music of the period, and Scarlattis perhaps more than most, sprang directly from
the composers ngers, as it were, in the act of improvising. On the other hand,
though, the writing of vocal music was a considered activity, subject to the demands
72
F. 244: 4 Ann aherungen an eine Sonate, in Musik-Konzepte 47 (1986), 80.
73
B ottinger, Ann aherungen, 75 (Die Kunst des unreinen Satzes); the concept is amplied from 75 to 92, and I
return to it especially in Chapter 5 of this study. The phrase itself, playing on Schenkers Der freie Satz, means
unclean or impure composition.
74
B ottinger, Ann aherungen, 101.
75
I translate Kathleen Dales characterizing phrase tecnico-manualistico from her review of Le sonate di Domenico
Scarlatti: proposta di un ordinamento cronologico by Giorgio Pestelli, Music and Letters 49/2 (1968), 184, rather than
Pestellis commonly used tecnico-pianistic[o] (see Pestelli, Sonate, 3 and 5, for example), since the latter may
sound too narrow in its application. The only logical English word that can cover all the necessary ground,
keyboardistic, is too ugly ever to have caught on.
Panorama 41
of the text and the rules of good composition .
76
This sense of looser creativity
inherent in keyboard music has also led to the suggestion that the sonatas may have
been dictated improvisations, attractive because it seems to offer an explanation for
the absence of autographs.
77
This is not to deny the particular physical immediacy of so much keyboard music
of the eighteenth century, and certainly not Scarlattis, nor the sense of rhetorical
freedom in this repertoire, compared to, say, a string quartet or a cantata, but these
properties need to be reformulated. Reference to improvisation can become a tool
of evasion unless the terms of its employment are carefully thought through. It is ne
if it can be understood in the applied Schenkerian sense that all tonal composition
(at least at the highest creative levels) partook of improvisation. This was possible
because of the relatively secure nature of tonal rhetoric in the eighteenth century, all
its syntactical, harmonic and melodic manoeuvres what Rose Rosengard Subotnik
calls the supreme condence of a style in which. . . tonality was so secure.
78
Partly
because of such condence, the distinction between creating and playing about
was far from hard. And so to single out keyboard music for improvisatory attributes
misconceives the nature of creativity altogether at the time. Indeed, Charles Rosen
comments: The forms and textures of the early eighteenth century altogether are
closer to improvisation than those of any other time in Western music before jazz.
79
Within those terms of reference we may then allow that the physical engagement
entailed in keyboard composition may have made improvisation an even more vital
force. Without those terms, though, we have an approach that simply denies Scarlatti
his extraordinary compositional virtuosity.
PEDAGOGY
The other technical-manual rationale pedagogy has been a millstone round the
neck of all eighteenth-century keyboard music.
80
The perception of the keyboard
sonata, for example, is that it is a small form small not just in the obvious
physical senses but also in aesthetic import and an amateurs form, predominantly
female, domestic, didactic. Such associations very often seem to circumscribe the
scope of scholarly treatment, which is modest, careful, clean: in other words, all the
undeconstructed feminine virtues. In a wider context, the frequent and logistically
76
Domenico Scarlattis Cantate da camera and their Connexions with Rome, in H andel e gli Scarlatti a Roma,
proceedings of conference in Rome on 1214 June 1985, ed. Nino Pirotta and Agostino Ziino (Florence:
Olschki, 1987), 2589.
77
An extreme version of this claim may be found in Chambure, Catalogue, 910.
78
Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996),
239n. The Schenker disciple, Felix Salzer, expressed something similar when he wrote that music had reached
that unconscious stage of musical expression so vital to the development of an artistic language. Structural Hearing:
Tonal Coherence in Music (New York: Dover, 1962), 6.
79
Bach and Handel, in Keyboard Music, ed. Denis Matthews (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 74n.
80
Some of the material that follows in this paragraph has been drawn from my review of books by Bernard Harrison
and John Irving, No Small Achievement, Times Literary Supplement 4949 (1998), 20.
understandable recourse to keyboard music, especially that of the eighteenth century,
in any number of teaching contexts in the present day has reinforced the didactic
image. The Scarlatti sonatas have not suffered from such taints as badly as many
keyboard repertories; the sheer difculty of so many of them has seen to that.
Nevertheless, one wonders whether an implicit feminine gendering of most of the
repertory does not play a part in its relative obloquy in the current climate the
dolls house of domestic connement next to the mans world of public genres like
opera and symphony.
81
Even at a higher level of technical prociency, after all, many
eighteenth-century keyboard composers were associated with distinguished female
protagonists: Scarlatti with Mara B arbara, Mozart with Barbara Ployer, Haydn with
Therese Jansen and Rebecca Schroeter.
The force of such associations may be seen in the book by Hermann Keller, who
describes the sonatas as a Hohe Schule des Klavierspiels, a complete course in key-
board playing.
82
He devotes a long section to enumerating all the technical features
in which the sonatas were intended to develop prociency scales, arpeggios, oc-
taves, leaps, repeated notes and so forth. In the course of this pedagogical exposition
he notes Scarlattis tendency to use repeated-note chords that evoke the guitar, and
comments: They give the sonatas in which they appear a marked masculine charac-
ter in contrast to the keyboard music of the minor masters of the later eighteenth
century destined more for the use of ladies. Elsewhere he describes C. P. E. Bach as
a feminine composer and Scarlatti as a masculine one, noting too that Bach never
steps outside his bourgeois North German atmosphere.
83
Kellers anxiety on this
score is instructive; Scarlatti had to be rescued from the female domestic associations
of his genre.
The pedagogical rationale for the sonatas turns up frequently elsewhere: already in
1839 Carl Czerny had asserted the great utility of the sonatas for pianistic study.
84
That this category again slights the place of artistic creativity is apparent in the much
more recent estimation by Howard Ferguson that, though he may never aim for the
heights reached so effortlessly by Bach, [Scarlatti] extended the technical possibilities
of his chosen medium in a way unmatched by any other composer.
85
The clear
implication is that, in their concentration on athletic training and development,
81
For an entertaining consideration of such issues see Richard Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and
Socio-cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), especially
Chapter 3, Music, Sexism and Female Domesticity. If my claim about the causes of the unexciting current
image of most eighteenth-century keyboard music is reasonable, then it would appear that the assumptions
explored in this chapter are still with us. One should note too that the eighteenth-century keyboard sonata often
functioned as a safe laboratory for the era of historical (and analytical) positivism.
82
Keller, Meister, 39.
83
Keller, Meister, 44 and 83.
84
Czerny cited in B ulow, Klavierst ucke, i; see also Longo, Preface to Opere complete per clavicembalo di Domenico
Scarlatti, [i]. Note too how the work of Klaus Heimes on Scarlattis near-contemporaries Seixas and Soler gives
central importance to this category through a huge chapter on tutorial aspects in Soler and an extensive
citation of technical passages in Seixas. Antonio Solers Keyboard Sonatas (M. Mus. treatise, University of
South Africa, 1965), 55100; and Carlos Seixass Keyboard Sonatas: The Question of Domenico Scarlattis
Inuence, Bracara Augusta 28 (1974), 45367.
85
Early Keyboard Music, in Keyboard Music, ed. Denis Matthews (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 40.
Panorama 43
the sonatas lack any inner content. The assumption that there is a necessary gulf
between the two areas, that one either composes proper music or satises pedagogical
demands, is creatively and historically unrealistic. In any case, we should bear in mind
that the systematization of technique, the isolation of digital features to be practised
independently, did not truly arrive until the nineteenth century. It was this view that
then made of so much eighteenth-century keyboard music a useful stepping stone,
both technically and musically, to the later repertory.
86
CHONOLOGY
Two other fundamental areas of investigation have been held up as the salvation
for Scarlatti studies chronology and organology. The reliance on a well-established
chronology for almost any form of scholarly musical study has already been explored.
The particular terms of reference for any discussion of this matter have been set by
Kirkpatrick; one of the main reasons he was able to tell such a good story in his 1953
book was that he was so condent of his chronology. All the standard parts of the mas-
ter narrative
87
can thus take their place, in the conspicuous stylistic development . . .
from the ashy and relatively youthful sonatas of [V 1749] and a few already copied
out in [V1742] through the poetic richness of the middle period of 1752 and 1753. . .
to the most complete and digested maturity imaginable in the late sonatas from 1754
to 1757;
88
subsequently we read that in the late sonatas everything is at once thin-
ner and richer.
89
What rendered Kirkpatricks wholly traditional narrative rather
incredible, if not absurd, was that he believed the dates of copying almost coincided
with those of composition. Thus, as he conceded himself, the development of a
lifetime
90
was compressed into a remarkably short period.
Malcolm Boyd has made a useful distinction between the two separate strands
of Kirkpatricks chronological claims. He believes there is a good deal of stylistic
evidence to support Kirkpatricks general theory of a direct relationship between
the order of composition and the order of copying into the two main sources; on
86
While the cure-all of improvisation has never been disputed in the literature, a number of writers have distanced
themselves from the pedagogical view. Roy Howat, for example, believes that the character of the Essercizi
has nothing to do with the dryness of purely didactic exercises, while Massimo Bogianckino states that the
intentional dealing with any one technical problem is not to be found in Domenico Scarlattis sonatas. Howat,
Domenico Scarlatti: Les XXX Essercizi, notes to recording by Scott Ross (Stil: 0809 and 1409 S 76, 1977), [4];
Bogianckino, The Harpsichord Music of Domenico Scarlatti, trans. John Tickner (Rome: De Santis, 1967), 116n.
87
For a full discussion of the standard evolutionary master narrative see James Webster, Haydns Farewell Symphony
and the Idea of Classical Style: Through-Composition and Cyclic Integration in his Instrumental Music (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), 33547. The power of the traditional narrative is also evident in the BBC
biography, in which at the appropriate stage of the programme we are informed of a late surge . . . a creative
outpouring of old age; Thompson, Scarlatti.
88
Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 145. I have substituted here in square brackets Sheveloffs designations for V XIV and XV,
since the numbering of these last two volumes does not make clear that they antedate those numbered I to XIII.
89
Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 173. This is in itself a standard gambit, what Janet M. Levy calls the concentrated late style
in Covert and Casual Values in Recent Writings about Music, Journal of Musicology 5/1 (1987), 11.
90
the other hand, he nds it hard to credit the special theory. . . that the sonatas
were copied into the Venice and Parma sets more or less at the time that Scarlatti
completed them.
91
This incredulity seems to have been shared by most other writers.
The general theory has been widely accepted; or, it might be more accurate to say,
it is often tacitly applied as a working tool without any direct acknowledgement of
its shaky basis. If one rejects the intrinsic musical status of the pairs, for instance
seeing them as acts of compilation rather than composition then chronology is
immediately destroyed in any specic, if not altogether in a broader, sense.
That some broader sense remains is apparent in the existence of like-minded
groups of works through the Venice and Parma collections. Roughly speaking,
this is most apparent in the sonatas now numbered in the K. 100s, 300s and 500s
and much less so elsewhere. If one accepts the existence, if intermittent, of fairly
homogeneous groupings, then are they the product of retrospective planning or a
reection of the composers various creative periods?
Among those who believe that the groupings reect a real chronological succession
are Kenneth Gilbert, who tells us that the three successive colours used for his edition
correspond to the three creative periods proposed by Kirkpatrick, youth, middle age
and maturity.
92
The standard developmental narrative is thus coloured in in the most
literal way, as the colours on the covers change from a ery red to a ourishing green
to a rich gold. On the other hand, it has been suggested that that the compilers of
the volumes were creating a sort of anthology, bringing together compositions with
common linguistic characteristics.
93
Such decision-making, though, would have brought on a headache; how similar
did sonatas have to be, for example, in order to qualify for such adjacency? While
sonatas undoubtedly were brought together to make pairs on the basis of key, the
notion that they were also brought together on the much wider and less quantiable
basis of style and language, in bulk, seems highly unlikely. The case of the sonatas
in Parma VIII and IX (roughly equivalent to Venice VI and VII), as mostly found
in Volume 7 of the Gilbert edition, seems to conrm this. The majority of these
sonatas are so distinctive texturally, topically and even, it would appear, aesthetically,
compared with the rest of Scarlattis output, that it is difcult to believe that they were
not written in a delimited period, prompted by external considerations on which
we can only speculate.
94
The idea that they were written on and off throughout the
91
Boyd, Master, 16061.
92
Gilbert, P eriple scarlattien, in Musiques Signes Images Liber amicorum Franc ois Lesure, ed. Jo el-Marie Fauquet
(Geneva: Minkoff, 1988), 132.
93
94
Sheveloff suggests that some of these works may be for clavichord; he seems to believe, however, that there are
only about ten of these pieces, whereas there are surely many more in this distinctive stylistictextural group.
See Sheveloff, Frustrations II, 99101. It is also worth noting that almost no sonatas from the K. 300s appear
in the Lisbon Libro di tocate volume recently published by Doderer, nor in the Vienna II volumes unearthed
by Eva Badura-Skoda in 1971. Roberto Pagano notes an indisputable falling-off in quality in Venice V to
VII (K. 266355) and conjectures that these sonatas may have been intended for the instruction of a new
pupil Fernando. Domenico Scarlatti, in Dizionario Enciclopedico della musica e dei musicisti, Le biograe, vol. 6,
ed. Alberto Basso (Turin: UTET, 1988), 635.
Panorama 45
composers career, closing off most of the avenues freely chosen by Scarlatti in the
surrounding works, then brought together later, seems counterintuitive.
Uniting the concerns of chronology and pedagogy is Emilia Fadini, who offers the
hypothesis that the Venice volumes of 17527 were ordered so as to provide a gradu-
ated keyboard course: the didactic aspect of the production cannot be minimized.
95
She essentially offers a new telling of an old story with a series of technical crescendi,
traced several times over until the nal synthesis of the last volumes. Her grand plan
certainly has a feel-good factor in the way it emphasizes the coherence of the Venice
collections and skirts any nasty thoughts about chronology. The argument that most
of the sonatas are etudes dex ecution transcendante or, on a lower level, quasi-didactic
lessons transparently acts as yet another attempt to avoid any awkward contempla-
tion of the aesthetic character of the sonatas, never mind the source situation. Much
to be preferred is Kathleen Dales optimism in the matter: because no chronology
is known and hence we cannot follow his development as a composer, playing all
the Scarlatti sonatas is like journeying in a land where it is always spring.
96
OGANOLOGY
No issue in Scarlatti studies has raised more strong feelings than that of organology,
at least since the time of Sheveloffs provocative theory that the fortepiano may have
been the instrument of choice for a large number of sonatas.
97
(He also suggests the
suitability of clavichord and organ for a relatively small number of them.) Before
then there seemed no doubt that this was harpsichord music. Many still believe that
the harpsichord was central to the sonorous and technical conception of the whole
output; others simply exclude any reference to the fortepiano.
98
For this camp the
only question worth debating has been just what sort of harpsichord might best
project these sonatas.
99
Backing up the Shevelofffortepiano axis has been David Sutherland, who has
reinterpreted existing evidence to suggest that Scarlatti was the pianos rst great
advocate.
100
He notes that Scarlatti must have tried Cristoforis new instrument on
trips to Florence in 1702 (with his father and family) and 1705 (with the singer
Grimaldi), at the palace of Prince Ferdinando de Medici, who had supported
Cristoforis work. This does indeed seem so likely that our familiar modal verb
hardly seems necessary. He also observes that the diffusion of Cristoforis pianos . . .
is largely congruent with the geography of Scarlattis career, suggesting that Scarlatti
95
Hypoth` ese ` a propos de lordre des sonates dans les manuscrits v enitiens, in Domenico Scarlatti: 13 Recherches,
489.
96
Hours with Domenico Scarlatti, Music and Letters 22/2 (1941), 115. Note that this was written in 1941, before
Kirkpatricks chronology destroyed such enviable possibilities of innocence.
97
First suggested in Sheveloff, Keyboard, 31941 and 357, then presented more denitively in Sheveloff,
Frustrations II, 90101. He notes that only seventy-three sonatas lie beyond the range of the Queens
pianos.
98
For example Alberto Basso, notes to recording by Christophe Rousset (Decca: 458 165 2, 1998), and Gilbert,
P eriple.
99
Sheveloff, Frustrations II, 90.
100
Sutherland, Piano, 252.
himself was the agent of that diffusion.
101
This is particularly striking when we recall
that the rst published keyboard works specically designated for the fortepiano, the
twelve sonatas by Lodovico Giustini of 1732, were dedicated to the Infante Don
Antonio of Portugal, brother of King Jo ao V. We should also note the title given
to the extraordinary works of Scarlattis younger colleague Albero in the Madrid
manuscript dedicated to Fernando VI Obras, para clavicordio, o piano forte
which must have been written between 1746 and 1756.
102
Other scholars have made
a case for the viability of the fortepiano, either through primary research (Pascual,
Pollens, Tagliavini, Badura-Skoda)
103
or for stylistic reasons (Pagano, for instance,
who believes the young Scarlatti must have realized that the Cristofori instrument
would give him a better way of realizing on the keyboard certain vocal aspects of
his inspiration
104
). A number of recent writers have mentioned the likely relevance
of the piano to at least a good number of the sonatas as a matter of course.
105
Just how much does all this intensive research matter? A large industry has grown
up around the attribution of specic works of the eighteenth-century keyboard
repertoire often within the uvre of a single composer to specic keyboard
instruments, perhaps most notably in the case of Haydn.
106
Yet the most important
lesson to observe from what seems to us now like a muddle of different instru-
ments, makes, ranges and special devices must be that they coexisted for most of
101
Sutherland, Piano, 250.
102
Linton E. Powell, The Keyboard Music of Sebastian de Albero: An Astonishing Literature from the Orbit of
Scarlatti, Early Keyboard Journal 5 (19867), 10, 12. It seems most unlikely that the phrase o piano forte was
added later, a point agreed by Powell, Antonio Baciero and Genoveva G alvez; see Powell, Albero, 14 (n.17).
Note too that clavicordio refers here to the harpsichord rather than the clavichord.
103
Beryl Kenyon de Pascual, Francisco P erez Mirabals Harpsichords and the Early Spanish Piano, Early Music
15/4 (1987), 507, 512; Stewart Pollens, The Pianos of Bartolomeo Cristofori, Journal of the American Musical
Instrument Society 10 (1984), 656; Pollens, The Early Portuguese Piano, Early Music 13/1 (1985), 19; Luigi
Ferdinando Tagliavini, Giovanni Ferrini and his Harpsichord a penne e a martelletti , Early Music 19/3
(1991), 399; Badura-Skoda, Hammerklavier. Badura-Skoda claims that two of the pianos at court went up to
g
3
, an assertion that I have not been able to corroborate; Badura-Skoda, Hammerklavier, 528. However, Beryl
Kenyon de Pascual, in discussing the piano in the Seville Museum with a ve-octave range (G
1
to g
3
), notes: If
we accept . . . that not all Domenico Scarlattis sonatas were written for the queen, perhaps we should consider
the possibility that some of the works for a 61-note instrument (G-g) were also played on, and perhaps even
composed for, a piano; Pascual, Mirabal, 512. Cristina Bordas notes several other references to the Spanish
piano from before 1750 in Musical Instruments: Tradition and Innovation, in BoydCarreras, Spain, 185n.
104
Pagano, Vite, 173.
105
See Bengt Johnsson, Preface to Domenico Scarlatti: Ausgew ahlte Klaviersonaten, vol. 1 (Munich: Henle, 1985), vi,
and Rafael Puyana, Inuencias ib ericas y aspectos por investigar en la obra para clave de Domenico Scarlatti,
in Espa na en la m usica de Occidente, vol. 2, proceedings of conference in Salamanca on 29 October5 November
1985, ed. Emilio Casares Rodicio, Ismael Fern andez de la Cuesta and Jos e L opez-Calo (Madrid: Instituto
Nacional de las Artes Esc enicas y de la M usica, 1987), 56. Note also the arguments in favour of Mara B arbaras
likely early ownership of pianos in Michael Cole, The Pianoforte in the Classical Era (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1998), 1517.
106
For recent examples see: A. Peter Brown, Joseph Haydns Keyboard Music: Sources and Style (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1986), especially 16071, including a list of preferred instruments for particular sonatas; L aszl o
Somfai, The Keyboard Sonatas of Joseph Haydn: Instruments and Performance Practice, Genres and Styles, trans. the
author in collaboration with Charlotte Greenspan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), Part I; and
Bernard Harrison, Haydns Keyboard Music: Studies in Performance Practice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 132.
Panorama 47
the eighteenth century. We must also bear in mind that the various instruments
were not necessarily as distinct in sonority as we might imagine today, that they
were in many cases tolerably similar.
107
The very title of Alberos Madrid works
suggests a relaxed attitude to what was deemed appropriate for a particular keyboard
instrument. Yet this in turn seems unsatisfactory. If we concentrate once more on
the case of Scarlatti, no one could deny for all the differences of organological
opinion the extreme sensitivity to sound exhibited by the composer. There is no
aspect of his style more marked by originality, both in conception and execution.
Given this, what did Scarlatti actually hear when he created his soundscapes? Surely
his point of departure was the colours and possibilities of particular instruments.
The implications of this organological indifference have not really been followed
up in the literature. Even if one prefers the notion of discrete groups of sonatas for
different instruments, it is difcult to imagine any keyboard composer, including
Scarlatti, schizophrenically conceiving rst one sonata or group of sonatas for one
instrument, then a second for another, especially when his larger style remains seem-
ingly immune to such proposed shifts.
108
And there is a larger question of composing
principle: it is not within the gift of the composer to control the precise sound qual-
ities of a performance. Even if we accepted that all the sonatas were conceived on
and meant for the harpsichord, we would then have to ask which particular harpsi-
chord in which royal palace was the authentic source for the technical and sonorous
properties of an individual piece. Perhaps one might claim the sonatas of Scarlatti
are keyboardistic in the rst instance, that gesture could be as important to their
conception and realization as is sonority.
Yet one feels that the battle will continue, particularly on the part of the
Kirkpatrickharpsichord axis. Frederick Hammond, for example, has recently writ-
ten: Scarlatti might have conceived a fewmonochromatic sonatas for the early piano,
but there is no reason to suppose that a composer already acknowledged in his youth
as a master of the visually and aurally splendid harpsichord should have taken any
more interest in the fortepiano than Artur Rubenstein took in the clavichord.
109
The rst part of this sentiment rests on Kirkpatricks speculation that a few of the
pieces in Venice I and II with inert bass lines might represent experiments in writ-
ing for the early piano;
110
but why would the composer respond to a touch-sensitive
instrument with monotonous and thin textures? The most likely answer, that the
piano could do with dynamics what the harpsichord had to do with texture, does
not seem adequate.
Also highly sceptical about the possibility of the piano is John Henry van der
Meer, who has recently constructed a new chronology for the sonatas based on
107
See Edward Ripin, Haydn and the Keyboard Instruments of his Time, in Haydn Studies, ed. Jens Peter Larsen,
Howard Serwer and James Webster (New York: Norton 1981), 305.
108
With the seeming exception of the group of sonatas concentrated in the early K. 300s referred to earlier.
109
Hammond, Scarlatti, 167. Another instance of such an anti-piano reaction, misquoting David Sutherland
along the way, may be found in PaganoBoyd, Grove, 403.
110
the development essentially the progressive outward expansion of harpsichord
range. He believes with Kirkpatrick that the pianoforte was used at the Spanish
court only for accompanying and cites as evidence the lack of dynamic nuances in
the manuscripts;
111
one might counter with the relative lack of any clear indications
for changing manuals.
112
Not all the harpsichords we have information about were
one-manual instruments and there may well have been others we do not know of.
The inventory of the Queens instruments drawn up in 1758 has been used as the
basis for most discussion of Scarlattis keyboard instruments, but its value rests on two
assumptions: that the sonatas were conceived only in terms of her instruments and
that the collection remained unchanged over a long period.
113
In fact, as Sutherland
points out, Kirkpatrick chose to ignore certain evidence he had himself quoted
which argued against his assertion of the pianos accompanying role (reinforced by
an appeal to Farinellis fondness for the pianoforte).
114
This was a reference by
Burney to a harpsichord with a transposing keyboard, which was probably the third
instrument in the Queens inventory and which could only have been used for
accompanying.
115
The recent publication of the Farinelli inventory conrms this
claim that the accompanying instrument was a harpsichord.
116
Van der Meers new chronology suggests that the composition of the sonatas was
spread over most of Scarlattis career: thus 13 per cent of the works (including almost
all the Essercizi) were probably written in Italy and 24 per cent in Portugal and Spain
up to c. 1740. These remarkable claims rest on shaky methodological foundations.
The author states that when a sonata with one range is paired or arranged in a group
of three with compositions with a larger compass, it has been taken for granted that
the work in question belongs to the group with the larger compass.
117
This is a fatal
aw; van der Meer does not so much as acknowledge the very many writings that
point up the clear weaknesses in Kirkpatricks pair theory.
118
It is also surely dangerous
to base a chronology purely on range. Might the Essercizi, for example, have been
111
The Keyboard Instruments at the Disposal of Domenico Scarlatti, The Galpin Society Journal 50 (1997), 153. The
only exceptions to this are K. 70 and K. 88, two sonatas widely believed to be accompanied works (Sheveloffs
term is melo-bass sonatas). Van der Meer makes the rather extraordinary suggestion that the dynamics, rather
than giving instructions to the string player(s), imply that the accompaniment to the violin would have been
performed on the piano.
112
Some possible instances are discussed in Sheveloff, Keyboard, 34251.
113
See Hammond, Scarlatti, 168, and Sheveloff, Keyboard, 327.
114
Sutherland, Piano, 251 and Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 184.
115
See Sutherland, Piano, 251.
116
See Cappelletto, Farinelli, 210, and also Boyd, Scarlatti and the Fortepiano in Spain, Early Music 24/1 (1996)
(Correspondence, with reply by David Sutherland), 189.
117
Van der Meer, Keyboard, 140.
118
Almost uncannily appropriate to the present case are Sheveloffs words from his 1970 dissertation: It is dangerous
to make . . . assumptions about range based on the evidence of pairing; in fact, one of the most inadvisable of
procedures would be the formation of a tripod based on chronology-organology-pairing[,] using the evidence
of one to justify the other. This sort of circular logic creates a series of links, any one of which, if effectively
broken by the introduction of new evidence or the more efcient and logical use of old evidence, causes all
three basic elements of the tripod to fall. Sheveloff, Keyboard, 337.
Panorama 49
deliberately restricted in this respect because of the organological imponderables of
a foreign market?
119
Aside from this, it is not clear why the sonatas use of range should always auto-
matically expand outwards, even assuming the progressive expansion posited by the
author. It may be true more often than not that, as van der Meer claims, Scarlatti
does try to use the highest available note in individual sonatas, but for the substantial
number where this is not the case, such an ordering principle is misleading. And
what about revisions to the sonatas? An example that has recently come to light serves
to illustrate the slippery nature of such considerations. In the copy of K. 474 found
in the Lisbon Libro di tocate, published in 1991,
120
there are several points where a
lower-octave doubling is given with the high e
3
, presumably in the manner of an
ossia. It would seem as if d
3
was the highest note available on the instrument for
which the copy of the sonata was made. Or perhaps this was an example of caution-
ary editing, with the copyist or composer unsure about the range of the instruments
at court in Lisbon. Or perhaps the sonata originally existed in the narrower-range
version and this was a suggested expansion based on knowledge of the instruments
at Lisbon. In any case, this very tangle of possibilities gives some sense of how pro-
visional conclusions based on compass can be. Deepening the mystery in this case
is that the surrounding sonatas in the Lisbon collection are registrally much more
expansive.
It was suggested previously that harpsichordists have by no means all shown the
great interest in Scarlatti that one might have expected. Keller, writing in 1957,
felt that some peculiarities of Scarlattis writing seemed atly to contradict harpsi-
chord style, especially the use of octaves (see K. 487 for an example of the sort of
texture to which he was referring). The fact that many sonatas sounded better on
the piano than on the harpsichord, and vice versa, had not helped: conscientious
pianists shy away from playing [Scarlatti] on their instrument, thinking it is really
harpsichord music; harpsichordists are uncomfortable, feeling that this is no longer a
clear-cut harpsichord style, and so dont play him. If only both sides would play him
at all . . . !
121
STYLE CLASSI FI CATI ON
Albert Einsteins maxim that the secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your
sources would seemto apply particularly well to Domenico Scarlatti. Two corollaries
of this have already been stressed: the composers relative lack of historical situatedness
and the consequent claims for an absolute originality. In a sense, Scarlatti is only one
119
Sheveloff believes that the avoidance of notes above c
3
in the Essercizi may represent cautionary editing;
Sheveloff, Keyboard, 327.
120
The circumstances of this publication are explained more fully below on pp. 6970.
121
Keller, Meister, 378.
of the most distinguished victims of a musicological malaise about mid-eighteenth-
century music, which is treated from another angle in James Websters study of
Haydns Farewell Symphony. Whereas Haydn has suffered from inadequate critical
apparatus with respect to the rst half of his output, all Scarlattis keyboard works
may be said to fall within the age of uncertainty, born of what Webster calls the
notion of a general inadequacy in mid-century music.
122
The difculties of style
classication that beset Scarlatti and others, though, are not so much a symptom of a
general historiographical problem as one particular at least in its intensity to the
eighteenth century. Of course, as soon as musical periods or eras are invoked, there
will be grey areas that affect all sorts of composers and genres, involving dualities
such as mainstream vs. peripheral or central vs. transitional; but it is not a question
of whether composer x receives a good deal or suffers from distortion. After all, the
position of those who are securely based within a period is just as constructed, just as
conditional, as the position of those who are a bad t. More to the point is whether
the prevailing system of thought allows for ease of treatment.
This is why the problem is so acute for the perception of eighteenth-century
music. The looming edice of Classicism, so tightly dened and entrenched in its
stylistic and aesthetic values, has made it very difcult to deal with a vast quantity
of surrounding music without a bad conscience. The traditional consensus has
been that (Viennese) Classicism is fully operative only from about 1780. It is also
generally felt that what we call the Baroque has begun to unravel by about 1720,
if not earlier; only the activity of J. S. Bach, until 1750, has distorted this in the
popular imagination. This yields a period of uncertainty and transition of some sixty
years, comprising most of the eighteenth century; absurdly, this is longer than the
ensuing Classical style itself! There is a corresponding difculty on the other side
of the edice, although not one that is chronologically so xed. Composers such as
Hummel, Dussek and Clementi have also fared badly, tainted with similar epithets
inadequate, impoverished, illogical, extravagant, manneristic as their pre-Classical
soul mates. Schubert, whose instrumental music might also belong here, has proved
somewhat less problematic, perhaps because his songs have offered writers a get-out
clause.
However, we cannot overcome such uncertainty by starting with a clean slate,
free of any periodization; it would be unrealistic, perhaps even dishonest, to claim
that we can dispense entirely with such ingrained terms of reference. If it is the
associations of the two terms as much as anything else that have caused such recent
disquiet the extravagance of one, the ordered, exemplary, and indeed geographically
specic nature of the other Baroque has just about become the equivalent of a
dead metaphor, its original associations now invisible to us. Classical, on the other
hand, seems unlikely to atten out in the same way; it has too charged a history.
Nevertheless, the persistence of the two terms testies to the sense that there is indeed
a fundamental artistic and cultural change at issue, but this needs to be treated in a
122
Webster, Haydns Farewell Symphony, 340.
Panorama 51
more nuanced way and cannot be thought of as having a clear point of arrival. A
starting point is the distinction suggested by George Hauer, that an aristocratic
courtly attitude to art produces the Baroque, while a democraticbourgeois attitude
produces Classicism.
123
In this problematic quest for historical identity I have already suggested that Scar-
latti can be understood as being as much a willing accomplice as a helpless victim,
given his high level of self-awareness.
124
The famed originality has a part to play in
this equation. It is often painted as a relatively innocent, inherent quality anything
but self-conscious but, while it may have a spontaneous side, it is also calculated.
If the historical recipe for the pre-Classical transitional period offers confusion, un-
certainty and plurality, for Scarlatti it offers opportunity. It is as if, sitting on our
shoulders, Scarlatti revels in his historical status.
This is not a luxury that critics can share. In their attempts at stylistic classica-
tion, they have chosen to emphasize different ingredients: the past (Baroque, but
sometimes also Renaissance polyphony), the uncertain present (galant/Rococo/
pre-Classical/post-Baroque/mid-century style), the near future (Classical), the far
future (modernism) or none of the above (originality). The ultimate in uncertain
stylistic placement is, of course, absence. The silent discrimination practised by many
generalist works has already been noted. Many Italian writers of more recent vintage
have emphasized the Baroque orientation of the composers work, and more gener-
ally his indebtedness to native traditions. One of the central strands of Pestellis book
details Scarlattis war against the modern galant style, one which is nally openly
declared in the many of the alleged late works; Scarlattis weapon of choice is the
Italian toccata as practised by his father.
125
On the other hand, many other recent
writers have claimed the composer for Classicism almost as a matter of course.
126
The two nal categories, originality and modernism, have rarely been invoked
in recent times. The sense that we can make relatively direct contact with the past,
that we can engage in unmediated dialogue with earlier gures, has fallen from
favour: contextualization is all. Equally, notions that composers exist outside time
(originality) or for the future (modernism) are an embarrassment, even though on
one level their very treatment in a present-day context is premised on just such
attributes. The balance of historiographical consciousness has shifted: we are now
almost painfully aware of our partiality as interpreters of the past, condent only that
123
Cited in Pestelli, Sonate, 23.
124
Several other writers have pinpointed this quality. For Bogianckino, Scarlatti is extremely conscious of his own
style, for Boyd he is one of the most style-conscious of all composers, while Degrada writes of sua sempre
vigile ricerca espressiva (his ever-vigilant search for expression). Bogianckino, Harpsichord, 43; Boyd, Master,
116; Degrada, Lettere, 309.
125
126
These include Lang, Rosen (for whom the sonatas provide the rst signicant examples of [the] new dramatic
style), Alexander Silbiger (Scarlattis spirited buffo style) and Daniel K. L. Chua (who cites a passage of reiterated
gures from K. 521 to illustrate how cadential forces generate the energy of the Classical language). Lang,
300 Years, 5878; Rosen, Classical, 43; Silbiger, Scarlatti Borrowings in Handels Grand Concertos, The
Musical Times 125/1692 (1984), 93; Chua, The Galitzin Quartets of Beethoven: Opp. 127, 132, 130 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995), 166.
our deliberations and (even more) those of past generations will reect the present.
Scarlatti intrudes with particular urgency on this newer state of affairs, since all his
circumstances seem to demand bolder explanations.
These were provided en masse in times that were less deferential to matters of
historical method and generally asserted an absolute independence from any geo-
graphical or temporal location. All of these seem to have taken a lead from Burney,
who had written in the 1770s that Scarlatti was truly inimitable . . . the only original
Genius, who had no Issue; and who formed no School.
127
Such declarations have
made of Scarlatti a force of nature, not a product of culture. It would be insufcient
simply to align them with older historical ways; in a similar manner to the panoramic
prose exemplied earlier, these declarations take their cue from the transcendental
physicality that so many have found in the sonatas.
The other way of removing Scarlatti from the clutter of contemporary association
was to assert his modernism. In one of its incarnations this is not a historically
problematic claim. Scarlatti can readily be situated in the context of the quarrel of the
ancients and moderns. For Burney again, Scarlatti was the rst composer to embody
the modern spirit, the rst who dared give way to fancy in his compositions.
Theodor Adornos denition of what modern meant for Bachs time involves similar
claims: it meant to throw off the burden of the res severa for the sake of gaudium. . . ,
in the name of communication, of consideration for the presumptive listener who,
with the decline of the old theological order, had also lost the belief that the formal
vocabulary associated with that order was binding. Wilfred Mellers dubbing of
Scarlatti as an eighteenth-century modernist is meant in the same spirit. The com-
poser, he tells us, wanted to do his own thing.
128
This use of colloquialism cleverly
reminds us of the perennial nature of this process. Claims for greater human relevance,
after all, accompany every artistic change, which is thus by denition modernist; this
even applies to new conservative strategies.
The other kind of modernism associated with the composer claims him as a
prophet or kindred spirit of the twentieth century, when the term also comes to
describe an artistic movement or period. Thus Max Seiffert in 1899 saw in Scarlatti
a prophet on the threshold of the modern epoch,
129
while Edward Dent in 1935
took him to be a sort of primer to modernism:
One result of that musical revolution which began with Debussy and is still in the process
of discovering the music of the future is that we have learned to appreciate and enjoy much
of the music which theorists and historians of the last century condemned as barbarous or
even licentious Mussorgsky, Berlioz, Gesualdo, Prince of Verona, P erotin and the early
127
Cited in Kate Eckersley, notes to recording (Loves Thrall: Late Cantatas, vol. 3) by Musica Fiammante
(Unicorn-Kanchana: DKP(CD)9124, 1992), 5.
128
Burney cited in Eckersley, Thrall Notes, 4; Adorno, Bach Defended from his Devotees, in Prisms, trans. Samuel
and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 141; Mellers, The Masks of Orpheus (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1987), 84.
129
Geschichte der Klaviermusik, third revised and expanded edn of C. F. Weitzmann, Geschichte des Klavierspiels and
der Klavierliteratur, I: Die

Altere Geschichte bis um 1750 (Leipzig: Breitkopf und H artel, 1899), 426.
Panorama 53
medieval composers . . . We need today, more than our grandparents did, width of musical
receptivity. We are faced everywhere with new types of music which are at rst difcult
to understand and enjoy. The study of such a man as Domenico Scarlatti will help us to
adapt our minds to new outlooks and to look forward to the future with sympathy and
enthusiasm.
130
If this associates Scarlatti with a humanistic breadth and tolerance, with openness
to the new, there was a very different modernist interpretation, the moderno mec-
canismo cited by Longo in the preface to his edition. This pregured Scarlattis
adoption by the Italian Futurist movement, which found in him just the image of
unyielding speed, elemental rhythmand il movimento aggressivo to serve their anti-
Romantic ends.
131
As noted at the outset, this image has persisted more than many
critics would like. Gino Roncaglia in fact subsequently dubbed Scarlatti a futurist,
although as much with respect to his supposed anticipations of the nineteenth as the
twentieth century. On the bicentenary of the composers death he wrote, Domenico
Scarlatti . . . is more alive than ever in the sensibilities and tastes of modern life.
132
Again it would be easy to emphasize only the historical moment of such a remark;
but it is worth more contemplation, since of all eighteenth-century masters Scarlatti
surely awakes the least nostalgic sentiment. (At least, if he is played with the vigour
which seems to be his due. The history of culinary interpretation of the sonatas
will be addressed in Chapter 6.) From this point of view at least, it is no accident
that Scarlatti also acted as a catalyst for neo-Classicism. Other modernist attributions
do not just invoke the spirit of the music; they suggest that its very materials and
techniques are comparable to those of the twentieth century.
133
It is worthy of note that similar sentiments whether they are simply determined
by this imagery or not have come from outside the musical world. In his historical
novel Baltasar and Blimunda, set in the reign of Jo ao V, the Portuguese writer Jose
Saramago includes the personage of Domenico Scarlatti. In tandem with the main
ofcial thread of the novel, the building by the King of a monastery at Mafra, the
characters of the title are involved with one Padre Bartolemeu in the construction
of a ying machine, known as the passarola, to which Scarlatti lends his enthusiastic
support. If Padre Bartolemeus Passarola were ever to y, I should dearly love to travel
in it and play my harpsichord up in the sky, urges our composer. Subsequently we
come across the description: Meanwhile the musician tranquilly composed his music
as if he were surrounded by the vast silence in outer space where he hoped to play
one day.
134
Thus are the tendencies to futurism and moderno meccanismo united.
Another recent manifestation of such modernity comes from the choreographer
130
Domenico Scarlatti: 16851935, The Monthly Musical Record 65/770 (1935), 177.
131
132
Domenico Scarlatti nel secondo centenario della sua morte, in Immagini esotiche della musica italiana, Accademia
Musicale Chigiana (Siena: Ticci, 1957), 67 and 69.
133
See Alain de Chambure, Les formes des sonates, in Domenico Scarlatti: 13 Recherches, 53, and John Trend,
Manuel de Falla and Spanish Music (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929), 149.
134
Saramago, Baltasar and Blimunda, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988), 161.
Siobhan Davies: Ive just started working with two pieces of music by Scarlatti . . .
and I nd this well of idiosyncratic, imaginative verve just racing through the music.
Scarlatti begins to seem remarkably contemporary. You feel the way he has extem-
porised and gone beyond the familiar.
135
STYLE SOUCES
There are many more writers, of course, who have dug for Scarlattis roots in the
past, in search of inuences on and sources for his style. Claims have been made on
behalf of such composers as Pergolesi, Corelli, Frescobaldi, Greco, Durante, Vivaldi,
Alessandro Scarlatti and Marcello and such other ingredients as the Neapolitan opera
sinfonia, the Italian operatic aria, the rened aristocratic sensibility of the Arcadians
and the polyphony of the sixteenth-century ecclesiastical masters.
136
Perhaps the
most intriguing suggestions do not involve direct instrumental precedents. If the
Italian operatic world is a reasonably well acknowledged part of any equation, less
commonly considered have been certain specic aspects of the Neapolitan scene.
One might recall Burneys story of the Neapolitan violinists who amazed Corelli
with their easy, brilliant sight-reading of passages he found very difcult;
137
note also
this description of seventeenth-century Neapolitan singing style fromJ.-J. Bouchard:
Neapolitan music is striking above all for its lively and bizarre movement. The manner of
singing . . . is brilliant and rather hard: in truth, not so much gay as odd and scatty, pleasing
only by virtue of its quick, dizzy and bizarre movement . . . ; it is highly extravagant in its
disregard for continuity and uniformity, running, then stopping suddenly, leaping from low
to high and high to low, projecting the full voice with great effort then suddenly containing
it again; and it is in precisely these alternations of high and low, of piano and forte, that one
recognizes Neapolitan singing.
138
These traits might remind us of many aspects of Scarlattis virtuosity and melodic
invention.
135
Siobhan Davies, A Week in the Arts, The Daily Telegraph, 20 May 1995, A5.
136
For these attributions see: Richard L. Crocker, A History of Musical Style (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 349,
Degrada, Lettere, 31011 (Pergolesi); David Fuller, The Dotted Style in Bach, Handel, and Scarlatti, in
Bach, Handel, Scarlatti: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Peter Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985),
117 (Corelli); Ife, Scarlatti, 9 (Frescobaldi); Friedrich Lippmann, Sulle composizioni per cembalo di Gaetano
Greco, in La musica a Napoli durante il Seicento, proceedings of conference held in Naples on 1114 April 1985,
ed. Domenico Antonio DAlessandro and Agostino Ziino (Rome: Edizioni Torre dOrfeo, 1987), 293 (Greco);
Degrada cited in Pagano, Vite, 183, and Pagano, Piena utilizzazione delle dieci dita: una singolare applicazione
della parabola dei talenti, in Domenico Scarlatti e il suo tempo, 857 (Durante); Michael Talbot, Modal Shifts in
the Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, in Domenico Scarlatti e il suo tempo, 334 (Vivaldi); Pestelli, Sonate, 6786,
and Pestelli, Bach, Handel, D. Scarlatti and the Toccata of the Late Baroque, in Tercentenary Essays, 27791
(Alessandro Scarlatti); William S. Newman, The Keyboard Sonatas of Benedetto Marcello, Acta Musicologica
29/1 (1957), 38 (Marcello); Rita Benton, Form in the Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, The Music Review 13/4
(1952), 270 (the opera sinfonia); Dent, A New Edition of Domenico Scarlatti, The Monthly Musical Record
36/430 (1906), 221 (Italian operatic arias); Degrada, Scarlatti[,] Domenico Giuseppe, in Enciclopedia della
Musica, vol. 5, ed. Claudio Sartori (Milan: Rizzoli Ricordi, 1972), 358 (the Arcadians); Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti,
115 (sixteenth-century polyphony).
137
Cited in Pagano, Dita, 845.
138
Cited in Pestelli, Sonate, 44.
Panorama 55
Another ingredient of this sort, as found in the list above, is the seemingly surpris-
ing one of sixteenth-century vocal polyphony. When mixed with the example of
certain Italian Baroque masters, this has often been said to provide the secure techni-
cal basis from which the sonatas could take ight. Kirkpatrick, for instance, held that
the example of Gasparini, Corelli and Pasquini gave [Scarlatti] the same power to
tame the luxuriance of his fancy; furthermore, the Spanish inuence was assimilated
and distilled with all the rigor that Scarlatti had learned from his sixteenth-century
ecclesiastical masters.
139
Whether many subsequent similar conclusions were inde-
pendently reached or simply form part of a characteristic Scarlattian litany is not
clear, but it is difcult to see the logical connection they all make.
140
Why did
other well-schooled composers, of Scarlattis or another generation, not attempt the
same originality or experiment? Such judgements remove the crucial element of
choice from the stylistic equation. The same is true with Bouchards description of
Neapolitan song; if this bears on Scarlattis style, it will be because the composer had
an ear open for it. Leonard B. Meyers words on the nature of inuence will prove
germane here. They are crucial to situating all aspects of Scarlattis style, above all
the vexed matter of Iberian inuence.
The nature of inuence, like that of creativity, has been misunderstood because emphasis
on the source of inuence has been so strong that the act of compositional choice has been
virtually ignored. And when the importance of the prior source is thus stressed, there is a
powerful tendency unwittingly to transformthat source into a cause, as though the composers
choice were somehow an effect, a necessary consequence of the mere existence of the prior
source . . . Other composers were in all probability exposed to the same piece of music or
external conditions without being inuenced, or they might have been affected in quite
different ways.
141
I NFLUENCE
Turning the telescope in the other direction, to try to determine the extent of
Scarlattis inuence on subsequent generations, is just as vexed a procedure.
142
Leaving aside the various possible interrelationships with the other most promi-
nent members of the Iberian Keyboard School, Seixas, Albero and Soler, and the
English cult of Scarlatti,
143
as well as the different inuence provided by the com-
posers modernism, we have great difculty in making strong connections. This
difculty once more serves the cause of Scarlattis originality and the cause of the
139
Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 42 and 115.
140
See for example Ife (the relative conservatism of his musical training in Italy is often the key to his originality)
or Andreani (the solidity of an acquired older technique, that of Palestrina and the motet style, can allow (and
explain) all the anomalies of the composers writing). Ife, Scarlatti, 19; Andreani, Sacr ee, 98.
141
Style and Music: Theory, History and Ideology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 143 and 144.
142
Malcolm Boyd devotes a whole chapter to this area; see Boyd, Master, 20523.
143
This is examined in Richard Newton, The English Cult of Domenico Scarlatti, Music and Letters 20/2 (1939),
13856. Linton E. Powell looks to possible inuence on a subsequent generation of Spanish keyboard composers
in The Sonatas of Manuel Blasco de Nebra and Joaqun Montero, The Music Review 41/3 (1980), 197206.
isolationists among the critical community, who maintain that the composer did
not inuence the wider course of music history.
144
Uppermost in the sights of the stylistic assimilationists,
145
on the other hand,
has been the edice of Viennese Classicism. This interest follows naturally from
the ideological drive of eighteenth-century music history as characterized earlier.
For a long time this was thought to be primarily a question of spiritual orienta-
tion, since there seemed no evidence of any widespread promulgation of Scarlattis
works in Vienna. In 1971, however, the discovery by Eva Badura-Skoda of twelve
collections of Scarlatti sonatas in manuscript, in the archives of the Gesellschaft
der Musikfreunde, led to some re-evaluation. There were of course close connec-
tions obtaining between the courts in Lisbon, Madrid and Vienna; Joseph II and
Mara B arbara were cousins.
146
Figures who may well have been involved in the
Viennese promulgation of Scarlattis keyboard music include lAugier, Metastasio
and Porpora.
147
Armer logistical link is Giuseppe Scarlatti, our composers nephew.
It is generally assumed that Giuseppe visited his uncle in Spain before 1755, possibly
as a result of the performance of his opera LImpostore in Barcelona in 1752, and thus
he may have been the agent of transmission for the sonatas to Vienna.
148
Before such revelations gave greater plausibility to any theories of inu-
ence, the spiritual orientation emphasized the possible Scarlattian inheritance of
Beethoven.
149
Most of the proposed links hinged around a certain physicality and
taste for reiteration, most easily localized in the scherzo spirit that Scarlatti was
thought to hand to the later composer.
150
Many of these references in the older
literature may of course tell us more about the status of Beethoven at that time
the composer as touchstone for any form of music appreciation than the dynamics
of inuence. The composer who succeeded Beethoven as axial point of the musical
universe, Mozart, is omnipresent in Pestellis book. The author detects in Scarlatti
144
David Yearsley, in a study of hand-crossing in the 1730s, is able to construct a case for Scarlattis inuence on what
seems to have been a Europe-wide phenomenon, even though in a strict positivistic sense the documentation
does not support this. His arguments suggest that a certain conception of evidence is what has constrained
investigations of the composers historical impact rather than lack of evidence as such. The Awkward Idiom:
Hand-Crossing and the European Keyboard Scene around 1730, Early Music 30/2 (2002), 22435.
145
I borrow the concept and terminology of isolationism vs. assimilationism from Daniel M. Grimley,
Peripheralism, Acculturation and Image in Fin-de-Si` ecle Scandinavian Music (M.Phil. dissertation, University
of Cambridge, 1995).
146
Noted in Badura-Skoda, Die Clavier-Musik in Wien zwischen 1750 und 1770, Studien zur Musikwissenschaft
35 (1984), 74.
147
These are examined in Federico Celestini, Die Scarlatti-Rezeption bei Haydn und die Entfaltung der
Klaviertechnik in dessen fr uhen Klaviersonaten, Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 47 (1999), 967.
148
See Seunghyun Choi, Newly Found Eighteenth[-]Century Manuscripts of Domenico Scarlattis Sonatas
and their Relationship to Other Eighteenth[-] and Early Nineteenth[-]Century Sources (Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Wisconsin, 1974), 10812.
149
See Philip Radcliffe, The Scarlattis: (ii): Domenico Scarlatti (16851757), in The Heritage of Music, ed. H. J. Foss
(London: Humphrey Milford/Oxford University Press, 1934), 29; Luciani, Sinfonismo, 44; Dent, Scarlatti,
176; Henry Cope Colles, Sonata, in Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians, fth edn, vol. 7, ed. Eric Blom
(London: Macmillan, 1954), 896.
150
See for example B ulow, Klavierst ucke, ii; Malipiero, Scarlatti, 480; Villanis, Italia, 170.
Panorama 57
the gleam of future Mozartian spirituality
151
and is able to point to a number of
linguistic similarities. Indeed, there are moments where the diction of the sonatas is
uncannily Mozartian which is just the traditionally unhistorical way of pointing to
Mozarts Italian operatic and galant heritage. For all that, the surfeit of comparisons
with Mozart does not get us very far, since there is a more rewarding comparison to
draw with Haydn, whose keyboard works are sometimes held to show a Scarlattian
inuence.
152
Quite often, though, the attribute Scarlattian amounts to no more
than a avour of rapidity and agility. Any links between Haydn and Scarlatti, as
already proposed in the rst chapter, are more a question of creative mentality than
coincidences of material or texture.
NATI ONALI SM I
An element hinted at in the stylistic classications reviewed above, and a major fac-
tor in Scarlatti reception, is nationalism. This operates at the two levels suggested
in Chapter 1. First there is the overarching characterization of Latinate art in op-
position to the Austro-German mainstream, one largely subscribed to by Latin and
non-Latin writers alike. The attributes evoked are highly essentialized and must be
so to full the cultural dynamic of the comparison. The mainstream represents the
universal set, within which the other culture must establish its particular niche.
Thus while Austro-German music may or may not demonstrate qualities such as
elegance, logic or precision, these qualities are inherent in all Latin art. The criti-
cal activity of those members of the other culture may take an isolationist stance,
emphasizing even more the attributes found in the subset, or it may attempt assimi-
lation, minimizing the differences, as found in some of the connections drawn with
Beethoven or Mozart. Even in the latter case, though, the category of Latinate art
is still epistemologically active; it forms the starting point for all activity, whether
positive or negative. Below are the qualities consistently attributed in the literature
to Scarlatti the Latin composer.
Instant Latinate Essentials Generator
1. elegance and grace
2. rationality and logic
3. Mediterranean, Classical
4. detachment, dryness, precision
151
152
Eric Blom claimed a strong inuence of Scarlattis spare keyboard style on that of Haydn and L aszl o Somfai
believes that such works as Haydns Sonatas Nos. 42 in G and 50 in D show a Scarlattian inuence. Blom,
Review of Il clavicembalista Domenico Scarlatti: il suo secolo la sua opera by Cesare Valabrega, Music and Letters
18/4 (1937), 422; Somfai, The Keyboard Sonatas of Joseph Haydn, 253. H. C. Robbins Landon suggests that the
young Haydn may have known some of the Scarlatti sonatas; see Haydn: Chronicle and Works, I: The Early Years
17321765 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 84. However, the most detailed investigation of this topic
is contained in Celestini, Haydn.
5. joy and happiness
6. clarity, limpidity, transparency, lucidity
7. brightness and brilliance
8. lightness.
153
These constructions have often been used as a stick with which to beat the music of
the mainstream. Such attacks, however, have been made from a position of weakness:
in most of the institutional contexts of Western art music, the Austro-German, having
built up a degree of immunity, retains its aura of being law-giving and universal.
Indeed, the attitudes of its adherents often show what Alan Sineld has called the
difculty of a dominant culture in realizing the relativity of its own perceptions.
154
Such an assumption of universality controls the following discussion by Charles
Rosen of the place of national styles in the Baroque: In the great German masters
Bach and Handel, the contrasts are of little importance, the styles fused. They pick
and choose where they please; it is perhaps one of their advantages over Rameau and
Domenico Scarlatti.
155
This asserts that Scarlattis style is less varied and less exible
than that of the German masters, a conclusion that is difcult to accept. It points
to another common corollary of the basic cultural dynamic, that Latin music is an
acquired taste, that it will only satisfy in certain temperamental circumstances. We
can see this, admittedly self-consciously introduced, in Eric Bloms review of Cesare
Valabregas book on Scarlatti:
The author is not often betrayed by a Latin hankering after ne phrases into such false
metaphors as lopulent[o] giardino scarlattiano. The cool and [sprightly] wit of Domenico
Scarlatti, generally heartless and material but always exquisite and cunningly put together,
gives one nothing like the pleasures of a luxuriant garden, but rather if one must be
metaphorical like those of a perfect assortment of tasty and varied hors doeuvre accompanied
by the nest and driest of sherries.
156
It was precisely in the eighteenth century that our mainstream began to relocate
from Italy to Germany: by 1800, at least in terms of keyboard writing, German
composers had at last achieved a self-condence that enabled them to assert the
superiority of their music.
157
The terms of reference for this struggle, as outlined
153
I do not give specic references, since all attributions may be found almost anywhere with great ease. The
inuence of the Italian novelist Gabriele DAnnunzio, who brought Scarlatti into the cultural mainstream with
his 1913 story La Leda senza cigno, is discussed by a number of writers. Pestelli observes that his story had the
important effect of xing the Scarlattian image once and for all as implying health, joy, strength, brightness,
latinit` a, mediterraneit` a. See Pestelli, Sonate, 31.
154
Alan Sineld, The Migrations of Modernism: Remaking English Studies in the Cold War, New Formations 2
(1987), 116.
155
Rosen, Classical, 46.
156
Blom, Valabrega Review, 423. This was echoed by Kathleen Dale in 1948, when she suggested the sonatas were
so exquisitely precise and concentrated that to hear a long succession of them would be like sitting down to
a banquet consisting exclusively of hors doeuvres. Domenico Scarlatti: His Unique Contribution to Keyboard
Literature, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 74 (1948), 40.
157
Daniel E. Freeman, Johann Christian Bach and the Early Classical Italian Masters, in Eighteenth-Century
Keyboard Music, ed. Robert L. Marshall (New York: Schirmer, 1994), 230.
Panorama 59
by Dennis Libby, have been echoed up to the present day: In the confrontation
between German and Italian music, for Italians the very term musica tedesca was
one of reproach, signifying an inability to write for the voice, and a fondness for
excessive complexity. The partisans of German music saw the Italian variety as
insipid, shallow, imsy in construction and shoddy in workmanship. Libby points
out that the judgment of history has come down overwhelmingly on the German
side, adding what has now become an article of faith, that music history has still not
completely freed itself from attitudes prevailing in its formative days as a scholarly
discipline in nineteenth-century Germany.
158
These attitudes are apparent not just
in historical method and assumptions, of course, but also in the way we characterize
musics technical and expressive properties. In other words, a neutral model of
scholarly procedure has been determined by modes of enquiry which are coloured
by the attributes of a specic musical culture. So, for example, we look to harmony
where the Austro-German tradition has its greatest apparent sophistication as the
engine of tonal music at the expense of rhythm and syntax.
159
Scarlatti has needed to be rescued from the associations of superciality and im-
siness outlined by Libby the negative image of the Latinate agenda above. So
Schenker assimilated him into a sturdier tradition by claiming Italy was a part of
him, yet . . . he was no part of Italy.
160
We noted in the rst chapter the attempts to
downplay the fact that most of the sonatas are fast. The emphasis on the composers
roots in the world of Renaissance polyphony the perceived mainstreamof its time
seems to answer the same need.
The most common response to such lurking danger, though, has been to withdraw,
in isolationist fashion, into strains of ineffability, of racial mysticism. The classic
strategy of the Latinate other has been to cultivate a sense of inaccessibility. A good
example may be found in the performing tradition of French music, warning off
those who do not possess the most esoteric good taste from attempting their Faur e
or Ravel. For Scarlatti the ineffability is to be found, paradoxically, in clarity. This
Latin clarity is the master category around which all the other traditional associations
cluster. It is invoked, one must emphasize, not just by Latin writers ghting their
corner but also by outside apologists. Alfred Brendel, for example, believes that
in performance of the sonatas Scarlatti needs very clear contours, Mediterranean
clarity.
161
Lang tells us that this spirited music offers the most welcome antidote
for everything that is heavy, dense and overloaded.
162
The wonderfully revealing
wording leaves us in no doubt of the national origins of the heaviness. At the same
158
Italy: Two Opera Centres, in Man and Music: The Classical Era, ed. Neal Zaslaw (London: Macmillan, 1989),
15.
159
This is discussed in detail in Chapter 4, pp. 1457.
160
Schenker, Meisterwerk, 154.
161
Brendel, Music Sounded Out: Essays, Lectures, Interviews, Afterthoughts (London: Robson, 1990), 239.
162
Lang, 300 Years, 589. A corollary of this is the frequent assertion of a superior Latin taste. Witness this statement
by Macario Santiago Kastner in a discussion of ornamentation: What has always existed, and continues to exist,
is good taste and bad taste. French, Italians, Spanish and Portuguese lean instinctively towards go ut s ur, more
than do Anglo-Saxons and Germans. The Interpretation of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Iberian Keyboard
Music, trans. Bernard Brauchli (Stuyvesant: Pendragon, 1987), 40.
time, of course, by accepting the basic terms of the debate, it reinforces the distinction
between what is solid and universal (the heavy main course of the Austro-German
mainstream) and what is an acquired taste (the antidote, the cleansing sorbet).
That this Latin clarity is not self-evident, but more of a defence mechanism, is
apparent from some of the unlikely contexts in which it is invoked. For example,
Verdi noted in 1864 of the Cats Fugue, K. 30, that with such a subject a German
would have created chaos, but an Italian made something as clear as the sun
surely an improbable verdict on the artistic end product.
163
Or Claude Rostand
tells us: Scarlattis rhythmic inventiveness is as inexhaustible as it is rened, yet it
never courts confusion but retains a naturalness and transparency that have never
been equalled.
164
How does this verdict, entirely typical, square with the zigzag of
Scarlattis actual syntax, the elisions, the vamps, the patterns that fail to complete
themselves? It is no accident that the vamp itself (briey dened in Chapter 1) had to
be conjured into existence by English-speaking scholars Kirkpatrick, who called
it the excursion, then Sheveloff, who gave it the name used here. Before that,
when even acknowledged as a vague quantity, it had no name and hence no real
existence. Instead, we have found Scarlatti being idealized as a counterweight to the
Austro-German mainstream.
Another example of Latin clarity at full power comes from John Trend:
The passion is there, but it is always expressed with concision and clarity; the music is dry
and sparkling, but it sparkles in the heat, not in the cold. Scarlattis music, indeed, glitters
like hot Spanish sunshine, illuminating impartially, but not unkindly, tragedy and comedy
alike. There can be tragedy leading to despair, as in the incomparable Sonata in B minor
[K. 87]; yet even the shadows are hard and clear, not only in outline, and the faintest approach
to sentimentality is interrupted by a dry cackle of laughter from across the way. Scarlatti is
the exact opposite of Schubert.
165
Even if the last sentence gives the game away, this is an imaginative realization of
the governing paradigm. It also points to an aspect of Scarlattis sonatas that can be
difcult for us to cope with, given our immersion in German musical manners. This
is a certain relentlessness, as identied by Cecil Gray (with the Latin sun now beating
down on Italy rather than Spain):
Indeed, his dazzling brilliance and grace seem at times almost excessive; one comes to long
for a sombre, shadowy passage as one longs for a cloud to come and veil, if only for a brief
moment, the hard, white glare of Italian summer skies.
166
If based on a limited, or selective, reading of the sonatas, and if issuing from our
governing paradigm, this nevertheless identies a strand that has nothing to do with
163
Cited in PaganoBoyd, Grove, 406.
164
Notes to recording by Anne Queff elec (Erato: 4509 96960 2, 1970), 10.
165
Trend, Falla, 149.
166
Gray, History, 140. Compare Pierre Hantas much more recent comment that a certain jarring harshness
accompanies the gaiety that has so often been emphasized in Scarlattis work. Notes to recording by Pierre
Hanta (Astr ee Nave: E 8836, 1992/2001), 11.
Panorama 61
relentless tempi it is just as evident in Andante as Allegro movements. We have
encountered it already in the machinations of K. 254. Grays charge of excess also
represents a welcome delivery from Latin sweetness and light.
NATI ONALI SM I I
The second level of nationalism involves the treatment of our composer within
individual countries. It has already been suggested that Scarlatti lacks the weight of
any single culture industry behind him. This was already apparent to Dent in his
commemorative article of 1935:
What a scandal it would cause to all good German patriots if anyone suggested that Domenico
Scarlattis two hundred and ftieth anniversary should be celebrated this year on equal terms
with those of Handel and Bach! And it is a curious thing that the wish to celebrate Domenico
Scarlatti should be put forward in England, of all countries, and not (as far as I am aware) in
Italy, the country of his birth, or in Spain, the country of his adoption. We English people
have in fact had a particular affection for Domenico, which has manifested itself continuously
from his own times down to the present day.
167
This mischief-making dates of course from a time of more belligerent nationalism
throughout Europe,
168
yet it is valuable for its reminder of the link between national
consciousness and institutional support an equation which could not be so baldly
articulated in the present day of pan-European harmony. Aside from a rare objecti-
cation of the assumed German musical standpoint, we are reminded of an apparent
lack of organized interest from the two countries that should have the greatest stake
in Scarlatti. A similar observation was passed by Max Seiffert in 1899, before the
advent of Longos edition: The duty to present to the musical world a complete
critical edition of Scarlattis epoch-making works should have been incumbent upon
Italy; but she has yet to remember this. The honour was left to foreign countries, . . .
although not through complete editions.
169
Seiffert was referring to the German
editions by Czerny and B ulow, so scoring a nationalistic point for the more univer-
sal culture. Indeed, Dents statement is not without its own element of nationalist
preening; it also ts into the wider patterns of English adoption of outside com-
posers and English love of eccentrics.
170
The two main players in this story, though, have still exhibited a form of Latin soli-
darity at this second level of nationalism. By and large, they have been happy to agree
that Scarlatti is Italian. Thus the Italian tradition tends to reclaim him for the coun-
try of origin; the Spanish has been difdent, and even defensive, about the adopted
167
Dent, Scarlatti, 176.
168
See Santi, Nazionalismi for an account of the Italian context for this what Santi calls the second nationalism.
169
Seiffert, Klaviermusik, 420.
170
This is the point Richard Newton seems to miss when he writes that Scarlattis special excellences are of so
un-English a character that we could hardly have been surprised if they had been but coldly appreciated here.
Newton, Cult, 138. I am not suggesting that any perceived eccentricity was sufcient cause for the cult in
its own right.
Spaniard in its midst. This has been fuelled by the too easy assumption, following
Kirkpatrick, that Scarlattis music represents the essence of the Spanish musical soul.
Just as nationalist rhetoric may have gone underground while its supporting oper-
ations remain in place as has been implied in the study of style classication so
it can be argued that these traditions have retained much of their force up to the
present.
The manner in which Scarlatti was nally embraced in twentieth-century Italy has
been the subject of two compelling discussions by Piero Santi and Giorgio Pestelli,
both of which concentrate specically on the nationalist (which also means Fascist)
element.
171
The composers reclamation also coincided, of course, with a modernist
disparagement of Romantic style, hence the particular signicance of our master
category of clarity. Not only was Scarlatti reclaimed for Italy, but so was supremacy
in instrumental music altogether, which had been usurped by Austro-German parti-
sans: this particular strain of initially anti-Germanic Mediterraneanism
172
was soon
muted by political events. In order to make Scarlatti specically Italian (again), writ-
ers had to differentiate within the elements of the Latinate paradigm. This meant not
only distancing the composer from any Spanish elements (Portugal was hardly men-
tioned), but, less obviously, distinguishing the Italian artistic spirit from the French.
Valabrega, for example, compared the terse, virile quality of Scarlattis energetic
musical laughter with the French harpsichord art of Couperin and Rameau, which
was dened by its sentimental and sensual languor and its adorable preciosity.
Furthermore, he likened the frenzy of embellishments in Couperin to a coral in-
vasion, so unlike the clean vitality of Scarlattis musical lines.
173
The healthy body
of Scarlattian art was also unaffected by any Spanish clothing: It doesnt matter if
[he] spent a number of years at court in Spain and Portugal; his creative spirit, even if
breathing the ckle vapours of the Spanish guitar, remains essentially Italian and free
from any deep ethnic inuence. For the author there were three Italian founders of
instrumental style and technique Corelli on the violin, Scarlatti on the harpsichord
and Clementi on the piano. Scarlattis pioneering approach was particularly to be
aligned with that of Clementi, another great Italian. . . of the next era
174
(reminding
one irresistibly of the wind-up number on Frank Zappas album Tinsel Town
Rebellion, containing the repeated acclamation Lets hear it, folks, for another great
Italian!
175
).
Healthy innocence was also the key for Gino Roncaglia, for whom Scarlatti was
one of the greatest interpreters of the elegance, urbanity, grace and serene spirituality
of the rst half of the eighteenth century in our Italy. His music conjured up clear
skies, sweet waters, the pure joy given by meadows in ower and the interior joy
171
Santi, Nazionalismi. Pestelli, Sonate, Introduction/II, Il mito di Domenico Scarlatti nella cultura italiana del
900, 2556.
172
173
Valabrega, Clavicembalista, 978 and 99.
174
175
Frank Zappa, Tinsel Town Rebellion (Ryko: RCD 10532, 1981/1995), at the end of Peaches III.
Panorama 63
born of harmony of spirit with the natural surroundings.
176
Remarkably similar
imagery is found in the account by Luigi Villanis, from three decades earlier, in
1901:
The comic seems to be the prerogative of the Italians, just as wit is characteristic of the French
and depth of philosophical thought distinguishes the German races. So in the laughter of
Neapolitan opera buffa there sparkles some of that joyful sun that plays on the waters; it gives
us a breath of that fragrance given off by gardens in ower; it lls us for a moment with that
child-like gaiety that is found in the games of young boys, half-naked, running on the beach.
When the French muse laughs, there is an undercurrent of malice; with Germans a gentle
melancholy of spirit is revealed . . . With us music laughs happily and then calms down;
Couperin laughs and dances in a thousand mincing affectations, while C. P. E. Bach simply
smiles.
177
The amusing anticipation here of one of the central images of Thomas Manns Death
in Venice is not entirely incidental; the journey of Gustav von Aschenbach to Venice
is, after all, in search of precisely the restorative qualities lauded by Villanis and so
enshrined in European cultural lore.
This exaltation of clear healthy Italian simplicity, together with a tendency to
ignore alien elements, is also found in a musical tribute, Alfredo Casellas Scarlat-
tiana of 1926. This divertimento on music by Domenico Scarlatti for piano and
small orchestra works in references to many sonatas in a collage-like structure.
178
Gianfranco Vinays description of the fourth of the ve movements (Pastorale) as a
celebration of the Italian character of Scarlattis art, of the deep ties between certain
Scarlattian melodic inections and Italian popular song,
179
misses the point that
the whole piece does this cultural work. It is Italianized and picturesque, its syntax
tting in neatly with the literary tradition of the panorama. There is scarcely a hint
of any sonata that might have been thought of as overtly Spanish in avour. The
only real candidate, K. 450, which Clark has recently classied as a tango gitano,
180
would presumably have been taken by Casella to be Italianate. This is a kind of ethnic
cleansing.
This appropriation of Scarlatti has left its traces, if, as suggested earlier, in more
covert form. The continuing status of the Longo edition is one indicator. Roman
Vlad, writing in 1985, admits to having caused a scandal by saying that the Longo
edition still infests Italian conservatories.
181
In the Siena conference of the same
176
Roncaglia, Centenario, 64.
177
Villanis, Italia, 170.
178
Malcolm Boyd has given a list of references to sonatas in Boyd, Master, 2334. To this list, which the author
acknowledges is incomplete, I would suggest the following additions, in order of the ve movements: I the
countersubject of K. 41 (which Gianfranco Vinay misidenties as a distortion of K. 257; Le sonate di Domenico
Scarlatti nellelaborazione creativa dei compositori italiani del Novecento, in Domenico Scarlatti e il suo tempo,
128), K. 64; II K. 259, 162; III K. 450, 64; IV K. 446, plus something akin to the vamp of K. 439; V
K. 96. Some of these derivations are also spotted in Vinay, Novecento.
179
Vinay, Novecento, 136.
180
La port ee de linuence andalouse chez Scarlatti, in Domenico Scarlatti: 13 Recherches, 667.
181
Vlad, Storia, 22.
year, the sonatas were still referred to by Italian scholars according to Longo numbers,
and music examples were drawn from the Longo edition. Pestelli, having preferred
Longo to Kirkpatrick numbers for his 1967 book, had by 1989, in a review of two
new volumes, jumped straight to the Fadini numbering, Kirkpatricks system being
given rst in parentheses, then not at all. If there were simple logistical reasons for
such preferences, the cultural status of Longo having precluded its disappearance
from general circulation, a more secure piece of evidence might be the fact that no
Italian translation of Kirkpatricks fundamental book appeared until 1984.
There are, however, more ne-grained instances of appropriation. The emphasis
by Italian scholars on Scarlattis strong roots in the past, if not simply reecting a more
intimate knowledge of the repertory, may (as already proposed) reect this tendency.
After all, Casella in Scarlattiana chose to incorporate several of the plainly archaic trio
sonatas (K. 81, 89, 90), so remote fromany notions of Scarlattian style, in preference
to works that might have disturbed his stylistic picture.
182
Pestellis assertion of the
general conservatism of [Scarlattis] work can be understood in this way too.
183
Nevertheless, Pestellis 1967 book could hardly be accused of ignoring the Iberian
avours or failing to deal with their implications, since they feature fully in the
discussion; but at a structural level his classication of the sonatas does just that. Many
of the most apparently Spanish or gesturally extreme works are made coeval with
the Essercizi, for instance, placed in the categories of toccata and study, effectively
deecting attention from their national allegiance or the creative temperament
on display. The structuring he adopts favours the sonatas displaying clear Italianate
roots or moderation and polish in their approach. How, for instance, can K. 120
simply be buried amongst the studies, or K. 99 and 114 among the toccatas?
Such a reception history, perhaps with an element of protesting too much about
the purely Italian, does not contradict the underlying assertion of the composers
statelessness. The scale of the operation in Italy has after all not been that great
as we have seen in other contexts, the non-activity is more signicant than the
activity. Indeed, in 1971 Kirkpatrick wrote, perhaps mainly as a polemic against
the continuing use of Longo: It is [in Italy] that the conception of Scarlatti as no
better than any of his mediocre contemporaries and that the inveterate scrambling of
chronology have retained an almost unshakable foothold.
184
In the case of Spanish
reception, however, the sense of absence is far more pronounced. Very little indeed
has been published on Scarlatti until the relatively recent past. There are, it must
be said, some simple logistical rationales for this state of affairs. It is only from the
1980s onward that musicology has become institutionalized in Spain meaning the
182
There can be no doubt that Casella was aware of the generic status of these works he published two of them
in an arrangement for violin and keyboard in 1941, discussing their status in his Preface. See Rodolfo Bonucci,
Le sonate per violino e cembalo di Domenico Scarlatti, Studi musicali 11/2 (1982), 249. Bonucci believes the
themes taken from the sonatas for Scarlattiana were chosen by Casella for their intrinsic fascination; Bonucci,
Violino, 258.
183
184
Scarlatti Revisited in Parma and Venice, Notes: The Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association 28/1
(1971), 7.
Panorama 65
establishment of separate music departments within universities with their teaching
staffs, students, training programmes and the sense of professional identity that arises
from that. Prior to this Spanish music researchers tended to receive an ecclesiastical
training. Without a musicological industry, the mass production of evidence so
typical of other countries had barely begun, and therefore many resources such as
libraries and archives have remained untapped. As Juan Jos e Carreras relates, it is
not only the heritage contained in these archives which remains unknown, but the
very existence of the archives themselves. This is a situation which is particularly
serious in the case of private or semi-private archives, many of which are in danger of
getting irretrievably lost. There is a long way to go, therefore, before the catalogues
of the Spanish musical archives can be said to be complete. These difculties of
training and resources have led to what the author characterizes as the problem of
individual, isolated and uncoordinated research in Spain.
185
If this sounds like the
summation of Scarlatti research given earlier, largely for different historical reasons,
then if one combines the two sets of circumstances, it would appear that Scarlatti
has been doubly affected!
For Scarlatti, however, the recent institutionalization of musicology in Spain seems
to have borne some fruit, in the form of documentary and manuscript discoveries
which will be described further on. Boyd has framed the prior lack of material very
well:
It is a strange fact, quite as remarkable as the complete disappearance of the autographs of
Scarlattis keyboard music, that when Kirkpatrick (1953) and Sheveloff (1970) compiled their
exhaustive lists of Scarlatti sources neither writer was able to cite a single manuscript copy of
a sonata in any Spanish library or archive. This is a situation no less singular than would have
been the complete disappearance from England of all Handels oratorios, or the loss of all
trace in Germany of Bachs church cantatas, and it cannot be explained simply as the result
of negligence on the part of librarians, archivists and scholars.
186
That neglect may play a part in the situation, though, is implicit in Boyds wording,
and this is where nationalistic concerns blend into institutional rationales. At the
beginnings of Spanish musicology in the mid-nineteenth century, the focus of most
scholars was on the so-called Golden Age of Spanish music, the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. The eighteenth century in Spain had witnessed great foreign,
and above all Italian, inuence. (There was a comparable Italianization of Portuguese
musical life. This was made possible by the end of the war with Spain in 1713 and
the discovery of gold in Brazil, allowing Jo ao V to buy in great numbers of Italian
musicians.
187
) Hence scholarly activity focused on those periods and repertories that
had suffered less contamination by alien inuence and were thus regarded as having
185
Musicology in Spain (19801989), Acta Musicologica 62/23 (1990), 266 and 287.
186
Boyd, Master, 153.
187
See Manuel Carlos de Brito, Scarlatti e la musica alla corte di Giovanni V di Portogallo, in Domenico Scarlatti
e il suo tempo, 69 and 72.
been more intrinsically Spanish.
188
In this currency, Scarlatti, an Italian working in
eighteenth-century Spain, was not going to fetch a high price.
This was not just retrospective resentment, however; it may have been an active
force at the time, particularly in the eld of opera. Italian opera in Madrid under
the Bourbons seems to have been resented by both middle-class audiences and
Spanish singers, composers and players.
189
The focus of this enormously success-
ful venture, Farinelli, even witnessed the circulation of a pamphlet against him in
1753.
190
Recent revisionist views suggest, however, that the Italian invasion may
have been somewhat overplayed by historians. Carreras believes that the whole
process of Italianization was by no means a struggle between Italians and Spaniards,
but a process undertaken by the Spanish composers themselves.
191
One indigenous
form, however, did appear as a minor challenge to the dominance of opera. The
tonadilla esc enica, normally performed between the acts of a play, appeared on the
Madrid stage in the middle of the century, lasting until about 1800. It was the Span-
ish equivalent of the intermezzo, largely comic and unpretentious. One of the most
common character types was the majo, who would have fun at the expense of Italian
fops and French dandies; he was a theatrical representation of Spanish resentment
towards foreign cultural invaders.
192
For the variety of reasons mentioned so far, it has been very rare for Spanish
musicologists to work on non-Spanish themes. This in itself is telling in the context
of Scarlatti research, as is the blunt assessment of Xo an M. Carreira that xenophobia
and patriotism, even short-sighted parochialism, still inform not a little Spanish and
Portuguese musicology.
193
We need to recall in connection with this the defensive
attitude towards the alleged Spanishness of the Scarlatti sonatas; many Spanish musi-
cologists appear to feel that the issue has been prejudged, without their having been
consulted, as it were. Also at stake is the wider assertion of Scarlattis inuence on
Iberian keyboard music, which has also been treated with scepticism. One of the
strategies in response has been to retreat into notions of an ineffable Spanishness,
one that is inaccessible to outsiders the same cultural dynamic that has shaped the
performance tradition of French music. This response is more specically culturally
188
See for example

Alvaro Jos e Torrente, The Sacred Villancico in Early Eighteenth-Century Spain: The Reper-
tory of Salamanca Cathedral (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1997), ixx, and also Torrente, A
Critical Approach to the Musical Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Spanish Music (Cambridge: unpub-
lished, 1995), especially 118.
189
This view is represented in Mary Neal Hamilton, Music in Eighteenth[-]Century Spain (New York: Da Capo
Press, 1971; reprint of rst edn [Urbana, Illinois, 1937]), 100.
190
See Javier Herrero, Los orgenes del pensamiento reaccionario espa nol (Madrid: Editorial Cuadernos para el Di alogo,
1971), 63.
191
See Torrente, Villancico, 6n., and Carreras, FromLiteres to Nebra: Spanish Dramatic Music between Tradition
and Modernity, in BoydCarreras, Spain, 716. In the context of the villancico, Torrente also describes Dur on,
Literes and Torres as protagonists in the introduction of Italian operatic conventions; Italianate Sections in the
Villancicos of the Royal Chapel, 170040, in Boyd-Carreras, Spain, 79.
192
Craig H. Russell, Spain in the Enlightenment, in Man and Music: The Classical Era, ed. Neal Zaslaw (London:
Macmillan, 1989), 359.
193
Opera and Ballet in Public Theatres of the Iberian Peninsula, in BoydCarreras, Spain, 28.
Panorama 67
determined too, since it invests in the allure of a dark, mysterious Spain, the most
commonplace of outside images (the Black Legend). In this manner the members
of a marginalized culture collude in its essentialization.
194
The grandest example of these tendencies may be found in Macario Santiago
Kastners 1989 article, Repensando Scarlatti, a sustained exercise in scepticismabout
all the received wisdom on the composer. He refutes the image of technical novelty
and with it Scarlattis assumed leadership of a new keyboard school, pointing to the
example of K. 61, which shows many gurations deriving from the toccatas of [his
father] Alessandro.
195
Scarlattis possible inuence on the native Iberians Soler, Seixas
and Albero is regarded as insignicant. More important for our current purposes,
however, are Kastners intimations about the true essentials of Iberian musical feeling.
Thus he claims of Scarlatti: When the southern Italian appears to be moved or ery,
he does it in order to affect a pose, but this is not as convincing as Iberian depth or
tragic sentiment.
196
We are also told that the harmonic and intervallic turns and the
vernacular rhythms found in Scarlatti that are supposed to be so denitively Spanish
are also found in the works of Vicente Rodrguez (16901760), Seixas, Soler, Albero
and others, to such an extent that it seems more prudent to ignore folklore as a
particular explanation for Scarlattian style. Such musical colours, Kastner points out,
had in any case spread to Sicily, Naples (where Scarlatti, grewup, of course), Valencia,
Portugal and so forth. The real Spanish musical language is not simply an inorganic
mix with Arab, Sephardic and gypsy additions it has been judged as such by
musicologists . . . who have little familiarity with what is genuinely Iberian.
197
A more temperate expression of this cultural dynamic may be found in, for exam-
ple, the recent comparative study by

Agueda Pedrero-Encabo of Scarlattis Essercizi,
published in 1739, and the thirty sonatas of Rodrguez, which were written well
before the date that appears on the manuscript, 1744. The aim of the study is to
settle the question of whether Scarlatti inuenced the Spaniard. This is intended in
the factual sense of establishing prior claims to certain progressive features such
as formal shaping rather than simply for reasons of stylistic interest. Perhaps not
194
James Parakilas has read such withdrawal differently, in his account of nineteenth-century exotic constructions
of Spain: It seems to be a danger of exoticism that those who are its objects, when they conclude that they
cannot overcome their exotic relationship to the centers of power, begin to consider that they might be better
off with no relationship at all. How Spain Got a Soul, in The Exotic in Western Music, ed. Jonathan Bellman
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 193. For all that the authors focus lies elsewhere, it seems
remarkable that Scarlatti receives not even a glancing mention as a possible model for nineteenth-century exotic
representations of Spain. This surely reveals some of the colonializing assumptions that are implicitly being
criticized, the historical and geographical marginality of Scarlatti placing him beyond consideration or even
conscious thought.
195
Kastner, Repensando, 152 and 151. No one would deny the older heritage of K. 61, but this is an anomalous
sonata in any case through its unique use of variation form; what about the hundreds of sonatas for which
Kastners statement would appear not to hold?
196
Kastner, Repensando, 137.
197
Kastner, Repensando, 154. A different sort of scepticism was evident in Roberto Gerhards 1954 BBC radio
talks, The Heritage of Spain. Gerhard did not deny the Spanishness of Scarlatti, but felt it was a avour, a
peculiar accent rather than consisting of direct incorporation of Spanish/amenco material. The scripts of the
talks can be found as Gerhard.11.18 (2.12) in the manuscripts room of the Cambridge University Library.
surprisingly, the writer lays more weight on the differences of the respective com-
posers than on any similarities, some of which are very striking indeed. One of the
strongest distinctions between the composers, according to the author, is found in
Scarlattis harmonic usage, illustrated by the colourful melodic turns of K. 7 and
the rich chords of K. 6;
198
but not a hint of possible Iberian inspiration is given, a
topic that is studiously avoided in this article.
I do not disagree in principle with the scepticism found explicitly in Kastners
review and implicitly in Pedrero-Encabos account of inuence. Eternal vigilance
is after all an indispensable quality for all Scarlattian research in particular. When
it comes to the vexed question of Iberian inuence, though, there has been an
obvious and apparently logical way forward an ethnomusicological investigation.
Boyd, supported by Clark, has called for the services of an ethnomusicologist familiar
also with the art music of eighteenth-century Spain and Portugal.
199
Whether we
really need this providential gure is beside the point for now. If we accept this
as an urgent requirement, then there would be an obvious country of origin for
such an individual. But no one appears to have stepped forward. Once again in
the eld of Scarlatti reception, what has not happened is at least as signicant as
what has.
Of course there are other ethnic elements that need investigation: the role of
Portuguese and Neapolitan folk music has not been addressed either. When set
against the tone of many of the views expressed above, van der Meers description
of the composer as an Italian-Portuguese-Spanish genius represents a rare bit of
diplomacy.
200
Food for future thought is provided by the comments of Burnett James
on the attitude to Scarlatti of Manuel de Falla, indisputably a Spanish composer. They
remind us that the Spanishness or otherwise of Scarlattis keyboard sonatas is not just
a question of national essences, but has a historical dimension too:
Ironic at rst sight is the way in which the leading composers of the [Spanish] renaissance
over a century later, notably Falla himself, who were in the habit of denouncing the Italian
inuence on Spanish music and its debilitating effects on the native product, themselves
looked to Scarlatti as mentor and exemplar.
201
EVI DENCE OLD AND NEW
It is probably no coincidence that, with the changing circumstances of musicological
activity in Spain, a number of Scarlattian discoveries have been made there in recent
times. Yet signicant new information has also emanated from England, Italy and
Portugal in this period, amounting to an extraordinary late (twentieth-century)
harvest of which Kirkpatrick would have approved. Whether benetting from any
198
Los 30 Essercizi de Domenico Scarlatti y las 30 Tocatas de Vicente Rodrguez: paralelismos y divergencias,
Revista de musicologa 20/1 (1997), 388.
199
Boyd, Master, 222; Clark, Boyd Review, 209.
200
Van der Meer, Keyboard, 157. Another diplomatic summation may be found in IfeTruby, Spanish, 6.
201
Manuel de Falla and the Spanish Musical Renaissance (London: Gollancz, 1979), 35.
Panorama 69
impetus provided by the tercentenary in 1985 or owing more to sheer chance, such
discoveries at least offer a few more ecks for our blank canvas, since they have
answered few questions and solved few mysteries. Even if they have only caused
one to pose the same questions again, one should bear in mind that what might be
crumbs with other composers make meals for the Scarlatti scholar.
Certainly one of the most important nds is the correspondence of Monsignore
Vicente Bicchi, papal nuncio in Lisbon from 1710 to 1728. Just when Scarlatti did
arrive in Portugal has long been a matter for speculation. We learn from Bicchi,
though, that Scarlatti entered Lisbon to begin his posts as Master of the Royal
Chapel and keyboard teacher to the Royal Family on 29 November 1719.
202
This
would appear to rule out Roberto Paganos attractive theory that Scarlatti resided in
Palermo from April 1720 to December 1722.
203
We also learn of the performance
of far more serenatas and cantatas than so far known, and astonishingly that the
composer made his court debut as a singer and appears to have sung on a number
of occasions. (Scarlattis vocal abilities have been conrmed by the still more recent
discovery that he sang and played the harpsichord for James III, the Old Pretender,
in June 1717 in Rome.
204
) We also nd out somewhat more about several major
breaks from the composers Lisbon routine during the 1720s. The last of these has
turned out to be longer than previously thought from January 1727 until probably
December 1729.
205
According to the nuncios letter, Scarlatti went to Rome to
recover his health, while we know that he married his rst wife in Rome in May
1728. Here is an example of more meaning less, since speculation may now begin
concerning the composers other activities during this period of almost three years.
It would now appear that, contrary to popular legend, Scarlatti was not present at
the exchange of princesses in January 1729, when Mara B arbara was married to
Prince Fernando of Spain.
This information is contained in the preface to the facsimile edition of the Libro di
tocate, briey mentioned before. This copy of sixty-one Scarlatti sonatas was acquired
by the Portuguese Institute of Cultural Heritage in 1982; it can, Gerhard Doderer
believes, be dated to the early 1750s. Many of the ramications of this copy will
be explored in connection with subsequent commentary on individual sonatas. The
hottest news, though, is the appearance of a new Sonata in A major, found only in
this source, and the presence in the collection of K. 145. The latter sonata, known
202
Gerhard Doderer, New Aspects Concerning the Stay of Domenico Scarlatti at the Court of King John V
(17191727), Preface to facsimile edn, Libro di tocate per cembalo: Domenico Scarlatti (Lisbon: Instituto Nacional
de Investigac ao Cientca, 1991), 910. See also Aurora Scotti, LAccademia degli Arcadi in Roma e i suoi
rapporti con la cultura portoghese nel primo ventennio del 1700, Bracara Augusta 27 (1973), 11530. See
Appendix, Archivio Segreto Vaticano Segretaria di stato, Nunziatura di Lisbona, vol. 75 (Portogallo). In
between entries, Scotti paraphrases Scarlatti arrives in Lisbon on 20 January 1720. Quite how one squares this
with Doderers information is mysterious, as is the fact that information contained in an article of 1973 should
have remained unknown for so long. It would have saved Pagano a lot of work.
203
Pagano, Vite, 35462.
204
See Edward Corp, Music at the Stuart Court at Urbino, 171718, Music and Letters 81/3 (2000), 35163.
205
Doderer, Libro, 11.
only from a copy in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, was placed by Sheveloff
in his doubtful category,
206
but its authenticity now seems conrmed. (The same
may also hold therefore for its companion, K. 146.) The Sonata in A major has been
accepted without reservation by Boyd and van der Meer.
207
Taking its authorship for
present purposes as read, its very existence raises doubts about the comprehensiveness
of the Parma and Venice sets. The general assumption has been that these copies
represented a sort of Gesamtausgabe, and that if any other sonatas were to turn up,
they would be very early ones that were not deemed worthy of inclusion even in the
earliest Venice manuscript of 1742. This would not appear to be the case with the A
major Sonata. Thus one of the commonly agreed near certainties may be crumbling.
Amidst the numerous Spanish copies of Scarlatti sonatas that have nally emerged
in the recent past (such as the copies of 189 works at Zaragoza
208
), a number of
new sonatas have been found attributed to Scarlatti. Some, such as the two sonatas
held at the Real Conservatorio Superior de M usica in Madrid, the four found in
Montserrat and the Sonata published by Rosario

Alvarez,
209
seem quite unlikely.
Some of the other unknown pieces attributed to Scarlatti seem more promising
the three sonatas found in the cathedral of Valladolid, and especially the two from
the Biblioteca Nacional de Catalunya in Barcelona.
210
Perhaps the most unexpected of Scarlattis three countries for new discoveries
would be Italy, yet we have already given an account of the importance of the
Farinelli inventory, with its suggestions of a richer Spanish production of vocal
music than might have been supposed and the revelations of its list of keyboards.
211
In any case, the whole document suggests that any further searching for new music
might want to concentrate on Italy as well as the Iberian peninsula. Indeed, Pestelli
discovered in the late 1980s four (or six) Scarlatti sonatas in an unknown manuscript
at the University of Turin. This is a rare nd, since there are few copies of sonatas in
Italy dating from the rst half of the eighteenth century. Furthermore, the sonatas,
206
Sheveloff, Frustrations I, 41819. The sonata is found in the Fitzwilliam Museum at MU MUS 148 (formerly
32 F 13).
207
Boyd, notes to recording by Mayako Son e (Erato: 4509 94806 2, 1994), 6; van der Meer, Keyboard, 137.
208
Reported in Jos e V. Gonzalez Vall e, Fondos de m usica de tecla de Domenico Scarlatti conservados en el archivo
capitular de Zaragoza, Anuario musical 45 (1990), 10316. Note the fact that the copy of K. 206 carries the
date 1752. If this reects the date of copying rather than reproducing what was found on the source, then this
copy was possibly made before that which appears in Venice. K. 206 can be found as the rst sonata of P V,
dated 1752, and the rst sonata of V III, dated 1753.
209
The Madrid sonatas are published as Appendix III in Boyd, Master, 24052; Bengt Johnsson (ed.), Montserrat
Sonatas Nos. 14, in Domenico Scarlatti: Ausgew ahlte Klaviersonaten, vol. 1, 8190; Rosario

Alvarez, Una nueva
sonata atribuida a Domenico Scarlatti, Revista de musicologa 11/3 (1988), 88393.
210
Antonio Baciero (ed.), Valladolid Sonatas Nos. 13, in Nueva biblioteca espa nola de m usica de teclado, vol. 3
(Madrid: Union Musical Espa nola, 1978), 3750, and Mara A. Ester-Sala, Dos sonatas de Domenico Scarlatti:
un tema abierto, Revista de musicologa 12/2 (1989), 58995 (sonatas reproduced in facsimile on 5914).
211
In addition, under the category of Libri Differenti we nd between items 15 and 16, entitled Sonata (/Sonate)
per clavicembalo di Scarlati [sic], mention of a Spiegazione della Musica. What can this mean? The explanation
of (the) music seems to be of a piece with the sonata of item 15; is this Scarlattis explanation, of this particular
sonata, of music in general? It would certainly be nice to know. For further discussion of the inventory, see van
der Meer, Keyboard, 147. Once again here, more information brings more uncertainty.
Panorama 71
although copied in a different hand, form part of a manuscript containing toccatas
by Alessandro Scarlatti and Handel.
The Turin sonatas comprise, in three pairs: K. 76 and K. 71; K. 63 and a Minuet
in G major; K. 9 and a Minuet in D minor. The rst three of these sonatas might
well have emanated from an Italian environment, while the copy of K. 9 one of the
best-known Scarlatti sonatas in the nineteenth century, which earnt it the nickname
of Pastorale diverges markedly from the reading found in the Essercizi. Pestelli
notes that, without any elements to help us with the dating, this manuscript could
be later than the 1739 edition of K. 130, but it cannot derive from it because of the
divergences. However, he avers that the hypothesis that [these sonatas] returned to
Italy from Portuguese or Spanish sources, long after the departure of the composer
for these countries, seems among the least probable.
212
It is quite conceivable, of
course, that Scarlatti took them back to Italy himself, especially since we have to nd
something for him to have done during the now yawning gap of 17279. On the
other hand, the two new Minuets (the fact of whose pairing with established sonatas
speaks well for their status) also have strong Italian traits.
213
One should bear in mind
too Graham Ponts theory that K. 63 represents a written record of Scarlattis entry
in the famous (but, of course, unsubstantiated) keyboard contest with Handel.
214
If we compare the Turin version of K. 9 with the one published as part of the
Essercizi, one detail stands out above all the closing bar. This consists of a D
minor arpeggio falling from d
2
to D in even triplet quavers from the rst to the
fourth beat, whereas the Essercizi version features a held unison. Scarlatti virtually
never has this kind of arpeggiated close, so common in the works of contemporary
keyboard composers, which seems to exist primarily to ll in the bar. A good
example may be found in the nal bars of the Giustini movement given as Ex. 3.2a
in the following chapter. (Where it does exist, as in the nal ourishes of K. 115 or
K. 136, it is normally a means of dispelling the tension arising from prior cadential
reiteration, and is thus rhythmically integral.) It tends to have an unwinding effect,
both texturally and affectively, that the composer obviously went out of his way
to avoid. Instead we are more likely to nd unisons, which often have a relatively
taut and tense effect compared to the satisfaction provided by a full harmony, either
chordal or arpeggiated. Such a feature, both in its positive manifestation and in its
negation of a generic commonplace, exemplies Scarlattis critical distance from
even the most ingrained of habits, the least chosen parts of a piece.
The discovery of this version of K. 9 might indicate, as many have suggested, that
all the Essercizi were revised or polished-up versions of considerably earlier work as
212
Una nuova fonte manoscritta per Alessandro e Domenico Scarlatti, Rivista italiana di musicologia 25/1 (1990),
115 and 117.
213
Pestelli compares that in G major with K. 80 and allies the D minor Minuet with that chromatic caprice . . .
well known in the Neapolitan environment and cultivated by Scarlatti himself in the Essercizi, as in K. 3 and
K. 30. Pestelli, Fonte, 105.
214
See Handel versus Domenico Scarlatti: Music of an Historic Encounter, G ottinger H andel-Beitr age 4 (1991),
23247, especially 2434.
the composers dedication to Jo ao V might also imply.
215
But we are straying onto
dangerous territory. Any judgement that the Turin reading is earlier and hence by
implication less mature, less Scarlattian is conditioned by unproblematic notions
of style, progress and chronology that have already been shown to have undermined
discourse about both our composer and the music of his century.
Also of rst importance has been the publication in 1985 of an edition by
Francesco Degrada of the comic intermezzo La Dirindina. The rst performance,
scheduled in Rome in 1715, was prohibited at the last moment. It would appear that
the libretto, by the notorious Girolamo Gigli, was found too offensive, for the public
good and the good of the singers it satirized so unkindly.
216
The scandal caused led
to considerable demand for copies of the libretto, which Gigli had printed outside
Rome so as to get around the prohibition order. Several aspects of the affair suggest
that Scarlattis association with such a libretto was not incidental. The use of the
word scarlatti (scarlet silks) in the libretto is, as Annabel McLauchlan has pointed
out, noteworthy since it indicates a collaboration between Gigli and Scarlatti at the
stage of the works construction, and thus implicates both men more seriously in
an organized satirical attack.
217
In addition, there is the unusual note found on the
nal page of the libretto: The excellent music of this farce is by Signor Domenico
Scarlatti, who will be pleased to oblige everyone. Evidently, Scarlatti too wished to
prot by the scandal and sell some copies of the score.
218
The work seems nally
to have been performed in Rome in 1729; we may now suggest that Scarlatti was
himself present on this occasion.
Malcolm Boyd observes of La Dirindina that it is surprising to observe Scarlatti,
whose whole life was spent in the service of monarchs, viceroys and princes, aligning
himself with one of most subversive writers of the time in a work explicitly designed
to call into question the values of an art form which, more than any other, served to
atter and support the established order.
219
Indeed it would appear surprising, but
then it is precisely such values that seem to emerge from the composers keyboard
music.
215
These are Compositions born under your Majestys Auspices: Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 102. Sutherland, for ex-
ample, believes the dedication letter suggests that the works originated as teaching pieces in Lisbon; Sutherland,
Piano, 246. We have already noted van der Meers organological reasons for believing that they were undoubt-
edly composed at a considerably earlier date; van der Meer, Keyboard, 141. On the other hand, Kirkpatrick
wonders whether this phrase in the dedication means that Scarlatti, by virtue of continuing in Spain to teach
Mara B arbara, still considered himself under the Auspices of the King of Portugal and so the sonatas might
still have been written in Spain; Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 137. Heimes believes it extremely unlikely that the
Essercizi were written in Portugal before 1729, that Scarlatti would have selected ten-year-old pieces when he
wanted to put his best foot forward, so to speak, on the occasion of receiving his knighthood; Heimes, Seixas,
467.
216
Pagano believes that the wrath of the censor was directed more at Gigli himself than at the matter and manner
of the libretto. The subject of the libretto was a usual satire for the time. Pagano, Vite, 336.
217
An Examination of Progressive Style in Domenico Scarlattis La Dirindina (M.Phil. dissertation, University
of Cambridge, 1996), 12.
218
See the commentary in Degrada, Preface to edition of La Dirindina (Milan: Ricordi, 1985), xxii.
219
Boyd, Master, 734.
Panorama 73
Among other discoveries, the most intriguing are more letters from Portugal, this
time from the secretary to Jo ao V, Alexandro de Gusm ao. In one of these he indicates
that the famous Catalan oboist Juan Baptista Pl` a had come to Lisbon in 1747 on
Scarlattis recommendation. The signicance of this becomes apparent in a letter of
the same year, in which Gusm ao writes that new and piquant Scarlatti sonatas had
arrived and that he had heard themplayed in his own house in a way that pleased Pl` a
even though the latter had heard them played by the composer himself.
220
This is
the nearest thing we now have to a conrmation that Scarlatti performed publicly at
court in Madrid (question nine of our earlier list of specic uncertainties), unless we
are rather perversely to conjecture that Pl` a was granted a private informal audience.
On a more personal note, Beryl Kenyon de Pascual uncovered in 1988 the details
of a dispute that arose in 1754 between Scarlatti and his daughter-in-law Mara del
Pilar concerning her dowry following the death at the age of eighteen of his son
Alexandro (who had married secretly at the age of seventeen).
221
Also casting a
pall over his nal years is the memorial to the composers will, published by Teresa
Fern andez Talaya in 1998. The goods inventoried in the two additions show that
Scarlatti had enjoyed a very comfortable position; among them we nd reference to
a clavicordio, valued at 3,000 reales. The other signicant musical news contained
is that there were two keyboard instruments in Scarlattis house that belonged to the
Queen; these were returned along with various scores on the composers death.
222
Another precious piece of evidence, but one that has been in circulation since
1739, is the preface that Scarlatti provided for the publication of his Essercizi. Here
is Kirkpatricks translation:
Reader,
Whether you be Dilettante or Professor, in these Compositions do not expect any profound
Learning, but rather an ingenious Jesting with Art, to accommodate you to the Mastery
of the Harpsichord. Neither Considerations of Interest, nor Visions of Ambition, but only
Obedience moved me to publish them. Perhaps they will be agreeable to you; then all the
more gladly will I obey other Commands to please you in an easier and more varied Style.
Show yourself then more human than critical, and thereby increase your own Delight. To
designate to you the Position of the Hands, be advised that by D is indicated the Right, and
by M the Left: Fare well.
223
The primary importance of this paragraph has been taken to lie in the unique
declaration of his art apparently given here by Scarlatti. We have already seen, though,
that the composers letter to the Duke of Huescar in 1752 has been read as another
such artistic document. The methodological problems apparent in the interpretation
of the Huescar letter need to be addressed in conjunction with our preface; this
220
See Brito, Portogallo, 789.
221
See Domenico Scarlatti and his Son Alexandros Inheritance, Music and Letters 69/1 (1988), 239.
222
Memoria con los ultimas voluntades de Domenico Scarlatti, m usico de c amara de la reina Mara B arbara de
Braganza, Revista de musicologa 21/1 (1998), 162.
223
may explain the ungenerous insertion of apparently in the sentence above. What is
needed before we judge the contents is a little light deconstruction. Both documents
ought, for a start, to be situated in an epistolary practice of the time. Before we take
literally Scarlattis complaints in the Huescar letter, we need to ask questions such
as who the composer was addressing and what both parties stood to gain from the
transaction. The letter accompanied scores supervised by the composer from the
parts for two hymns written by the composer Pierre du Hotz. These were rst
performed in Brussels in 1569 in honour of two ancestors of the current Duke of
Huescar.
224
Such a background to the letter might suggest that, in honouring the
past through scorning the present, Scarlatti was honouring also the ancestors and
hence the current Duke himself; they linked him with better, more illustrious
times. The composers remarks may simply have been a way of complimenting
the good taste of the Duke, either because of the particular circumstances of the
commission or because the Duke was known to be partial to the older polyphonic
ways. Perhaps too Scarlatti had a particular gain in mind. After all, immediately
after the condemnation of the moderns for their contrapuntal ignorance, Scarlatti
requests a visit from the addressee: I cannot go out of my house. Your Excellency
is great, strong and magnanimous, and full of health; why not come therefore to
console me with your presence: Perhaps because I am unworthy?
225
These are some
possibilities to consider before the composers remark can be taken as a statement of
artistic faith.
Indeed, hanging on every last artistic word is a tradition that dies hard. Having a
large quantity of material to draw on only increases the difculty of disentanglement.
One only need consider the cases of many voluble twentieth-century composers,
such as Schoenberg or Messiaen, who are so consistently taken at their word, even at
a sophisticated critical level. It is fatally easy to allow composers pronouncements to
dictate the terms for the reception of their music. This is not to deny the relevance
of such commentaries, merely to suggest that composers have an obvious stake in
how their music is understood. So they create to an extent personal mythologies,
leading us toward certain preferred angles on their output and away from others.
Scarlattis mythology is of course very different from the norm, since it rests on such
negative (or absent) foundations. Nevertheless, we can still ask the same question
of the pronouncement in the Huescar letter, in addition to those already posed. If
we take it objectively, as a genuine expression of artistic taste, as sincerely meant,
then given the consistent slighting of the old ways in the sonatas we would
have to conclude that Scarlatti was a hypocrite.
These concerns are especially relevant as we return to the preface to the Essercizi,
since its tone is so remote from that of the strictures contained in the Huescar
224
225
Quoted in Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 121. We might also note the characterization by John Lynch of the Duke as
a malicious man . . . who, it was said, would betray his own mother to further his ambitions; Lynch, Spain,
184. This might help distance us further from any notion that Scarlattis letter simply represents an amicable and
sincere transaction.
Panorama 75
letter. Not only that, but it almost seems to set up an anti-mythology, inducing the
reader not to take the works too seriously, since the composer himself disclaims all
seriousness (profondo Intendimento). It almost seems as if Scarlatti is colluding in
the subsequent image of himself as light, supercial, the class clown, as if he does
not want to play the game of being a great composer. Note in this respect the
denial of Visions of Ambition. There is, of course, a historical way of rescuing the
preface, by referring it to the epistolary tradition of the modest disclaimer (such as
we nd in Mozarts dedication to Haydn of the six string quartets of 17825). It was
customary for the composer to downplay the quality of his efforts in this manner.
It was, however, equally customary for the composer to stress the seriousness of his
labours, as Mozart does, rather than to imply that the music has been shaken out of
his sleeve, as Scarlatti seems to.
One also needs to consider the conjunction of the preface with the dedication to
Jo ao V that precedes it, a matter that has rarely been considered. This does indeed
contain the standard obsequious gestures, but how can one square these gestures,
the magnitude of the dedicatee and the honour of the event that seems to have
occasioned the publication (the conferring of a knighthood on Scarlatti by the
King) with the trivial tone of what follows? This is not to imply that any offence
would have been taken by the monarch, who would surely have known what to
expect from his former employee, but to suggest that there is a certain breach of
decorum inherent in the conjunction of the two passages. It would also seem to
be a strange way to respond to a knighthood to write light music, and further
to imply (as is indeed the case) that the works are difcult to execute and that the
works are not very varied in style. Even the nal words, Vivi felice (live happily),
although once more a common enough formula, arrive abruptly, with a distinct lack
of ceremony. The implication, if we want, like Mellers, to appropriate a modern tag
on the composers behalf, is: dont worry, be happy.
It is in these terms rst of all that we must grapple with the preface as a public
staging of the gure of the composer and not simply as the outlining of an
artistic creed. As a rare gift for the Scarlatti scholar, the preface has commanded
many imaginative readings, even though most have looked simply for such a creed
or for evidence of the composers real-life personality. Pagano, for instance, thinks it
consonant with the qualities lauded by Mainwaring, of charming modesty, without
acknowledging the historical roots of such self-deprecation.
226
Sebastiano Luciani
rightly characterizes the preface as a delicious display and suggests it is repre-
sentative of Scarlattis mordant character;
227
presumably he is referring to musical
character, since the only grounds for lending the real-life Scarlatti such attributes
lie in a realist reading of the preface itself. Several writers do in fact dwell on the
226
He does, however, note that the preface is terribly remote from the previous adulatory Baroque delirium and
wonders, playing on the title of an article by Kirkpatrick, Who wrote the [sic] Scarlattis dedication?. Pagano,
Vite, 413. The article alluded to is Who Wrote the Scarlatti Sonatas?: A Study in Reverse Scholarship, Notes:
The Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association 29/2 (1973), 42631.
227
Luciani, Note I, 469.
sociological implications of the delicious display. Zuber notes its astonishingly free
tone, associating this with the fact of its publication in progressive London rather
than in Spain.
228
Many aesthetic readings of the preface concentrate on the two key phrases,
profondo Intendimento and Scherzo ingegnoso. For F. E. Kirby, the conjunc-
tion of the ingenious jesting with the following aim of mastery of the harpsichord
shows something characteristic of the new galant taste the emphasis on enter-
tainment and diversion coupled with a didactic aim. For Gretchen Wheelock, in
putting both expert and amateur on notice to expect challenges to traditions of solo
keyboard composition, Scarlatti acknowledges that his ingenious jesting intends
serious didactic ends. Here the didacticism seems to lie not in Kirbys technical
programme but in the very ingeniousness of the jesting. In other words, behind the
ingeniousness lies learning, but it is not the kind of learning a composer traditionally
displays. In a twist on this line of thought, Zuber reads profondo Intendimento as a
reference to the strict or learned style: Scarlatti is, in fact, opposing the rationality of
musical hearing with an outmoded strict style. She believes the whole document
has been underestimated, as merely the programme of a galant virtuoso. What
is at stake, we might claim, is a new kind of artistic intelligence. The readings by
Wheelock and Zuber spell a modernist refutation of traditional techniques and aes-
thetic attitudes, just the refutation that Burney championed in Scarlatti. This would
seem to be endorsed by the subsequent phrase Show yourself then more human
than critical, which could be understood as an appeal to contemporary relevance.
Loek Hautus in fact invokes Burneys claim that the composer knowingly broke
the rules, from a position of strength, as it were; he observes the modication of
Scherzo, the playful element so striking in the composers music, by ingegnoso,
which makes it clear that naive cheerfulness is not implied. In short, Scarlatti is
a reexive composer.
229
This reading supports the earlier assertion of Scarlattis
self-consciousness.
No such quality is implied by those writers who take the composer at his word,
those for whom profundity must be a demonstrable intent both musically and
verbally. This reects the kind of cultural conditioning that has already been discussed
in several contexts. His art has its limits, writes Klaus Wolters, and [Scarlatti] is
modest and honest enough to mention these in the preface. For Keller, the preface
conrms Scarlattis lack of spiritual depth and universal signicance when compared
to Bach. For Philip Downs, Scarlattis warning not to expect profound art was not
a facetious warning, for his readers did not want the profundity of a J. S. Bach.
Even Boyd, admittedly in something of an aside, writes One may argue about the
extent to which Scarlattis intentions went beyond a mere ingenious jesting with
228
Zuber, Blumen, 19.
229
Kirby, A Short History of Keyboard Music (New York: Free Press, 1966), 1656; Wheelock, Haydns Ingenious
Jesting with Art: Contexts of Musical Wit and Humor (New York: Schirmer, 1992), 18; Zuber, Blumen, 1819;
Hautus, Insistenz und doppelter Boden in den Sonaten Domenico Scarlattis, Musiktheorie 2/2 (1987), 137.
Panorama 77
art in the sonatas.
230
The presence of mere speaks eloquently for the force of the
dominant cultural model. Are we to take it that Scarlatti is not serious (enough)?
With the name of Bach acting as the natural touchstone, whether implicit or
explicit, for these discussions of Scarlattis seriousness, we might also consider the
claim of Robert Marshall that the Goldberg Variations were inuenced by the Essercizi.
He conjectures that, in placing madcap and strict-canon variations side by side, Bach
might have been responding to the preface, with its duality of profound learning
and ingenious jesting.
231
If this were indeed the case, it would represent a char-
acteristically systematic response to and misunderstanding of the terms of the
preface. Scarlattis denial of profound learning should surely be taken in the spirit
which Rosen nds in the ingenious jesting of Haydns popular style, which can
ingenuously afford to disdain the outward appearance of high art.
232
A similar mock
ingenuousness can be found after all in the very title given to the collection. This
might be another customary way of expressing humility, but there is certainly an
ironic gap between this claimed modesty and the arrogant uency, if one will, of the
technicalmusical contents. In this respect at least Scarlatti seems happy to throw us
off his trail.
230
Wolters, Domenico Scarlatti, in Handbuch der Klavierliteratur I: Klaviermusik zu zwei H anden (Zurich: Atlantis,
1967), 155; Keller, Meister, 29; Downs, Classical, 53; Boyd, Master, 190.
231
Bach the Progressive: Observations on his Later Works, The Musical Quarterly 62/3 (1976), 3489. Roman
Vlad also thinks it highly likely that Bach composed the Goldberg Variations in full knowledge of the Essercizi;
Vlad, Storia, 14. Sheveloff expresses grave reservations about such a proposal in Sheveloff, Frustrations II,
112.
232
3
HETEOGLOSSI A
AN OPEN I NVI TATI ON TO THE EA: TOPI C AND GENE
If Scarlatti had a genius for leaving few traces in life, he showed the same talent
in his work. We have already reviewed the difculties of classifying his style in
the large, issuing both from the broader historiographical problems associated with
eighteenth-century music and from the composers own anomalous position within
such a system. On a more intimate scale too the details of Scarlattis language are
difcult to x. In particular, his relationship to such notions as topic and genre is
ambiguous and elusive. The exact source or stylistic location of what we are hearing
at any one moment is often quite unclear. On the other hand, the sonatas seem
unprecedentedly open to a range of inuences hence the panorama tradition
and unusually direct in their presentation of them. This is particularly true of all the
popular material, which rarely offers occasion for pastoral nostalgia or a culinary
exoticism. Thus we are faced with the paradox of a music that is turned outwards
yet resists classication. If Scarlattis range is democratically wide,
1
there also ap-
pears to be a certain reserve in the avoidance of explicit allegiances of topic and
style.
The critical difculty has been to hold these two conicting elements in some sort
of equilibrium. The panorama tradition rushes to embrace the diversity of material
in the sonatas, but, by making such varied manifestations of style a global attribute,
it skirts the question of how they are to be identied and how they operate in
particular instances. The alternative, approaching the paradox from the other side,
is to deny programmatic or picturesque intent. Not surprisingly, this has been less
in evidence in more recent writing, since the formalist line that meaning is found
beneath rather than on the surface has fallen from grace. Thus Kirkpatrick, having
done so much to esh out a panorama, especially a Spanish one, stated nevertheless
that it does not nd expression merely in loosely knit impressionistic programmusic,
but is assimilated and distilled with all the rigor that Scarlatti had learned from his
sixteenth-century ecclesiastical masters, and is given forth again in a pure musical
language that extends far beyond the domain of mere harpsichord virtuosity.
2
This
was of course an attempt to give creative respectability to a gure who so often was
1
Mellers, Orpheus, 86.
2
78
Heteroglossia 79
(and still often is) seen as the provider of light relief; more importantly for present
purposes, it tries to rescue the composer from any implications of an indulgent
eclecticism.
Many other writers were anxious to distance Scarlatti fromthe sullying associations
of the programmatic.
3
The desirability of an abstract view is evident in Degradas
assertion that, whatever the [external] suggestions from which the imagination of
Scarlatti takes its cue, each element quickly loses its ties to an empirical reality,
becoming puried in the nervous ow of the music and being reduced, without
the least descriptive ambition, to the abstraction of a formal game.
4
Even if such
pronouncements seem quite obvious in their historical moment, they can certainly
not be rejected completely: if the external suggestions were as fundamental as the
panoramists imply, then they would surely be more transparent in their presentation.
What the abstractionists play down, though, is the very fact of the mixed style itself,
and in particular the historical force of such impurity. After all, if Scarlatti was intent
on purity, he was certainly at liberty to ignore the outside voices that seem to press
in on his musical world this is what all composers to a greater or lesser extent had
always done.
This very fact of a mixed style, not just globally but more often than not at
the level of the individual sonata, allies Scarlatti unambiguously with modernist
tendencies. An essential difference between our binary pair of Baroque and Classical
lies in the sense of musical argument that arises in the latter through a pronounced
variety of material. Because this variety issues from a single organizing gure, the
composer, there is an inherent sense of critical perspective on or distance from the
material. There can be no feeling of absolute authority to the discourse when so many
different voices present themselves; instead, language assumes a relativist signicance.
Replacing the gure of the Baroque is the Classical topic, a term which by
denition refers to a larger musical world, one of which it forms just a constituent, a
possibility. It is axiomatic to this study that Scarlattis sharp variety of musical materials
encourages us to view him in a Classical light; yet such a classication seems difcult
when the topical operations so often appear to be covert. How democratic can this
variety be when its manifestations are not readily accessible and comprehensible by
either musical amateur or professional?
The elusiveness of such open music may be illustrated by several cautionary tales
deriving from commentary on particular sonatas. At this stage our concern will be
with sonatas that present a relatively unied surface, where topics, to use Leonard
Ratners distinction, act as types rather than styles.
5
In other words, the topics
ll the frame of a section or movement (as in the labelling of a piece according to
the dance type of a minuet) rather than simply being one element among several or
many (as when minuet style forms just part of a more varied whole).
3
See for example Willi Apel, Masters of the Keyboard: A Brief Survey of Pianoforte Music (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1947), 164 (the sonatas are entirely free from programmatic connotation), or Valabrega,
Clavicembalista, 111 (his pronounced aversion to any programmatic design).
4
Degrada, Enciclopedia, 358.
5
Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer, 1980), 9.
Ex. 3.1 K. 238 bars 15
Commentary on the Sonata in F minor, K. 238 (Ex. 3.1 presents the opening),
has uncovered a nice variety of attributions. David Fuller suggests it is reminiscent
of Corelli preludes and allemandes. Pestelli also hears the sonata in terms of older
models, comparing it to K. 8 and K. 92, both essays in a dotted style, and so assigns
it to the Portuguese period of the 1720s. In the light of Kirkpatricks remark, My
Portuguese friends tell me that [K. 238] resembles a folksong from the Estremadura,
Pestellis chronological suggestion is fortuitous! (Rafael Puyana tells us it was Kastner
who made this suggestion, and that the melody derives from a popular ballad that is
still sung today.) To back up his classication, Kirkpatrick further suggests a scoring
for outdoor wind band and a possible processional context. Gianfranco Vinay notes
that Casella used bars 26ff. in the Sinfonia of Scarlattiana; the reference is found
in the Grave introduction that calls up a glorious past, suggesting that Casella too
heard this passage, if not the whole sonata, as antique. Boyd counters the folk-song
classication with: But [Kirkpatrick] did not quote the folk-song, and the style of
the sonata as a whole seems to derive more from French court music than from
what we would normally recognize as Spanish folk style. (Boyd confuses Spain with
Portugal, perhaps assuming an Iberian musical solidarity that we may pass over for
the present.) For Clark, any French aspect is surely a matter of the look of the
notes on paper; like many others, [this sonata seems] to be lled with that intense
loneliness so typical of so much Spanish folk music. Subsequently she has stated
that the sonata uses a well-known tune from Segovia, sung to the romance Camina
la virgen pura.
6
Thus, just in terms of national style or identity, K. 238 has been
found to be Italian, Portuguese, French and Spanish.
If this is indeed a Portuguese or Segovian folk tune, then it shows the dangers of
a too easy categorization based on apparently familiar surface phenomena. On the
6
Fuller, Dotted, 117; Pestelli, Sonate, 161; Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 167, 201 and 294; Puyana, Inuencias, 52;
Vinay, Novecento, 128; Boyd, Master, 180; Clark, Boyd Review, 209; Clark, Clark Notes, [5].
Heteroglossia 81
other hand, in even the most folk-like of Scarlatti sonatas, there will inevitably be
interference from other musical styles or from other types of syntax we are not after
all dealing with transcription. Even given the most genuine attempt to render what
is heard, this can only take place against the linguistic constraints of the time. The
sequences at bars 11
3
13
1
or 2630
1
, for example, surely offer a Baroque style and
syntax; Casella chose wisely for use in his archaic movement. On the other hand, a
passage like 8
3
to 11
3
seems very near to a possible folk model, especially with the
isolated melodic impulses in the right hand. These raise questions not just of critical
interpretation but of performance practice. If one reads the piece as French dotted
style, then these melodic units can be heard and played as straightforward ourishes
within the style. If, on the other hand, they are felt to be vocal exclamations, then
a different execution may be in order, less clipped and more expansive.
Another case where differences of aural opinion testify to the composers powers
of suggestion suggestion rather than statement is K. 435 in D major. This has
been heard as implying Italian, French and Spanish musical imagery: castanets jostle
with mandolins and echoes of the French clavecinistes.
7
The material at bars 45 also
nds a counterpart in an untitled piece in D major (47v) by Santiago de Murcia
from his Passacalles y obras (1732), the most extensive collection of Spanish guitar
music of the time. This reminds us that Scarlatti may have responded to the guitar
playing found at court rather than just that heard in popular contexts, as so much
of the literature implies. The use of the gure by de Murcia may suggest a French
source, given the French background to the popularity of the guitar at court.
8
Such variety of stylistic and topical characterization does not have to be seen as
in any way problematic. Sonatas such as the two above are an open invitation to
the ear. They solicit the imagination of the listener. The very lack of specicity
of association must be understood as essential to the works, and indeed to most of
Scarlattis sonata output; we are not, in other words, faced with eighteenth-century
naive pictorialism. (Not that there is anything wrong with that; we only need call
to mind what wondrous ends it serves in The Creation and The Seasons.) Even where
aural evocations in the sonatas become quite explicit, they are rarely sustained. In spite
of Kirkpatricks reservations, impressionism, as dened for Scarlatti by Donald Jay
Grout, covers these qualities quite nicely: Because his sonatas absorb and transgure
so many of the sounds and sights of the world, and because he treats texture and
harmony freely with a view to sonorous effect, Scarlattis music may be termed
impressionistic; but it has none of the vagueness of outline that we are apt to
associate with that word.
9
The strength of such a term lies in making clear that the
7
Compare the interpretations in: Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 204; Sacheverell Sitwell, Appendix: Notes on Three
Hundred and More Sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, in Southern Baroque Revisited (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1967), 290; Chambure, Catalogue, 147; Pestelli, Sonate, 24950; Vinay, Novecento, 123.
8
See Neil D. Pennington, The Spanish Baroque Guitar, with a Transcription of De Murcias Passacalles y obras (Ann
Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981). The corresponding passage is found from bar 25 in the untitled Murcia piece.
Pennington reminds us that when Felipe V arrived from France in 1700, he brought with him about twenty
members of the French court, who were used to hearing the guitar played in court entertainments.
9
Grout, History, 456.
evocative material, however suggestive of particularities, is a means to an end, that
the composer is not interested in static depiction.
The often widely diverging readings or better, hearings of individual sonatas
are thus very much in this dynamic spirit. Even though they may play some part
in particular instances, historical distance or ignorance cannot account for such
conicting reactions. Just as the works themselves incorporate different voices, this
generosity is extended to the granting of interpretative room for different listeners.
Another tempting apparent anachronism that can help us capture this quality is
Mikhail Bakhtins heteroglossia. The following denition by John Docker will
have the most force if we understand language to include the musical language
which is our concern here:
[Heteroglossia is] the operation of multi-voiced discursive forces at work in whole culture
systems. For Bakhtin heteroglossia is clearly evident in the workings of language, where the
ction of a unitary national language is always trying to contain the stratication, diversity and
randomness produced in the daily clash of professional, class, generational, and period utter-
ances. Existence itself is heteroglossia, a force eld created in the general ceaseless Manichaean
struggle between centripetal forces, which strive to keep things together, unied, the same;
and centrifugal forces, which strive to keep things various, separate, apart, different.
10
Such a governing concept is relevant not just to the original cultural sense of Scarlattis
clashing utterances which I claim is conceived as such by the composer but to
what we make of them. It was suggested earlier that the elusiveness of their denition
seems to contradict the democratic accessibility that the variety itself promises to
deliver. Now we may understand, however, that it is precisely the elusiveness that
delivers the democracy. If the framing of topics were to be too neat and clear,
then the sense of heteroglossia would fall away. As things stand, we are offered not
just a successive, but a simultaneous variety of the musical surface, tempting us to
x our impressions in specic terms but allowing for few right or wrong answers.
The exteriority is what counts, not the absolute value of particular references we
think we can identify. Such a process can only unfold because Scarlatti presents a
studied elusiveness it is no accident of spontaneous or improvised Latin invention.
Gino Roncaglia grasped this beautifully in 1957 when he wrote that nothing is
programmatic, but everything is intensely evocative.
11
To an extent this reects the limits and difculties of topical identication alto-
gether (and this also applies to the classication of gures). There is always the danger
of nominalism in topical approaches; labelling a topic as such does not exhaust the
signicance of the relevant material, since its associations may be a matter of relative
indifference to an argument. Further, topic theory does not readily allow for the
relative neutrality of some material. This is clearest in the case of singing style,
which often seems more like a given of most later eighteenth-century language than
a marked and discrete type of invention. On a larger scale one might question the
10
Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 171.
11
Roncaglia, Centenario, 65.
Heteroglossia 83
premise that changes of material evince a basic dramatic or theatrical orientation.
How surprising can variety be in the mixed style? Contrasts of material may be-
come as much self-evident as dramatic. If there is also a certain inbuilt interpretative
promiscuity to topical thinking, though, which will rely on the assessment of the
individual context for its explanatory power, this is as much a strength as a weakness.
In the particular case of Scarlatti, however, I have just argued that such issues take
on a harder edge. Further, in his case this all takes place over and above the reader
[or listener] authority that is a basic assumption today the emphasis on the power
of a listener to construct a framework of understanding rather than deferring to the
authority of the composer. Even if we allow and celebrate the variety of responses
according to cultural knowledge and circumstances, there is nevertheless a remark-
ably low level of intersubjective agreement about the likely identity and provenance
of so much of Scarlattis material.
Such concerns seem especially urgent when it comes to classifying dance types
amongst the sonatas. So much, after all, is at stake when trying to x a national
identity for the composer, as manifested in the claims for prevailing ethnic colour.
It is indeed easy to become mesmerized by a concern for dance derivations, and
once more this is due to the seeming directness of presentation. Even if we assume
for the moment that some or many of the individual sonatas are based on particular
dances, we need to stand back in order to grasp the larger point, one that is not easy
to see because it involves a typical Scarlattian absence. This is that the sonatas rarely
identify the dance forms on which they might be based.
12
The composer, we should
remind ourselves, was free to provide titles and topical designations. The very fact
that he does not label very frequently when he often could speaks volumes. The
eighteenth-century tendency was after all to provide such designations wherever
possible, bearing in mind the pictorial and programmatic tradition. Only in the
case of some minuets and pastorales does Scarlatti align his invention with particular
forms. There is only one exceptional case amongst all the sonatas K. 255, which
contains the words oytabado and tortorilla in the course of the rst half. As
we might somehow expect, these little bits of evidence have proved completely
mysterious; it has been suggested that they refer to organ stops or to bird calls, but
they might also refer to dance types.
13
If this is indeed the case, it stands as a salutary
exception to the composers silence on such matters. A possible rejoinder to this
interpretation, that there was no need for the composer to label music that was
conceived primarily for private royal consumption, does not seem adequate to the
scale of the silence.
When we move beyond the assumption that particular sonatas must summon up
particular dance forms, we may nd that dance per se becomes the governing topic.
Take the case of K. 496 in E major; in 3/4 time, this has been identied by Pestelli as
12
Compare Basso, Rousset Notes, 6.
13
Luigi Tagliavini has wondered whether oytabado is a corruption of the Portuguese word oitavado, which
was a popular dance there in the eighteenth century. See the discussions in Boyd, Master, 178, and Sheveloff,
Frustrations II, 989.
a minuet. It seems difcult to agree with this; the basic rhythmic cells, the rst-beat
triplet and the repeated-note crotchet gure, are surely rather too insistent in manner
and gesture for the upmarket dance form. Equally, although this represents a modern
style, it is not courtly-galant. We might compare it rather with the Sonata in A at
major, K. 127, which, while in cut time, has a quite similar atmosphere. Both works
represent that distinctive Scarlattian category of what we might call fresh-air music,
turned outwards but lacking formal ties to any one topic or genre. Surely K. 496
embodies dance as a basic impulse rather than any particular dance form. Suggestions
of a minuet are therefore not excluded, but they cannot be denitive either.
We may certainly presume that a sonata like K. 305 in G major has a dance
basis, but it is so remote from a Baroque stylized form that one should really make
comparisons with a work such as Coplands El sal on M exico, which aims to capture an
essence through the free working of fragments rather than reproduce one single form
or type. Many of these fragments in K. 305 can in fact be heard in other sonatas:
in K. 311 (compare bars 824 with 268 of the present work
14
), K. 284 (compare
its opening material, with drone pedals, with bars 57 here), K. 413 (compare bars
910 with 1213 of K. 305), or K. 372 (see bars 379, which are very similar to bars
57 here).
The opening unit of K. 305 is almost impossible to scan. Performers are generally
chronically underaware of the implied cross-rhythms of many of the dance-like
sonatas, unless they are clearly indicated by the notation. To give just one possible
version of the opening unit, it could be heard and played as a frankly jazzy succession
of (counting from the initial left-hand G) 5/8 3/8 2/8 5/8. Indeed, irregular
rhythmic handling generally counts for everything in these dance-like movements.
The composing against the bar line suggests that the energy of the dance cannot be
contained in conventional notation. Most of the rst eleven bars are written against
the bar line, from 12 we are back on the downbeat, then 1921 are very ambiguous
in this respect. The phrase elision halfway through bar 33 places the subsequent
music against the downbeat once more.
The second half gives the impression of accelerating. After the newinitial material,
we simply hear permutations of what was heard in the latter part of the rst half,
from bar 22, as the music seems to gallop to a close. In other words, the thematic
treatment is mimetic of the way a dance, once warmed up and having left behind
its preliminary skirmishes, develops an unstoppable momentum.
Scarlatti thus responds to the structural dynamics of the dance and in a way leaves
the world of avowed craftsmanship there is little feeling of the high-art social
context within which the work by denition is situated. Instead there is the sort
of uncanny directness that encourages us to identify such sonatas as the real thing.
To hear such a sonata as some might, as a rened reection from above of real-life
material, is to underplay precisely what is most radical here, the immediacy of tone
and technique and the sensation of rude energy.
14
Noted in Chambure, Catalogue, 113.
Heteroglossia 85
Of course, such irregularity as we nd in K. 305 is not to be thought of as
inherently realistic. This would be to reinscribe what Lawrence Kramer calls the
sentimentalization of wildness,
15
the myth of the music of the people being unin-
hibited and free, as opposed to an art music constrained by syntactical and expressive
convention. In reality folk music is often more ordered and regular than art mu-
sic. If the spirit of the dance governs K. 305, and this becomes even more striking
in highly impetuous works such as K. 262, it is idealistically irregular, expressing
the blur of activity, the frenzy, the exhilaration of bodily movement. Once more
evocation counts for more than any programmatic delity. So Scarlatti manages to
give an impression of unprecedented commitment to popular dance forms without
necessarily being highly naturalistic.
This contradictory combination of immediacy and distance tends to be replaced
by simple distance in many other topical and generic contexts. Once more it is a
question of notable absences. Many writers have implied the relevance of generic
categories such as concerto, toccata and suite for the sonatas. Yet two of these are
hardly to be felt at all. Only the toccata seems to have a real generic identity for
Scarlatti, and even then it is not often presented in pure form, being mixed up
with other types of material. There are certainly works that recall or depict the
concerto many of the Essercizi and sonatas such as K. 70 and K. 428 but these are
relatively few and relatively indirect in their references to the genre. The frank-
ness apparent in many of the sonatas of Marcello and Seixas, to name two near
contemporaries, provides a notable foil to this. The straightforward suggestions of
the solotutti divisions of the concerto and the continual presence of overt string
gurations, in such works as the third movement of Marcellos Sonata No. 7 or
Seixass Sonata No. 5 (1980), bring home how subdued such manifestations are in
Scarlatti.
The composers relationship to the suite category, however, provides the most
telling absence. Gerstenberg noted in 1933 that Scarlatti made little apparent use of
suite movements as models, except for the (fashionable) minuet.
16
Indeed, few are
the movements that will submit to such generic dance classications; as we have
seen, there is another type of dance altogether that Scarlatti prefers to cultivate. The
actions of B ulow and Longo in creating suites out of the sonatas were thus not just
determined by the problematic brevity and independence of so many individual
pieces they were also an attempt to provide the sort of generic security that most
of the sonatas conspicuously deny. Indeed, the whole notion of genre is held at
a distance. Even in the case of the works labelled as minuets, the most signicant
element is a wider statistical one: there are not many of them. Jo ao Vs appreciation
of French culture and ways, for instance, seems to be reected in the work of Seixas:
very many Seixas sonatas contain short minuets that follow larger movements in a
prevalent two-movement structure. The minuet was of course the aristocratic French
15
Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 125.
16
Gerstenberg, Klavierkompositionen, 85.
dance form par excellence. It was also one of the genres most cultivated in Spanish
keyboard music, but not by our composer.
17
This apparent indifference to certain external allures, what Henry Colles nicely
described as the glamour of conscious association,
18
is fundamental when con-
sidering Scarlattis relationship to genres. One can see the same attributes outside
the realm of the keyboard sonatas. Magda Marx-Weber nds it striking that, in his
Stabat mater, Scarlatti makes sparing use of the standard chromatic formulas that
occur in most church works with a serious text such formulas as the pathotype
fugue theme that falls by a diminished seventh and the chromatic fourth. She also
notes that the word-painting traditionally associated with words such as agelli and
tremebat is almost entirely absent.
19
Equally, the ground-bass structure found in
the rst aria of the early cantata Bella rosa adorata is the only known example in all
of the composers music.
20
In these instances too, Scarlatti seems to prefer not to
belong.
In at least one instance, though, such militant creative disdain leads to the opposite
result. There is one topical signal about which Scarlatti is normally absolutely explicit:
the fanfare or horn call. In this case, the individuality is found precisely in giving the
topic such a gloriously full and open expression. Most contemporary keyboard music
did not of course even attempt such effects; but where it did, as with the French
pictorial school, the result is generally restrained, quite unlike the boldness of the
Scarlattian versions. This use of fanfare forms part of a wider predilection for rudely
vigorous open sonorities, including unusual octave doublings and parallel fths, that
would normally have been considered out of scale for a keyboard instrument. The
treatment of the horn call by two other composers provides a telling comparison (see
Ex. 3.2a and b). Towards the end of the gigue nale from his Sonata No. 3, Giustini
introduces an unmistakable reference to a horn call. Note, however, the frequent
insertion of an E in between the C and G. This provides a gentrication of the gure,
the third softening the bare fth of the underlying model,
21
which was clearly too
rude to stand by itself. Almost exactly the same process is evident in the nale of
Galuppis Sonata No. 6,
22
in the rst few bars, but here the horn fth is avoided
altogether. It is difcult to imagine any Scarlatti sonata being so coy about this topic.
In most cases, though, the topics found in the sonatas are not self-evident in
manner or presentation. They tend to be skewed in various ways. In the Sonata
in C major, K. 398, the topical basis is the pastorale. The indicators of this topic
17
This comparison between Seixas and Scarlatti is explored in Kastner, Repensando, 1512.
18
Colles, Sonata, 895. Notably, Colles also remarks that the sonatas do not appeal to the familiarity of established
dance rhythms.
19
Domenico Scarlattis Stabat mater, Kirchenmusikalisches Jahrbuch 71 (1988), 19.
20
Pointed out in Boyd, Cantate, 253.
21
The classic horn-call gure is made up of two parts: while the upper line descends by a third, the lower descends
triadically, creating intervals between the two parts of a third, fth and sixth respectively. A reversed, ascending
form is also common.
22
The numbering is taken from Baldassare Galuppi: Sei sonate, ed. Iris Caruana (Padua: Zanibon, 1968),
No. 5052.
Heteroglossia 87
Ex. 3.2a Giustini: Sonata No. 3/iv bars 5677
Ex. 3.2b Galuppi: Sonata No. 6 bars 18
remained very stable over a long period of time: use of drones, parallel melodic
intervals, relaxed repetitions, setting of the music in simple keys such as C, F and
G major that could plausibly be tackled by rustic musicians. A subset of the drone
involves a transformation of the static bass note into a rhythmic pedal, almost always
oscillating between two notes an octave apart. Very frequently this converts into a
crotchetquaver unit in the compound time signatures (such as 6/8 and 12/8) most
favoured for the pastorale. This can be seen in the extract from the Pastorale for
organ by Domenico Zipoli, published in 1716, given in Ex. 3.3a.
23
The oscillating
octave pattern that opens K. 398 (see Ex. 3.3b) undoubtedly refers to this common
bass gure, but the composer presents it in disembodied form. It covers the full
range of the keyboard, using all available Cs; the gure is reinvented to become a
play of rhythm and sonority. This demonstrates well the composers independence or
critical distance from found material; what should be subordinate becomes central,
what should be restricted in compass becomes wide-ranging. The effect is so gently
playful that one scarcely notices the disruptive wit that underpins it.
The Sonata in F major, K. 379, carries a dance title. The most striking feature
of this Minuet are the demisemiquaver gures marked con dedo solo, meaning
glissando. In the rst half these gures only appear once the dominant, C major,
has been reached, allowing for their simple execution on white notes only. The
second-half equivalents, although not marked as such, should also presumably receive
a glissando treatment. For this to happen in the context of the tonic, however, B
would need to be used rather than the B demanded by the notation. Such an odd
23
A subset within this subset involves the lling-in of the jumping octave by notes approximately halfway between.
See Der ruhende Pan, the interlude for strings alone from Telemanns Overture for Four Horns, Oboes, Bassoon
and String Orchestra, F11 (1725). A very similar bass pattern is found in the slow movement of Beethovens
Pastoral Sonata in D major, Op. 28, testimony to the remarkable durability of such topical signals.
Ex. 3.3a Zipoli: Pastorale bars 4756
Ex. 3.3b K. 398 bars 19
bitonal effect can, however, only just be glimpsed given the speed and register of the
right hands gures. More disconcerting than this, though, is that these nger solos
appear in a work named Minuet, which is hardly the most appropriate home for
them. This is perhaps acknowledged in the title carried by the M unster and Vienna
readings of the sonata, Minu e stravagante. The feature is not simply introduced as
a novelty; it is a natural extension of the earlier rapid scalic shapes in both direc-
tions. Such thematic respectability cannot disguise, however, the obvious infelicity
of this freakish effect appearing in the context of a sociable and fashionable dance
form.
As well as the sort of outright disembodiment found in the examples above,
Scarlatti also deects topics in an indirect manner. K. 18 furnishes an example. It is
built from the busy Fortspinnung found in so many of the Essercizi, but the treatment
does not entirely match. The sonatas repetitive syntax removes the archaic character
from the governing style of the material.
24
This subtle conict of means and manner
is most apparent in the reiterations of bars 413, and especially from halfway through
24
This is also discussed in Pedrero-Encabo, Rodrguez, 382.
Heteroglossia 89
Ex. 3.4 K. 263 bars 134
bar 42, a moment when the semiquaver patterns suddenly achieve an extraordinary
poetic stillness.
The Sonata in E minor, K. 263, begins with material of older vintage (see
Ex. 3.4). Like K. 402, in the same key, it presents antique modal polyphony. The con-
trasting lines in thirds in high and low registers found from bars 6 to 11 simulate
antiphonal exchanges.
25
Compare Scarlattis own Miserere in E minor, which features
25
The anonymous writer of notes to a recording of K. 263 suggests that it recalls old music almost ironically in
its polyphonic gravity. Notes to recording by Gustav Leonhardt (Harmonia Mundi: BAC 3068, 1970), [1].
Ex. 3.4 (cont.)
just such exchanges of parallel thirds.
26
These are succeeded by imitation and further
antiphony, retained throughout the rst half except for cadential points.
This is a sonata that works by transformation, so that although there is a tonal
return the dramatic progress is from A to B. There are no harsh edges to the piece,
and the decorum of the opening style is never overtly undermined.
27
It is not so
much that Scarlatti suggests a stylisticaesthetic gap between past and present, but
rather he is playing with a sense of time. The opening has the quality of a memory,
strengthened by its failure to reappear. Through the course of the sonata a musical
present tense of the sort entertained in the discussion of K. 277 becomes more
insistent, especially in the second half. Such playing with past and present may indeed
have been inspired by the schizophrenic professional and geographical circumstances
of the composers career. A sonata such as K. 513, as we shall see in due course,
presents this more overtly.
In spite of the fact that the opening does not return, its presence is felt everywhere
in the rst half. All the octave scales, rising except for the elaborated extended format
26
Quoted in Marx-Weber, Domenico Scarlattis Miserere-Vertonungen f ur die Cappella Giulia in Rom, in Alte
Musik als asthetische Gegenwart: Bach, H andel, Sch utz, proceedings of IMS congress, Stuttgart, 1985, ed. Dietrich
Berke and Dorothee Hanemann (Kassel: B arenreiter, 1987), 136.
27
Kirkpatrick includes the sonata as example of a type in which a free succession of ideas brings about gradual
changes of mood. Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 278.
Heteroglossia 91
bars 245 and 312, are reections of the opening, with its rising octave followed by a
gap-lling stepwise descent. With the rst such derivative, in bar 12, the initial rising
octave g
1
g
2
is lled in by step; it then contains the descending steps approximately
to the equivalent point in bar 2 where the ear is diverted by the imitative reply of
the right hand. On a larger scale the soprano from 13
3
to 16
1
elaborates a simple
stepwise descending octave; note also at bars 18 and 19 the rising octaves then
stepwise descents of the stretto pattern. Later versions of the scale are pointed by the
prominence given to E in various contexts: the suspended e
1
in the tenor at 20
4
that
initiates the falling linear intervallic pattern; the way the right hand curls back up
to e
2
at 25
1
before its conclusive descent; the very prominent e
1
reached in the left
hand by the jump of a third at 26
1
; the corresponding right-hand shape, imitating
the left across the phrase structure, at 278. In almost every case, the E falls to the
D as in the model.
A number of other archaizing features maintain the suggestion of the antique:
the chromatic imitation from 16, which could be from a ricercare; the subsequent
linear intervallic pattern and sequence from bar 20
3
; and, very noticeably, the parallel
fourths at 26
2
and 33
2
. Because of their position within the structure, and the secure
establishment by this point of a stylistic context for their archaism, these fourths do
not share the anomalous avour of those heard in the second bar of K. 193 (Ex. 1.4a).
In addition, frombar 20 to the end of the rst half all the material is composed against
the bar line, the bar line needing to be displaced to the third beat of the bar. This,
quite different in character from the metrical slipperiness we noted in K. 305, is
suggestive in its own right of earlier practices. One could imagine this piece in a
stylistic context where the bar lines were editorial. This also issues from the rst
material; Kirkpatrick cites K. 263 as a conspicuous example of the undesirability of
the bar line, although restricting his remarks to the opening.
28
Through all these means the opening is kept alive while its features are absorbed
into somewhat more modern idioms. On a large scale, even the lack of harmonic
adventure in the rst half (which continues to be the case later in spite of the more
active harmonies) ts with the decorum of the opening style; after the chromatic
passage that follows the rst structural cadence in III there are no chromatic notes
whatever and no attempt to inect or shift fromGmajor. The most current-sounding
material forms the coda from bar 34
3
, more open in sonority and expression than
anything previously, but even this takes its cue from the opening the right-hand
shape at 5
3
6
1
that formed a cadence to the opening phrase is here expanded to
articulate cadentially the whole rst half.
The open fth that starts the second half is a familiar sonority at this point of
Scarlattis structures. It often seems to act as a pivot to a new harmonic world,
clearing the air by invoking an elemental interval. (Compare K. 490, discussed in
Chapter 5.) This casts the closing material from the rst half in a new light. The
second half-bar unit of bar 41 is now a repetition rather than being a third higher,
28
the total effect now being musing and introspective, less ordered, and the left hand
follows suit at 45. The sonority grows richer on the turn to A minor. In fact, after the
rst bar, the whole of the second half is in the minor mode. The rst-half material is
thoroughly reordered, and expression becomes more urgent as past associations turn
into present experience, disturbing the previous equilibrium. From bar 47 there is
no imitation; the right hand continues its line, giving a lyrical sweep to the ascending
sequence as opposed to the ordered turn-taking of the rst half. The gure in the
second half of each bar is composed of steps rather than the previous falling thirds
heard in 28 and 29; the painfully dissonant appoggiaturas on the third crotchet of
each bar make this narrower range very audible.
Further intensications follow. The linear intervallic pattern from bar 53 is much
higher than before. The chromatic gure from 58 is greatly intensied through its
presentation in a stretto form. From bar 64 the cadential phrases that were separated
by six bars in the rst half (25
3
26
3
and 32
3
33
3
) are now juxtaposed, again in
ascending sequence. In bar 68 we hear a richer and higher version of 15, with our
parallel fourths now placed in a clearly diatonic rather than archaic context.
The register continues to be higher in the transposed closing material from bar 69.
The penultimate bar carries the emphasis on seconds to a logical climax, as the har-
monic texture is invaded by crushes. If this is remote from the language of the
opening, so is the marked sense of a personal lyrical voice above them. The hint of
exotic-Spanish avour here, which has been tasted briey at several other points in
the second half (especially in the scales at bar 62), acts as an index to the change in
orientation of the material since the outset. The nal bar may be an archaic reference
(the ending in minor that omits the third as a propriety), but the E octaves in each
hand can also be heard as a verticalized reference to the octaves of the initial entries in
bars 13. In both respects this nal bar constitutes a somewhat grim gesture towards
the decorum of the opening topic. K. 263 is dramatically conceived, yet there is no
rupture of style of the sort we will observe in many sonatas to come. The stretto
from bar 58 is emblematic of this quality; it is at once a climax of learned style and
the passage of most intense lyricism in the sonata.
29
Such inherent creative polyvalence means that few sonatas seem to display an
absolute delity to their putative topics. Some possible examples are K. 446, a past-
orale, and K. 365, a rare example of apparently unbroken Baroque decorum. A work
like K. 198 in E minor sustains a two-part invention texture almost throughout, but,
rather like K. 263, it nishes in a very different place to that where it started,
becoming more and more racy and shading into the territory of the dance. A
number of the Essercizi appear not to share such topical wavering. K. 4 in G minor,
for example, is impelled along at an even rate, never really strays from its opening
material, is not premised on surprise.
30
The splitting of the texture into distinct
29
Peter Williamss comment that it looks as if it is meant to be played dolce afrms this latter sense. The Chromatic
Fourth during Four Centuries of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 106.
30
Several writers suggest that K. 4 is an allemande: Pedrero-Encabo, Rodrguez, 375; Pestelli, Sonate, 138; Seiffert,
Klaviermusik, 422.
Heteroglossia 93
voices near cadence points to provide a richer sense of closure the voices often
chase each other towards the nal chord is retained by the composer as a device
long after most of the elements of this language seem to be abandoned.
A more intriguing test case for topical delity is provided by the Sonata in B
minor, K. 87. Sheveloff claims that this work, like K. 8, 52, 69, 92 and 147, seems
to be arranged from some sort of large homogeneous ensemble work, like a string
fantasia or concerto grosso.
31
Yet the freedom of part-writing and informality of
texture we nd in these works are surely only possible precisely because all the lines
are conceived for one instrument. The intimacy of tone and technique also rather
argue against this attribution. A most telling piece of evidence is that, in his 1746
concerto arrangements for string orchestra of many of the Essercizi, Charles Avison
does not arrange K. 8! There is in any case a sonata that ts the bill better than any
of those listed by Sheveloff: K. 86, which suggests a Corellian trio sonata, although
even there the counterpoint is too wide-ranging and free for this to be a reality.
What all these works do share, though, is a certain ambiguity of creative stance.
How style-conscious is Scarlatti here; is he inside the style or detached from its
techniques? Is K. 87 an attempt at a genuine stile antico or a nostalgic glance?
The rst aspect to consider is the very undramatic harmonic movement; this sonata
barely leaves its tonic. The end of the rst half is more on than in the dominant,
featuring an imperfect cadence, IV of B minor, at 31
3
32. The e
1
in the soprano
on the last quaver of bar 33 provides only the weakest of tonicizations of V. In any
case, there is the plainest of moves back to a root-position B minor at the start of the
second half. We should note too that V was not a normal destination for the rst
half of a minor-key work. Compare the end of the rst half of K. 60, which is also
very much on the dominant of G minor rather than in it; K. 67, another likely early
work, shares this feature. The tonic acts as constant magnet in K. 87, in particular
in the thematic form of bar 1. There is no articulated opposition of keys in other
words the harmonic language is not really diatonic, and this reinforces the sense of
the archaic topic.
On the other hand, what models are there for this free counterpoint? The texture
is congested, and this is not claried by the small amount of imitation. Here, as in
K. 52 and K. 69 in particular, Scarlatti seems happy to write contrapuntally with-
out an explicit formal basis. Such textures are hardly unknown elsewhere in the
eighteenth century, but the degree of informality seems unique to Scarlatti. If we
compare K. 87 with a movement such as the Allemande from Bachs Partita No. 4
in D major, we nd that, for all its freedom, the texture there is much more hierar-
chically conceived; and Handels free contrapuntal textures are neater and less dense
than what we nd in the present work.
32
We must acknowledge, however, that this
31
32
A number of Handels Courantes approximate to this sort of keyboard texture. Compare, for example, the
Courante from the Suite in C minor, HWV 445, which has a good deal in common with K. 69 (however, some
of its initial material is used as a Sarabande in the fragmentary Suite in C minor for two keyboards, HWV 446!),
or the Courante from the Suite in G minor for Princess Louisa, HWV 452 (c. 1739).
may be more our problemthan Scarlattis. Hans Keller once asserted that there was no
adequate language for discussing textures that are freely polyphonic. Commenting
on this, Philip Weller has suggested that most of our terminology for dealing with
polyphony is derived from the teaching of strict counterpoint. He believes we need
to acquire a exible vocabulary and mode of discourse capable of dealing with
freely unfolding polyphonic textures.
33
Although the existence of this conceptual gap may mute any claims for uniqueness,
there does seem to be something special about Scarlattis free polyphony. In its
unsystematic texture it is, I would suggest, reminiscent of the composers dislike
of formal neatness in other contexts and his aversion to formality altogether, to
overt structural, topical and generic control. We might look also to his fugues,
which subvert the genre,
34
and the imitative openings that are quickly abandoned
or undermined. These imitations are sometimes taken to arise from sheer force of
habit, but, in that they suggest a relatively strict contrapuntal conduct that is almost
always denied, they may also embody disdain.
K. 87 is particularly close in spirit and substance to K. 69; compare the respective
nal bars or the constant use of a rhythm in conjunction with a stepwise descent.
Both seemintense and tender in mood yet there is also some sense of distance framing
the music. Of course this is in a way inevitable and prompts some renement of our
central point of enquiry. By denition there will be a gap in the perception of the
piece, since the style it embodies is not compatible with the modern musical dialects
of Scarlattis time. This gap was exploited as such by composers in the sacred genres
which were the usual home of the stile antico, so as to suggest the historical and moral
authority of a past style. Its very inaccessibility to a modern sensibility (both then
and now) is what guarantees its effect. The crux of the matter, therefore, is whether
we can locate anything within the sonata itself that suggests this distance.
There appear to be no breaks of decorum in K. 87: the inexorable quaver pulse,
with scarcely a trace of normal periodicity, seems to increase the external gap and
weaken any internal one. The music seems to renew itself without the overt cre-
ative intervention so favoured elsewhere by the composer. The descending dotted-
rhythmic bass and the constant return to a soprano b
1
, as agents of this renewal,
underpin the piece. They act like a refrain or disembodied subject. However, the
musical character does surely change in the second half the parts become less in-
dependent, and sequence and the circle of fths are employed, as the music achieves
greater direction (compare bars 63ff. with their equivalent at 27ff.). Is there a hint
of irony in the very deliberate sequences of 48ff. and 57ff.? They are certainly more
modern in style than anything we heard before. Is there some suggestion that the
remote beauty of the rst half must be compromised by the action of the second, a
sense of regret? More patterning is certainly required in the second half to ground
the music syntactically and affectively; perhaps the antique counterpoint cannot be
33
Frames and Images: Locating Music in Cultural Histories of the Middle Ages, Journal of the American Musicological
Society 50/1 (1997), 33n.
34
Sheveloff states that each [fugue] is in some way ighty, overcomposed or grotesque; Sheveloff, Grove, 343.
Heteroglossia 95
plausibly sustained in an age when diatonic functionality must take rst place. Do
these changes simply represent technical necessities, though, or are they calculated
to create an aesthetic distance?
The ambiguous creative traces in this sonata are reected in its comparatively vo-
luminous reception, which tends to fall into two categories: the authenticist, which
hears K. 87 as a straight exercise in recreation of an old style, and the anachronistic,
which hears it as the height of emotional poetry.
35
For Christian Zacharias, in the
former camp, K. 87 is an embodiment of the Spanish past, a Vittoria madrigal re-
born, austere yet unfettered by the conventions of counterpoint. A different sort
of Spanish colouring is detected by Donna Edwards, who says that bars 279 are
characteristic of the siguiriya gitana. This is not completely implausible in its own
right, especially since the rhythmic and syntactical character of the material is very
different from what surrounds it. Puyana believes K. 87 is Portuguese in the character
of its melancholy expression, that it reveals that state of mind known as saudade an
untranslatable mixture of bitterness, grief, anxiety and nostalgia.
36
However, even the most Romantically or ethnically inclined accounts of K. 87
would not presumably deny the older lineage of its basic material. From these points
of view, though, the language employed would simply be an old means to a new end.
For the authentic interpreter, any added value would already be inherent in the
very use of the language outside its effective time period. Such issues can of course
arise with any use of older styles. What makes them more pressing in the current
case is the feeling that Scarlatti is so keenly aware of what it implies to cultivate older
means, especially when, on the keyboard, there is already a gap between material
and medium. K. 87 seems to be more than a display of science would one be
wrong to suggest that it is more affecting than the real thing, like Richard Strauss
being Mozartian? The many recorded performances seem to share this historicist
relish. Only Zacharias does not favour the prevalent remoteness and self-regarding
nostalgia
37
but are these a product of history or are they encouraged by a similar
creative stance on the part of Scarlatti?
A LOVE-HATE ELATI ONSHI P? SCALATTI
AND THE GALANT
The historiographical malaise that affects mid-eighteenth-century music means that
the galant style is both difcult to dene and difcult to defend. Collectively we are
not quite sure what it is, but we know we dont like it. The common image of galant
style involves mannered melodic manoeuvres, thin textures, an articial simplicity,
35
For some of the varying verdicts see Anonymous, Notes to recording by Vladimir Horowitz (RCA: RL 14260,
1982), [1]; Pagano, Dizionario, 635; Pestelli, Sonate, 523; Roncaglia, Il melodioso settecento italiano (Milan: Hoepli,
1935), 261; Valabrega, Clavicembalista, 286; Vinay, Novecento, 123.
36
Zacharias, notes to recording by Christian Zacharias (EMI: 7 63940 2, 1991 [notes 1985]), 8; Edwards, Iberian
Elements in the Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti (DMA dissertation, North Texas State University, 1980), 2930;
Puyana, Inuencias, 52.
37
EMI: 7 63940 2, 197985/1991.
a dull moderation of expression, an aristocratic ambience and impoverished technical
means. It has effectively been regarded as a sort of dumbing-down, but not seemingly
in the name of a bracing populism. It therefore involves the unappealing combination
of being intellectually low and socially high.
The basic historical moment of the style is, however, well enough understood:
it is a reaction against the technical and cultural features of Baroque art. What has
not been well dened is the connection of the galant with other anti- or post-
Baroque styles. Crucially, we tend to separate galant from the world of comic opera.
This might seem reasonable enough, given our association of galant with moderate
and buffa with quick speeds, the racy naturalness of opera buffa against the rened
naturalness of galant, the Italianate roots of one against the French roots of the other.
Yet the two styles must be seen as two sides of the same coin, as the public and private
faces of the same tendency. Both were premised on a desire for greater accessibility
and informality, and both achieved this by denying the authority of the church or
strict or high style. While the appreciation of comic opera in these terms has not
been impeded, it has proved difcult to grasp the modernity of the galant. Of course
new simplicity will always tend to impress less than new complexity, but the new
linguistic means of the galant have been stigmatized as mere fashion, as a parade
of trite formulas. On the other hand, opera buffa is cherished in spite of, or even
precisely for, its highly formulaic aspects.
Perhaps the difference in image can be summed up in one word: Mozart. While
the example of Mozarts comic operas gives a retrospective blessing to all that went
before under that rubric, the future issue of the galant has never been so clear. Yet
Mozarts instrumental works, for instance, inherit a galant instrumental style just as
surely as his operas relate to an earlier tradition, only we prefer not to phrase it in
these terms. The bad press that the galant has had obscures the simple reality that
it did win out, not just by weight of examples, but at the highest artistic level. Its
simplicity of surface means and moderation of manner, in the name of more direct
communication with the listener, seem unpalatable to us today as the basis for a
paradigm shift.
The crux of the negative reception of the galant style is the resulting abandonment
of artice and complexity in general, and the abandonment of counterpoint in
particular. Signicantly, one reads frequently about the thin textures of the galant,
while it is unknown to nd disparagement of the thick textures of the older style.
Equally, while the galant is short-winded and features too many cadences, one
does not nd the older style described as long-winded. Further, the galant is dened
by its mostly melodic clich es, while Baroque contrapuntal tags do not suffer from
this ignominy. I have written elsewhere that our superstitious awe of counterpoint
gives it a moral authority [that] seems to place it above . . . critical scrutiny.
38
This
authority does indeed seem to be relished quite uncritically by a high proportion
of the musical community. In a sense, this inconsistency of response is determined
38
Chopins Counterpoint: The Largo from the Cello Sonata, Opus 65, The Musical Quarterly 83/1 (1999), 122
and 117.
Heteroglossia 97
by the very different aesthetic premises of the old high style and the newer galant
one. For Carl Dahlhaus the period of the galant saw the beginnings of true aesthetic
reection, in contrast to the socially exclusive absolutismof the seventeenth century,
where aesthetic judgment was never really an issue.
39
In inviting a personal response,
indeed an individual view of what music should mean or be, the galant was opening
itself up to rejection by the powers of aesthetic judgement that it was the rst to
allow! The fact that we take the accent of much galant music to be as courtly or
high as the music it replaced is not of the rst importance; what it speaks of is
quite different. This is why there is no necessary credibility gap between Hauers
democraticbourgeois orientation and an often gracious style of delivery.
A useful recent reminder of the foundations to the galants bad press has been
provided by Laurence Dreyfus in his study of Bach. The author states: The Enlight-
enment in the rst half of the eighteenth century resulted in a kind of catastrophe
for serious musical artice, through its naive worship of nature, facile hedonism,
uncritically afrmative tone, appeal to public taste, privileging of word over music,
emphasis on clearly distinguishable genres, [and] rejection of music as metaphysics.
By catastrophe for musical artice we are obviously to understand above all the
decline of counterpoint. Artice in this context seems to be value-free, thus also
reinforcing the absolutist terms outlined in the previous paragraph. On a different
cultural level, uncritically afrmative brings home another current difculty with
the galant aesthetic, what Voltaire dened as its seeking to please.
40
Dreyfuss phrase
logically implies there must also be an uncritically negative way of seeing things, but,
with our elevation of the tragic and the broken (in modern and postmodern thought
respectively), one should not hold ones breath for it ever to be acknowledged.
Subsequently Dreyfus claims that the progressive musical thought of the day, for
all its elegance and charm, had signalled a regression in technique.
41
This implic-
itly narrow denition of what constitutes good musical technique, based again on
uncritical elevation of the stricter styles, has dogged not just the galant but all post-
Baroque idioms (in which we should also include the styles of sensibility and Sturm
und Drang). The problematic technical image of these idioms largely explains why
we have the absurd situation referred to earlier of a sixty-year interregnum between
High Baroque and High Classical styles. After all, the High Classical is dened to a
great extent by its recovery of serious technical means, above all counterpoint.
42
Dreyfuss rather grudging acknowledgement of elegance and charm is typical of
39
See David A. Sheldon, The Concept Galant in the [Eighteenth] Century, Journal of Musicological Research 9/23
(1989), 9091.
40
Cited in Daniel Heartz, Galant, rev. Bruce Alan Brown, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians,
second edn, vol. 9, 430.
41
Laurence Dreyfus, Bach and the Patterns of Invention (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 2434.
Note also the verdict of Daniel E. Freeman: From the standpoint of the modern critic, many composers of the
mid-eighteenth century had much better luck relying on tried and true techniques held over from the Baroque
rather than experimenting with new styles. Freeman, J. C. Bach, 256.
42
See the formulation by Julian Rushton that the complexity of the Classical style is partly the result of its historical
consciousness, its assimilation of those styles against which the galant was in revolt. Classical Music: A Concise
History from Gluck to Beethoven (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), 29.
our wider failure to enter imaginatively into the claims of the new simplicity. The
pleasant melody and sociable tone of the galant must have been stirring in their
provision of a more immediately human scale to music. We need to try to hear it in
the same fresh light, odd though the comparison may seem, as Debussys monodies,
which also gain their effect partly through the polemical overturning of a weighty
technical apparatus.
43
In view of the bad press accorded to the galant style it is not surprising that
attempts have been made to distance Scarlatti from its associations. Paul Henry Lang
asserts that while the rest of Europe took readily to the aristocratic style galant, to
Scarlatti this style evidently appeared frozen on the surface and hollow within, a
series of habits and prescribed customs and clich es. Degrada notes approvingly how
the late cantatas contain a density and severity of structure that is far removed from
galant blandishments. A large proportion of Pestellis study of the sonatas is devoted
to disentangling Scarlatti from the style, of which we nd traces and hints which
are only short-lived. If Scarlatti was touched. . . by the galant but not attracted to
it, this was due to the impatient sensibility that never let the keyboard rest.
44
In
detailing this war against the galant it is notable that Pestelli hangs on every scrap
of counterpoint found in the sonatas.
For all his protestations, at the very end of the study Pestelli calibrates the sig-
nicance of Scarlattis connection to the galant very nely when he characterizes
it as a love-hate relationship (attrazionerepulsione).
45
The anti-pedantic orientation
of the style nds an obvious counterpart in Scarlatti, especially in the form of the
freedom of dissonance treatment that was at the centre of its technical identity (and
of many disputes between old and new schools of thought).
46
Even if Scarlattis
treatment of dissonance goes well beyond what would have been acceptable to the
disciples of the galant, there is still a shared assumption. The same goes for the
prevalent two-part textures found in the sonatas, as well as the moderation of slower
tempo markings that characterize the galant approach
47
tempo markings slower
than Andante barely exist in the Scarlatti sonatas. It is in any case inconceivable that
Scarlattis music could exist entirely outside the galant, especially when dened in-
clusively to conjoin with the world of opera buffa. The highly articulated syntax and
associated cadential formulations, for example, were inescapable for any composer
who wished to speak in a modern voice. If on the other hand Scarlatti can hardly
be thought to embody all the attributes of the galant spirit, this is no different from
his reserved relationship to all other musical types and styles. The most important
cautionary note is sounded by David Sheldon, who reminds us that most musical
applications of the term galant were made by German writers, and that to ignore
this would run the risk of projecting German values onto all of Europe, and actually
43
I am thinking of such monodic openings as those to Pr elude ` a lapr` es-midi dun faune and the preludes Bruy` eres
and La lle aux cheveux de lin.
44
Lang, 300 Years, 587; Degrada, Lettere, 300; Pestelli, Sonate, 232 and 86.
45
46
See Heartz, Galant, 431, and also Sheldon, Galant, 97100.
47
This is discussed in Freeman, J. C. Bach, 239.
Heteroglossia 99
continue the tradition of Germanic bias in historiography. This is valuable in its
implication that the theoretical disputes over the galant may not have carried quite
the same edge for the LatinCatholic Scarlatti.
48
The love-hate relationship may be seen in two sonatas paired in both V and P,
K. 308 and 309 in C major. K. 308 shows like K. 277 (Ex. 1.2) the galant evocation
of the individual voice. Kirkpatrick suggests it might have been inspired by Farinelli:
one wonders whether Farinelli in his later years was singing with similar purity and
restraint. Ann Livermore writes of a vocal sense of line . . . developed with simplicity
and restraint against a sparse accompaniment.
49
Historically such suggestions are on
rm ground, given the association of the galant with the operatic world that we
are liable to overlook. To judge from the writings of Quantz a German, be it
said the sonorous ideal of galant music was Italian bel canto, which reached its
height in the rst third of the century, when the greatest castratos, such as Farinelli
and Carestini, were in their prime.
50
If the example of Farinelli was inuential in
Scarlattis particular case, whether by his presence in Madrid from 1737 or by earlier
repute, then this would have extended beyond the melodic delivery as such to the
constitution of the whole style.
Any ascription of restraint to K. 308, however, risks confusing texture with affect.
Of course there is a certain purity and simplicity to the writing, but to leave it at
that suggests a lack of sympathy with the new sensations offered by the galant. We
tend only to hear what sound to us like thin textures and short-winded melodic
lines, yet, given the preponderance of sigh gures throughout the sonata, one could
speak of a stylized eroticism. Note in particular the deepest sigh, found when the
tenor unexpectedly answers the upper voice at bar 30
4
; and the frequent grace
notes seem to signal a sort of amorous irtation. To get the full effect of this idiom in
historical context, one must set it beside a more established type of slow movement
K. 69 or K. 86, for example. The nakedness of the texture in K. 308 is shocking by
comparison it is the space between and around the strands of the texture that is so
expressive, indeed seductive. The lack of fullness in note values and texture can thus
be construed positively, not merely as a symptomof technical undernourishment. It is
just such attributes that help to create the galant notion of voice. Language metaphors
dominated eighteenth-century discourse on music, and their force increased along
with the increasing cultivation of shorter syntactical units that could be equated with
speech rhythms. Hence the common metaphor of music as conversation and, more
broadly, the sense of a voice that was exible and attentive to changing circumstances,
that seemed to engage directly with the listener.
This texture promotes an atmosphere where the slightest inection registers, in
which the sighing appoggiaturas can achieve their full sensual effect. Note in partic-
ular the magical conduct of a circle of fths in bars 1115. The unprepared sevenths
48
Sheldon, Galant, 103. Compare Bogianckinos assertion that the Latin-Catholic world found it relatively easy
to leave behind the Baroque. Bogianckino, Harpsichord, 20.
49
Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 169; Livermore, A Short History of Spanish Music (London: Duckworth, 1972), 11617.
50
See Heartz, Galant, 431.
in bars 12 and 14 illustrate that freedom of dissonance treatment, the force of which
is hard for us to recapture today. The galant was a domestic as well as a courtly
language and therefore likely to be associated with the feminine; all the sighs found
in K. 308 further this sense. One thinks of an eighteenth-century literary equiv-
alent, the epistolary novel, which seems undramatic in its structure and premises
yet can convey great intensity within its world. Indeed, Goethe dened the style
of the related sentimental novel as being typically feminine, full of full stops and
short phrases.
51
Leaving aside any arguments on essentializing of the feminine, one
wonders whether the galant, like the eighteenth-century keyboard sonata which
often embodies the style, has been downgraded for just this reason. A certain covert
sexism seems to operate in both cases; and this is intensied by a perception that
galant sensibility was conned to a comfortable social world. These generate the
unattractive combination of a style that is intellectually low but socially high.
52
If one accepts that the feminine sighs of K. 308 should convey some intensity, it is
up to the performer to make this happen. This is particularly true by denition of the
galant, which is a style of personal inection. It is all too easy for the contemporary
performer not to hear beyond Langs prescribed custom. The tone should not be
breezy or innocent or decorative; all the appoggiaturas invite some heaviness of
execution, con amore rather than simply pleasing.
If the companion work, K. 309 (Ex. 3.5a) is not galant in the more specialist sense,
it does exemplify the galant in our inclusive sense (equivalent to the unfortunate
terms pre-Classical or mid-century style), as being the modern vernacular.
Its most striking feature is undoubtedly the long-note melody rst heard from
bar 10. When this enters, interrupting the start of a parallel phrase from bar 8, it
seems to come from nowhere, with the new right-hand note values and left-hand
repeated notes. This sense of incongruous interruption is encouraged by the return
to the opening gure at 1415. The predominant conjunct movement up to bar 9
is replaced by grotesquely sprawling wide intervals the voice leading is as poor as
could be imagined. As with K. 254 (Ex. 1.4), but even more so, this simply must
be a parody of some sort. Is this a joke on the galant? The literature of the time
teemed with complaints on the part of the ancients about the galants inability or
unwillingness to observe the proprieties or rules of composition; we have here
an extreme instance of a lack of learning.
53
The second version of the long-note
melody, like the rst outlining a diminished seventh, is even more awkward, in
51
Cited in Pestelli, The Age of Mozart and Beethoven, trans. Eric Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1984), 11.
52
Note the working denition by Ann Jessie van Sant that greater degrees of delicacy of sensibility often to a
point of fragility are characteristic of women and upper classes, in Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel:
The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1. Note that I am making the
assumption throughout this argument that, for musical purposes anyway, galant and sensibility are closely related
phenomena.
53
We might compare this with Charles Rosens citation of a passage from Sammartinis Symphony No. 6, which
has a rather similar sprawling transitional top line, described by Rosen as unbelievably ugly. Sonata Forms (New
York: Norton, 1980), 14041.
Heteroglossia 101
Ex. 3.5a K. 309 bars 151
the hiccups of its bass accompaniment and its ve-bar duration. There is then some
attempt to repair the damage by gap-lling, the rising leaps being answered by falling
steps at 21 and 23.
54
The improvement continues with bars 22 and 24 forming
together with bar 20 a larger-scale falling progression, from d
3
to c
3
to b
2
. However,
there is something rather clumsy about the cadential approach of bars 25 and 26,
making one realize that there is another level to the apparent parody an inability
to handle modulation as well as voice leading.
54
This was also present in bar 14, in the lling of the previous c
2
b
2
gap by the stepwise descent from a
2
to d
2
,
but rather disguised by the thematic role of the bar as a return to earlier material, not the sort of continuation
found at bar 21.
Ex. 3.5a (cont.)
Bars 34 to 37 refer again to the problem passage. It is turned into a minor-mode
enclave, with repeated semibreve Gs replacing the gawky leaps. The repeated upper
appoggiaturas and harmonic colour even offer a hint, if no more than that, of Spanish
colouring (compare the similar melodic gures heard at the start of second half of
K. 490). The harmonic movement of the surrounding material is very straightfor-
wardly diatonic. That there might be something rather pointed about this simplicity
is suggested most strongly by the repeated left-hand Gs from bar 28, which cling
to the safety of the dominant after the laboured effort required to reach it. Like the
right-hand line to follow in bars 347, they also offer an emphatic correction of
the pitch contours of the initial sequence of four semibreve values. Thus an entirely
Heteroglossia 103
Ex. 3.5b K. 309 bars 5777
typical bass afrmation of the new key leaps into the creative foreground. The clos-
ing idea also seems pointedly simple; bars 436 could easily be imagined as the
peroration of a comic operatic number, demonstrating again the stylistic adjacency
of buffa and galant.
The second half not surprisingly makes further efforts to put right the problem
passage (see Ex. 3.5b). The rst and second tries, from bars 61 and 67, are less awful
than the rst-half versions because there is a better balance between rise and fall
and the intervals described are narrower. The third version plays even safer, with its
repeated notes perhaps taking their cue from bars 347, but, with its very plainly
exposed tritone caused by the leap up to b
2
then tamely back to the safety of the
repeated f
2
, it is actually the ugliest of all. Once more the bass accompaniment
is unsettled in its precise rhythmic form, and the feeling persists that it is quite
incongruous anyway as a companion to the semibreve values. Another irritant is
that, as in the rst half, the passage seems undecided about whether it should last
for four or ve bars.
The second subject from bar 82 is quite drastically rewritten it is only four
instead of six bars long, and the bass is more shapely with its stepwise movement
Ex. 3.5c K. 309 bars 8392
than the previous repeated notes. Indeed, the very marked fall from a semibreve
G to a semibreve F, producing a highly directional 4/2 harmony in bar 83, offers
another type of correction to the prevalent leaping about of the semibreve rhythms.
Finally at bars 869 the problem passage is put right (Ex. 3.5c) and its stylistic origins,
totally obscure to this point, are made clear. From galant ineptitude we arrive at
a solution that is like a typical contrapuntal tag (compare several famous Mozart
examples, such as those found in the nales of the Jupiter Symphony and the G
major Quartet, K. 387). We should also note that the bass at bars 869 seems to nd
a settled accompanying rhythm and that it complements the intervallic trend of the
tag in exemplary fashion. From this perspective the previous passages suggest the
composing of someone with a little learning who has a notion of using a clever old
tag, but cant remember how it goes. This sonata parodistically embodies the very
criticisms that were made of the modern manner at the time.
There are many other works that seem to parody aspects of the galant manner,
especially its tendency to produce chopped up music. Deliberately poor continuity
of thought is displayed in the initial parts of sonatas like K. 106, K. 524 and K. 170
(the tempo designation of which, Andante moderato e cantabile, already tells us
what style to expect). On the other hand, just as many sonatas are eager to test the
genuine charms of the style, even if, as in K. 277 or K. 384, these are ultimately mixed
with other, incompatible ingredients. Only in one section of his sonata output does
Scarlatti produce a series of apparently straight galant essays. These, the works centred
around V VI and VII (K. 296355), are what I would dub the modest sonatas;
the chronological implications of their production have already been considered in
Chapter 2. Certainly many of them t oddly in the wider context of the whole
uvre. Their demeanour is introverted, the composers customary nervous energy
and use of sharp contrast being largely absent. They feature no registral extremes,
no marked popular colours, no overt virtuosity.
There is, however, a fundamental contradiction in the relationship of style to
technique in these works that has not been pointed out. Scarlatti treats a galant
idiom treble-dominated, with high and continuous bass lines, an emphasis on
Heteroglossia 105
graceful symmetry, and a pervasive modesty of tone in a rigorous manner, very often
monothematically, as if he is trying to force the idiom into the genre of an invention.
The composer becomes obsessed with pattern-making, so that the personal freedom
of inection that should be at the core of the galant is straitjacketed. The music wears
a xed smile, as it were, and begins to suggest a mode of toy music. In other words,
the galant idiom is forced to march to an uncongenial syntax. It is almost as if the
technique of the vamp has been transferred to the work as a whole, with the hypnotic
fascination of undifferentiated movement; it is noteworthy, though, that the modest
sonatas never employ vamps as such.
One can sense an equivalent to the concept of Classical tone in such works; there
is no way of knowing the extent to which the composer is standing aloof, and even
to ask, as Rosen says, is to miss the point.
55
Such works seem to bespeak a kind
of boredom, but it is as if the theory that through boredom comes fascination
56
is
being put to the test; the fascination comes from the sense that the composer may
be treading a ne line between giving the listener enough to go on and not enough
to go on. Thus such works can both repel and fascinate. The Sonata in A major,
K. 286, provides such an instance. The idea rst heard at bars 8
2
10 can easily
fascinate; it has an odd avour, with its staggered parallel intervals of fths and
octaves. Unlike most star turns in the sonatas, though, it is not transformed in any
way, nor does it interact with other material; it seems simply to be put through
its paces. Whether or not we choose to become engrossed, one should note that
the composer is being characteristically extreme in his gestures, as we nd with
comparable works such as K. 274, 291, 334 and 342. The tenor of the basic material
is accessible, the treatment rather forbidding in its ascetic minimalism. A sonata like
K. 286 is an entrancing object, one that is perfectly formed and spins indifferently
around before our eyes and ears.
Perhaps the most extreme work of this character is the Sonata in A major, K. 322.
Pestelli comments: Even when using the more casual locutions of international
language, Scarlatti loads his works with suggestions of popular song; see the simple
extended melody that emerges in the codas of [K. 322]. One needs to have heard the
pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli play this passage in full voice . . .; the performer
seems to react polemically to the clich e of a rened and slightly anaemic Scarlatti. In
his hands the passage emanates good health and outdoor singing.
57
While certainly
agreeing with such an approach in principle, one wonders if it applies to K. 322,
which does seem pallid, not so much because of the nature of the melody, but
because of the thinness of the total texture. The melody is accompanied throughout
only by bass minims.
58
It would surely be difcult to hear this merely as popular
simplicity.
55
56
Discussed by Diane Arbus in Diane Arbus (New York: Aperture, 1972), 13.
57
58
Georges Beck calls these boring implacable minims . . . without variety or vigour. R everies ` a propos de
Scarlatti, in Musiques Signes Images Liber amicorum Franc ois Lesure, ed. Jo el-Marie Fauquet (Geneva: Minkoff,
1988), 15.
Pestelli further suggests that K. 322 is composed at the absolute limits of economy
imaginable, achieving a sort of virtuosity in saying everything with a minimum of
means . . . This is an inexpressive work par excellence, without the least tension it
would have been incomprehensible to the masters of the galant.
59
This is hard to
square with his comments above, but seems more attuned to the spirit of the work.
The means are certainly minimal: this is not simply a dull work, but pointedly,
exotically dull. This quality inheres not in the character of the material as such but
in the implacability of its treatment. By far the most dramatic moment is the simple
diminished seventh arpeggio in bar 63. Really the sonata offers a virtuoso proof
of our boredomfascination symbiosis. There is something akin to what we nd in
Shostakovich or Mahler a mixture of being drawn to and repelled by the banal
but because of the terms of eighteenth-century musical language, dening such a
process is more elusive. After all, it was precisely the galant (remembering its broader
sense) that aspired to the naturalness and simplicity that were seen as the supreme
merits of folk music, which led to a narrowing of the gap between popular and
high-art idioms. Thus K. 322, while patently galant in manner, could also be heard,
in its apparent unselfconsciousness, as a form of stylized or idealized popular song.
The work cannot, however, be heard as a parody, because it lacks any foil within
itself.
K. 322 also illustrates the composers concerns with space and register that will be
explored in Chapter 6 this is all keenly felt as narrow and conned. The diminished
seventh of bar 63 is the one expansive gesture, but it is immediately gap-lled.
60
The
sonata presents a completely stratied texture there are holes above and below as
well as in between the two lines, and still the whole sounds narrow, because there
is absolutely no depth of eld to the sound.
61
The extreme, seemingly mechanical
continuity of texture and of syntax remind one again of the phenomenon of the
vamp. This means that, pace Pestelli, the sonata does express a certain sort of tension,
like that of someone who needs to run for a train but is forced to walk.
In bar 65 of his rendering of the sonata, Zacharias plays two minim As in the
bass instead of the correct semibreve.
62
While this change may represent the sort
of tidying that almost no performer of Scarlattis sonatas can resist, it might also be
that he has quite understandably become mesmerized by the established pattern
of the bass line. The semibreve A in 65 produces a brief loss of momentum that
seems to be occasioned by the mild shock of bar 63. It is unfortunate that the
performer does not observe this semibreve value, since in the terms of K. 322 it is a
59
60
This may owe something to the diminished-seventh chord outlined in the treble at 48
4
49, part of a singleton
phrase that causes an unexpected blip to the repetitive symmetry. On the other hand, this unit is not rhythmically
anomalous as is that heard in bar 63.
61
Beck, perhaps misunderstanding the world of the modest sonatas, believes K. 322 is a typical example of a
sonata that needs textural lling-in: Shouldnt one breathe into [the bass minims] the life they are lacking by
adding some notes? One could drive a coach with ve horses through the gap between treble and bass. Beck,
R everies, 15.
62
EMI: 7 63940 2, 197985/1991.
Heteroglossia 107
momentous happening. Apart from this bar, the bass plays absolutely nothing apart
from minims.
I BEI AN I NFLUENCE
It should be clear in the light of a number of earlier discussions that I believe the issue
of Iberian inuence has been largely misconceived. It has been regarded principally
as a question of essence, at the expense of certain historical considerations. We have
seen, for example, that Falla looked to Scarlatti as the classic Spanish composer,
and there is no doubt that Scarlatti had an inuence on later Spanish art music,
whether in dening an approach to the incorporation of popular elements or whether
in suggesting a certain compositional ethos. If we accept that this inuence was
practical as well as spiritual, then the authentically Spanish becomes unknowable.
If we suppose for a moment that nothing about Scarlattis sonatas is intrinsically
or extrinsically Spanish, then the mistaken application of certain features of his
sonatas in the name of Spanish music would logically lead to the exclusion of such
works also from any ethnic canon. This would hardly be a tenable position. The
fact that Scarlattis Spanish idiom may be no more truly representative of Spanish
popular music, or various subsets within that, than horn calls are of German folk
music is not of fundamental importance. Spanishness is what we or a composer
construct as being Spanish; it is in the rst instance a question of tradition, of
cultural determination, rather than one of essence. Furthermore, our impressions of
Spanishness derive in the rst instance from its embodiment in art music, even for
those who have direct experience of, say, amenco guitar and vocal performances.
This is because a natural ltering occurs when we listen to folk music, or when a
composer listens, then attempts to incorporate its elements. An assumption of creative
selective hearing normally operates in the transmission of folk music in an art-music
context that which cannot be captured within certain bounds of coherence and
decorum is omitted. Leonard Meyer tells us that a composers representation of
such sounds is itself always partly dependent upon prevalent cultural traditions for
hearing and conceptualizing the phenomenon in question.
63
This will vary over
time and according to the properties of the language within which a composer
works, but it also interacts with those ltered features found in previous art music.
In this sense folk elements cannot really be heard at all until they are brought into a
high-cultural context and thus given a basis for comparison.
63
Style and Music: Theory, History and Ideology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 126. This and
the other matters of principle discussed here help render less urgent the logical objection to the whole enterprise
of identifying Iberian strains: that we are in no position to assess the form taken by folk idioms well over two
centuries ago and should not extrapolate back on the basis of knowledge of later examples. See for example
Frederick Hammonds remark that until we know more about eighteenth-century Iberian folk music, detailed
documentation of its inuence on Scarlatti is impossible. Hammond, Scarlatti, 178. We might also note at this
point one of those Scarlattian absences the fact that Joel Sheveloff studiously avoids all questions of Iberian
material and inuence.
The notion of being able to recover the essential features of a folk style or a national
character, removing later accretions to reveal an authentic original, is a common
cultural trope. For clear historical reasons, though, it has had particular force in
a Spanish context. The image of Spain, and in particular Andalucia, as Europes
oriental other, as a place where one could see the Middle East without leaving the
West,
64
is well established. So well established as a musical construction, in fact, that
a composer like Debussy could, in works like La Puerta del Vino and Ib eria, simulate
it with almost no direct experience of the country or its indigenous folk music.
65
It is hardly surprising that such easy appropriation has led to the defensive and
sceptical attitude characterized in Chapter 2. On a broader scale, Xo an M. Carreira
has noted that a conviction that the task of the musicologist should be to retrieve
what is essential/national and to identify and dene what is articial/foreign is
a constant feature of standard reference works by Spanish and Portuguese musical
scholars.
66
The attempt to recover an uncontaminated form of amenco, one which is not
on general access and has not been corrupted by cultural or actual tourism, is rooted
in the same dynamic. This process was initiated with the organization of a cante
jondo festival in Granada in 1922, by Federico Garca Lorca and Falla among others,
the goal of which was to attempt such a recovery after the nineteenth-century
commercial debasement of the style. Its participants, and later representatives, have
been described by Timothy Mitchell as avant-garde primitivists who wanted to
shun history, to escape urban society, to ee the pollution of modernity.
67
Such
denial of history, of its sullying associations, avoids the central point that authenticity
is not essential to the experience of such music in the sphere of high art. By denition,
it does different cultural work in this context.
Against the relativismwhich has been offered above, one might argue that, without
some attempt to isolate the truly Spanish elements in Scarlattis style, however fraught
that operation might be, we cannot properly judge his style. We will be in danger
of attributing to the composers powers of invention, to his originality, what is
in fact a more or less direct rendering of popular material. A particularly striking
harmonic progression, for instance, a strong use of dissonance, an unusual texture or
type of phrase structure might simply be indebted to a folk model, for all the ltering
involved. How can we possibly grasp the nature of the composers creativity unless
we can identify such sources with reasonable condence, assess the relative delity
of the rendering, note the purposes served by transformations of material? This,
however, misses the point that the very incorporation of these elements, certainly
64
Timothy Mitchell, Flamenco Deep Song (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 112. See also Etzion, Legend.
65
Debussy attended a bullght in San Sebastan and was able to hear amenco singers and guitarists at the Exposition
Universelle of 188990 in Paris. See Chase, Spain, 299.
66
Opera and Ballet in Public Theatres of the Iberian Peninsula, in BoydCarreras, Spain, 17.
67
Mitchell, Flamenco, 169. For a more traditional account of the circumstances of the 1922 Concurso de cante
jondo see Marion Papenbrok, History of Flamenco, in Flamenco: Gypsy Dance and Music from Andalusia,
ed. Claus Schreiner, trans. Mollie Comerford Peters (Portland: Amadeus, 1990), 457.
Heteroglossia 109
given their apparently vivid manifestation in Scarlatti, is already a form of originality.
As has been stressed before, inuence is only what the imagination of the artist
chooses to make of it. It is a question of more or less conscious creative choice.
Other composers may have heard, but did not listen; at least, they did not let such
elements into their artistic world. This could, of course, relate to circumstances of
employment as well as temperament.
Remaining unaddressed, though, is the question of identication. Just what is this
material that is incorporated by our composer? We have already replied that the an-
swers lie in the future, as it were, in those features that were reected in later Spanish
music, whether issuing from that national environment or simulated elsewhere. But
if we indulge a natural curiosity about origins, we must wonder from whom Scarlatti
derived his Spanish features. When it comes to the incorporation of exotic elements,
he does appear to stand at the beginning of the line. Two younger contemporaries
of Scarlatti, Seixas in Lisbon and especially Albero in Madrid, appear to explore
similar areas, but it would be difcult on the basis of known circumstances to allow
them prior claim to this honour (and if this is so, then in what circumstances and
environments did Scarlatti acquire his familiarity with the style?). The implications
of this literal originality are, as already explored in Chapter 2, uncongenial both to
historiographical and nationalistic thought.
If this exoticism really is without precedent, this is less important in an absolute
sense than in the way it is contextualized within the art work. The exotic sounds
so novel in Scarlatti because it is placed in contexts that exaggerate its difference, or
in contexts that suggest the impossibility of its artistic presence.
68
In other words, it
forms part of the composers pointedly mixed style. The exotic will assume a harder
edge when it is an unexpected visitor than when it presents itself from the start. In-
deed, incorporation would generally be an impossibility under these circumstances.
Only a few Scarlatti sonatas present themselves in this way. K. 450 in G minor, the
sonata identied by Jane Clark as a tango gitano, is a rare example. Here is a sonata
that really acts as if it were in its entirety a functional amenco dance. The Spanish
element lls the screen. Consequently, there is no sense of argument in the work.
Commentators have often written as if many sonatas were simply to be explained as
this or that dance, but in fact any use of amenco topics seems to be almost entirely
as styles rather than types. Here, on the other hand, there is no overt sense of critical
distance we are simply presented with the whole object. Without the sharpening
provided by the presence of conicting material, the effect of the work is, in fact,
relatively unremarkable. K. 532 in Aminor also assumes a relatively functional aspect,
but we will see in the following chapter that it contains plenty of added value.
The intermingling of terms like Spanish, folk and amenco in the recent discussion
raises the familiar problem of determining the ethnic origin of popular elements in
68
In this connection I dissent strongly from Richard Taruskins suggestion that the Scarlatti sonatas represent a
typically eighteenth-century use of stereotyped local colour which is essentially comic. The weakness of both
notions should be apparent from the arguments presented not just in this section but throughout my study. See
Taruskin, Nationalism, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edn, vol. 17, 692.
the sonatas. The ambiguities of classication can be conceptualized as a series of
binary pairs held within ever-widening circles: Andalusian folk music vs. amenco,
Andalusian vs. Spanish, Spanish vs. Portuguese, Iberian vs. Italian. It has already
been suggested, of course, that a precise sourcing of popular elements is not always
possible or even desirable. The use of exotic in recent paragraphs was calculated
to bridge such taxonomical gaps, to focus attention on what counts in an art-music
context. It should also be read as implying something different from popular, but
without any binary opposition: exotic represents the hard edge of the popular. The
most sustained exotic colours, however, are undoubtedly associated with amenco.
The musical and cultural problems inherent in the denition of amenco are
legendary. The enormously complicated schemes for classifying its various vocal
and dance forms are less relevant for current purposes than its comparative cultural
interpretation. For one, amenco cannot be straightforwardly regarded as folk music.
It is not rural, it is urban. It is not timeless, but arose in the relatively recent past (by
general consent it had been clearly established by the start of the nineteenth century).
Its image is not healthy and merry; rather, it tends to connote fatalism, histrionically
expressed, and has strong associations with alcohol, prostitution and that despised
group, the gypsies. Perhaps most importantly, the authenticity of amenco cannot be
equated with anonymity, since its music is largely generated by specic individuals,
whose works carry their name when used by subsequent singers. However, this
no longer seems such a crucial distinction; the presence of specialized practitioners
in all sorts of folk traditions around the world is now fairly widely understood. It
is also very difcult to extricate amenco from the more traditional folklore of the
region. It is generally agreed that the safest distinction is made less on the basis of
material than on that of style of performance. Flamenco is more introverted, tense
and highly ornamented than traditional popular forms. This style is often associated
with the term cante jondo (deep song).
Not only is there considerable ambiguity about the boundary between amenco
and Andalusian folk music, but there is also a tendency to conate Andalusian and
Spanish folk music. This is not just the product of outside ignorance, though; it has
a historical dimension. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as Mitchell has
suggested, promoting Andalusian culture was the best means for promoting central-
ism and defusing incipient Catalan or Basque nationalisms.
69
When we reach our
wider circles of classication, the same overlappings occur. For instance, Jane Clark
has suggested that the sonatas K. 49092 make up a triptych of forms associated with
the music of Holy Week in Seville: thus K. 490 represents a saeta, K. 491 a seguidilla
sevillana and K. 492 a bulera. This has been disputed by Rafael Puyana; while ac-
cepting that K. 490 recalls the saeta, he believes K. 491 is a Majorcan bolero, and
K. 492 a Portuguese fandango. Further, he believes that many other sonatas belong
to the same family of Portuguese fandangos.
70
Finally, there are the same grey areas
between the Iberian and the Italian (or Neapolitan). Surprisingly few writers have
69
Mitchell, Flamenco, 156.
70
Clark, Andalouse, 635; Puyana, Inuencias, 53 and 52.
Heteroglossia 111
suggested that, rather than being a problem of classication, such ambiguities may
derive from a calculated stylistic crossover (leaving aside for now the question of any
open invitation to the ear). Puyana does make such suggestions. For example, he
notes that Scarlatti often cultivates the rhythm of the Italian gigue and complements
it with Hispanic accentuation, as in K. 525. In other sonatas the Neapolitan alter-
nates with the Iberian, thus amalgamating [Scarlattis] two fundamental sources of
inspiration; K. 429, with its barcarolle rhythm, offers such an alternation.
71
From this grand confusion we may reasonably assume that identication on the
basis of supposed dance rhythms always, of course, to the extent that such identi-
cation is regarded as necessary is the least reliable of indicators. In material terms,
one could propose that an order of melodic, then harmonic, then rhythmic features
corresponds to relative ease of identication. There is, in other words, less difculty
in disentangling say, amenco, from the Italian when we consider melodic style than
when focusing on rhythmic conformations. Of course, such an ordering is highly
provisional, but I believe it forms an index to relative levels of exoticism, which, it has
been argued, play a cardinal role in the larger stylistic framework. Thus, in the modal
islands of K. 193, for example, the melodic shaping sounds highly exotic, the har-
monic basis somewhat less so, and the underlying rhythm rather less again. The
other determining factor is the implied performance style, and the atmosphere that
this engenders. These considerations suggest, once again, that amenco should stand
somewhat apart when we ponder Scarlattis incorporation of elements from below.
Such a distinction matters because of the socio-political implications of the com-
posers use of amenco elements. We must rst acknowledge, though, that what the
composer incorporated could not have been dened as such at the time. Flamenco
music only assumed any sort of ofcial public identity once the edict of Charles III
in 1782, which sought to end the persecution of gypsies, allowed gypsy music to
emerge from its isolation. Within Scarlattis time at court in Madrid, for example,
Fernando VI decided to have some nine thousand gypsies rounded up and sent to
work in his munitions factories of C adiz, as a sort of nal solution to the gitano
problem. Nevertheless, it is clear that amenco must have developed from a source,
and that elements in the sonatas represent such source material. If so, then what was
a court composer doing bringing such disreputable elements into his music? This
question has been entertained by only a handful of writers. Barbara Zuber offers a
strongly political reading of these circumstances. She reminds us that before Scarlatti
received his knighthood in 1738, he had to attest to his purity of blood that he had
no Jewish or Moorish ancestors (the other two persecuted minorities of the time).
She believes that Scarlatti like other artists such as Cervantes in effect sided with
the gypsies, and that possibly [his] advocacy for the music of Spains lowest social
classes . . . was also a political and social index for his circumstances in Spain, of which
we know so little. Increasingly through the nineteenth century, especially with the
71
Puyana, Inuencias, 53. See also Clark, Andalouse, 63; for Clark, though, it is more a question of an Italian
sensibility which modies or controls the Spanish elements rather than Italian features being included as such.
establishment of the so-called caf es cantantes from the 1840s, amenco became a more
respectable and commercial proposition. Zuber reminds us that Scarlatti put such
material into his sonatas at a time when it was less opportune to perform this strange
music to the Madrid court aristocracy.
72
Such interpretations have been ventured
explicitly by no other writer.
On the other hand, Mitchell has persuasively documented the fact that upper-
class interest in under-class expressive styles goes back a very long way in Spain,
especially in southern Spain.
73
This may be correlated with the social phenomenon
whereby upper classes may cultivate a certain roughness of manner to distinguish
their behaviour from that of the aspirational middle classes, ever on the rise. In a
Spanish context, this meant amenquera an aristocratic adoption of gypsy manners
and even dress, to distance themselves from the enlightened Franco-Italian ways of
their middle-class inferiors. Again, though, it is difcult to assess the applicability of
this largely later behaviour to the composers environment. So often in the sonatas
one wonders what Mara B arbara would have made of a particularly vulgar or
irrational passage. After all, there is surely a big difference between the idealized
folk styles that were acceptable enough for court consumption and the electric
intensity more typical of Scarlatti. Kirkpatrick, as we have seen, suggested that such
elements functioned primarily as a distraction, quite the opposite of the gritty
realism we might prefer to hear in them. Only Pagano has suggested that they
may have been understood and enjoyed as such: the insertions of low-life material
seem to have been born from a sort of courtly connivance between master and
pupil.
74
Nor must we forget the Queens absolute passion for the dance, as attested
to by the English ambassador of the time, Benjamin Keene; perhaps this passion
extended beyond the execution of the normal courtly forms. Of course, we must
not overlook the possibility that the royal couple, and presumably the court in the
event of those sonata performances we have no record of, could not distinguish
between particular references to amenco-type material and more general popular
inections. Such political and environmental speculation should not in any case
overshadow the broader cultural moment of Scarlattis amenco manner, radical
beyond any doubt.
So what features may be proposed as indicators of a amenco style or manner? The
most salient, we have already suggested, may be melodic. The style is melismatic,
featuring ornate embellishment, incessant repetitions of a single note decorated by
appoggiaturas above and below, a limited melodic range and portamento effects. The
Sonata in C major, K. 548, features from bar 22 a modal island with such melodic
characteristics (see Ex. 3.6). Most notable are the harsh dissonances of bars 3033.
72
See Zuber, Blumen, 814. Note too the comments of Linton Powell when assessing Scarlattis apparent use
of guitar effects in his sonatas: Curiously enough, native Spanish composers of the eighteenth century did not
show an overwhelming predilection for emulating the guitar in their keyboard works. Perhaps they considered
such gypsy music vulgar. A History of Spanish Piano Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980),
149.
73
See Mitchell, Flamenco, 99.
74
Pagano, Vite, 447.
Heteroglossia 113
Ex. 3.6 K. 548 bars 1943
For all the apparent renement of notation, what the ear accepts is the insistent
repetition of a melodic cluster that always sounds dissonant against the changing
harmonies. The following texture, featuring purely diatonic sixths in the right hand
and bass octaves, with a clean gap between the hands, forms an effective antidote to
this exotic display. The strange melodic cluster is an outcrop of the previous material,
specically the ourish heard every two bars from bar 22
1
.
The cluster is briey heard again at bar 40, followed by a reintroduction of the
syncopations from 22, in a passage that seems like a parody of the exotic. (Note
the rough voice leading at bar 43, which is even more apparent at 48.) It may not
be that, but it does lighten the mood by being less static. Such apparent jauntiness
should not necessarily be thought of as antithetical to amenco, which involves
more than just pain and harshness; the sadness of cante jondo is a ritual aspect of its
expression, not unlike what one nds in the blues. It might be preferable to think of
Scarlatti as moving between more or less stylized forms of the idiom; this is in any case
inevitable, given the very act of composition and its high-artistic context. Stylization
is also tied up with the question of how the composer hears his source material.
Klaus Heimes, reviewing such melodic writing in Scarlattis disciple, Soler, suggests
that the conventional notation of such passages often represents but a courtly
purication of a vocal gliding through vacillating intervals.
75
Such purication,
though, is more an inevitability than the implied concession to royal taste. While the
writing at bars 22ff. might exemplify this process, the clusters at 3033 do not seem
to be very ltered at all. The notational suggestions of various forms of appoggiaturas
and neighbour notes are not very convincing in other words, this is just the sort
of material one would expect a composer not to incorporate, because it cannot be
heard within the constraints of the language and notation of the time. Yet Scarlatti
allows this irrationality into the nished artistic product.
The Sonata in F major, K. 107, is also notable for an apparent attempt to portray
amenco vocal effects (see Ex. 3.7a). The right-hand guration found at bars 1723,
with its outlining of a scale through repeated and implicitly slurred pairs of notes, is
found very frequently in the sonatas. However, is the current example, rather than
necessarily being heard as toccata-like, Scarlattis approximation to vocal portamento?
The repetitiveness of the cadential units and their extravagant ourishes at bars 2530
do suggest amenco melismata, even though the harmonies are diatonic. The related
melodic material from bar 33 is more clearly ethnic, but different only in degree
rather than kind. Also worthy of note is the effect of bars 3943, which do more
than display exotic scale forms; the clashes between the hands produce a compo-
site sound picture that may be suggestive of quarter-tones, of something beyond the
diatonic system and its notation. Such teeth-grinding dissonance is at least equalled
by bars 11213 in the second half. K. 55 is another work which takes great delight in
the displaying of exotic-sounding scale forms, which are surrounded by exuberantly
physical, entirely diatonic material. Again, the narrow clashes of the total texture
seem to reproduce the melismatic microtonal inections of amenco song.
76
The
climax of the exoticism in K. 55 comes at bars 8895 (see Ex. 3.7b); it requires a
real act of will not to hear such a passage as Spanish.
To return to K. 107, there seems in fact to be a amenco takeover of the sonata,
symbolized by the very unusual minor ending to a work that begins unexceptionably
in major. So often, when considering the harmonic indicators of amenco style,
75
Heimes, Soler, 172. The author gives as an example bars 4852 of Solers Sonata No. 19 in C minor.
76
For another example of the isolated display of such scales, see K. 232, especially bars 278 and 678, although
the effect here is much more quizzical. For an example by Albero, see Sonata No. 19 in B minor, bars 1821.
Heteroglossia 115
Ex. 3.7a K. 107 bars 1743
Ex. 3.7b K. 55 bars 8596
Ex. 3.8 K. 313 bars 6576
minor goes with the ethnic and major with the normal musical world. Exoticisms
ourish in the minor, while the major is more brilliant and accessible. This is nothing
very special in terms of tonal rhetoric, except that for Scarlatti the minor allows access
to all those oriental scalic avours. In Ex. 3.8, for instance, from K. 313, a turn to
the minor prompts a marked Spanish coloration in bars 712, where we nd one of
the closest approximations to that now ingrained marker of Spanishness, the rapid
turn gure. Here one could even say that the rubato is notated. However, this gure
is as much thematic as realistic; it reects the second subject of the sonata, heard
from bar 42.
Ex. 3.8 also illustrates the harmonic feature traditionally taken as axiomatic to
Scarlattis representations of the Spanish: the Phrygian progression or cadence. This
involves an emphatic leading towards the dominant by the note a minor second
above, which may be present in the bass or a higher voice; here it is found in the alto
g
1
in bar 71. Just as common is the hovering around the dominant by both

4 and
6. This can be seen in the activity of C and E around D in Ex. 3.7b. Boyd is more
sceptical: The frequent Phrygian progressions . . . are often said to derive from
the modes and cadences of Spanish folk-song, but they also occur prominently in
a cappella church music and as cadences in slow movements of Italian concertos and
sonatas. He also points out that the oscillation between the two chords is found
often enough in Scarlattis earlier vocal music.
77
This cautionary note overlooks the
conrming role that may be played by other factors, such as the stylistic clothing
and wider syntactical context of the progression; Exx. 3.7b and 3.8 seem to leave
little doubt about their ethnic roots. Nevertheless, one must temper ones certitude
when encountering examples such as Ex. 3.9 below, from an aria in Leonardo Leos
opera Amor vuol sofferenza:
77
Boyd, Master, 18081.
Heteroglossia 117
Ex. 3.9 Leo: Amor vuol sofferenza Tu si no forfantiello bars 79
Ex. 3.10 K. 218 bars 7784
This is a minor enclave that postpones the nal cadence of the opening ritornello.
The bass line hovers around the dominant, with dynamic and accentual weight
falling on

4 and
6; there is also a repetitive syntax that is clearly at odds with the

galant style of the surrounding melodic writing (both the dotted rhythms and the
cadential sextuplet are strong markers of the style). This suggests that such a feature
may be as Neapolitan as it is Spanish. That the Naples of Scarlattis boyhood was
under Spanish rule, however, suggests a partial explanation for such an ambiguity.
One should also be careful not to place too much weight on modality in general
when assessing popular simulations, since the modal functions as such an all-purpose
folk indicator. That said, in practice the role played by other parameters can remove
some of the uncertainty of attribution.
This is undoubtedly the case with the Sonata in A minor, K. 218. In bars 7982
(see Ex. 3.10) the composer strips away the melodic formulae that have domi-
nated the piece. We are left with the

4
6(
5) bass that in some form or other

has been present for much of the time and an accompanying upper part in voice
exchange with it. What remains is the engine of Spanish harmony as Scarlatti con-
ceives it in this sonata, IV or IV
6
alternating with V in the Phrygian progression.
Ex. 3.11a K. 182 bars 7485
Ex. 3.11b K. 188 bars 12430
This is a moment of unusual creative frankness which lays bare the imagined essence
of a Spanish sound. Indeed, it is like a form of Klang-meditation,
78
rather com-
parable to those extraordinary moments in the Fandango by Soler in which the
melody drops out and we are left to contemplate the ritualistic bass line alone. The
sense of this being distinct from the preceding music is enhanced by the rhythmic
opposition between these bars and the right-hand hemiola in the previous four
(bars 758).
79
Another harmonic feature found frequently in the sonatas seems to evoke the
world of amenco: the emphatic ninth above the dominant bass, often texturally
reinforced. Two similar realizations of this feature from K. 182 and K. 188 are given
in Ex. 3.11. (See bars 80 and 130 respectively.)
This ninth may even be related to the Phrygian cadence, as a verticalized form of
the semitone progression. Like the exotic scales, it has a fraught quality that seems
to place it outside the orbit of more open or relaxed folk idioms. Such expressive
denition in the composers use of modality, the pronounced sense of estrangement
from more customary musical languages, is what seems to have inspired a refresh-
ingly critical assessment from J. Barrie Jones. Writing of the Granados arrangement
of twenty-six of the sonatas, the author states: The occasional modal avours of
78
I borrow this term from James Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5, Cambridge Music Handbooks (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993).
79
Something remarkably similar occurs in the Fugue No. 1 in D minor by Albero, at bars 204ff .
Heteroglossia 119
Scarlattis music were to some extent inspired by Spanish folk-music, and that, no
doubt, is one of the explanations of that curious and sometimes unsatisfactory stylis-
tic mixture that is so characteristic of Scarlattis music.
80
Although one might jib
at the cautious line on the extent of modal activity, it is nice to nd a direct attack
on Scarlattis mixed style. This at least acknowledges just how incompatible the
different styles are in principle and the extent of the risks Scarlatti runs.
When considering those rhythmic factors that may capture amenco style, we
may set to one side the identication of dance rhythms that has already been shown
to be fraught in its own right. Instead, we may concentrate on several more abstract
matters. Over-repetitiveness is one recurring feature of amenco representation, for
example when the repetition of a normally simple cadential unit turns into the
opposite of what it normally connotes, stability. We have already seen this in K. 107
(see bars 2430 of Ex. 3.7a). In the Sonata in G major, K. 105, we nd in bars 649
three consecutive versions of the two-bar unit previously heard just once at bars
523 to clinch a phrase.
81
Here repetition is made exotic and therefore stylistically
unstable. This may be related in principle to the vamp, which does the same on a
much larger and more disruptive scale. The repetitions found in bars 3944 of K. 502
go further than this, though. Here we are treated to six consecutive bars of the same
module.
The sense of irrationality is magnied in the second half of K. 502. From bar 94,
with the changes of time signature in conjunction with the crude sequential patterns
and the agglomeration of different melodic rhythms, one senses perhaps more than
anywhere else in the Scarlatti sonatas a straining towards something that cannot be
expressed in the notation, that is quite beyond the comprehension of the world of
high art. Nowhere else does the music break down quite so openly and vividly. To
hear this just as a particularly lively translation of folk idiom is to miss the main point.
Recalling our principle of creative selective hearing, we would expect such music
never to have made it onto the page. The problem could not be much more acute
than that faced by a composer trying to assimilate amenco idioms, which are not
entirely European in origin and expression, and in the eighteenth century. What
Scarlatti is presumably trying to capture here above all is the metrical complexity of
amenco rhythms.
82
Another rhythmicsyntactical factor is more abstract still. It was suggested in the
early account of K. 277 that the inuence of amenco, and to an extent all folk music,
80
Enrique Granados: A Few Reections on a Seventieth Anniversary, The Music Review 47/1 (1986), 22.
81
Malcolm Boyd discusses copying matters with respect to the P and Madrid versions of K. 105 in a review of
the recording by Scott Ross (Erato: ECD 75400, 1989), Early Music 17/2 (1989), 272, and Scarlatti Sonatas
in Some Recently Discovered Spanish Sources, in Domenico Scarlatti e il suo tempo, 667. Both scribes seem to
have copied from a source in which repeat signs and great curves were used as a shorthand, leading to some
confusion in the nal product. On great curves, see Chapter 4, pp. 1735.
82
Clark says that K. 502 is a peteneras; Clark, Spanish, 20. The closing material of each half, from bars 60 and 119
respectively, is strongly echoed in several other Iberian sonatas. Compare it with that found in the same structural
position in the Sonata No. 117 in D minor by Soler, and also with the closing gures found in Alberos Sonata
No. 8 in F major, at bars 40 and 456. These similarities are so pronounced that they suggest less that the two
younger composers might have been inspired by Scarlattis piece than a shared external model.
may have operated on a level beyond the appropriation of various idiomatic features
that it encouraged a sense of the contingency of musical style altogether. Equally,
it was suggested that the composers sense of temporality may have been affected.
Such considerations are plain in the case of vamps, but they may intrude in quite
different contexts. The Sonata in A major, K. 404, plays with time through a rather
cubist assemblage of sequences the sort of intoxicating monotony that Scarlatti
may have cultivated under the impact of amenco. The descending scales with upper
pedal that recur again and again (from bars 36, 52, 75, 83, 117, 133, 156 and 164)
are clearly too thin or slow-moving in context to sustain the listeners attention in a
normal manner. Instead, we may nd ourselves listening to the passing of time and
becoming lost in the mechanics of the pattern. The texture too is absorbing in its
dryness. The material may be Arcadian, but the treatment goes way beyond that.
Everything seems to happen in slow motion.
83
The half-imitative texture heard at the beginning of the second half at last speeds
up the rate of events, but this is then countered by a slowing of momentum. Bars
105
4
113 comprise a magical moment when time seems to stop here we have
small sequential repetitions instead of the very long-winded ones that have been
the norm thus far. We hear several frozen gestures, rst of all a sort of idiomatic
musette, then a Spanish turn of phrase, both chiselled out by rests, and then, at bars
11415, a clear reference to a standard sequential syntax. Then the music returns for
good to the previous inscrutable manner. K. 404 could almost be a Satie piece about
boredom, alleviated only by these heart-stopping moments early in the second half.
If we are to connect the temporal sense of this sonata with anything, it might
be better regarded as Spanish rather than specically amenco in character. Indeed,
in some respects it seems opposed both to amenco intensity and to the nervous
character of most of Scarlattis syntax. As one hears it in K. 404, or other works like
K. 296 and K. 544, this is a passive attitude to time. Time is not used efciently or
functionally. Linton Powell has commented on this sense in the works of Rodrguez:
[Rodrguez] tends to carry on gurations and sequences much too long and to wander
harmonically with no clear sense of tonal goal. Anyone who has examined Spanish keyboard
music of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries will nd these faults long-
windedness and harmonic meandering. They appear to be native Spanish traits, endemic
to the music. But . . . perhaps they are deliberate esthetic aims. Could centuries of intimate
exposure to an alien Near Eastern culture have left a lingering fondness among the Spanish
people for the static, the contemplative, the immobile, the goal-less, in contrast to Westerners
continual haste to be in motion from one preplanned point to another through the most
efcient means of transport? At any rate, we have not seen the last of this characteristic in
Spanish keyboard music.
84
83
Pletnev is surely right to adopt a deliberate Andante tempo in his recording of K. 404. Virgin: 5 45123 2, 1995.
84
Powell, Spanish, 10. Note also the comments of John Trend on a similar quality in Granados: Yet his sense of
form or, as some critics hastily conclude, the absence of it was also new; he rambled on, making his points
by repetition (like a Spanish poet) and saying the same thing in a number of delightful and decorative ways.
Trend, Falla, 33.
Heteroglossia 121
If this seems to collude too easily with the essentializing of the land of ma nana,
one simply has to have played through some of the fugues of Albero and Soler, the
tientos of Jos e Elas, and even more the sonatas of Rodrguez. To this Westerner
at least, the gigantic sequences one nds may be exotically enticing, but they can
equally be infuriating and upsetting, so implacably do they continue on their way.
Contemplation of this temporal property in conjunction with K. 404 convinces one
of the force of Puyanas denition of an intrinsically Spanish form of expression
that comes from an old tradition in which the passions and temperament are con-
trolled, leading to an intense expressive austerity. He believes that many sonatas
without the slightest folk colour show. . . that the composer had also acquired this
dimension.
85
The uncertainties of classication reected upon in this section have an executive
counterpart. This is the question of the relative degree of stylization appropriate
to the performance of perceived popular, and especially amenco, material. With
exceptions like the criticism by the Italian Claudio Bolzan of a recording by Alexis
Weissenberg, where the Spanish dance rhythms are too marked, so transforming
some sonatas into real Iberian dances,
86
this area has hardly been touched, in per-
formance as well as writing. Often, of course, no particular intervention is required
for such a avour to emerge.
87
In many cases, though, particularly in the rendering
of cante jondo elements, there is more room to manoeuvre. In Wanda Landowskas
performance of K. 107, the melodic style of which was discussed above, she slows
down markedly for the most exotic melismatic elements (from bars 33 and 107),
to convey what she calls the sensous and provoking nonchalance of the sonata.
88
Mikhail Pletnev, at bars 25
3
ff. and 45
4
ff. of his recording of K. 24, likewise exagger-
ates the exotic by a marked slowing of tempo, as well as the application of Spanish
avour a sort of mannered, histrionic tenderness. In particular he leans on the
alto ninth found at 30
1
and 50
3
for a real groan of misery. Emilia Fadini claims that
many sonatas begin in the manner of a guitar introduction, discursively, without
regular metre, even if the notation suggests otherwise; the notated tempo applies
only to the (amenco) song or dance that follows.
89
Such bold claims are realized
in her performances of works like K. 99 and K. 184. Jane Clark is another recent
performer who sometimes takes a radically direct route. In her version of K. 225, for
example, she replaces the simple crotchet accompaniment of the left-hand chords
85
Puyana, Inuencias, 54.

Agueda Pedrero-Encabo similarly evokes an eminently Spanish compositional tradition
of an austere, expansive and reiterative character. For her, however, this is an essence inherited by Rodrguez
from Cabanilles, and denitely not encountered in his contemporaries Scarlatti and Seixas. La sonata para teclado:
su conguraci on en Espa na (Valladolid: Secretariado de Publicaciones e Intercambio Cientco, University of
Valladolid, 1997), 248.
86
Reviewof recordings by Vladimir Horowitz (CBS: MP 39762) and Alexis Weissenberg (Deutsche Grammophon:
415 511 1), Nuova rivista musicale italiana 22/1 (1988), 101.
87
Try, for example, Virginia Blacks driving, exuberant performance of K. 187. United: 88005, 1993.
88
Landowska on Music, collected, ed. and trans. Denise Restout, with Robert Hawkins (Secker and Warburg:
London, 1965), 249.
89
Notes to recording by Emilia Fadini (Stradivarius: 33500, 1999), 1819. Even within this scheme she differentiates
between the relatively rigid instrumental and free vocal elements that follow an introduction.
with the rhythm of the seguidillas, upon which dance form she believes the sonata is
based.
90
Should the player put on such an accent? Should a performance in such circum-
stances be stylized, assimilated to a perception of the prevailing style of the composer
or his era, or should it be realistic? Naturally, this realism is itself a highly stylized
construct, leaning heavily on the inherited notion of Spanishness dened at the
outset of the whole discussion.
The most common reaction to this matter of performance practice would be to err
on the side of caution. But such histrionic exaggeration as we nd in Landowska and
Pletnev is arguably very much in style. Wouldnt a straight and sober performance
represent a lesser degree of taste? The same issue arises with Andreas Staiers version
of the Sonata in Amajor, K. 114. He gives an exceptionally ery performance, which
spills over into hysteria when, in the passage beginning at bar 34 and especially from
bar 144, he speeds the music up almost beyond belief.
91
Here once again some
will feel that Staier fails to keep the suggestions of amenco at a distance, that this
is too much of a good thing. At this point the well-worn notions of eighteenth-
century moderation and distance will come into play. These are all too evident in
the moderate character of many Scarlatti performances. One might also recall the
topical reserve that, it has been argued, denes the composers wider approach to
style, but this is an inherent property that hardly requires executive demonstration.
Indeed, such reserve would be positively misleading if translated into performance
it may deny styles their absolute claims but it does not deny them their vitality or
right to speak. The splendidly unreserved Staier in fact makes the vitality of K. 114
frightening rather than in any way picturesque. Perhaps he was heeding the advice
of Kirkpatrick, given when considering the Romantic inheritance that still denes
so many of our attitudes to music, post-authenticity mood notwithstanding:
The type casting of eighteenth-century music that was common in the last century was by no
means eliminated by twentieth-century restorers and enthusiasts. Rather they forced it into
an even tighter costume, into a kind of strait jacket created by the newer notion of a profound
and impassable gulf between eighteenth-century and romantic music. Consequent on the
rise of a sense of style, rose a conception of Stilechtheit that was often quite unsupported by
the historical researches with which it pretended to justify itself. Eighteenth-century music
was forced to be pure and abstract; humanity was permitted it only in the most limited
form. . . There is no nobler mission for a harpsichordist or for a player of Scarlatti than to
frighten such people to death!
92
90
Explained in Clark, Clark Notes, [5].
91
The performances reviewed in this section derive from the following recordings: EMI: 7 64934 2, 1949/1993
(Landowska); Virgin: 5 45123 2, 1995 (Pletnev); Stradivarius: 33500, 1999 (Fadini); Janiculum: JAN D204, 2000
(Clark); Teldec: 0630 12601 2, 1996 (Staier).
92
Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 280. Perhaps reecting such a tradition, Pestelli makes the strange comment that the
interpretation Scarlatti gives of folklore is free from the slightest vulgarity; Pestelli, Sonate, 193. Surely it is
precisely the sensation of rude vulgarity that is so novel in the composers incorporation of folk elements. In
any case, folk music itself never comes across as vulgar in an aesthetic sense vulgarity requires an aiming high
to be noticeable.
Heteroglossia 123
TOPI CAL OPPOSI TI ON
The topical plurality and ambiguity that characterize Scarlattis mixed style have
been read by Giorgio Pestelli as indicators of the composers theatrical vocation.
The sonatas overow with the animated life of the stage, they offer us a musi-
cal spectacle. In eshing this out, the author reminds us of the theatricality with
which eighteenth-century life was often conducted, its fondness for disguises and
masquerades.
93
This is an attractive metaphor for the sense of musical process found
in the sonatas. Similar imagery is found elsewhere in the literature: Sacheverell Sitwell
found the sonatas inhabited, alive with gures.
94
Clearly related to the panorama
tradition, such conceits have the advantage of stressing more clearly the agency of
the different types of musical material, that they are not simply held within a sort of
tableau. The effect of the mixture may, in other words, be dramatic.
An example of such inhabited music is K. 96 in D major (see Ex. 4.12), one of
the best known of the sonatas. In its wide range of imagery, it seems to aim for
a carnivalesque inclusion of the whole (musical) world. The second half enriches
this sense of generosity by containing a good deal of new material or old material
radically transformed compare the repeated-note mutandi i deti passages, for in-
stance, found from bars 33 and 145 respectively. The equivocation over mode at
the end of each half also strengthens the sense that we are in a world of bound-
less possibility, one that is both democratic and comic. Everything and everybody
have their part to play; all the worlds a stage. The overcoming of the minor in-
terpolations in each half could even be seen as symbolic of this comic viewpoint.
95
Even if some of the materials such as the fanfares might seem to be indebted to
French models, the sonata as a whole is very far indeed from the rather formal pro-
grammatic approach of the French keyboard composers. K. 96 is unthinkable in the
French tradition, or indeed any other tradition at all, given its directness, its worldly
vigour.
96
A sonata such as K. 96 has an indubitably panoramic aspect which has then been
extrapolated, rather too easily, to the entire output of sonatas. In the majority of
cases the effect of such a mixture of material may be more disputatious or uncertain;
it may even, as J. Barrie Jones found, be unsatisfactory. This is where the theatrical
metaphor loses its force, unless it can be broadened to take account of the harder-
edged opposition of different topics and styles encountered in many works. At
this level it may seem less a case of conicting characters placed on one stage as
characters that inhabit different stages altogether. The outcome of such conict can
93
94
Sitwell, Background, 131, 135.
95
For an account of this type of patterning, deriving from the minor echo-repeat so familiar from the world of
the Italian concerto, see Talbot, Shifts, 314.
96
Several musicians have heard K. 96 within just one topical frame. B ulow calls it Gigue in his Achtzehn ausgew ahlte
Klavierst ucke (Leipzig: Peters, 1864), where it forms No. 6 of Suite No. 3, and Alfredo Casella arranged it for
small orchestra as the nal movement of his Toccata, Bourr ee et Gigue (Paris: Maurice Senart, 1933). Puyana
counts this as one of the many Portuguese fandangos amidst the sonatas; Puyana, Inuencias, 52.
Ex. 3.12 K. 402 bars 1102
be difcult to gauge: does Scarlatti fuse opposites or narrate the impossibility of
their convergence?.
97
The Sonata in E minor, K. 402, opens in strict or learned style (see Ex. 3.12). The
crucial elements of this style were, according to the theorist Heinrich Koch in 1802:
97
This is how Kevin Korsyn encapsulates a comparable issue in J. W. N. Sullivan and the Heiliger Dankgesang:
Questions of Meaning in Late Beethoven, Beethoven Forum 2, ed. Christopher Reynolds (London: University
of Nebraska Press, 1993), 172.
Heteroglossia 125
Ex. 3.12 (cont.)
a serious conduct of the melody, using frequent stepwise progressions which do not
allow ornamentation and breaking-up of the melody into small fragments; frequent
use of bound dissonances (suspensions); and strict adherence to the main subject.
98
All of these elements obtain here, with suspensions being especially prominent. More
98
Cited in Ratner, Classic Music, 23.
Ex. 3.12 (cont.)
than that, though, this is a topic old-fashioned even in the rst half of the eighteenth
century it is in the mould of the sixteenth-century vocal polyphony, with the same
antiphonal suggestions, that we found in K. 263. Note that the left-hand writing of
bars 7
2
9
1
mirrors that found in the right hand at bars 1
2
3
1
; less exactly, the left
hand at 5
2
7
1
follows the right hands 3
2
5
1
. This is a perfectly formed and highly
unied texture.
From bar 9 there is an immediate shift from the opening idiom. The music
continues to move in precise two-bar units, but the effect is very different. To
begin with, the Palestrina style cannot have this repeated-block syntax. In place
Heteroglossia 127
Ex. 3.12 (cont.)
of the long descending phrases we hear a breaking-up of the melody into small
fragments in the repeated melodic unit, while the left hand jumps between the thirds
ACE heard at bars 111315. For all the marked difference in stylistic premises,
the right hand uses two of the earlier basic shapes scalic descent in plain crotchets at
9
2
10
1
, then the neighbour-note motion towards a cadence (compare bars 1011
1
with 45
1
). However, these shapes are now treated insistently, unlike their previous
calm distribution. The texture becomes much more homophonic, with narrower
doublings (parallel thirds against the previous sixths), and the tessitura is drastically
compressed as all parts remain within the span of an octave. In addition, the very
presence of trills is a strong signier of change: remember that ornamentation should
not occur in the strict style. With its abrupt reharmonizations of the right-hand line,
the passage from bar 9 is also explicitly diatonic in its harmonic versatility after the
modal world evoked at the start. At bars 14
2
and 16
2
in the left hand we nd a
rhythmic hint that the opening has not entirely been subjugated. Bar 16 in fact
moves back towards genuine part-writing.
Then at bar 17 the opening tries to reassert itself. This is immediately apparent
in the reappearance of b
2
, the rst note of the piece and the rst suspension. It will
continue to act as an important reference point, both registrally and as a concise
reminder of the opening stylistic world. The composure of the opening is not
regained, however. The imitations come sporadically; ascending lines cross against
falling ones (see the voice exchanges at 1920 and in bar 21). Note also the presence
of parallel thirds at 17 and 19
3
20
2
and the plain outlining of a tritone at 1921.
From bar 22 the music has clearly returned to the melodic stasis found from bar 9.
Signicantly, the density of trills increases (hinting at an oriental melodic style, as
might the

5
6 bass). The strict topic survives only in the tenor interjections of the
original 76 suspension cell, now heard very much as a remnant. This rst section
has an ABAB expressive-material structure that will also hold for the entire rst half.
A rest with a pause follows, the rst of many in K. 402.
If the strict topic was undermined within the rst section, then bars 26ff. blow
it away. We move to the most up-to-date style, the galant. For Koch in 1802, the
dening elements of the free, or unbound style were: many elaborations of the
melody, with more obvious breaks and pauses in it and more changes in rhythmic
elements; a less interwoven harmony; the fact that the remaining voices accompany.
99
The harmonic non sequitur emphasizes the stylistic leap: we move from a bare fth
FC, which could be heard either modally or as a dominant of B minor, to
D major. While this sounds abrupt, from a more abstract technical viewpoint it is
actually smooth: the omission of any A at 25 avoids a clash with the As at 26, and the
c
2
heard in the soprano can be heard retrospectively as the leading note of D. There
are other points of economy too: bar 26 begins with a falling triad just like bar 1,
while at 29 in the right hand we hear a reworking of the CBBC succession of
bars 245!
The differences are of course more to the point. The chain of falling steps in
bar 1 is replaced in 26 by a chain of falling leaps (in other words, an arpeggio); the
bass also leaps about, quite gratuitously, especially at 3031; we hear a homophonic
texture; minor-modal is replaced by the sociable major; the harmonic rhythm is
much slower, with all harmonies in root position until bar 34; there are very wide
gaps between the hands; and the chromatic appoggiatura at 27 is a real marker of the
galant. This appoggiatura is an echo, across the chasm, of the one we heard in bar 25,
but with the dissonance now approached by leap. The same happens with the dis-
sonant d
1
of bar 29. These unprepared dissonances display the modern style which
caused such theoretical anguish to the upholders of the old ways. In addition, the
asymmetry of detail within a symmetrical framework is very modern, a technique
found constantly in the later galant language of Mozart, for example.
100
Note how
the sequential repetition in bars 289 is not exact, with the melody of bar 29 being
a free decoration of that in bar 27. The two rising arpeggios in the bass at 30 and
99
Cited in Ratner, Classic Music, 23.
100
In his recording of K. 402, Andr as Schiff employs a heavy legato from bar 26, which seems odd stylistically.
This free and mixed style needs mixed articulation. In his second-time performance of the rst section he
adds ornaments at bars 6
3
and 20
1
; the inappropriateness of such additions will already be plain from the earlier
discussion of the strict style. This reects not, of course, a wrong performance but the difculties of stylistic
apprehension posed so often by this music. Decca: 421 422 2, 1989.
Heteroglossia 129
32 then balance the two falling ones heard before in the treble, another form of free
symmetry.
More striking is the extravagant leap at the end of each rising bass arpeggio from
c
2
down to D, as if to emphasize the freedom from bound style, the difference be-
tween modern instrumental and old vocal ways. Nothing could be more antithetical
to the language of the opening than this detail. Try singing that, the modern style
seems to demand. The new triplet gure at 31, with its chic decorative air, represents
one of those pronounced changes in rhythmic elements noted by Koch. It is per-
haps the obviously inorganic nature of such an element that has caused the negative
characterization of galant language as being full of articial formulas, without the
realization that such looseness was delivered in the name of freedom. The protracted
formulaic cadence at bars 367 then widens the stylistic gap still further. The wittiest
of all the oppositions, however, is half buried in this formula: the melodic gure
from bar 35
2
, with the same initial long-note syncopation, transforms the stepwise
descent from B to E heard at the start.
The subsequent pause is once more broken by completely new material and a
disorientating jump of a third. This D to B move is at once more shocking than the
previous jump and less so, because the new material itself enters less demonstratively
than did the D major arpeggios in bar 26. The B (A) will in turn move back to F,
thus rmly ensconcing the use of thirds-relations. This relationship was set up by the
shift from A to C to E in the bass at bars 1115; but more important than the connec-
tion of intervallic shape which is now writ large is the principle of harmonic exi-
bility that underpins this diatonic behaviour. It now contradicts the opening style on
the largest possible scale. We also nd ourselves a tritone away from the tonic.
Again, there is some voice-leading continuity across the void: the closure of the
second section on a unison D provides a smooth pivot to what follows. Like the
opening, this section begins on the second beat, while the parallel thirds provide a
textural reference to strategic points in the rst section. The answering unit more
explicitly revives earlier material compare the right-hand line at 40
4
42
1
with bars
3
4
5
1
or the whole of bar 41 with bar 8, to give the most obvious parallels. Altogether
this material seems to mediate between previous extremes. The sequential repetition
of the rst four bars up a step recalls the procedure heard in bars 269 of the second
section, while the suggestion of antiphony between the units revives the opening
texture. Yet the very alternation of style between phrase units in questionanswer
fashion is only possible in the modern manner.
A mini-vamp follows from bar 46 as a melting pot for the disparities presented
thus far. A suspension gure occurs four times from bar 46, vaguely echoing the
suspensions that characterized the opening learned style. Now, however, they are
restruck and move (incorrectly) upwards.
101
The exact counterpart of the gure
101
This feature is noted by Hermann Keller, who suggests (not in a schoolmasterly tone) that such voice-leading
misbehaviour hurts the ear; see Keller, Meister, 71.
at 46
4
47
2
, however, is found at the very end of the rst section, in the BBC
succession across the bar at 245. The hint of the exotic found there is now more
openly realized, with the insistent repeated chords and the abandoned atmosphere
of the whole. From bar 55 there are clear echoes of the end to the rst section,
culminating in bar 58, with its pause, matching bar 25. There is, however, no
remnant syncopation in the tenor now. The music almost seems to have turned full
circle; we are back where we were before the rst rupture. Might this imply that
all the intervening material was a big interpolation, or, more extraordinarily in
view of the destruction of all precepts of good continuation, of stylistic and affective
integrity, that we have just witnessed that it was all redundant? On other hand, the
fact that we nd ourselves back in bar 25, so to speak, might suggest that D major
is about to recur.
In addition, the pauses have by now conditioned us to expect an ensuing surprise,
so it is doubly surprising when the same harmony is resumed after the gap. It is a
double bluff, one which also continues to hold back a viable alternative key area,
whether III or V. This section fromthe end of bar 58 again appears to have mediating
force, but now leans more openly on material from the second section, with the bass
arpeggios and melodic repeated notes (compare bar 30). Bars 624 contain multiple
echoes of the multiple material we have been confronted with so far:
1. The melodic peak on a syncopated two-beat b
2
in bar 62, followed by a descending
scale, recalls the rst section, bars 12 and 1719;
2. The syncopated rhythm with neighbour note in bar 62 alone may be compared
with bars 4, 41 and especially 78
1
;
3. The right hand in bar 63 reintroduces the previously anomalous triplet rhythm
of bar 31, now put in a directional rather than decorative context;
4. The contour of 624 as a melodic whole resembles bars 357, especially with the
initial second-beat syncopation on B and the following elaborate ornamentation;
5. The immediate cancellation of the leading note in the ABA line of bar 62
replicates at the dominant the DED of bars 89.
From bar 69 there is another descent from b
2
, eventually moving down a whole
octave. The outline of the falling triad from bar 1 can be recognized in bars 69 and
70. The left hand brings back the vamping middle-register crotchets (with more
textural thirds) from the previous section, emphasizing the

5
6 progression, FG.
There is also a consistent use of harmonic interruption, at bars 64, 69 and 72, when
each time the expectation of reaching a root-position dominant becomes stronger.
Such teasing harmonic detours are of a piece with the stylistic interruptions of
the discourse. The root position is nally granted at bar 75, which brings a more
conclusive assemblage of elements, seemingly in the name of nding a middle style.
We hear another descent fromb
2
down an octave; the triplets are nowintegrated into
the surface rhythm instead of representing sporadic outbursts; the thirds in the left
hand achieve direction. Above all we have harmonic security; until we reach bar 75,
Heteroglossia 131
the next best thing was found in the second section. This described a complete
rounded harmonic movement of D major early in an E minor work! This was
an illusory harmonic security. Given such harmonic and stylistic uncertainties, the
unison texture that articulates B minor from bar 77 makes a very decisive impression.
We then receive a rude surprise over the double bar into the second half B
to C is the largest-scale interrupted progression of the piece. Immediately at bars
823 the opening gambit from bars 12 is harmonized IIVV and thus brought
within the realm of contemporary style.
102
The bass sonority and note values recall
those of the modern second section, while our thirds intrude again at 83
2
84
1
. In
a stunning display of topical transformation, the opening unit is brought back ve
times successively from the start of the half, each time differently treated, as if to
purge it thoroughly of its original strict associations. The passage as a whole is of
course anything but strict, being keyed around a modern versatility, with several
changes of mood.
After the galant reworking of the opening at bars 823, bars 845 present a more
contrapuntal version. An exact transposition of bars 12 occurs in the left hand,
which also of course answers the right hand of the previous two bars. The upper voice
of 845 moves in contrary motion, as at bars 19 and 21, before disappearing into thin
air at the start of 86, a charming way of undercutting the return to counterpoint. The
third version is like a textural halfway house, with its chorale-style setting. At bar 89
1
of the fourth working, the expected dissonance wrought by a suspension is replaced
by a triple chordal dissonance. The fth version proceeds from the same basis but
reharmonizes the augmented second, expands in duration and reveals more clearly
than the fourth version a debt to the rst-half vamp rhythm in the left hand. The
insistent syncopated rhythms clearly derive from the same area. Thus the rst dozen
bars of the second half compress all the stylistic and textural possibilities presented so
disconcertingly in the rst half. At the same time, the consistent use of one piece of
material the opening two-bar unit as a pivot for the invention reveals a certain
debt to the precepts of the strict style. In bar 94 the voice-exchange pattern heard
most recently in bar 85 is nally put in a more stable harmonic context. From bar
95 a sixth form of the gambit, the same as heard at bars 88 and 90 (except that the
C is replaced by C), leads to a third harmonization, now much more consonant as
a simple dominant seventh. Signicantly, the effect of the suspension that we would
expect on the downbeat of bar 96 has now completely worn off.
The ending of this section in G major means that the return of the second section
in G (down a fth from its rst-half form) plays a different role. Instead of being
a harmonic shock, it gives us more of what we have just reached. Its harmonic
meaning also changes in that it has a straightforward harmonic relationship to the
starting key of the second half. The IV, C majorG major relationship is what we
might have expected to hear in the rst half. There is a fairly extensive rewriting of
bars 1014, which now have a more transitional character (note especially the exact
102
A similar transformation of a strict-style opening can be heard at the same point of K. 240.
sequence created in 1034). Bars 1001 and 1023 in the right hand now integrate
the syncopated rhythm of the original learned cell quite explicitly. The dissonance is
prepared and resolved in more respectable fashion too, through a cambiata formation.
The section even begins on the same note, g
2
, as the start of the half. The arpeggios
themselves are no longer such a surprise after all the versions of the descending-
triadic Kopfmotiv in the previous section. Altogether this passage now forms a more
integrated part of the argument.
Subtle changes made in the version of the following section, from bar 113, also
suggest greater continuity. The left-hand material of bars 1313 comes straight from
bars 224, not from 557, as it ought. Thus the suspension gure in the tenor is
reintroduced. Crucially, there is no pause marked at bar 134. Even if so much had not
changed in the mean time, the device would anyway have exhausted its potential by
this stage. It also disappears because, with the changed form of bars 1313, Scarlatti
is in effect taking us directly from the equivalent of bar 25 to 58
4
, so cutting out our
big rst-half interpolation. The most signicant changes, though, are found in the
bass of bars 145 and 148, with their echo of the sustained surprise C that began the
second half. Thus even the constant interrupted progressions themselves are now
less jarring, since reference to C has been made a way of integrating the harmonic
action of the second half.
K. 402 as a whole drives towards greater coherence of its very disparate elements.
To speak of a comic variety of the surface seems inadequate to the scale of the
contrasts or better, ruptures presented to the listener in the rst half. The very
act of composition itself seems to be under scrutiny, with the sense that the pauses
represent a creative abandonment of the prior material, that the sonata begins several
times over in a new key and in a new style. After all, if such incompatible styles are
to be housed within a single work, one might expect a structure that contrived to
de-emphasize the awkwardness. Instead, the silences (which the performer might be
advised to make long and outside the basic pulse) and the harmonic shifts advertise
the fact. On the other hand, the very lack of smooth (re)transitions in the rst part
of this work may show a particular sophistication of technique, born from an under-
standing of the potential and relative compatibility of different materials. From this
point of view, the awkward silences and harmonic jumps represent correct syntax.
Much broad symmetry is then needed in the second half to act as a counterweight
to the disruptive force of the rst, but with many important adjustments at a micro
level reecting the changed signicance or weight of materials. At the end we ar-
guably have, as suggested earlier, a middle style it is certainly not especially modern.
Here and at rst hearing, from bar 75, this sounds like the recollection of a Baroque
concerto grosso idiom, in the manner of Corelli or Vivaldi: is this a middle way?
The structure and material of the opening sections might almost be conceived
as a reply to critics, ctional or actual. They could certainly be allied with the
quarrel of the ancients and moderns. The beginning might convey the message to
the ancients, So this is how you want me to write music? The composer then shows
how it does not and cannot work in the present day. We could even place this sonata
Heteroglossia 133
in a specically Spanish context of theoretical controversies, above all the dissonance
war unwittingly started by Francisco Valls in 1715 (to which we shall return). Of
course, the very intense working of all the basic material of the sonata, as explored
above, itself reveals learning, in the name of nding some common ground. The
contrasts turn out not to be as abandoned as they rst appear.
A number of sonatas raise such contrasts onto a more explicit structural plane.
In his chronological classication Pestelli brings together a group of six sonatas that
consist of a dialogo tra musica antica e moderna. One of these, the Sonata in E
major, K. 162, alternates Andante and Allegro sections. The Andantes are in an idyllic
pastoral vein. They offer a very polished and idealized naturalness Arcadian, in
other words. The Allegros, on the other hand, have a bustle about them and some
suggestions of string guration that prompt rmer comparisons with the world of
Vivaldi and Corelli.
103
For all the Italianate pedigree of the materials in this sonata,
the formal nature of their juxtaposition again suggests concerns apparent elsewhere in
the Spanish musical environment of the time. We nd a similar plan, for example,
in Alberos Sonata No. 22 in F minor. Here, an evocation of antico style in the
Adagio sections is followed by an exhilarating romp of modern guration in the
Vivo sections. The unusual formal plan, particularly in the way the rst B section
of the ABAB alternation straddles the double bar, is shared by K. 162.
The contest of ancient and modern is found on a larger scale in the six works
by Albero entitled Recercata, fuga y sonata. Powell has suggested that the titles imply
sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century inuences respectively,
104
and these
three-movement works do seem to represent three historically progressive styles:
ancient preludizing (recalling not just the genre of the title but also the French
unmeasured prelude), the contrapuntal tradition (issuing from the past if still alive in
the present) and the popular/galant world of the current time. Further suggesting a
conscious eclecticism are the Obras de organo entre el Antiguo y Moderno estilo by Elas
of 1749, for which Albero himself wrote the preface. This also obtains in the case
of the twelve piezas and toccatas found in the Montserrat collection entitled Obras
del Maestro Jos e Elas, and several of the piezas are quite explicit about their stylistic
allegiance: the indications en forma de aria and en forma de concierto are found
in the tenth and eleventh respectively.
105
It is very characteristic that, while Albero
and Elas make plain the nature of their stylistic project, Scarlatti does not spell out
such a plan. Although the contest of styles is built into the basic structure of the
work, K. 162 offers no title to help the player or listener. As ever, it contents itself
with the anonymity of Sonata.
That the composer was not inspired by external trappings, whether taking the
form of titles or an explicit formal alternation of styles, can be seen in most of the
other alternating sonatas, such as K. 170, 176, 265 and 351. They tend to be curiously
103
Compare the guration that closes the rst half of K. 162 with that of the closing ritornello in K. 265, bars
1934.
104
Powell, Albero, 16.
105
See

Agueda Pedrero-Encabo, Some Unpublished Works of Jos e Elas, in BoydCarreras, Spain, 21415.
nondescript. Of greatest interest is the possibility of operatic inuence on such forms,
given the composers own habits in his early operas. Changes of tempo, dynamics and
affect are strikingly frequent, for example in Ptolemys aria Tiranni miei pensieri,
from the newly recovered Tolomeo et Alessandro. Boyd has made a telling comparison
with Handels setting of an adaptation of the same libretto in 1728; in a number of
arias the unied Affekt of Handel can be set against the contrasting of particular
phrases in Scarlatti.
106
One might also compare our alternating sonatas with some
of Scarlattis orchestraloperatic overtures as in the sharp uctuations of Sinfonias
Nos. 9 and 14.
107
Thus the theatrical metaphor for Scarlattis opposing topics and
styles may have some literal roots.
In fact the composer tends to achieve stronger effects not by alternation of this
sort, but through interruption. The Sonata in D major, K. 236, contains a seemingly
inexplicable interruption in the rst fteen bars of its second half. There can be
no doubt of its older vintage, with the very clear large-scale imitations and linear
intervallic patterns suggesting perhaps a toccata idiom.
108
On the other hand, the
rest of the sonatas material is not exactly without toccata-like properties of its own.
These form part of a typical assemblage dominated by the racy dance rhythms of
bars 2030. Perhaps the greatest surprise afforded by the interrupting material is
simply its continuous semiquaver rhythmic values, whereas the rest of the material
comprises virtually continuous quavers, apart from the very occasional semiquaver
cell. Although it disappears as mysteriously as it arrived, the passage does leave its
mark; in bars 579 the raw popular dance material is given in melodic sequence, a
stylistically unlikely treatment for which the rst half provides no precedent.
109
More disconcerting still is the Sonata in B at major, K. 202. The return to rst-
half material from bar 110 in the second half, after an interruption, is very eeting;
and what we hear subsequently is really a coda using new material in a markedly
broader, more popular style than the music of the rst half. Strictly, the literal return
lasts for just one bar. The left hand does not wait its turn to provide an imitative
answer, as it did at the start of the rst half, but interrupts the right hand by moving
to the third pitch of the original shape, E, in a cross between imitation, stretto and
hocket. That effectively does for the opening material before we move on to the
populist coda.
110
The rst half of K. 202 is effectively a blend of toccata, galant and popular. In
the light of subsequent events, it may be regarded as a civilized version of the mixed
style, without hard edges. The middle, interrupting section is in Italian popular style,
whether one describes it as a siciliana, as do Sitwell and Chambure, or a pastorale, as
do Pestelli and Boyd.
111
In length and force of expression it quite outweighs the outer
106
Boyd, Tolomeo, 1819.
107
These works are discussed in Boyd, Master, 8083.
108
Pestelli describes it as a sudden aring-up of the toccata which breaks the unity of the discourse, a renewal of
the toccatismo of Alessandro Scarlatti. Pestelli, Sonate, 76.
109
For other examples of interruptions, see K. 282, 414 and 511, all in D major.
110
Max Seifferts remark that the structure of the whole is reminiscent of an Alessandro Scarlatti overture form
seems cold comfort. Seiffert, Klaviermusik, 422.
111
Sitwell, Baroque, 288; Chambure, Catalogue, 83; Pestelli, Sonate, 2023; Boyd, Master, 172.
Heteroglossia 135
sections. Indeed, as we have seen, it seems to blast away the material of the rst half.
It also shifts harmonic ground constantly and disconcertingly. This is very ambitious
for a folk style; compare the much more realistically modest harmonic activity of the
interrupting pastorale in K. 235. Also striking are the clusters and rough chordings
and the relentless drive intoxicating monotony of the rhythmic construction.
Such features, it is plain, do not have to connote amenco idiom, suggesting again
that the gap between Italian and Spanish folk languages is often not as wide as we
might imagine. Such considerations seem even less urgent than usual, though, if we
think through the implications of the whole structure.
The harmonic abstruseness, which almost turns a straightforward pastoral idiom
into a vamp, and the very calculated registral plan, which helps build the tension
towards a climax at bar 85, both lie outside customary conceptions of folk art. The
popular musical imagery thus has an articial, even fantastic character. In spite of
the fact that this section is so patently an artistic product, its interrupting presence
in the context of the whole marks a distinct step outside, or back from, the world of
high art. After all, this interruption is so lengthy that it effectively constitutes the
main material of the sonata,
112
giving the whole structure a centrifugal force. In
the confrontation it implies between what Peter B ottinger calls the closed sphere
of art and its acoustical environment,
113
the contingent nature of musical high
art is revealed: whatever its pretensions to comprehensiveness (hence the civilized
variety of the rst half), it remains a dialect of the few. The rest of the world may
not be listening.
This is the most radical implication of the rupture in K. 202, of its linguistic
incompatibilities. That Scarlattis sonatas are situated in a world that may not be
listening is brilliantly grasped by Jos e Saramago in Baltasar and Blimunda. When in
the novel Scarlatti took to visiting Baltasar and Blimunda on the estate of the Duque
de Aveiro, where they worked on the passarola:
He did not always play the harpsichord, but when he did he sometimes urged them not to
interrupt their labors, the forge roaring in the background, the hammer clanging on the
anvil, the water boiling in the vat, so that the harpsichord could scarcely be heard above the
terrible din in the coach house. Meanwhile, the musician tranquilly composed his music as
if he were surrounded by the vast silence in outer space where he hoped to play one day.
114
The last sentence here has already been cited for its implications of futurism, but what
precedes this offers the ideal expression, not so much of the composers aesthetics,
112
To give this some statistical support, Andreas Staier, in his recording of the work (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi:
05472 77274 2, 1992), takes 105 over two playings of the rst half and 220 over a single playing of the
second half. Of this, the pastorale section takes 200 and the coda just 20. With a repeated playing of the
second half, the interruption takes up over two thirds of the total performance time. On the other hand, I
believe that Staier takes the pastorale too slowly (Boyd comments on the tendency to play eighteenth-century
pastorales too deliberately in Master, 172). It may begin in charming fashion, but the brutal development of
texture and insistence of the governing rhythm seem to demand a livelier pace to have their full effect. Thus
the total length of the interrupting passage might lessen, but it would still be disproportionate.
113
114
Saramago, Baltasar and Blimunda, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988), 161.
but of his philosophy. Art music, or at least Scarlattis art music, can have no prior
claims over the stuff of everyday life.
The governing irony that allows the artistic product that is K. 202 to exist at all
is the very manufactured, articial nature of the naturalistic pastorale section. It can
only realize this philosophy by in fact simulating the stuff of everyday life. It is this
ironic knowledge that allows Scarlatti to compose his music so tranquilly in the
din; he knows that his music, while surrounding itself with real life, stands ultimately
apart from it.
Another extraordinary counterpart to this, also lying outside the realm of the
normal critical literature, can be found in David Thompsons BBC television pro-
gramme of 1985. The challenge for this medium lies in nding appropriate visual
imagery to accompany the playing of eighteen sonatas over the course of the pro-
gramme, when, that is, the pictures do not simply showthe performance of the works
by Rafael Puyana. On the occasion that interests us here, the music of K. 240
a mixed-style sonata with a predominance of popular avours is set to picture-
postcard images of the canals of Venice, well stocked with gondolas. At the point
where the sonata swerves into an exotic passage (bar 43), the picture changes sud-
denly and most disconcertingly. We nd ourselves in a workshop watching the
activities of the gondola builders sanding, hammering, planing and cleaning. In
other words, we are viewing the labour that puts the gondolas in the postcards. The
correspondence to the stylistic sense of many Scarlatti sonatas should be clear. The
world of high-art music is analogous to the picture postcard, a controlled presenta-
tion of nished imagery, while sonatas like K. 202, and indeed K. 240, with their
rough edges and abrupt changes of perspective, allow us to glimpse the existence of
another, foreign world. This world may help create the material for (Scarlattis) art,
but we would not expect it to be directly acknowledged or glimpsed in the raw.
The Sonata in C major, K. 513 (Ex. 3.13), consists of an even clearer version of
the ABCshape that was implicit in K. 202. This work has been seized upon gratefully
by all writers on the sonatas, since for once, in the rst two sections, we can be quite
certain as to the topical references. The opening section (A) is marked Pastorale, thus
issuing from the same stylistic source as the interrupting B section in K. 202.
115
The
theme of the second section (B) is an Italian Christmas carol, Discendi dalle stelle.
This more clearly offers the pastoral vein as found in many Christmas concertos,
with drones and parallel thirds imitating the pifferari (players of pipes or fes). The
nal, very different, section (C) seems to present a toccata style with populist accents,
but the dance impulse is also certainly present.
The harmonic scheme of K. 513 is most unusual all the real action takes place
in A. The B section is entirely in G major, while the C section is entirely in C major
(although avoiding an articulated root-position I until bar 62). The odd harmonic
practice thus reinforces the stylistic dislocations.
115
The additional marking Moderato, however, gives it a more leisurely aspect than most of Scarlattis versions
of the topic (K. 446, for example, is marked Allegrissimo).
Heteroglossia 137
Ex. 3.13 K. 513 bars 116
The A and B sections represent two faces of the same pastoral idiom: B is artless
where A is artful. The A section seems to offer a nostalgic view, but the material
is worked and made more affective than the reality (a property suggested in our
earlier examination of K. 87). It is only naive in the rst two and a half bars. These
are followed by an exact repetition of the material down a tone in B at major,
which immediately undercuts the simplicity. The leaping octave gure in the bass,
heard early on in bars 3, 5 and 8, is the same marker of pastoral style we saw in
K. 398 (Ex. 3.3b). Whereas it was playfully disengaged from its proper function
there, in K. 513, as in works such as K. 270 and K. 446, it carries its normal rustic
connotations.
What follows, however, contains many sour notes. The sudden exposed dom-
inant seventh of bar 6 seems an intrusion, emphasized further by the parallel 6/3
movements onto it. Yet it is also a logical dissonance, fusing the C major tonality of
the opening with the following B. This phrase unit stops abruptly, followed by a
dramatic silence; its repetition then makes one line out of the top two voices, thus
exposing the tritone. (The subsequent parallel fths in the top two parts of 8
2
may
be a characteristic reference to rustic technique.) The reworked sequential repetition
of this three-bar unit, beginning on the nal quaver of bar 8, is more anguished,
with the succession of perfect and diminished fths heard in the right hand. Again,
this would appear to originate in the common technique of affectionate parody of
rustic players. If so, by sounding so harsh, it transcends this. The same could be said
of the howling f
2
at 10
4
, which might represent being out of tune. Our opening
idyll is now a distant memory.
More artice is apparent in bar 15, where we nd a wonderful overlap in the phrase
structure; 15
3
ought, like 14
3
, to represent the nal beat of a one-bar unit, but it also
functions as the downbeat of its own one-bar unit. This is conrmed by the parallel
one-bar unit beginning at 16
3
. At last here we reach the dominant, in conjunction
with a return to the initial texture and idiom: the purity of representation of the
opening is thus reasserted.
This has been a very convoluted mode of reaching the dominant; with the attain-
ment of the goal, it prolongs itself very sturdily, but by means of quite new material.
The A section has strayed from the authentic utterance promised by the generic
title, through its artistic perspective on the pastoral material. B clears the air, gives
us the real thing; it creates a sudden sense of stylistic perspective. After the highly
strung core of A, it sprawls crudely and riotously. For all the greater realism of B,
the fade-out heard at the end, at bars 345, is certainly more arty than folksy. (It is
realized precisely in this sense in the fourth movement of Casellas Scarlattiana.) The
same three right-hand notes that effect the fade-out are reactivated on the return to
a repeated A section (with f
2
becoming f []
2
); this linkage technique is also plainly
artistic. It helps to create the striking effect on return to A, which now sounds
like an apparition. It becomes even more comprehensively framed than it already
implicitly was.
The start of C parodies the start of B; compare the pitch contours of the top
parts at bars 3638
1
and 17
3
18
3
. More generally, the parallel intervals seem to guy
those found in B. This all feels more like a coda than a second half. We had the
same sensation with the nal part of K. 202. Does this represent the modern or the
composers personal keyboard style; is it a distinct new stage in the argument or
more of a dismissive gesture? For Wilfred Mellers A and B are uproariously routed
by a whirlwind presto coda. He adds: Whats to come is still (very) unsure.
116
116
Heteroglossia 139
K. 513 is certainly affectively open-ended. It would seem to present a narrative
Scarlatti throws a challenge to the listener to make sense of the story.
In recent times the conventional assumption that non-vocal music can tell some
sort of story has been subjected to intense scrutiny. Precisely in what sense can a
narrative voice be conceptualized in instrumental music and how can the distancing
from events essential to the act of narration possibly operate? The consensus that
only under special conditions can such musical narrativity exist has in turn been
queried, for example by Robert Hatten, who suggests that shifting the level of
discourse may not be enough to create literal narration, but it achieves one of the
characteristic aims (or consequences) of narrative literature that of putting a spin
on the presentation of events.
117
Such shifting is very clearly delineated in K. 513.
He also invokes Bakhtins concept of the polyphonic novel, in which characters
interact with the narrating voice to the extent that the narrator becomes a plurality
of centres of consciousness irreducible to a common denominator. Such interaction
of centrifugal stylistic forces, together with the overt signalling of the presence of a
narrator (the controlling composer) by means of arty devices, is also found in K.
513 and to a greater or lesser extent in all those Scarlatti sonatas that live by self-
conscious topical manipulation. The fade-out at the end of B, for example, clearly
creates a distancing effect.
118
Further, Hatten explicitly links the heteroglossia of
Bakhtin, the play of styles and language types in literature, with possible musical
equivalents: extreme contrasts in style or topic (especially those involving a change in
register), cueing of recitative as a topic, direct quotations, disruption of the temporal
norm can all enable the composer to present different perspectives in the music.
119
Three of these four possible conditions are met by the current sonata.
Mellerss interpretation of the story is that it might be said to [be] about the end
of the old world.
120
It certainly suggests some disintegration of a unitary experience
of the (musical) world. If this is an elaborate way of suggesting a post-Baroque
orientation that was hardly unique to Scarlatti, it is certain that Scarlatti pursued the
consequences and implications of a mixed style further than any other composer
of the time.
121
That this newly uncovered variety may be confusing as much as
liberating is apparent in the conundrums presented by K. 202 and K. 513.
Thus far our investigation of topical mixture has not touched on its most common
formin the sonatas outright topical opposition within a single integrated structure.
It is often difcult to determine the outcome of such oppositions. Of course the
mixed style as a whole is premised on a coexistence of its elements, but, as was made
117
On Narrativity in Music: Expressive Genres and Levels of Discourse in Beethoven, Indiana Theory Review 12
(1991), 76.
118
For Massimo Bogianckino, this morendo connotes a sorrowful fading out of the memory. Bogianckino,
Harpsichord, 110.
119
On Narrativity in Music, 95.
120
121
Both Clark and Pestelli believe K. 513 to have been written early in the composers career. See Clark, Enemy,
545, and Pestelli, Sonate, 2034. Both writers unnecessarily assume that there must be a close temporal rela-
tionship between inspiration and composition, as if a composer of all people would not be able to retain or
remember material well beyond the time of rst acquaintance with it.
clear during the study of the panorama tradition, it is inadequate simply to extend
such a principle of tolerance to the nature of the individual work. The outcomes
may suggest a fusion of elements (centripetal) or a separation of them (centrifugal);
the contest may produce a victor or at least a sense of progression fromone element to
another. In K. 256, for example, the dotted style that is prominent in the rst half has
to give way to the galant; in K. 434, the contrapuntal manner of the opening, while
never entirely abandoned, is overwhelmed in the second half by dramatic melodic
and textural developments. These works remind us that many of the styles and topics
juxtaposed by Scarlatti would normally be treated autonomously. This is certainly
the case with both the dotted style and imitative counterpoint, which we would
normally expect to exist without contradiction in entire sections or movements.
Such examples remind us not to be complacent about the achievement of topical
variety.
One particularly interesting phenomenon among the sonatas that seem cen-
tripetally inclined is illustrated by the Sonata in F minor, K. 386. The toccata is
surely the basic premise, but some of the syntax and inections suggest Spain and
the dance. Perhaps we need to apply the term fusion in its current popular musical
sense to understand the creative results fusion rather than the very frequent jux-
taposition. The second subject from bar 32 is clearly Spanish in its harmonic and
pitch contours but does not break the decorum of the toccata style. The left hands
falling thirds and the right hands d
2
f
2
e
2
succession t with earlier shapes. Does
this suggest that the exuberance of toccata and of amenco are the same thing, that
they represent the same human impulse? The physical and emotional exhibitionism
that they respectively represent mix very naturally here, in the name of extravagant
display. Both require many notes in their expression, the toccata by denition so,
but amenco does as well. As with other such sonatas, like K. 29, 48, 50 and 545,
there is here a dissolving rather than contrasting of topical categories: is this a way
of adding a passionate edge to the basic keyboard genre of the toccata? The genre
undergoes expressive renewal through this mixture, in best traditions of Verfremdung
theory.
122
Many other types and degrees of fusion are represented. The Sonata in G minor,
K. 476, offers a bracing mixture of Iberian dance and Baroque idioms. The two
often seem to go together, sharing a propulsive power that favours heavy and regular
accentuation. This is quite unlike the variety of weight within beats and bars and
phrases found in the modern style. K. 476 contains one of the most memorable
realizations of a common syntactical device in the sonatas: a three-part sequence
that involves the wholesale transposition, generally upwards, or reharmonization of
a phrase, often made dramatic by the use of silence around each of the units. In view
of the element of bluff that is frequently involved, as well as the sense that we are
122
K. 50 has the distinction of being found in a Portuguese copy in the Biblioteca Nacional in Lisbon, Ms. Mus.
338, entitled Sonatas para Cravo do Sr. Francisco Xavier Baptista, but without Scarlattis name being given. Does
this suggest it was a Portuguese work? See Kastner, Repensando, 149.
Heteroglossia 141
witnessing a performance by the composer, we shall be calling it the three-card
trick. An underlying coherence is provided by a circle of fths from bar 96. If this,
like the sequential organization, seems a standard linguistic feature of the time, the
manner of presentation suggests an Iberian inuence, which might be conrmed
by the stylistic basis of this sonata. It seems to be an example of the bien parado, that
moment in the dance when the participants freeze in their positions.
The Sonata in G major, K. 337, is another work assembling different styles that
share exhibitionist elements. First we hear a toccata which also has touches of violin-
ismo; then in bar 18 we have a perfect example of what Pagano terms the eruption
of another world.
123
This very amboyant amenco material (almost exactly par-
alleled at the start of the second half of K. 324) takes ones breath away. Here is an
example of a passage that surely does call for some slowing and exibility of tempo
it is difcult to assimilate the material with the rhythm and pacing of the rest. From
bar 23 we hear what is more obviously violin writing like a solo passage from a
concerto. The plunging arpeggios of bars 257 reect bars 59 and 1216. They are
certainly more idiomatic for the violin than the keyboard at this later stage, but the
more natural keyboard equivalent from bar 5 reinforces Pestellis argument that much
keyboard toccata guration was originally translated from violin technique.
124
From bar 34 we return to more folk-like material, but now with an Italian accent.
However, the closing cadential shape at 37 and then at 413 strongly resembles bars
19 and 21 of the amenco material. When it occurs at the end of the half, it is also a
typical Baroque bit of guration, another example of our Essercizi-type cadence. The
composer seems to be delighting in nding similar turns of phrase in incompatible
idioms styles are being united in a higher cause. What they have in common is
their public face. The very unusual full chords at the end of the half and the end of
the piece seem to renew the suggestions of an orchestral-concerto idiom.
The closing material from bar 34 is expanded in the second half, at the expense of
the string-crossing passage. It is heard rst in E minor, the mode seemingly at odds
with its populist character. Signicantly, towards the end of the passage it mutates into
something that derives clearly from the world of high art; after the simple popular
IV alternations, a 710 linear intervallic pattern sets in at bar 77. However, the
pattern is broken after a bar and a half; as in so many other sonatas, Scarlatti denies
the pattern its natural completion, which would require at least another bar and a
half. The popular character of this material is then strongly reafrmed by the rather
rustic decorations in the right hand once the material reaches the tonic. Although
the two styles are thus sharply differentiated, there is the suggestion that the two have
something in common. The high-art sequence emerges unprompted, as it were, in
a context of popular repetition. The common ground is a desire for and joy in
patterning and reiteration.
One nal case study presents the more abrasive side of topical opposition. K. 99
in C minor is a very clear case where the Spanish idiom does battle with a higher,
123
Pagano, Vite, 448 (queste irruzioni di altri mondi).
124
See Pestelli, Toccata, especially 279 and 281.
international language what I have generally been calling the Baroque. What is
unusual in K. 99 is that the Spanish idiom unequivocally opens the work and also
frames it at the end of each half.
This opening material (a fandango?) contains a tension within itself, though, the
sort of harmonic tension apparent to one listening with tonal expectations. The
apparent tonic C minor is weakly articulated, and in fact G, which sounds like it
ought to be a dominant, seems to be the tonic. The combination of placement
within the bar and melodic contour stress the pivotal role of G. Note how the
melodic line, perhaps an attempt to reproduce cante jondo, moves from G up to D,
the latter emphasized by the preceding ornamentation. Bar 4 then has a stronger
double meaning: it represents a point of repose or resolution as it clears away the C
minor harmonies, but in the light of bar 5 it is also heard as dominant preparation.
The sense of C minor as I in the following bars is still equivocal, though. Note the
Phrygian

4
6 bass at bars 56, which will be more fully exploited from bar 31 to
bar 37. The AA false relations sound very exotically modal, and the nal arrival
on I in bar 8 is far from conclusive. The C is not supported by other members of
the triad; instead, the bass line rather fades away through downward octave coupling
and the pause clearly represents a question mark. Structurally this may be a cadence,
but rhetorically it is anything but.
It is quite logical that what follows is a sweeping C minor arpeggio an attempt
to assert tonal authority, and this is supported by a change of style that sets in rmly
from bar 13 with a descending Baroque sequence. At bar 26 we are still in C minor,
which makes sense in the harmonic context described above in other circumstances
it would be a remarkable disproportion. At bar 25 we have not so much an elision
as an interruption, with the sudden entrance of a new melodic style and repeated
chords in the left hand, and the material arguably acts as a transition in stylistic terms.
Nevertheless, bar 26 still sounds like a further, and more dramatic interruption, by
material that is passionate and histrionic, of classic Spanish formation. Note the exotic
effect of the appoggiatura at 27
1
and the accumulation of sound in the left hand by
means of clusters. Driving the point home, the contour of the right hand, especially
with this nal appoggiatura, resembles that at bars 56
1
. The rising third AB-C
at 27
2
28
1
then suggests the shape of 4
3
and 6
3
, so that the sense of a variant on the
earlier phrase unit is even more complete. The repetition of the phrase at 27
2
29
1
then represents a syntactical parallel to the earlier passage. However, the exibility
of syntax from bar 26 is worthy of remark; we basically hear three versions of the
unit, but only the middle one is complete. The rst lacks a beginning (although we
only hear this in retrospect, of course) and the third lacks an end. This is a common
technique in Scarlatti, and one we should not take for granted. An absolutely straight
series of repetitions of a phrase unit without some fudging of the edges is quite
rare.
The third unit is interrupted by bar 31; even though the voice leading from30 into
31 is passably smooth, there is another abrupt change of texture. Bars 31ff. could be
regarded almost as neutral ground in terms of style and keyboard writing, although
Heteroglossia 143
they still favour the Spanish. The bass line hovers around Din modal manner, picking
up on the

4
6 shape from the opening unit, bars 56, while the soprano varies
the up-and-down stepwise melodic motion of the previous section. On the other
hand, the total right-hand part carries a suggestion of cross-string writing, while
the left-hand leaps to the top of the texture revive the cross-hands writing of the
sequence from bar 13. The total texture is more aerated and stratied its more
formal conception also suggests the Baroque manner of before. Then, unusually,
bars 3
3
ff. return from 36
3
ff., as the Spanish material reasserts itself very directly. The
changes to the upper voice in bars 39 and 41, compared with the model, bring the
modal mixture fully into the melodic line itself.
The opening to the second half rewrites the opening to the rst half: the right-
hand material is essentially the same but with more ourishes, while the left hand
rather makes the point of the original by being anchored in G throughout. This
truer revelation of the openings harmonic nature is now of course possible in the
new harmonic context, following the cadence in G at the end of the rst half. From
bar 48 the most overtly Spanish material of the rst half (26ff.) is translated into, or
appropriated by, the international terms. It is treated in simple descending sequence,
thus taking on the syntactical character of the material played from bar 13 in the rst
half. The texture is again more aerated and stratied the clusters have gone, and
there is a comfortable gap between the hands. This now leads, more smoothly than
at the equivalent point in the rst half, to the neutral material at bar 52, but this
in turn has been clearly captured by the world of diatonic normality. The passage is
now in the major, III (the rst structural use of the major mode in the piece), the
stepwise movements of the original are replaced by VI successions in the bass and
triadic outlines in the right hand, and the upper-register material in the left hand
now occupies third as well as second beats. With this two-crotchet rhythm and the
outlining of a third from second to third beats, it recalls the left-hand upper-register
shapes at bars 13, 15, 17 and 19. The sequential shift upwards from bar 57 is also
telling harmonic progression replaces the inarticulate hovering of bars 317.
From bar 64 yet another abrupt change occurs, back to swooningly Spanish mate-
rial. This revives the music of bars 26ff., but now in plain quavers the broken-sixth
semiquavers have since been appropriated by the Baroque idiom at 4851. The more
neutral passage returns from bar 68 with its function as a melting pot claried, but
just when we might expect the return of the closing/opening material, at bar 75,
there is a dramatic intervention by the material from bars 13ff. This is now more
boldly shaped with its chain of falling thirds, but it leads to a pause and a rest in bar
80 that have a similar character to bar 8 a sense of impasse.
The closing material returns in the tonic, but one might say the sonata ends with
a sense of stalemate. There is neither strong harmonic resolution nor rhetorical reso-
lution. Harmonically the opening uncertainties return, and the lengthy preparation
of V (modal I) from bar 64 until bar 80 is met by a single tonic perfect cadence in the
last two bars. (The root-position tonics reached in bars 83 and 85 do not complete
their preceding V6/5 harmonies; they represent a backing-up to the beginning of
the phrase.) The harmonic and rhetorical aspects are of course intimately connected,
since the two types of harmonic behaviour derive from the two different stylistic
worlds, which appear to be centrifugally incompatible. One should not imagine that
the Baroque idiom in some way holds back or interferes with the true expression
of the Spanish one; both are extrovert in their different ways, and in terms of gener-
ating momentum and incident they make a great team, but any closed structure in
a diatonic art-music context demands a satisfactory articulation of a primary tonal
area, and this does not happen here. One might say that the V 1749 indication to
move straight on to K. 100 (volti subito) represents a natural consequence of the
unresolved tension of K. 99.
If so, must it be this particular sonata? P does not link the two, and does not in fact
pair K. 99 at all. The V II version of the sonata precedes it by K. 139 in C minor.
Might Scarlatti have written a sonata that seems to demand a sequel, preferably in
a clear tonic major like that of K. 100, without prescribing or deciding which one
it must be? If not, we need to consider the composers sense of an ending. There
are certainly many other sonatas which do not conclude very conclusively (K. 277
from Chapter 1 was an example, and try sonatas like K. 416 or K. 132). There are so
many sonatas that do seem to end with a thorough sense of resolution, though, that
one cannot claim that such a structural dynamic is anachronistic when applied to
Scarlatti. We have seen how K. 193, for example, decisively embraces the diatonic.
What allows such a profusion of voices to enter the Scarlatti sonata? And allows
them to interact in such an extraordinary way? Leonard Meyer, in considering the
question of what makes composers (such as Scarlatti) innovators, seeks an inherent
artistic explanation:
Three interrelated personality traits seem to favor the use of innovative procedures and
relationships: (1) a distaste and disdain for whatever is highly predictable or is sanctied by
custom; (2) a complementary propensity to delight in conjoining seemingly disparate and
discrepant realms or in turning things topsy-turvy by, say, making old means serve new ends
(perhaps in order to mock custom); (3) an ability to tolerate ambiguity a necessary condition
for the actualization of either of the rst two tendencies. The ability to tolerate ambiguity is
important because it enables the artist to take time to invent and consider more alternatives,
and in doing so to nd more satisfactory ones than might otherwise have been chosen.
125
These three elements have all been amply demonstrated in our consideration of
Scarlattis creative personality thus far. The ability to tolerate ambiguity will be-
come even more apparent as we turn in the next chapter to an examination of the
composers syntactical style.
125
Meyer, Style and Music, 139.
4
SYNTAX
EPETI TI ON AND ATI ONALI TY
1
What are we to make of a tonal language that appears to privilege rhythm over
harmony? In the keyboard sonatas of Scarlatti the exploration of rhythm or, more
broadly understood, the exploration of syntax would seemto take priority over har-
monic considerations as such. The identikit image of a Scarlatti sonata would involve
generous reiterations of short phrase units against a relatively lightweight harmonic
background, but a general impression of animation does not amount to the privi-
leging of rhythm one might claim for the composer. Rather, it is simply a part of a
larger campaign in which all elements of normative syntactical patterning are open to
investigation. Inevitably, these will turn around the matter of degrees of repetition.
Repetition at some level or other is of course an essential precondition for the
existence of music, for it to be recognized as constituting an artistic statement. In
Western art music we can account for it most comfortably when it fulls certain
roles or ts with certain models. For instance, it may be present in the name of a
larger symmetrical whole: thus an antecedent phrase is matched by a consequent to
make up the larger unit known as a period; an immediate repetition of a shorter unit
followed by an elaboration of the same constitutes a sentence; on a higher level larger
sections can be repeated to give us ABA form or rondo form. Such repetitions occur
in the name of structural comprehension, and all live by the basic duality of departure
and return. They lend hard edges to our listening experience; they guide us through
a process that is potentially less clearly focused and less immediately meaningful than
our encounters with other forms of artistic expression, where words and images
provide a more concrete starting point. On a lower level, repetitions may be used
both to create and to dispel tension; for instance, they may abound in a transition or
development section, promising a stability that will coincide with their disappear-
ance. On the other hand, repetition in codas aids a different type of articulation, but
one which is again the corollary of a primarily harmonic argument. In this instance
the repetitions imply the forced exclusion of alternative material different keys
or themes or textures and so strengthen a sense of closure. Such repetitions on
these lower levels generally exceed what we might call natural limits and so tend
1
This section is based on a paper given at the University of Surrey in October 1997 and subsequently at the
University of Cambridge.
145
to draw attention to themselves. Nevertheless, this represents a well understood
rhetorical strategy the purpose of the insistence quickly becomes evident.
But what if repetition is unpredictable or seems out of all proportion, in other
words when its functional basis is unclear? The Scarlatti sonatas offer a wide range
of such non-functional moments. Seemingly excessive, unmotivated repetitions are
common, passages that test our tolerance levels and seem to rend large holes in the
musical fabric. Most frequently such repetitions are as direct and literal as can be; it is
worth noting that variation, in the sense of the immediate varied treatment of a short
musical unit, is largely foreign to Scarlatti.
2
Further, its large-scale manifestation,
variation form, is found just once among all the sonatas (K. 61). Variety of detail
tends to be found within rather than between units. Thus the smallest cells may be
subject to continuous changes of exact shape, but at the level of the phrase Scarlatti
is unlikely to provide the sort of varied repetition that was second nature to Mozart,
for instance. The exact repetitions we are faced with, at the level of the phrase unit,
may well occasion embarrassment on the part of a performer or writer. One strategy
for deecting this, the use of echo effects in performance, must be viewed with
suspicion, since it goes against the grain of Scarlattis style.
3
This style itself goes
against the grain of the level and type of repetition with which we feel comfortable:
insistence seems to count for more than minding ones musical manners.
These two characteristics or principles can hold good on a larger scale as well.
Repetitions are there when we dont expect them and absent when we do; they are
both lacking and excessive. One particular manifestation of the taste for excessive
repetition has even, as we have seen, earned its own label. In the vamps, one
cell, normally without any evident thematic relevance to the rest of the work, is
repeated ad nauseam against a changing and highly elusive harmonic background.
If this feature is quite well known, there are many other syntactical peculiarities
that are less widely acknowledged missing bars, whose absence tends to destroy
our sense of hypermetre, missing bass notes, whose absence tends to destroy our
sense of phrase, phrase elisions and overlaps, which may even occur between the
two halves of the entire piece, so undercutting the structural cadence at the end
of the rst half. In short, Scarlatti will do anything to undermine a normal sense
of patterning. Surprising irregularities and surprising regularities together suggest a
thorough questioning of syntactical models, yet all these features have not earned
Scarlatti the reputation for technical wizardry that a study of the works suggests he
deserves. He is allowed to be a technical wizard of another kind, but that is not what
is meant here. Scarlattis rhythmic and syntactical virtuosity have been undervalued
or not even acknowledged because our training leads us to value harmonic range
over a rhythmic one.
2
This at least is the conclusion one must draw from the evidence of the sources. The question of possible ex-
temporized variation and embellishment has been discussed at the level of the phrase by Boyd, Ross Review,
273, and at the level of repeated playings of entire halves by Sheveloff, Frustrations II, 1036. The addition of
individual ornaments, as it were spontaneously, was of course a possibility for any keyboard music of the time,
but this will not necessarily have the larger implications that are currently under discussion.
3
See Rosen, Classical, 623, as one example of many warnings against this practice.
Syntax 147
Both theoretically and compositionally, it would seem, harmony has been regarded
as the real motor of tonal music. A wide harmonic vocabulary is almost always to
be admired. Harmonic exploration is cognate with depth and mastery; rhythmic
exploration, including in its widest sense syntactical exploration, is more likely to be
regarded as an optional extra. It may be felt as quirky, offbeat, a special effect rather
than something that is intrinsically substantial or necessary. Thus a simple harmonic
vocabulary is more likely to draw comment than a simple syntactical vocabulary.
Simple harmonies may need to be rescued by some special appeal, leaning on the
text or notions of affecting simplicity, for instance, whereas four-square syntax may
well not even be perceived as a problem. In the classroom chorales are worked in
the name of good voice leading and of harmonic range; training in rhythmic and
syntactical skills, in order to acquire versatility in these areas, barely exists as such.
Ear tests concentrate overwhelmingly on ne differentiations of pitch rather than
rhythm.
To put this more abstractly, our cultural and theoretical training means that we are
better at dealing with progression than with proportion when it comes to the way
music moves. As if plugging the gap, Scarlattis most conspicuous efforts are directed
towards investigating proportions. If we are undersensitized to such matters, then it is
all too easy to assume an irrational basis for the consequent musical behaviour in the
Scarlatti sonatas. Notions of his geographical distance fromthe European mainstream
help too in simply making the composer a wild man of the Iberian peninsula. While
irrationality is a real presence in many of the syntactical oddities of the sonatas,
this presence is rationally conceived. Its effects are understood and calculated, even
if the results remain startling or unbalanced. Often we seem to witness a battle
between untutored physical impulse and the syntactical habits of art music, the
physical side invading and exposing the artice that surrounds it. This arises naturally
from the sort of topical manipulation examined in Chapter 3, although it is not
simply to be correlated with a perceived opposition between the popular and the
artistic, an opposition which we have seen is frequently compromised as well as
afrmed. Through this battle, as well as through all his other rhythmic and syntactical
peculiarities, Scarlatti makes us aware of the contingent nature of musical time.
A concise example of how such issues may be raised is found in the Sonata in F
major, K. 554. The opening idea (see Ex. 4.1a) consists of a chain of thirds from C
to C.
The latter part of this idea is expressed in rhythmic diminution, as if throwing
the idea away, and throw away is exactly what Scarlatti does with it. This arresting
opening sinks without trace. It must leave the listener with a sense of dissatisfaction
that something so characteristic should fail to return. That the chain of thirds could
have an indirect motivic inuence on later material is not to the point; it may have
an organic connection to subsequent events, but rhetorically there is no counterpart
at all. A very convenient point of comparison is what Handel does with the same
idea in the same key, in the nal movement of his Concerto, Op. 6 No. 2 (see
Ex. 4.2). This also falls a notional two octaves fromCto C, with a similar acceleration
towards the end. It constitutes a fugal subject whose many, inevitable, structural
Ex. 4.1a K. 554 bars 15
Ex. 4.1b K. 554 bars 4657
returns form the exact syntactical opposite to Scarlattis neglect of his subject.
4
It
is pretty much an unwritten law of all Western composition one of those rules
of good continuation that the most characteristic feature, that which stands out
most clearly against a background of the familiar, should be reiterated, investigated
or developed. Handel takes his fresh invention and uses it to prove his craft, by
showing the capacity to integrate it into a musical argument. From this perspective,
Scarlattis procedure represents not so much a lack of craft as a deliberate refusal
to take up the expected challenge. Instead the challenge is of a different nature
it is to us as listeners, when faced, not here with unexpected repetition, but with
the unexpected absence of repetition. The failure of this opening to return simply
projects the unexpected absence onto a larger syntactical unit the entire piece.
4
This corresponds to a fugal theme type that Warren Kirkendale associates with the Rococo; it uses three descend-
ing thirds in succession as the repetend of a sequence. This might in turn suggest that Scarlattis unaccompanied
rst bar makes as if to evoke this theme type before throwing it away. Fugue and Fugato in Rococo and Classical
Chamber Music, revised and expanded second edn, trans. Margaret Bent and the author (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1979), 98.
Syntax 149
Ex. 4.2 Handel: Concerto Op. 6 No. 2/iv bars 113
The second half of K. 554 also features something highly unusual and, leaving
aside the application of repeat marks, unrepeated, from bar 49 (see Ex. 4.1b). This
of course is some sort of episode rather than something that announces itself as
potentially thematic and form-determining, as we heard at the start of the piece.
What it has in common with that opening, though, is that it is an enticing pattern
that fails to nd any clear resonance elsewhere in the structure. It too stands as
an isolated sonorous object. After it has also disappeared without trace, the rest
of the second half presents us with as much repetition as we could possibly want,
a literal transposition of the last twenty-seven bars of the rst half. And so these
two passages act as no more than irritants to the larger structure, which otherwise
proceeds as if nothing were amiss. Affectively, though, the balance is rather different.
The second passage in particular is enormously memorable in its sinuous sequential
movement. It is an example of what we might dub Scarlatti jazz, meaning that any
possible external inspiration seems to count for little; it seems rather to represent
the identifying personal manner of the player-composer. Inspiration instead seems
applicable in another sense the composer is visited by a single brilliant idea that can
only be properly captured at one moment in time. Against the plentiful repetitions
of the rest of the music, both immediate and rhyming between the halves, our two
unique passages give a sense of the here and now, of a sort of musical living for the
moment. It is as though they exist in real time as against the composed time of the
rest of the sonata.
Another concise example of a sonata where single events seemto inhabit a different
world is K. 525, also in F major. Writing in 1927, Gian Francesco Malipiero pointed
out the similarity of K. 525 to the Scherzo of Beethovens Seventh Symphony.
5
Such
a comparison may easily be deconstructed as an attempt to add lustre to the Scarlatti
work, to lend it prestige by association; some other instances of this were noted in
Chapter 2. Nevertheless, even aside from the obvious kinship of material, there is a
remarkable kinship of spirit. The scherzo-like quality of K. 525 (perhaps attested to
by B ulows renaming of it as such in his arrangement
6
) reminds us that many of the
Scarlatti sonatas may be protably, if seemingly anachronistically, thought of in this
light. After all, the scherzo is one tonal genre where we do expect rhythmic handling
to occupy centre stage (in the case of Mendelssohn, for example, the frequent very
soft dynamics encourage us to concentrate on pure pulsation).
In one respect, however, this sonata does not t with our maverick syntactical
prole. Like many another work, K. 525 begins by means of imitation between the
hands, but whereas most of these sonatas abandon the imitation almost immedi-
ately, in another example of opening premises that are not carried through, K. 525
pursues the idea. The opening material governs the whole piece, very much in the
economical mode we associate with the later scherzo. Bars 9ff., for instance, are in
many more than the two or so notated voices we hear a piling up of entries in the
manner of a stretto. We are presented with a modern, racy contrapuntal texture. The
repetitive syntax that ensues throughout the sonata is not to be construed as in any
way exceptional in its own right; it is no syntactical aberration, but a logical conse-
quence of the textural mode adopted. However, the huge chords that occur shortly
after the stretto (bars 20, 22 and so forth; see Ex. 5.6a) provide a gesture that kills any
5
Malipiero, Scarlatti, 480.
6
It may be found as the nal, sixth piece in Suite No. 2 of Achtzehn ausgew ahlte Klavierst ucke, in Form von Suiten
gruppiert (Leipzig: Peters, 1864).
Syntax 151
Ex. 4.3 Platti: Sonata No. 3/iii bars 919
Baroque vestiges dead at a stroke. They are the antithesis of any and all part-writing.
So foreign are they to the contrapuntal style and the eet progress of the sonata that
they seem to occupy a separate temporal as well as textural dimension. Thus,
just like the two unrepeatable and seemingly incompatible passages in K. 554, these
chords come from another world. They suggest a collage-like conception of the
whole in the manner of Stravinsky. Crucial to this understanding is the invariance
of the chords; they are not worked, are not subject to a (temporal) progression that
would make good their anomalous status. In this sense, they do not participate in
the larger argument of the sonata; indeed, we could easily imagine a version of K.
525 that would be apparently unaffected by their absence. Ex. 4.3, from the nale
of the Sonata No. 3 in F major by Giovanni Benedetto Platti, published in 1742,
features a similar textural disruption.
This movement, entitled Gigue, is predominantly in two parts, and so the sudden
chords, with their arresting rhythm, disrupt both its textural and generic premises.
Platti, however, incorporates his shock into the larger argument and so assures the
coherence of the whole. The initial shock of the D
7
chords is somewhat assuaged
when they are immediately followed by G
7
chords, constituting exactly the sort of
progression that is lacking in the Scarlatti. The best touch, however, is found in the
nal bar of the half, after several bars that restore the customary two-part texture. The
nal C major chord clearly provides a textural counterpart to the earlier seven- and
eight-part chords, thus completing the progression. It also allows us to understand
the disruptive texture as a dramatic realization of the circle of fths, from D to G
to C, in the name of establishing the dominant. Not only that, but this nal full
chord would have been an expected gesture anyway. Countless movements from
the keyboard music of the time proceeded largely in two parts until such cadence
Ex. 4.4 K. 27 bars 132
points, when it was common practice to ll in the harmony, either chordally or
by means of an arpeggio. (As we have already seen, Scarlatti goes out of his way
to avoid both possibilities.) Platti thus wittily justies the convention here through
the particular prior circumstances of the movement.
7
By comparison, the chords in
K. 525 are like inarticulate gestures, blobs of sound.
If the seemingly independent existence of the killer chords in K. 525 offers a
rather indirect example of a syntax that is both split-level and repetitive, there are
sonatas whose repetitive traits are more obvious to the listener. An example is K. 27
7
For another example, see Sonata No. 29 in C major by Rodrguez. The predominantly two-part texture, full of
familiar suggestions of string writing, is interrupted at bar 54 by huge eight-part repeated chords. These are then
assimilated by being treated in a characteristically generous sequence, with seven separate limbs, taking us back
to the departure point of G major in bar 68.
Syntax 153
Ex. 4.4 (cont.)
in B minor (Ex. 4.4 gives the rst half). Its stretch of apparently irrational repetition,
heard in the rst half from bar 11, is all the more exceptional in that it cannot be
rescued by any evocation of Latinate vitality. The repetition feels static rather than
kinetic.
The sonata in fact progresses by means of a dialogue between learned and toccata
styles; neither term is ideal, but they help to capture a clear opposition of syntactical
types. Of the passage from bar 11 Giorgio Pestelli writes:
Then there is something for which one can truly nd no source or reference: an insignicant
arpeggiated guration, instead of continuing on its way, begins to circle around itself like a
Catherine-wheel . . . Here the strophic logic of traditional musical discourse collapses, that
made up of antecedents and consequents, of attractions and repulsions always in motion.
This reiterative furore, for which time stops, so to speak, oscillates between a hedonistic taste
that rejoices in its powers and a sensibility that is astonished by the possibilities of the world
of sounds.
8
The hedonism of which Pestelli speaks implies an inability or unwillingness to be
rational and measured in ones enjoyment, to know instinctively when enough is
enough. Here it must do business with the severity of a learned style. However, the
learned style of the rst three bars is not entirely blameless, with some clear denials
of voice-leading propriety a b
1
is missing from bars 2
1
and 3
1
. But it does better
than the toccata style from bars 4 to 6, which features the clearest of parallel octaves
between the outer and inner parts. Of course these could be understood as colouristic
doubling, and the B minor 5/3 chord of bar 4 is in fact succeeded by 6/3 chords in
the two subsequent bars, but the ear is so sensitized by the idiom of the rst three
bars that the parallels really do register as such. The following polyphonic texture at
bars 79 is more solid with its four parts, but again there are missing continuations
in individual voices. In the rst instance this is to avoid the consecutives that would
arise from their presence.
9
The toccata style responds by showing more exibility of
melodic movement; the g
1
f
1
e
1
traced by the upper line at 11
2
12
1
chimes with
the linear movement of the learned material, more specically with its falling thirds.
Compare, for instance, the bass line from 7 to 10, with its falling-third semiquaver
shapes and also the augmented version traced by the crotchets DCB, GFE
and FED.
On the next syntactical level up, though, there is no exibility at all, just a seem-
ingly endless repetition of the same bar. The hands swap roles twice, relieving the
monotony technically and visually, but not syntactically. Is this really music? is the
question that hovers over the passage.
10
Eventually something must give, and from
bar 17 the arpeggios form themselves into a linear intervallic pattern of 108, with
suspensions added to make a 1098 pattern (see Ex. 4.5a).
This swapping around of the roles of the hands in an extremely repetitive passage
is also found in the Sonata No. 1 in D minor by Rodrguez. The similarity of
conception is very striking. Frombar 49 of this piece a two-bar module of alternating
V5/3 and V6/4 harmonies is played twice in each disposition before the hands
exchange material, which consists, as in K. 27, of broken chords in a middle register
and widely leaping crotchets on either side. The ensuing four-bar units are played
four times in all, making sixteen bars altogether! This easily outdoes K. 27. Not
8
9
Thus the implied tenor b at 8
1
would yield parallel fths with the alto. One bar later, the alto note is omitted
for the same reason to avoid a simultaneous DE in the tenor and AB in the alto.
10
Peter Williams compares the passage with the opening of Bachs Gigue from Partita No. 1 in B at major. In K.
27 this difference of articulation, depending on which hand does the leaping, seems to be a calculated effect . . .
Alas, once again we will never know for certain whether Scarlatti intended a distinction or, on the contrary, was
giving the player the task of producing the same effect by two quite different methods. Hints for Performance
in J. S. Bachs Clavier ubung Prints, Early Keyboard Journal 5 (19867), 323.
Syntax 155
Ex. 4.5a K. 27 bars 1721
10 10 98 10 98 10 98 8
Ex. 4.5b K. 27 bars 236
10 7 7 7 7 10 10 10 10 10
only that, but after a two-bar breather the same repetition is repeated up a fourth,
although this time it nally breaks into a harmonic progression from bar 81. This is
similar in effect to the linear pattern that takes over from bar 17 of K. 27. Although
in themselves much more extreme than what we nd in K. 27, the character of
these repetitions is far less certain. As much as anything, they revive the questions of
Spanish temporality discussed in Chapter 3.
This device that emerges in bar 17 helps to civilize the syntax of the mind-
less toccata.
11
The quasi-parallel octaves still obtain between the outer voices, but
these can now be more readily grasped as colouristic doubling. Bars 21 and 22
then form a sort of neutral link in the manner of bar 10. From bar 23 we hear
another linear intervallic pattern, a 107, that lies more in the province of the
learned style. Reductions of this pattern (Ex. 4.5b) and that of bars 1721 are given
above.
In its rhythmic uidity, though, this pattern seems to take something from the
toccata passages. This suggests that the two styles are beginning to borrow, indeed
learn from one another. The rest of the half bears out this reading. Thus at bars
267 the rapid unfolded thirds of the semiquaver guration bear the imprint of the
toccata, but note the subtle imitation between the left hand of 26 and the right hand
of 27. There is also a rough inversion between the scalic quavers that pass from the
11
I dissent from Pestellis comment that bars 17ff. reveal a melody of facile sentimentality; Pestelli, Sonate, 146. He
overlooks the learned basis provided by the linear intervallic pattern, quite loaded in this context. A sentimental,
nostalgic impression may indeed be created, but this tells us more about how we hear such patternings today,
and our enjoyment in surrendering ourselves to their ancient lineage. See the discussion on reception of the
galant style, Chapter 3, pp. 968.
right hand in bar 26 to the left hand in bar 27. The closing gesture from bar 29 is
of more uncertain import and has an enigmatic effect. Stylistically it lies within the
realm of the toccata, but its falling scale steps owe a debt to the learned material
from the start. These semiquaver scale steps seem to ll in the wide spaces of the
earlier toccata passages.
On a grander and more radical scale is the Sonata in G major, K. 260, where
once again passages of unreasonably extensive repetition alternate with more familiar
material. This work appears to invert the order of things: the normal passages (those
that the composers contemporaries would have recognized as proper music) do
not ultimately so much afrm the familiar diatonic world as represent a rather
pallid response to the vamps, which must be regarded as the real content of the
sonata. Found approximately in bars 2541, 6171, 10736 and 15578, these feature
obscure harmonic progressions, marked implacably by left-hand chords on each
downbeat, offset by oscillating quaver patterns in the right hand. All four passages that
followthe vamp sections are similar in material and seemuntouched by the foregoing
events. In another context they would be unexceptionable, but here, if they represent
reality to the vamps fantasy (since this can hardly be a viable way to go about the
craft of music), their reality the recognizable thematic patterns, the movement
by normal-length phrases, the rmly articulated tonality is dull, unsatisfactory,
perhaps even unreal. There cannot be much doubt that their plainness is deliberate;
they are effectively totally diatonic so that the contrast between what feels like
absolute freedom and Gebrauchsmusik is underlined. All four responding passages in
fact feature some chromaticism, but this is purely linear and never undermines tonal
clarity.
Of course the vamps are totally dependent on the surrounding contextualization
provided by the normal sections, since, as we have seen with the composers use
of exotic elements, such music cannot exist without this regular framing but that
an independent existence can even theoretically be conceived for the vamps is the
radical possibility suggested by K. 260. Thus the contingency of musical norms
is suggested; they become disembodied through their relationship with the vamp
passages. Scarlatti goes further than any other composer of the common-practice era
in suggesting that diatonicism, and its syntactical clothing, does not encompass the
musical universe. We all must have wondered at some time whether this or that tonal
composer, while improvising at the keyboard or in the mind, played or imagined
combinations of notes and types of syntax that could not conceivably nd their way
into any nished artistic context. Only Scarlatti seems to have had the nerve to allow
such moments into his nal products.
This is not to say that we can advance improvisation as an explanation for these
moments, for the reasons detailed in Chapter 2. Nor can we rescue them by an
appeal to a form like the free fantasia. The fantasia was, after all, a distinct genre that
sanctioned all manner of freedoms within its frame, while Scarlatti impurely mixes
his fantasies with more standard material, in works that carry the title of sonata
Syntax 157
(how rich this bland title is turning out to be!).
12
It is characteristic, though, that
in K. 260 he seems disinclined to reassert the authority of the prevailing language,
hence the rather underwhelming response to the challenge posed by the vamps.
Kathleen Dale, writing in the 1940s, got this just right when she commented that
the visionary quality of these interpolations is emphasised by the prosaic character
of the surrounding paragraphs of scales and arpeggios.
13
Such questions may arise through the contemplation of any of the composers
vamps, but the difference in this sonata is that the vamp is not a single, if extended,
central event it recurs at regular intervals. The four separate sections belong together
as clearly as the diatonic sections do, and at each recurrence, the implication is that
the vamp, having been temporarily suppressed, has risen to the surface again as if
it insists on its rights to take a full formal part in the musical structure, as though the
structure is to be analogous to some kind of rondo form. In fact, the vamps assume
more prominence in the second half, as each one lasts about twice as long as its
rst-half equivalent. Thus their striving towards autonomy becomes more insistent.
Although the vamps seem remote from any eighteenth-century diction (even if
possibly taking their cue from Vivaldian concerto gurations
14
), they in fact contain
strong melodic impulses that never shape themselves into anything denitive. There
are plenty of rogue moments among the revolving right-hand patterns when the
rate of pitch change suddenly spurts ahead of what we might expect, particularly
in the second half. It is as though we are approaching an eloquent statement but
never achieve it. We can hear this best in the rst vamp of the second half, especially
between bars 115 and 126. Always becoming, never being, each vamp melts away,
and what is eventually delivered is mundane bustle.
In memory the piece exists not so much in its ofcial G major as in its timeless
moments. If Scarlatti wasnt a relatively peripheral gure, we could describe this as
a truly prophetic piece of the Ich f uhle Luft von anderem Planeten variety. It is
so exceptionally audacious that we dont have the historical or stylistic means to do
justice to it. Characteristically, Scarlatti doesnt explain the object is presented for
our contemplation, and nothing is signposted.
It is worth pointing out that K. 260 has not been much recorded. Indeed, players,
both in concert and on disc, have shied away from all the most excessively repetitive
sonatas, and especially those that contain vamp sections. It is not hard to divine the
reason for this avoidance. Excessive repetition is embarrassing for the performer
and possibly for the listener too. When it cannot be understood to fall within one of
the rhetorical categories outlined earlier, then it may seem antisocial, if not living on
12
I mention this genre by way of comparison because of its associations with the sort of harmonic freedom found
in K. 260. Historically, though, it does not have strong ties with Scarlattis cultural and working environments.
The toccata would be a more apt point of comparison, but since I believe Scarlatti uses this much more as a style
rather than as a type, the same reservations apply.
13
Dale, Contribution, 43.
14
See Sheveloff, Grove, 3389. We will return to this stylistic suggestion.
the edge of sanity. After all, many forms of irrational conduct or mental illness involve
repetitive behaviour, arising from an inability to judge the line between enough and
too much. Or if we think of the reception of twentieth-century minimalism, many
hostile parties have accused it of an antisocial orientation, linking minimalism with
the hippy drug culture of 1960s California. The embarrassment for the player of
a Scarlatti vamp is one of having to act out such seemingly unbalanced, irrational
behaviour. The performer is uniquely exposed. This is a particular problemgiven the
traditional role played by eighteenth-century music in our culture as the embodiment
of civilized values; it offers an opportunity to advertise ones taste, ones sense of
style, as Kirkpatrick would have it, that has been taken up by many performers as
well as listeners. As vamps generally involve free guration and decontextualized
harmony, there is no style as such to immerse oneself in or to hide behind.
On the other hand, it is seemingly easier for performers to cope with Scarlattis
absent repetitions, and with the resultant lack of symmetry. The coping is often
achieved by means of various acts of subterfuge tidying up ornamentation, for
instance, so that parallel units automatically receive parallel embellishment, or by
adding bars at the ends of sections to make a phrase scan. Scarlattis habit of lopping
off a bar giving us one bar at the end of the rst half, for example, when two are
needed to balance the hypermetre of the whole phrase is disregarded by performers
almost without exception. An example may be seen at the end of the rst half of
K. 523 in Gmajor (Ex. 4.6). Bar 43 is preceded by three matching two-bar units from
bar 37 and should clearly be followed by another bar of the D octave to make up the
expected, indeed surely inevitable eight-bar phrase. The failure of the expected bar
44 to eventuate runs so strongly against the syntactical grain that it is hardly surprising
if most performers show themselves unable to cope, except by effectively rewriting
the close of the phrase. Indeed, in many cases they may not even be conscious of
ignoring the notation.
Mikhail Pletnev does exactly that in a performance that conveys a wonderful sense
of the registral play through the sonata, showing how much structural resonance and
colour may be invested in this parameter.
15
His deviations from any published text
may well trouble the Scarlatti acionado, but they form a useful index to the most
idiosyncratic aspects of the composers style in this piece. Everything that is most
individual here this most individual of performers smoothes out and regularizes. As
well as the addition of extra bars at the end of each half to make the numbers balance,
we nd the elimination of asymmetrical details that prevent the precise repetition of
small cells (such as the removal of the tenor d in bar 39 and the playing of the whole
bass line one octave higher), and the replacement of the open fth on the downbeat
of bar 21 Pletnev must consider this too raw a sound and so replaces the left hands
A with a C.
16
15
Virgin: 5 45123 2, 1995.
16
Exactly the same alteration is found in B ulows arrangement of K. 523, found as No. 6 of Suite No. 1 in
Achtzehn ausgew ahlte Klavierst ucke. This reminds us of Scarlattis relishing of such open sonorities, as detailed in
the discussion of horn calls in Chapter 3, pp. 867.
Syntax 159
We also hear notes added in the bass at bars 7, 9, 11 and 13. Missing bass notes are
one of the thorniest problems for the modern-day editor of Scarlatti sonatas. Bass
notes are frequently lacking precisely at important structural points, just when the
preceding harmonic activity most demands their presence and articulative power.
Their denial can create what Ralph Kirkpatrick called a sickening emptiness in
the bass which produces vertigo, and their absence often seems so incredible that
scribal error is generally assumed by editors.
17
The delicacy of the matter lies in the
probability that some of them may indeed represent scribal error but that all of them
together cannot they are too frequent an occurrence. However, as a species they
may be aligned with those missing bars at the ends of phrases; they also suggest a
determination to undermine precisely the most secure and automatic of syntactical
habits and assumptions. Kirkpatricks visceral reaction indicates the level at which
such denials affect us; intellectually we may just about be able to assent to them,
but the musical body rebels. Such details are, and should be, almost impossible to
live with. And so from bar 7 Pletnev spells out the linear intervallic pattern that
is only half articulated by Scarlatti, thus removing the teasing distortion of texture
and register. Ex. 4.7a shows the underlying pattern which Pletnev brings to the
surface.
More striking by far than these, though, is the addition of a companion phrase
unit at the beginning to match the singleton at 14: Pletnev replays these four bars
before proceeding further. He of course gives us what we have a right to expect the
sonata starts with a self-contained periodic phrase unit and with a sequential pattern
that seems to demand a response or continuation in kind. Everything would seem to
be set up for an immediate repetition. The mode (even the very key of G) and metre
(3/8) play a part in this too, implying a light style that would be structurally easy.
In fact, what we have is a version of what I call the opening stampede, quite
a common occurrence at the start of Scarlatti sonatas, which favours momentum
over clear articulation it is structurally breathless, we are given too much to take
in too quickly. The opening of K. 457 in A major furnishes another instance of this
stampede. We do not expect to nd such intensity and unpredictability of action
at the beginning of a sonata. There is no secure point of cadential or phraseal
articulation; instead, we are propelled forward in search of the stability that should
have formed the point of departure. The hectic patterns at bars 517 of K. 523 are
also very characteristic in this regard they twist out of any settled shape. K. 523 in
fact turns out to be a problem sonata, where all subsequent material represents some
sort of response to the initial challenge to our perception. In terms of shape, bars 513
are already an answer to the opening unit, given their basis in a stepwise descending
sequence. The phrase functions as a very indirect and expanded consequent to the
rst four bars.
In strict syntactical terms, though, these bars do not correct the impression of
lopsidedness. That process begins slightly later. The material from bar 21 is a clear
17
Cited in Sheveloff, Uncertainties, 159. This article offers an almost unique discussion of the feature, at 15965.
Ex. 4.6 K. 523 bars 173
reference to the opening, with some simplication of the pattern but more impor-
tantly a new continuation the four bars 214 are balanced by the continuation
towards a cadence point, making eight bars in total. The whole is then repeated,
thus dealing with both original unsatisfactory aspects of the opening bars: the
short-windedness and the lack of phraseal balance. Even the closing material from
bar 37, with its melodic outline falling from

5 to

1 (see the stepwise fall from a
2
to d
2
at 379), reworks the contour of the start (the stepwise fall from d
3
to a displaced
Syntax 161
Ex. 4.6 (cont.)
g
1
in bar 5), and now there are three iterations of the unit, overlapping. Three is
certainly better than one.
That the opening is to be conceived as a problem becomes absolutely clear at the
start of the second half. This moves straight to the tonic minor and simply gives us
the opening four bars in that key (447). The initial harmonic sense is of course
different because of the opening D pedal. The minor key also works rhetorically
here, casting a shadow over the condent but wrong opening gesture. This explicit
tonic-minor version is given a new continuation, leading to a half-close at 50; the
original phrase has again been broadened.
There is immediately another recomposition from bar 50. The sequential con-
struction of the original right hand is now made more structurally sequential
in other words, into a linear intervallic pattern (76; see Ex. 4.7b). The original
compound melodic structure is now made explicit, with a clearly independent alto
line. And so we have a timely intervention by a more learned style; its associations
of sturdy technique and reliable patterning make it once more a good friend in a
Ex. 4.7a K. 523 bars 715
10 (7 7 7 10) 10 10 7 10
Ex. 4.7b K. 523 bars 5054
Ex. 4.7c K. 523 bars 5764
4 6 4 6 4 6 4 6
Ex. 4.7d K. 523 bars 448
crisis. In fact, this passage is doubly learned, since, in addition, the bass is imitating the
right hand from the start of the half (compare bars 4448
1
of the right hand with the
left hand from50
2
to 54
1
). Both these elements of learning, the linear pattern and the
imitation, impose a rmer shape on the original unit. We should note especially that
the left-hand imitation of the earlier right-hand pattern means that we have two
phrases acting as question and answer, precisely the sort of relationship that was de-
nied at the start but which Pletnev decided to full. This second phrase too receives
a continuation, at bars 545, to lead to a half-cadence.
There follows yet another recomposition. With a phrase overlap, the right hand
from bar 56 traces the same line from d
3
to a
2
heard at the beginnings of both
Syntax 163
halves, while the alto becomes still more independent, forming its own 46 pattern
with the bass (see Ex. 4.7c). This contains all four original stepwise pairs, as found
too at bars 4448
1
: this is illustrated by Ex. 4.7d, which aligns the shared notes.
This then hooks into a repetition of bars 489 at 645, but note how the total
phrase has expanded. The phrase including 645 is at least two bars longer than that
containing 489; the exact length depends on whether one includes the overlap in
bar 56.
Thus we have a very comprehensive working-out of the original problem, sig-
nicantly involving learned devices coming to the rescue. Does their presence also
suggest that the very opening was based on serious patterning, but dressed in new
clothes and failing to cut a convincing gure? This could mark a syntactical plot
involving the collision between periodic and sequential impulses or the modern
manners of a galant style and the older ways of the learned. It requires a consider-
able effort on our parts to become alive to such possibilities of syntactical argument,
when, as outlined earlier, we most naturally read tonal music in terms of its harmonic
narrative. If we only have an ear for harmonic vocabulary, a sonata like K. 523 will
pass by all too easily. After all, it moves briskly enough to the dominant, which is
prolonged in totally diatonic manner, and then, remarkably, spends the entire second
half in the tonic (if mostly on its dominant), only changing mode halfway through.
Our training might suggest that there is nothing to detain us only a quirky open-
ing that could be ascribed to artistic mannerism. But it should be apparent that the
composer is well aware of the implications of his syntactical tricks, whether made
good, as here, or not.
What stimulus might Scarlatti have had for the cultivation of his peculiar syntactical
habits, aside from the workings of his own creative mind? K. 532 in A minor suggests
one answer. As proposed in the previous chapter, K. 532 is an unusual case in that,
like very few of the Scarlatti sonatas, it appears to be entirely Spanish, a dance scene,
presented as if it were a transcription. There is a sense of proud gesture in the ery
repeated units, which is perhaps easier to choreograph than to analyse in normal
terms. Repetition is always easier to evoke than to explicate.
While often it seems to be more the principle of irrational repetition, abstracted
from any localized source, that governs the vamps and comparable passages, K. 532
suggests that the principle may also be more locally grounded. It virtually begins
with a vamp, reharmonizing time and again the repeated melodic cell c
2
b
1
. This
is then expanded immensely from the start of the second half, starting with the
same notes as at the beginning (compare bars 63
3
66 with bars 4
3
7), in the most
common position for a vamp. While this may be a recreation of a frenzied ritual,
it also shows a fascination with a xed sonorous object. The repetition becomes in
fact more repetitive over the course of the passage.
To start with, Scarlatti replaces the endlessly repeated melodic cell with transposed
forms between each four-bar unit. Thus the reiterated CB becomes ED from bar
67 and then GA from bar 71. Unlike the rst-half model, though, the bass ostinato
Ex. 4.8a K. 541 bars 1630
gure now remains constant, so that while the upper voices become less repetitive,
the bass becomes more so. A quasi-stretto speeds us towards an exact transposition
of the whole passage up a fourth (compare 63
3
75
1
with 83
3
95
1
). This leads, not
to more variance, but to a direct repetition of the start of the second larger phrase
(compare 83
3
ff. with 95
3
ff.), with the bass an octave lower. From here Scarlatti
reverts to the earlier principle of melodic insistence and harmonic change found in
the rst half. When from bar 107
3
we return for the third time to the identical phrase
(as at bars 83
3
and 95
3
, save for the change to minor), it is a powerful effect. After all
the animation, after all the repetitions, varied either in the upper voices or the bass
but never both at once, we win through to. . . more of the same. It is almost like a
victory for brute repetition over differentiated composition, the same principle we
saw in the treatment of the huge chords in K. 525, although on a broader level the
whole vamp-like passage obviously ts this bill.
A similar distinction also seems to inform the Sonata in F major, K. 541, another
work that strongly suggests the contingent nature of musical time. This sonata be-
comes dominated by material, rst heard frombar 19, that is less thematically distinc-
tive than anything else in the piece a routine left-hand guration and a right-hand
two-chord shape whose purpose is unclear (see Ex. 4.8a). Perhaps the right hand
punctuates the hectic repeated accompaniment, but it does not divert it from its
course. It suggests cadential closure note the sudden thick texture and the trills
but the left hand ignores the repeated cues. In effect we have an accompaniment
Syntax 165
Ex. 4.8b K. 541 bars 5772
to nothing that becomes the centre of attention. Ironically, the phrase from bars
19
2
to 27
1
is a perfect eight bars long after a characteristic opening stampede that
plays around with nuances of phrase rhythm in an idiom that clearly favours duple
sectional organization. Is Scarlatti saying from bar 19 Fill in your own melody?
as if the demands of rhythm and our sense of syntactical proportion, now satised by
the eight-bar unit, far outweigh the particular means by which these are realized.
This much might be suggested by the continuation from bar 35, after a minor-
mode repetition of our eight-bar unit. The left-hand gure remains in essence the
same except that it is no longer rooted to the spot, but now it clearly accompanies
the tuniest of tunes. Pestelli notes this tune as a fragment of an Italian Christmas
song, known as the Couperin pastorale.
18
If this is the case, it only strengthens the
sense of compositional gesture outlined above, that of lling in a melody so what
could be better than one which is pre-existing?
In the second half the purple patch is treated to a reductio ad absurdum and the
right-hand interjections become more obviously silly from bar 61, with the double
trills in the lower two parts of the three-part chords and the horrid voice leading
(see Ex. 4.8b). At the end of the rst unit, at bars 667, the left hand denies the V of
D minor implications that have been set up and goes its own way. It ceases, in other
words, to accompany. This is the surely inevitable outcome of the individualization
of an apparently subordinate line. The left hand reverses its direction and features an
awkward leap of the leading note down a major seventh. The right hand suddenly
18
Pestelli, Sonate, 2056. The same fragment can be found in K. 260, in fact compare bars 8891 of its rst half.
nds life after this too and presents a new gure at bar 67. A logical pause follows
the left hand must lead on now that it has overtly assumed the initiative, but it is as
if the right hands dramatic shape has called the lefts bluff. Bar 68 represents the rst
point of rest in both parts.
The re-emergence of the left-hand guration from silence conrms the sense that
the gure simply marks time rather than representing truly composed material. The
failure of the left hand to do anything more than continue with its accompaniment
to nothing suggests that we are hearing meaningless sound against a background
of silence. The subsequent passages and their subsequent silences only strengthen
the impression. Scarlatti appears again to be playing with the boundaries between
composed time and brute, mechanical time.
During the third of these second-half passages the right hand returns to its rst-
half form, so dispensing with the chordal parallel fths, and from bar 86 the left
hands now expected change of direction is not allowed free rein. The right-hand
chords move in a pattern with melodic force, the left hand is forced to adapt, and
the spell appears to be broken. This is clinched by the cadential pattern at bars 889,
which picks up on the tune of the rst half compare bars 35
2
36
1
, for example.
Melodic and temporal coherence has been resumed. Now there occurs another bars
rest with a pause.
Once more, however, the left hand at bar 91 emerges with its pattern out of
nothing, so that the strange sequence of events in effect continues. The security
provided by the patterning of bars 889 now seems just as provisional as the non-
sense material. One barely notices that this is now a recapitulation of the rst-half
material. The Christmas tune, however, does not recur; instead, from bar 98, one
hears pairs of notes in the right hand that seem to compress the rising second of the
chordal motive, while the left hand asserts its authority by pushing up by step from
A to F. This is even more apparent from bar 101, where the right hand is clearly
accompanying, not melodic. Such changes of detail help make this sonata another
poor specimen of the balanced binary form in which Scarlatti is supposed exclusively
to deal. The piece is progressively drained of recognizable thematic content as what
should be an incidental detail overruns the structure. In the end composed time
seems to be an empty vessel, as rhythms and repetitions lose their phenomenological
value.
19
Silence surrounds and inltrates the piece, and we are left with the impres-
sion of an empty chattering, as though Samuel Beckett had taken a hand in the
conception of this sonata. As we have observed Scarlatti shaking us free of various
syntactical dependencies and assumptions, offering a new perspective on the habits
that make up the art music of his time, we might not have suspected that he might
also call into question the largest syntactical unit of all the musical composition
itself.
19
Note the remarks by Jeff Pressing that systematic repetition of patterns can dull time perception, stretch or
even eliminate . . . the apparent time. His primary context for discussion is the music of (near) contemporary
composers, but he also notes the relevance of Scarlattis sonatas to the subject, mentioning K. 422 and K. 417.
Relations between Musical and Scientic Properties of Time, Contemporary Music Review 7/2 (1993), 109.
Syntax 167
PHASE HYTHM
We will now examine more closely some of the elements of Scarlattis syntactical
renewal. As already outlined, our prevalent assumptions about the relative weight of
different parameters in tonal music have led to a lack of awareness of rhythmic and
syntactical factors. Indeed, there is some lack of theoretical vocabulary for them, even
though they may often work more directly on listeners sensibilities than do harmonic
patterns. These factors do not of course operate independently of harmony: the two
are interdependent. Nevertheless, while there is a long tradition of considering
harmony more or less autonomously, abstracted from other musical parameters, the
same does not go for rhythm.
This should not be taken to imply that writers have failed to acknowledge Scarlattis
proclivities in this direction. Ralph Kirkpatrick described the composer as a past
master of phrase structure, noting Scarlattis employment of juxtaposition, contrac-
tion, extension and the insertion of irregular phrases, although, surprisingly, he did
not acknowledge the missing-bar phenomenon.
20
Signicantly, though, such re-
marks were subsumed under performance in the nal chapter of his book, while
consideration of Scarlattis harmony merited an earlier chapter to itself. Malcolm
Boyd counselled us to analyse not the statement and restatement of themes, but
rather the balance and imbalance of phrases, and the manipulation of motifs. He
adds that the phrase rhythm of the sonatas reects the composers position on the
stylistic border-line: while the music trades in short articulated phrase units, their
manipulation frequently results in a seamless continuity which has more in com-
mon with Baroque than with Classical methods.
21
As has been suggested elsewhere,
though, Scarlatti seems to make positive capital out of his transitional position, as
if he were colluding with the historical ction. This is not the same as a present-day
writer conveniently reading these features into the music and then connecting them
by means of the customary rhetorical identication with the composer. After all,
the same self-consciousness is evident in the play with various styles and linguistic
registers discussed in Chapter 3. Surely one of the reasons that the mixed style was
so attractive to Scarlatti was precisely that it allowed him to pursue his interest in
rhythmic and syntactical phenomenology different means of patterning, types of
reiteration and ways of constructing musical time.
It is Joel Sheveloff, though, who has provided the most considered commentary
on Scarlattis syntactical habits. Writing of the phrase structure of the Sonata in
D major, K. 140, he notes that its choice of a crooked, winding path may be of
a piece with other syntactical anomalies. He lists three examples: the beginning of
motives and phrases in the middle of a bar, stops in unusual places and relationships
of material between the two halves that are out of phase.
22
Elsewhere, he describes
how the uneven relationships between phrases produce a kinetic energy that helps
speed a piece on its way. The most frequent of techniques used to generate this
20
Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 311. See also the section Tempo and Rhythm, 292304.
21
Boyd, Master, 174.
22
Sheveloff, Uncertainties, 170.
energy is phrase elision, which only Haydn cultivates as frequently and as interest-
ingly as Scarlatti.
23
While such elision produces energy, it also denies our instincts for completion and
for symmetry. It can therefore bear both a positive and a negative (anti-normative)
interpretation; it can be productive and subversive. While it is often understood
as a means of avoiding the over-sectional tendencies of the new periodic syntax,
leading to Boyds seamless continuity, less often remarked in this context are the
positive attributes of periodic organization itself, which is after all the basic modus
operandi of Scarlattis keyboard music. Yet, apart from anything else, it is this that
allows the very possibility of a mixed style ordering by discrete units of syntax
encourages the conception of discrete units of material. If the raw syntactical ele-
ments of the new style do court the danger of short-windedness, equally, those of
the Baroque may lead to shapelessness. (This danger would seem to be satirically
reected in two works already examined in Chapter 1, K. 39 and K. 254.) That
this is rarely, if ever, acknowledged reects the more respectable perceived technical
basis of the older style, as discussed earlier in connection with the reception of the
galant.
Many musicians, however, cannot see past the composers untidiness, often directly
or subliminally accounted for as being primitive or negligent. Robert Schumann was
unable to come to terms with this aspect of Scarlatti it is difcult sometimes to
follow him, so quickly does he tie and untie the threads
24
while many performers
of course do a good deal of housekeeping before presenting their sonatas to the
public. Especially revealing are the recompositions of Charles Avison in his Twelve
Concertos of 1744, based on the Essercizi and a number of other (presumably earlier)
sonatas. In the preface to the initial publication of a single concerto he wrote that
many delightful Passages [are] entirely disguised, either with capricious Divisions,
or an unnecessary Repetition in many Places. These are just what Avison tends to
remove. He also claimed to be taking off the Mask which concealed their natural
Beauty and Excellency,
25
thus providing inadvertently an apt image for Scarlattis
manipulation of syntactical norms.
Avisons arrangement of the Sonata in A major, K. 26, as the last movement of
Concerto No. 1 is a case in point. The original is full of discrepant details; nothing
quite matches or aligns neatly. At the equivalent of bars 1521 (see Ex. 4.9) he omits
a bar so as to yield a neater 3 2 construction. It is difcult, though, to say just
which bar is omitted it seems at rst to be 19 but is in fact probably 15 since the
passage is really recomposed. The harmonic sense is changed. At bar 15 we get the
root-position A minor denied by Scarlatti after the preceding dominant preparation,
and the following bars alternate between prolongations of I and V; compare Scarlattis
hovering on the dominant and consequently more uid, continuous syntax. In fact,
23
Sheveloff, Keyboard, 415 and 369.
24
Cited in Boyd, Master, 218.
25
Cited in Boyd, Master, 225.
Syntax 169
Ex. 4.9 K. 26 bars 1540
the sonata is all dominant preparations of various sorts until bar 43 (even the opening
tonic is not given proper cadential denition).
Bar 20
1
features an elision, with the upper-voice c
2
both completing the falling-
third motive and initiating a new downbeat-orientated module. Avison clearly can-
not cope with this, since he has removed a prior bar to make the syntax scan. Another
elision follows almost immediately at bar 22
1
. This both completes the melodic line
from the two previous bars and runs into a sequential repetition a step down of
bars 15ff. As in bar 20, it is the lower part which rst moves clearly to the next
unit. This time, though, the elision of the third two-bar unit of the phrase does
not happen (see bars 267). The simpler patterning may act as a corrective to the
rst whole phrase, but in context bar 27 seems unexpectedly bereft of new devel-
opments; it sounds unnaturally bare. When from the following bar (28) we hear
the same upper-voice falling third, if now a third higher, which then rises back to
the initial note, the music seems to have caught up with where it should have been
two bars earlier (compare 1920 of the model). However, the inner part has already
abandoned its cross-string guration; bars 289 match 2021 in this respect, with
a rough inversion of contour. In other words, the inner part appears to be only a
bar behind. The bass octave gure goes with the sense of the treble in this game
of being out of phase it is two bars behind the model. Out of all this confu-
sion, Avison extracts material which makes the two phrases from 15ff. a matching
pair!
When the upper voice completes its rising third back to f
2
at bar 30
1
, the lower
parts have already moved on to a new texture. If a more straightforward patterning by
two-bar units seems to be re-established from this point, the strange clashes between
the hands mean that there is no chance to enjoy this. In other words, the sense of
material being out of phase continues. Conrming this sense is that while the upper
part seems to move to something new (in fact it is an intervallic distortion of the
rise and fall of 2021), the lower parts slightly rework the material that began the
two previous phrases. Compare these lower parts at bars 30
2
32
1
with bars 15
2
17
1
;
beginning on the second quaver of the bar, both feature a falling-third gure, doubled
in thirds, interspersed with a repeated-note lower strand.
This is answered by a rising third which the latter passage also doubles by thirds.
The difference in the latter passage is that the repeated notes now occur on, rather
than off, the beat. This creates a feeling of total syncopation, a way in which this
layer alone is out of phase with its earlier appearances. The threefold reiteration of
the lower parts from bar 30 also recalls the two previous phrases. This means that
30ff. constitute both a distinctly new section and a sequential continuation of the
earlier material. This is yet another layer of syntactical ambiguity, in the form of a
giant overlap of function.
A further complication is the role of bar 30
1
in the lower parts, thus far unac-
counted for. The parallelism with the two previous phrases encourages us to hear 32
1
as the last quaver of a six-quaver unit, but the fact that it matches the downbeat back
at 30
1
may encourage us to hear it rather as the rst beat of a six-quaver unit. Similar
ambiguities attend the top part. As in the lower voices, a six-quaver loop is set up,
but where does it truly start? On paper it seems to begin with the G on the second
beat of 30, but there is a grey area here caused by its continued stepwise movement
through from the D of 29. So perhaps we perceive a clearer beginning from the
subsequent D. It is not too surprising that Avison recasts the upper-voice line from
bar 30 and leaves out the accompaniment. What results is a resourceful rewriting
in the name of a much less remarkable half-cadential formulation. The confusion
of this whole passage from 15 is of course augmented by the left-over-right-hand
writing, especially from bar 30. Digital and syntactical strangeness are thus matched
in this topsy-turvy world.
Readers who have tried to follow all these twists and turns, or at least my account
of them, may well nd themselves in a state of nervous irritation. Yet this is exactly the
avour that tends to emerge fromthe sort of syntactical virtuosity on display. In many
Syntax 171
cases such material would simply have been unthinkable in an ensemble context
and this of course is one strong justication for many of Avisons alterations.
26
At the end of the half bars 656 are omitted another removal of unnecces-
sary Repetition. This makes for a neater, more controlled cadence. Yet it is also
unbalancing. The extra repetitions are both irrational and rational. In manner they
are overly insistent, but structurally they are needed to balance all the various in-
conclusive dominant hoverings that have gone before. In part, Scarlattis repetitions
signal a new importance for proportions in a musical argument, one based on a more
varied sense of harmonic and phrase rhythm. Avison has arguably not grasped this
sense of proportion. The fact that the same material is used from bars 43, 55 and 63
also makes clear that the same end is required a proper conclusive cadence in the
dominant (minor).
Revealing in a different direction is Handels treatment of the material he borrowed
fromthe Essercizi for his Twelve Concertos, Op. 6, of 1739. He consistently augments
Scarlattis material. Of course, Handels borrowing cannot be directly compared with
Avisons transcription, but it is noteworthy that both composers nd means of
making the original material more comfortable; one cuts while the other expands.
The nal movement of the Concerto in G major, Op. 6 No. 1, based on K. 2, is
the solitary exception. Elwood Derr suggests that this is probably the single instance
in Op. 6 where Handel reduces Scarlattis epigrammatic statements to still more
compressed terms.
27
OPENI NG AND CLOSUE
Another form of reworking alluded to a number of times already is the addition of
extra bars at cadence points by performers. Missing bars are most commonly found
at the ends of the two halves of a sonata but may occur at any relatively important
point of cadential articulation. This phenomenon illustrates the composers constant
vigilance, his distance from the most ingrained of compositional habits. It may be
allied not just with the absence of important bass notes, as suggested earlier, but also
with the pronounced tendency to avoid fully textured closes, whether simultaneous
(chordal) or successive (arpeggiated). We noted in Chapter 2 the avoidance of a
closing arpeggio in the generally known version of K. 9 in D minor. Extreme
examples of denial of a closing chord, when the preceding dominant chord surely
demands such a resolution, may be found in the extracts from K. 208, 317 and 450
given in Ex. 4.10.
Scarlattis curtness at such junctures, whether achieved through textural or syntac-
tical denial, seems to react against the rhetorical relaxation that normally coincides
26
Nicholas Cook makes a comparable point about Geminianis more literal-minded and straightforward concerto
grosso version of a Corelli sonata: that it may be as much a function of genre as of personal disposition. At the
Borders of Musical Identity: Schenker, Corelli and the Graces, Music Analysis 18/2 (1999), 195.
27
Handels Use of Scarlattis Essercizi per Gravicembalo in his Opus 6, G ottinger H andel-Beitr age 3 (1987;
published 1989), 176.
Ex. 4.10a K. 208 bars 1214
Ex. 4.10b K. 317 bars 11318
Ex. 4.10c K. 450 bars 4042
with the arrival at an important structural point. Such relaxation seems quite in-
evitable and natural; one only need think of the number of fugues that abandon
strict part-writing and a set number of voices in their nal bars. The interpretation
of such denial in Scarlatti can vary. If heard at the end of an entire sonata, it will tend
to suggest simple negation of the natural, that some tension built up towards the
cadential close remains unresolved; it denies us the full mental and bodily relaxation
we have been conditioned to expect. In a way, it may be seen as a specic embod-
iment of the taste for an open musical experience, as dened in the discussion of
the topically mixed sonatas in Chapter 3. Where else in the tonal repertoire of the
eighteenth century does one nd such an ambivalent attitude to closure? On the
other hand, when the syntactical side of such denial occurs at intermediate points
in the structure, it may serve the more positive ends of maintaining momentum.
Indeed, it may even be made good later.
One question that must arise when considering the missing-bar phenomenon,
a seemingly tiny detail with very big implications, is whether this is a considered
notation. Perhaps, if we bear in mind the unsatisfactory source situation, this reects
scribal laxity; or perhaps it reects an understood convention, with the performer
being expected to make up the missing bars as required. However, the sheer number
of missing bars or beats found in the sources overwhelms such commonsensical
objections. More specically, a number of sonatas are notationally explicit on this
Syntax 173
matter. In K. 149, for example, the rst-time bar at the end of the rst half makes
explicit that the performer should not wait for a whole bar to ll itself out before
continuing. The time signature is 4/4, and bar 16 follows a crotchet rst beat with
just a crotchet rest, marked with a pause. Gilbert inserts a 2/4 time signature in the
rst-time bar of his edition to guide the performer and changes the crotchet rest
to a quaver rest. The pause might admittedly be thought to allow for an effective
lling of the missing beats, but the second-time bar leaves no room for doubt, as
the second half continues immediately from the third beat of the bar. K. 199 offers
a more straightforward example. The nal rst-half bar of this 12/8 sonata consists
of just six quaver pulses; the third and fourth beats have gone missing. There is no
doubt that this phenomenon represents a highly individual effect, but we are not
trained to listen for individuality or to expect a personal stamp in such an area. Our
natural reaction is to deny it, from the point of view both of our body clocks and
of our theoretical training.
The Sonata in D minor, K. 120, represents an extreme and quite unequivocal
example of such abruptness at a cadence point (see Ex. 4.11, which gives the rst
half). The cadential reiterations from bar 22 build tremendous tension which more
than ever would seem to demand a spacious resolving gesture. Instead, we are given
a mere quavers worth of resolution on the downbeat of bar 27 before being whisked
back to the start of the sonata. The same operates in the continuation of the second
half from the second quaver of this bar. Tellingly, the second half provides a foil to
this: it ends, not with a quaver, but with a dotted semibreve marked with a pause!
Such contrasting treatment within a particular sonata again conrms that we are
dealing with a conscious technique.
28
A variant on the same principle is provided by what Sheveloff has dubbed great
curves, the large slurs found above and below staves most often in association with
repeat marks at the end of the rst half of a sonata. These slurs indicate that the
material contained within them is to be played rst time around and then omitted
on the second playing. Their effect is often to produce a large-scale structural elision
between the two halves. For Sheveloff they form a crucial part of Scarlattis radical
treatment of the midpoint of the binary form:
Most music in Scarlattis lifetime used a rst ending to provide a retransitional link from
the end of the rst half back to the opening material on the tonic; the second ending then
does away with this linking material, allowing the rst half to nish with the fullest, most
convincing stop in the piece, save for the parallel ending of the second half, and thus, of the
sonata. In Scarlattis usage of two endings, an opposite effect tends to prevail. In about 125
sonatas, he will allow the rst half to come to its fullest stop the rst time, and then use the
second ending to overlap the border between halves, so the musical fabric can ow seamlessly
[between] them, almost magically evaporating the usual brick wall between halves.
29
28
Sheveloffs phrase in a discussion of this feature in K. 125; he notes that it appears too often in Domenicos
keyboard works to be an accident. Sheveloff, Keyboard, 423.
29
Sheveloff, Uncertainties, 155. The great curve is also discussed in Sheveloff, Keyboard, 27988.
Ex. 4.11 K. 120 bars 127
If the effect may be magical, it may also be plain disconcerting. In K. 535 the
second-time closing arpeggio rushes ahead into new harmonic territory before one
can adjust (see Ex. 6.13). Another example that disorientates both our harmonic and
syntactical senses is found at the mid-point of K. 253; here the falling B at major
arpeggio that ends the rst-time playing of the rst half is completed second time
around not by a b but by an a.
Even many recent performers who are clearly working from the best editions fail
to observe the indications of the great curves. Once more, we must acknowledge
how fundamentally our musical body clocks are being interfered with, making ex-
ecutive resistance almost inevitable. The composer is not simply scoring easy points
at the expense of conventional shapings and proportions; what is indicated in the
sources is often deeply upsetting to our musical instincts. The implication is that
even these are habitual as much as fundamental, that they are the product of cultural
Syntax 175
Ex. 4.11 (cont.)
training. They are so ingrained that our experience of them has become located
entirely in the body, instinctively felt rather than consciously measured. Scarlatti,
by interfering overtly with such natural phenomena of voice leading, timing and
texture, returns them to an intellectual level, in an extreme of relativistic thought.
It takes an iron will on the part of the performer to meet rather than evade such
challenges.
Executive resistance is even plainer in performers approaches to the much more
frequent missing-bar phenomenon. One of the best examples of this may be found in
Ex. 4.12 K. 96 bars 130
K. 96 (see Ex. 4.12). The stand-alone bar 25 presents a challenge to the performer
a mental one. In recordings sampled, Andreas Staier adds two bars and an aspiration
after 25 before proceeding to bar 26, Vladimir Horowitz adds three extra bars to make
a four-bar unit, Anne Queff elec adds almost ve to make six, Pletnev just over ve
(plus a tremolo and mock-heroic piano hustle) and Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli
just under six bars. Christian Zacharias manages the comparatively superhuman feat
of adding only one extra bar after 25.
30
Obviously the grand build-up of sonority
from bar 11 onward seems to demand time to resonate, or at least some clearing-
space, before any continuation, and the duple construction also seems to require an
even count of bars before the next phrase can proceed. (Some of these performances
must be following Longo, who adds a pause over 25, but one imagines that even
without Longos intervention most performers would quite naturally add one. In
his edition B ulow not only adds a pause but also the indication longa!) However, it
must be quite clear that the composer is not prepared to grant this and what should
be heard is an intrusion by another idea before we could possibly expect it. Yet there
is also a positive expressive point to this denial of the natural. The rushed syntax in
fact aids the impression given by K. 96 of a giddy panorama, as considered in the
previous chapter. The rst real breathing space does not arrive until bar 137, well
into the second half, and this is marked by a pause. What follows this is a return of
precisely the material that arrived too soon in the rst half, bars 26ff. This represents
30
Deutsche Harmonia Mundi: 05472 77274 2, 1992 (Staier); Sony: 53460, 1964/1993 (Horowitz); Erato: 4509
96960 2, 1970 (Queff elec); Virgin: 5 45123 2, 1995 (Pletnev); Grammofono 2000: 78675, 1943/1996 (Michelan-
geli); EMI: 7 63940 2, 197985/1991 (Zacharias).
Syntax 177
a clear correction of what was so unsettling before and proves the need for doing
exactly what was notated in the rst half. On the whole performers consistently
play fast and loose with the rhythmic and phrase-structural features of the sonatas
in a way that they wouldnt contemplate doing for, say, harmonic structure. One
might counter that, historically, these represent legitimate areas of freedom for the
performer timing and delivery whereas harmony is xed, beyond all questions
of intentionality. This would simply conrm the priorities suggested at the outset
of this chapter.
The missing-bar phenomenon forms part of a wider vigilance about cadences
altogether. As implied already, the sheer number of cadences in the sonatas can be
seen as inherently problematic. For Hermann Keller the too frequent and too sim-
ilar cadences were the weakest point of Scarlattis style, although this was a fault
shared by other composers of the epoch, one connected with the disappearance of
the basso continuo. Macario Santiago Kastner wrote that the constant repetition of
small units was a common stain on eighteenth-century keyboard music.
31
Music as
dance is nowhere to be seen in such judgements. Often of course Scarlatti does shade
these cadences differently, whether through the syntactical means already discussed
or through registral manipulation; often too his most brilliant invention accompanies
this regrettable stylistic weakness. First of all, though, we need to consider a wider
defence of this stylistic feature. It is difcult for us now to appreciate the vigour
of eighteenth-century tonal language from this point of view repeated cadential
formations were a new and exciting thing, they must have given a sense of freedom.
Our ears are more geared to nineteenth-century ideals, precisely when such con-
siderations led to a weakening of tonal logic. Charles Troy has noted in a study
of the intermezzo how the constant repetition of small units is sometimes carried
to absurd lengths. For example, Orcone in Alessandro Scarlattis comic scenes for
Il Tigrane (1715) is directed to repeat the same four-note motive during an aria as
many times as he wants, until he shows himself to be out of breath.
32
(Scarlatti may
owe something to such an approach in his vamps and elsewhere, but his passages
have no words and are thus less immediately comprehensible.) A high degree of syn-
tactical articulation, above all by means of cadences, is indissolubly associated with
the entry of pronounced popular, comic and dance elements into art music, all of
which were richly exploited by Domenico Scarlatti. They are also predominantly
associated with speed, whose problematic aspects were considered in Chapter 1.
These considerations offer a stylistic background to the cadential formations found
in Scarlatti. Although these often sound, or are made to sound, like one of his most
distinctive personal traits, they are one of the aspects of his style for which we can nd
the clearest precedents and echoes. In sonatas by composers such as Galuppi, Platti
and Paradies one nds very similar turns of phrase in closing cadential passages, and
31
Keller, Meister, 78; Kastner, Introduction to Carlos Seixas: 25 Sonatas para instrumentos de tecla (Lisbon: Fundac ao
Calouste Gulbenkian, 1980), xvii.
32
See Charles E. Troy, The Comic Intermezzo: A Study in the History of Eighteenth-Century Italian Opera (Ann Arbor:
UMI Research Press, 1979), 946.
Ex. 4.13 Galuppi: Sonata No. 1/ii bars 5160
the same tendency towards sharp, jocular invention, suggesting a common Italian
comic-operatic heritage.
33
In particular one nds the repeated bass motion rising
mostly or entirely by step from I to V that is such a trademark at this point in Scarlatti
sonatas. Ex. 4.13 shows an example from the second movement of Galuppis Sonata
No. 1 in C major.
34
Such formulations remain a trademark of Italian operatic style well beyond Scar-
lattis and Galuppis time, of course, as does the relatively plain delivery of the perfect
cadence.
35
Yet in spite of these shared cultural characteristics, Scarlattis cadences do
often sound highly distinctive. The composer appears to reinvent the cadence. One
of the means by which he manages this can be found in the Sonata in G major, K.
180 (see Ex. 6.4). At bars 30 and 32 there is a sudden blur of activity in the cadential
pattern, caused by the unexpected sounding in the upper voice of a D, its quick
cancellation by D and the uncertain place of the intervening E in the harmonic
scheme. Scarlatti is fond of putting in elements that make one look askance without
threatening the harmonic sense (which is usually overwhelmingly strong at such
nal cadential junctures). Similar examples of chromatic interference in cadential
approaches may be found in K. 242, K. 495 (in the second half), K. 184 (in the
form of a whole-tone scale) and K. 482 (note especially bar 90, with its underlying
parallel fths between the voices, made worse by the tritone heard on the fourth
beat). K. 224 also offers a dizzying turn of events at the end of each half, seen in bars
64 and 66 of Ex. 4.14. What do such rogue elements mean? Is Scarlatti suggesting
that any old notes will do given the impelling force of the basic progression, making
us aware of the articiality of harmonic habits? The cadence and the approaching
manoeuvres represent an area of denition usually taken for granted, of course, not
33
Note too Pestellis comment that Sammartini showed a liking for unpredictable ideas, reserved for the coda;
Pestelli, Mozart, 31. For acknowledgement of this trait in Scarlatti see Boyd, Master, 168, and Chambure,
Catalogue, 123.
34
The numbering is taken from Baldassare Galuppi: Dodici sonate, ed. Iris Caruana (Padua: Zanibon, 1974), No.
5299.
35
As noted in Peter Williams, The Harpsichord Acciaccatura: Theory and Practice in Harmony, 16501750, The
Musical Quarterly 54/4 (1968), 520.
Syntax 179
Ex. 4.14 K. 224 bars 638
thought to require detailed listening. Through this harmonic and the previously ex-
amined syntactical interference we are suddenly forced to perceive the object afresh,
as if for the rst time. Such a process can be understood not just as a manifestation of
disdain but as a form of renewal, through the agency of the concept of Verfremdung.
In his study of insistence in Scarlatti, Loek Hautus invokes Verfremdung, the
equivalent of a term originating with Russian formalist literary theory in the 1920s,
to help explain the composers use of repetition and dissonance. As he explains, over
time the means of art, through habit and automatism, become pale and schematic
and lose their effect; thus, although we know an object or image or syntactical
device is still present, we can no longer see or hear it clearly. Our perception of it
has been worn down by over-familiarity. Such artistic means can be revived through
the deformation of existing models. By making strange, by twisting something
out of its familiar contours or placement, our perception of it can be renewed. As
Hautus reminds us, the need to combat such wearing-out of perception helps to
explain the driving force of artistic innovation and the development of personal
style characteristics.
36
Thus historical changes in art the shift or drift from Baroque
to Classical, for instance and the particular ngerprints of an individual artist can
both be grasped through the agency of Verfremdung.
This term is most commonly associated with its adaptation by Brecht, and here
the artistic aims seem to bear more specic relevance to Scarlatti. By the application
of Verfremdungseffekte Brecht hoped to force an audience to attend to the implica-
tions of the material presented rather than being swept along by all the familiar
dramatic-narrative devices, with their culinary comforts; the audience was to be
made critically aware of the articiality of their artistic experience. Surely no com-
poser before the twentieth century is so preoccupied with intrusive devices that force
all manner of reevaluation from the listener, although Haydn would run Scarlatti
close in many respects.
To return to the more fundamental denition of the term, it should be clear that
Verfremdung does not in any way specically dene Scarlattis artistic attitude. The
term highlights a basic historical dynamic that helps us account for artistic change,
so that at most we can speak of greater or lesser degrees of Verfremdung in various
styles, genres, epochs and individual outputs. In generic terms, for instance, it is of
less relevance to sacred genres and the strict style, when continuity with the past
and passive contemplation are desirable ends. In terms of individual outputs, we can
36
Hautus, Insistenz, 142.
certainly assert that Verfremdung is a constant presence in the structures of Scarlatti,
hence the category of originality that has been so frequently evoked.
Another type of cadential Verfremdung can be found in K. 120 (see Ex. 4.11). In
the rst half the nal cadential repetitions actually begin at bar 17
3
. The second
version from 18
3
is interrupted at bars 1921, then we hear ve more, every bar
ending the same way in all parts. The rst of these further ve repetitions emerges
during the course of bar 22; by halfway through the bar it has become clearly
recognizable, as if it is picking up from where the second playing was interrupted,
at 18
4
. The bass repetitions are essentially identical every time to get the real
avour of this insistence, the reader might be advised to play or sing through the
bass line alone from the onset of the passage. Such repetition arguably defamiliarizes
the cadence. Heard once or twice it is unexceptionable, but heard more often it
subverts the idea of cadence, which is now an object of contemplation in itself
even a fetish rather than a simply a mechanism or means of articulation. This is
particularly noticeable given the proportions of the structure (the cadential furore
begins not much beyond halfway through the rst half) and the Baroque manner of
the preceding material (note the sequence at bars 6
3
10
2
and the very metre, 12/8,
itself ) this is not a style that requires the frequent articulated cadential repetitions
that follow. These make us very aware of closure as a structural property, and, through
a repetition that has a delaying as much as a conrming effect, of the possibility that
closure might not eventuate. Thus we are again reminded of the articial nature of
musical time and its commonly agreed syntactical rules. Here we have an energy that
wont abate, an excessiveness that seems to refuse artistic control. The Verfremdung is
completed, as noted before, by the impossibly abrupt return to the beginning and
move onwards after a quavers worth of resolution. Over-preparation is succeeded
by under-articulation.
If the manipulation of cadence tends to upset comfortable expectations of ending,
the stampede technique upsets our equilibrium at the opposite end of a binary
sonata. As dened earlier in conjunction with K. 523 and K. 457, this occurs at
or near the beginning of the rst half of a sonata. Broadly speaking there are two
types of beginning to a Scarlatti sonata the difdent and the hyperactive. The rst
may be routine, conventional, low-key, often involving the use of imitation between
the hands that is then abandoned. This difdence is not necessarily a matter of
affective character but of structural function; if the opening material and texture are
abandoned, it raises the question of why the composer decided to begin with themin
the rst place, to place them in such a rhetorically and formally privileged position.
The hyperactive beginning, on the other hand, seems to present a celebration of
the tonic, the sheer excitement of being in motion. It is difcult for us to deal
with this except by evocation, since we are used to energy at this time being more
latent and channelled towards possible growth. K. 503 offers an example of this type
(although it also features initial imitation). The stampede can include both elements.
K. 268, for instance, suggests a certain creative difdence at the start, in that the
rst really chiselled invention is not heard until bar 15. On the other hand, this is
not simply a casual opening, and one could hear the rst section as expressing an
Syntax 181
energy level that takes a while to settle and channel itself. There is a blur of activity,
with one idea running into the next. After the initial formulaic gesture (compare
the opening of K. 339), new material occurs at bars 5, 7, 10 and 12. It is a sort of
montage technique.
37
That the composer is deliberately emphasizing animation at
the expense of shape is made clear in the contrasting syntax of the section from bar
15, where the phrase builds to a urry of movement after an arresting start using
unexpected dotted rhythms and syncopations. After the prior hectic activity, we hear
something distinct and memorable.
These opening urries normally take hold shortly after the beginning of a sonata.
They may create a blur of different patterns, as in K. 212 and K. 248, or they may
feature ritual repetition of a single gure. This is the case in K. 457, already consid-
ered, and sonatas like K. 194, 195, 375 and 447. Such ritual repetition invariably has
a pronounced popular character; these passages produce the sensation that we have
been caught up in something like a dance, without prior warning. In the case of the
Sonata in A major, K. 221, we are thrown off balance from the outset. The opening
presents a sort of grand preludizing with material that is hard to dene, but seems
to be a cross between a fanfare and a dance step.
38
It is a rhetorically memorable
version of a process by which momentum is gradually achieved by changing more
and more elements of a static repeated phrase, as in K. 457. This fascinating opening
gesture, not surprisingly, fails to return, suggesting the sort of musical living for the
moment outlined in the earlier discussion of K. 554 (Ex. 4.1).
One other syntactical feature that should be reviewed here is the three-card trick,
introduced earlier in conjunction with K. 476.
39
Other examples of this upward
transposition of an entire phrase may be found in K. 215, 261, 264, 268, 434, 449,
518 and 519. The relative functionality of the device varies greatly, but stylistically
it almost always carries strong popular suggestions. In bars 1744 of K. 519, for
instance, it comes across as a natural but rather un-arty device for intensication. A
similar type of patterning may be found in keyboard works by Durante and Marcello
among others, suggesting that this is also a particularly Italianate syntax (compared
with, say, the more worked manner of musica tedesca).
40
SEQUENCE
Thus far we have considered the ways in which Scarlatti distorts or at least defa-
miliarizes received notions of opening and closure. He also treats warily that most
characteristic medial syntactical sign the sequence. The recognition of this in the
37
Pestelli writes of a collage technique in this sonata, but he is presumably referring to the larger-scale juxtaposition
of different types of material, separated by rests and pauses. Review of Fadini edition, Nuova rivista musicale italiana
23/3 (1989), 462.
38
A fairly precise equivalent of this gesture can be found near the start of K. 484, which later has a passage with
left-hand leaps (rst heard from bar 27) that resembles bars 42ff. of K. 221.
39
Only Ralph Kirkpatrick appears to have isolated this device as such; see Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 249.
40
See the second movement of Marcellos Sonata No. 1 in D minor, bars 711, or Durantes Le quattro stagioni
dellanno Sonata per cembalo, ed. Alberto Iesu` e (Rome: Boccacini & Spada, 1983). Le quattro stagioni was found
in the Biblioteca Nacional in Lisbon, dated 1747.
literature is almost non-existent. Only Massimo Bogianckino touches on the matter,
noting that Scarlatti is reluctant to use the circle of fths.
41
This neglect shows the
difculties of assessing the stylistic mixture found in the Scarlatti sonatas. Sequence
is such a familiar form of patterning that the notion that it could carry a particular
signicance in a particular context might seem inconceivable. Presumably for most
writers on the sonatas any sequences observed were in effect stylistically neutral or
invisible. The neglect is also understandable because another Scarlattian absence is
at work. Study of the keyboard works of composers such as Marcello, Galuppi, Platti
and Seixas, to say nothing of Rodrguez, brings home how markedly Scarlatti simply
avoids the standard diction of the Baroque sequence. This is so strongly ingrained a
form of patterning that it can still be found relatively untransformed at the end of the
century, which is very striking in the context of a now widely practised mixed style
and periodic type of construction. Sequences are predictable and unitary in their
forward motion, while periodicity allows for sharp and unforeseen contrast. From
this point of view, the invisibility of sequence appears to be historically inbuilt.
42
It would be surprising indeed, in view of preceding discussions, were Scarlatti
not to apply a little Verfremdung to such an ingrained artistic habit. Bars 6
3
10
2
of
K. 120 (Ex. 4.11) pervert the Baroque sequence by means of hand-crossing they
make it (physically) unnatural. Sequence after all is normally the most self-evident
possible form of writing, without a marked inner content; as a medial sign, its job is
to move us from one harmonic or thematic area to another. In K. 120 Scarlatti gives
the mechanism an element of startlement and creative tension through the virtuosity.
Although this is apparently more visual than aural, the difculty of execution will
alter the colour and edge of the sound. The type of Verfremdung applied here must
be understood principally in the positive historical sense of the term; it is a way
of lending a renewed brilliance of effect to a very familiar device. The same might
be said of bars 525 and 5861 of K. 22. This also swaps sequential lines between
the hands, within a narrower range. A more negative physical disembodiment may
be found in bars 847 of K. 468, where right-hand glissandi are matched most
incongruously with a descending 810 linear intervallic pattern. An extra edge is
lent to this incongruity through the same means that we saw in the second half of
the Minuet of K. 379; the passage is in F major, but the glissandi, con dedo solo, can
only be realized by passing through Bs.
A stronger sense of estrangement from the device may be found in the Cats
Fugue, K. 30. This piece, sometimes regarded as an embodiment of the composers
respect for the old contrapuntal ways, as supposedly expressed in the letter to the
Duke of Huescar, is surely one of Scarlattis supreme gestures of disdain. The coun-
terpoint is intractable and rugged. There is a hidden creative virtuosity in creating
41
Bogianckino, Harpsichord, 66.
42
See the remarks by Charles Rosen concerning Schumanns use of the diatonic circle of fths in The Romantic
Generation (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 679. Of the sequence in general he notes its physical effect, a force
of motion, as composer and listener abandon themselves to it and allow themselves to be carried along by the
energy. As we shall see, abandoning himself to the sequence is just what Scarlatti generally avoids.
Syntax 183
Ex. 4.15 K. 293 bars 8495
what Kirkpatrick calls a magnicent tangle,
43
in so consistently avoiding the uency
of contrapuntal ways, in sustaining the awkwardness and dissonance, but it remains
hidden. At several points, the resistance to the natural gives way, and we are treated
to the most ironically mechanical of sequences. These are heard from bars 66 and
128. Given the surroundings, however, it is these sequences that form a blot on the
piece! The rst is certainly too long, and both feel creatively slack. Rarely is it so
obvious that sequence is being held at arms length. We can also nd examples from
beyond the world of the sonatas. Degrada cites a passage from the cantata Piangete,
occhi dolenti for its deliberately bizarre treatment of the voice, featuring two ris-
ing leaps of an eleventh. He ascribes this quite naturally to the text (scorning my
sorrow), but one might also note that this grotesquerie occurs in conjunction with
an old-fashioned sequence, made still more bizarre by huge offbeat multiple-stopped
chords in both violins.
44
The sense of disproportion to the rst sequence of K. 30 is writ large in the Sonata
in B minor, K. 293. This work has much in common with the modest sonatas in
spite of the fact that it deals in Baroque Fortspinnung rather than a galant idiom. Ex.
4.15 gives a avour of the sequential patterns that almost completely dominate the
piece. Given this dominance, we are forced to accept them as the primary thematic
material, not as a means to an end but as an end in themselves. This represents
defamiliarization on the largest possible scale. The sense of circularity is increased
by the fact that the second half quickly returns to a literal version of the rst half
43
44
See Degrada, Lettere, 299 and 302.
(compare bars 64ff. and 10ff.). After this there is an almost literal transposition of
the rest of the rst half, which is another level of mechanical reproduction.
K. 293 offers a clear reductio ad absurdum of the Baroque sequence, yet it entices
precisely because it makes us listen so differently. How, it seems to ask, do we listen
to this device, which always connotes becoming, never being; what does it do to our
sense of musical time? Scarlatti exposes again the articiality of syntactical structures,
but not of course in the sense of wishing themdead. Indeed, it must be made clear that
not all Scarlattian sequences are as loaded as those mentioned so far at bars 6063
of K. 325, for instance, we hear a neutral use of the device, as a straightforward, ef-
cient way of returning to the tonic.
45
The passage at bars 5764 of K. 232 is another
case of sequence apparently being used straightforwardly, here as a natural intensi-
cation of the discourse a common rhetorical role. The fact that it is surrounded
by so many exotic scales, though, may also give it the avour of a quotation.
If the foregoing sonatas suggest a sense of Verfremdung through contextual manip-
ulation, there are a number of works where the internal diction of the sequence is
impaired. In the Sonata in G major, K. 314, the signicant moment occurs from bar
90 (see Ex. 4.16a). What precedes this is the Vivaldi-concerto-type gural pattern
that Sheveloff refers to as the source of many of the vamps. This passage, beginning
in bar 70, perhaps does not quite count as a pure vamp, given the relative clarity of
its stylistic origins. However, what emerges from it is just what one might expect in
such a stylistic context a linear intervallic pattern and melodic sequence of a type
commonly heard as the climax to a passage of animation. Just at the point when the
sequence would become fully established, at the start of its second rotation in bar 94,
it is broken off, and we are quickly returned to the more popular, outdoorsy mode
that has prevailed for most of the sonata. This popular mode is back in full command
from bar 100. The normal mechanics of the sequence have been interfered with;
Ex. 4.16b offers the expected continuation, which our stylistic competence tells us
should consist of at least three complete limbs before the arrival at the harmonic
goal. It is as if the Baroque Fortspinnung needs to be reined in before it consumes the
rest of the piece. A passage in K. 427 (bars 26
3
29) goes one better, presenting two
complete limbs and the beginning of a third before the pattern is sucked under, as
it were, by the wave of toccata-like animation.
K. 53, a typically broad-brush work in D major, contains another telling exam-
ple of an aborted sequence. The toccata-like ourishes settle down into a motor
rhythm in the right hand from bar 23 onwards, suggesting violinismo, while the left
hand crosses back and forth. The exact repetitions of two-bar units are ripe for a
broadening-out into a sequence before any cadence point can eventuate. Scarlatti
begins to full this syntactical expectation: at bars 312 a 98 linear intervallic pat-
tern is initiated. Not only is the pattern immediately denied (and sequence is the
most automatic form of patterning with the strongest implication of continuation)
but in its stead we get four identical arpeggiated units at bars 33 and 34. There is no
violent wrenching aside of the promised pattern; it simply fades away.
45
Other examples along these lines could include the passages found at bars 8083 of K. 252, bars 949 of K. 359
and bars 5865 of K. 520.
Syntax 185
Ex. 4.16a K. 314 bars 87102
Ex. 4.16b K. 314: expected continuation of passage from bar 90
In the second half this material is greatly extended and the sequential impulse is
now satised. The 98 is specically realized at bars 74, 76, 78 and 80 (following
for now the Gilbert edition) and is meshed inside a larger controlling 108 pattern,
indicated on the score in Ex. 4.17. Further, we are then treated to an ascend-
ing linear intervallic pattern, the 56 at bars 825. A good example of a typical
Ex. 4.17 K. 53 bars 7295
non-congruence of patterning is found at 856: in bar 85 the a
1
representing
the 6 of its pattern is met by an A in the bass which breaks the thread, although
such a means of bringing a pattern to a halt is quite common. At bar 86, though,
the melodic 56 continues, even though the bass line indicates that we have moved
on to a new phrase. Only at 889 does the right hand catch up with the bass, so
that harmonically there are four repeated two-bar cadential units (from bars 86 to
93), while thematically (including the precise shape taken by the bass line) there are
just three. This shows a considered management of phrase rhythm in the name of
avoiding square syntax, especially given the overt regularity of all the pieces basic
units. In addition, the exact repetitions of bars 8893 are thrilling in context, coming
as they do after so much sequential and manual ddling.
For all the sequential fullment of the second half, though, some sense of es-
trangement remains. This is strengthened very considerably when the full source
situation is considered. Gilbert and Fadini both do some tidying in different ways.
Syntax 187
On the second minim beat of bar 76 in the right hand, the fth quaver of the bar,
V and P both give g
1
. So does the new Lisbon source and all other sources. Gilbert
changes this to an f
1
so as to form part of the 98 succession previously discussed;
Fadini respects the V and P reading here but then changes the fth quaver of bar 80
2
to an e
1
so as to create symmetry at another level, bars 74/78 and 76/80 forming
matching pairs. (Only M and W support this change.) Perhaps the reading most in
the spirit of distance suggested above would be to follow just what is given by V and
P: in this way expectations are met but not to the letter. One is always treading on
thin ice in such instances, ascribing intentionality to details that may simply represent
a difcult source situation. Whatever the merits of individual cases, though, there
can be no doubt that the larger image of the composer allows one to defend seeming
anomalies with particular conviction.
Sequence is also used by Scarlatti in a fairly standard role as a means of rescuing
the sense of musical process, or as a sort of safety valve. We have seen how in K. 523
(Ex. 4.6) it was a good friend in a crisis. The associations with the technical re-
spectability of an older style are here exploited as eagerly by Scarlatti as by other
composers, but always with the proviso that his mixed style tends naturally to sharpen
the edges of its constituent elements. The Sonata in C minor, K. 116, is one of those
works that seems to contain clear approximations to amenco vocal technique. The
sequence from about bar 84 in the second half seems to be used as a means of re-
laxation by recourse to traditional technique, buying time before the next frenzy.
A sequence is also used to loosen the hold of the exotic in K. 242, in bars 737.
It responds to the primitive sequences of parallel fths heard earlier in the second
half by retaining the basic material and organizing it into a civilized 105 linear
intervallic pattern. Other uses of this device in extremis include K. 181, bars 6569
1
,
K. 429, bars 3640
1
, K. 371, bars 7884, and K. 57, bars 1468.
The Sonata in F major, K. 195, presents early in its rst half an extreme form of
opening insistence, a huge expansion of what was originally, in bar 7, a ller tag.
This gure is heard in twenty-one consecutive bars, during which the composer
plays around with the ne print of its diminutional structures to achieve a high
degree of ambiguity and dissonance. The long-winded linear intervallic pattern
that follows from bar 28, in simple parallel tenths, could be construed as a gesture
of mock frustration, ushering in a toccata idiom that dominates the rest of the
half. Its simplicity cleanses all the nagging complications of what went before. A
preposterously long sequence heard from bar 84 then easily outdoes that of the
rst half; it is just as outlandish as that examined in K. 39 (Ex. 1.1). Whether one
chooses to hear it as satirical exaggeration or sheer exuberance, there is no doubt
that the pattern outlasts its functional utility.
46
Although seemingly introduced as a
46
Such patterns are found in a number of sonatas. In K. 517 in D minor the second-half extension of the simple
sequence from the rst half, at bars 827 and 98103, turns an unremarkable three-bar pattern of descending
tenths into ve bars. The sequence now surely goes on for too long, but without apparent satirical import.
Rather, given the Prestissimo tempo, it seems to emphasize the irrational aspect of a speed that will resist any
rhythmic differentiation, that wants to consume all in its path.
rescuing device, it becomes disproportionate in its own right. And so we return to
the Verfremdung of the sequence.
KI NETI CS
If many of the manipulations of phrase rhythm detailed above have been read as the
expression of a highly relativistic and critical creative spirit, there is another level at
which such operations may be understood. They form part of an all-encompassing
passion for musical movement in its own right, for the study of momentum, and for all
the patterns and mechanics of syntax. They involve an investigation of different ways
of experiencing time, space and movement. To claim that such a predilection helps
to dene an essential aspect of Scarlattis art seems unconvincing on the surface; is
not music in general and by denition naturally prone to dispense patterns in sound?
Even where composers seem to show no direct consciousness of such properties,
surely we are led to contemplate them quite independently of the particular manner
in which they are realized. What distinguishes Scarlatti in this respect is the sheer
intensity of his gaze. This intensity is aided by the conciseness of his structures. By
turning away from the possibility of more extended keyboard forms, the composer
was able to avoid the need to spread his invention more thinly; he could place
patterns under the closest of scrutiny. To identify this spirit of intense scrutiny, it
would be instructive to begin with works that do not appear to contain any of the
familiar distortions. The Sonata in G major, K. 14, represents a sort of music that
sets out to give pleasure through the neat, almost irresistible, symmetrical expression
of its shapes and phrases. This extends, as often in the Essercizi, to rhyming closes at
both ends of each half, so that between 18 and 19 we have a perfect mirror effect.
This is the dinkiest of many dinky moments in this sonata. The rst and last bars
also mirror each other. With all its matching patterns, K. 14 eschews surprise and
estrangement and instead delights in the pleasure of recognition.
Such pattern-making might seem hard to square with what we nd in most of
the sonatas. Scarlatti seems to move from an extreme of symmetry (or geometry) to
something nearer the other end of the spectrum. Yet if patterns are more commonly
broken than straightforwardly outlined, there nevertheless must rst be a conscious
recognition of their existence and a preoccupation with the way they unfold. In this
larger sense both K. 14 and its apparent opposites may t under the broader rubric
of intense syntactical exploration. After all, the neatness of a sonata like K. 14 also
shows an obsessive side.
47
Another work suggesting that sheer fascination with syntactical patterns weighs
at least equally with a critical realization of them is K. 257 in F major. Although
47
A good example of this would be the rotation dened by Farhad Abbassian-Milani in his study of the Essercizi,
Zusammenh ange zwischen Satz und Spiel in den Essercizi (1738) des Domenico Scarlatti, Berliner Musik Studien
9 (Sinzig: Studio, 1998). This circling movement using readily repeatable shapes is especially favoured in the
Essercizi but is hardly unknown elsewhere; compare the following discussion of K. 257. For a denition of the
term, see 145.
Syntax 189
a kinship with the toccata has been claimed,
48
the contained nature of its gestures
perhaps gives K. 257 more the avour of an invention, certainly in its initial phase.
In keeping with this generic suggestion, it continues to use the opening gambits as
a point of departure to a greater extent than is immediately apparent. The opening
leap up of an octave followed by the fall of a ninth is incorporated into the bass
line from bar 15 and is a constant presence thereafter; the tag is made to do service
as an agent of parallel sequential motion. The most fundamental shape, though, is
the falling third in the rhythm . It rst appears at bars 46
1
in falling sequence;
we might expect to hear a third sequential limb, but instead the need for space to
prepare a satisfying cadence asserts itself. Of course the sequence has done its job
harmonically after two bars by returning us to I, but the material has syntactical
implications that are not fullled. The same occurs at 1213, but with the right
hand rearranged to emphasize the parallel sixths/tenths with which the second basic
shape will henceforth be associated. Bars 1314 simply rewrite the preceding pair
of bars; the broken parallel fths in the right hand are not really to be thought of as
improper, since this is a fairly common type of keyboard guration in the eighteenth
century.
49
Bars 1517 feature another rewriting, with the hands essentially swapping
parts, but now the sequence extends for a more natural three bars.
Indeed, K. 257 has strong circular tendencies. With its constant recycling of
material, we never seem to arrive anywhere, and all this material is connective and
sequential. This apparent lack of progress is reinforced in the rst half by the fact
that from bar 8 to the double bar we never leave V.
Ironically, the agent of this not-getting-anywhere is the sequence, the most di-
rected propulsive device there is. The sonatas obsession with the mechanics of
movement to the detriment of any marked inner content may be taken in the spirit
of fascination outlined earlier, but it might also suggest a droll parody of the art of
Fortspinnung, chopped up into small units. From bar 19 we hear a return of bars
1314 in the minor, but these now occur twice as if to prolong the pattern-making.
Bars 234 are certainly more distinctive, but more clearly than anything else heard
so far they represent a transition. This leads us on to more of the same, as bars 1518
are repeated directly at 258. In another context, bars 2931 would make an effec-
tive, unbuttoned closing unit, but they are heard here as another recycling. They
vary the material of 257, not just in the obvious thematic sense but also in pitch
structure. The two lines are simply swapped around. In addition, though, bars 29
to 32 correspond almost exactly to the pitch content of bars 1316, a relationship
that adds to the sense of circularity. The closing right-hand units then work in the
opening gambit note the rise of an octave from c
2
to c
3
followed by a fall of a
ninth to b
1
outlined at bars 334. Thus even this very typical closing phrase is of a
piece with the preceding material. We seem to be in a hall of mirrors.
48
See Chambure, Catalogue, 99, and Pestelli, Sonate, 169.
49
See Paul Mast, Brahms Study, Oktaven und Quinten u. A.: With Schenkers Commentary Translated, The Music
Forum 5 (1980), 545 and 11621, for examples, and 186 for an explanation as to how Brahms might have seen
such passages.
At the beginning of the second half, in bars 389, the composer unusually com-
bines versions of two separate phrase units a version of bar 25 reverses into a version
of bar 24 as if demonstrating that they are even more alike than we thought they
were. This is made clear in the next two-bar phrase unit, which answers the rst with
a transposition of bars 256. Note too how he begins the second half, wittily, with
a rising octave shape, thus explicitly conjoining the opening gure with the later
material. The music is becoming still more uniform! It is also unusual for Scarlatti
to make the return to the tonic at this point a very common and underappreci-
ated part of eighteenth-century binary (and sonata) forms quite so prolonged and
secure; this again contributes to the deadpan avour of the work. Then we hear six
bars of the holding gure, a logical progression from the previous two (1314) then
four (1922). The fact that two bars of major are followed by four bars of minor here
replicates the order found in 1314 then 1922, in another conjoining of previously
separate events. The D minor version of the main melodic sequence of the rst
half, from bar 48, again hooks into earlier realizations all of the right-hand lines
in these passages occupy very much the same registral level, between about a
2
and
c
2
, so increasing the sense that we are endlessly revisiting familiar ground.
From bar 52 the original transition passage of bars 234 returns to its minor
coloration after the major-mode version at the start of the second half, and its
ensuing treatment at long last gives us some harmonic colour, a sense of progression
and a freer left-hand part. This is the one moment of freedom in the sonata, proving
by inversion that the repeated patterns found everywhere else are not as innocent as
they might appear. However, the complete passage from 52 to 58
1
is controlled by
another three-part descending sequence; there would seem to be no escape.
Bars 668 retain the right-hand pitches of bars 1517 and 257 when they return
to this material, instead of transposing them, thus making the circularity very clear.
The parallel phrase from bar 70 then does transpose the original material. However,
bars 7073 now generate their own matching unit. Bars 74ff. have no equivalent
in the rst half; they decorate the previous phrase, so that in the second half we
now have ve full or partial versions of the same melodic sequence (from bars 40,
48, 66, 70 and 74). The right-hand decorations at 74 and 75 and the breaking of
the pattern in the next bar suggest in their playfulness a small concession to our
need for some thematic variety. This is also an appropriate gesture of relaxation as
we approach the close of the sonata. The last three notes of the piece in the right
hand are a reminder of our basic shape; they are not present at the end of the rst
half. After the endless hearings of this falling-third gure, this nal version delivers
us from the prospect of a continuation. Making a cadence point thematic in this
way, with its consequent structural twist or correction of something heard earlier, is
a clear piece of structural wit. Although K. 257 uses Baroque stylistic features, the
playfulness, distancing and awareness of redundancy of speech articulate the concerns
of a supposedly later idiom. Indeed, it is in such a work that Scarlattis kinship with
Haydn is most plainly revealed. K. 257 works in the Haydnesque spirit of making
Syntax 191
something out of nothing, with the same popular tone that masks the wit of the
craftsmanship.
It is important to insist on the compositional and artistic integrity of a work like
K. 257, since it could easily fall victim, along with many similarly uneventful
sonatas, to a prevalent image of a shallow, digitally inspired vitality. Giorgio Pestelli
is one who has difculties with such mechanical works, those that do not exemplify
his theatricality or musical spectacle. If K. 257 recalls the issues raised in the
discussion of the modest sonatas, then Pestelli clearly feels boredom rather than
fascination:
When nothing happens in a Scarlatti work, then it lacks his special poetry and is merely
a document of keyboard technique . . . Scarlatti was not able to be impassive, detached and
ascetic in the face of his musical material; unlike Bach, he did not have a passion for thought,
he was not a reasoner in music . . . Without musical spectacle, his most worldly art has very
little signicance and ends up running dry.
In other words, to quote Dales summary of this position, Scarlatti is temperamentally
incapable of writing abstract music for the keyboard and needs a strong outer
stimulus for composition.
50
This alleged incapacity for abstract thought is based on
a conception of the art of music that we reviewed at the start of this chapter. Depth
and abstraction, as exemplied by the talismanic gure of Bach, are to be realized by
harmonic and contrapuntal means; Scarlattis syntactical exploration cannot even be
conceptualized as a possibly equivalent category. Yet this exploration is both deep
in the concentration the composer brings to the task and abstract in that we are
provided with very little in the way of concrete thematic work or harmonic argument
or variety of texture that might interfere with our contemplation of the syntax. Of
course it is this particular type of abstractness, focussing on the wrong parameter,
that encourages such interpretations as Pestellis; it is all too easy to see only empty
guration and an apparent expressive indifference. The lightness of touch partly
issues from a certain disdain for high seriousness that was emerging as a modern
artistic stance.
51
This can also deect us from the intensity of musical thought, which
in Scarlattis case can be as much around as in the given work. This intensity is also
evident in the very fact that Scarlatti is able to abstract his music so exceptionally
from syntactical habit, those means that have become so ingrained they are often no
longer part of the conscious compositional process. All this is achieved, as Henry
Colles wrote of Scarlattis repetitions in general, with his eyes open.
52
Another way of yielding to the hypnotic effects of patterns while also being
distanced from them is to create a disjunction between implied and actual syntax.
We have already seen this in the opening unit of K. 523 (Ex. 4.6), which implied
50
Pestelli, Sonate, 198; Dale, Pestelli Review, 1867.
51
William Weber describes this as a sense of propriety that abhorred speaking in excessively serious terms. Did
People Listen in the [Eighteenth] Century?, Early Music 25/4 (1997), 683.
52
Colles, Sonata, 895.
a symmetry that was withheld and then granted by degrees over the course of the
whole sonata. We have seen it too in the contradictory aspects of the modest sonatas.
An example of this is K. 323 in A major. It shows how even the most mundane
surface can conceal hidden terrors. In his edition of the sonata Howard Ferguson
counsels the player to note the irregular phrase lengths. All but the rst begin on
the half-bar, thus: 1st half, 5 1/2 + 3 + 4 + 3 + 3 + 2 + 5 + 5 + 2; 2nd half,
2 + 2 + 6 + 2 + 5 + 5 + 4 + 4.
53
In our syntactical terms, this is a really extreme
constructivist piece of writing; an idiom that promises to be light, airy and gratefully
divided into equal phrase units is treated both mechanistically and ambiguously.
Then there is the tension caused by the continual pull against the bar line, plus the
fact that K. 323 contains no rests whatever we nd a continuous texture from
start to nish. Certainly Gilberts suggested half-bar rest before the return to the rst
half, disappointingly conrmed by Ferguson in his edition, is undesirable from this
point of view indeed, anomalous by the terms of the piece.
54
What Ferguson does
not mention is the high degree of overlapping of phrases that creates this suffocating
syntax and texture. An instance of this may be found in bar 37, where the rst half
of the bar seems to end a two-bar unit as it parallels the three right-hand quavers
of bar 35. On the other hand, by analogy with the sequentialmotivic pattern that
unfolds in the ensuing bars, bar 37 is an indivisible melodic whole.
After all this ambiguity, there is a form of resolution at the end with two nal
four-bar units. Phrases is denitely not an appropriate term here, nor is it anywhere
else in the work. Arguably the sonata consists of just two phrases, if we bear in mind
the denition given by Roger Sessions that a phrase is articulated by a measure of
letting go.
55
If we then bear in mind the half-bar at the end of the rst half and
its effect on the performance, both in moving back to the beginning of the rst
half a beat too early and in moving immediately on to the start of the second, one
could easily conceive of the work as comprising just the one large phrase. This is
particularly remarkable, and radical, when we consider the miniaturistic nature of
the units that make up the language of the sonata. A work that might promise to
conrm all our worst prejudices about the impoverished nature of mid-century
style and its keyboard writing reveals a fundamental contradiction between syntax in
the small and in the large. Scarlatti denies the material its natural expression there
is something akin to Stravinsky about this process.
The Sonata in G minor, K. 111, suggests a very different style. It has a certain
Baroque darkness of tone; apart from a few bars of relative major early in the second
half, it is all in minor coloration. Incredibly, forty-one of its fty-ve bars feature
the same gesture, based on a falling arpeggio introduced in bar 1. Because of the
53
Scarlatti: Twelve Sonatas (Easier Piano Pieces No. 57, London: The Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music,
1986), 28.
54
This is an example of the missing half-bar problem(K. 305 offers another example), which in turn has implications
for the missing-(whole-)bar phenomenon altogether. See the discussion of this feature in Sheveloff, Keyboard,
28891.
55
Cited in William Rothstein, Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music (New York: Schirmer, 1989), 3.
Syntax 193
retention of this initial gesture, each repetition refers to the beginning, so that we
hear an endless series of openings. At the same time the bar 1 material is also clearly
a closing shape, as we can see from the cut of the bass line, the falling contour of the
right hand, and the cadential trill on the fourth beat. It would be very easy to imagine
bar 1 as the penultimate bar of an entire piece, being followed by unison Gs. This
reading is claried by the adaptation of the opening in such places as bars 11 and 37,
both suggesting a full close which is then denied. Because of its placement within the
whole structure especially in its most characteristic bar 5 form, where the left hand
takes over the arpeggio the material in fact also functions as a middle. Thus it is
caught between three possible syntactical functions, those of opening, continuation
and closing. This generates a mood that is both trance-like and distracted.
K. 111 is denitely a unied piece that is uneconomical to listen to; its rhetoric
may well derive from a twisted take on the Baroque exhaustion of an idea, but
parody is not necessarily suggested. The result is difcult to read; the effect hovers
between fascination and boredom, between pleasure in and disgust with the sonorous
material of the musical world. Much of the literature has tended to pass off all sorts of
repetitive practices in the sonatas as simple exuberance, but there is also an element of
compulsive, obsessive behaviour, particularly given the rather forbidding tone of this
particular work. This is most apparent in the mad voice leading of the parallel-fths
chords at 30, 32 and 34, very similar in form, sequential treatment and structural
placement to those found in the irrational K. 541 (Ex. 4.8).
The hypermetrical manipulation found in K. 323, K. 111 (not discussed above)
and so many other works is perhaps the key factor in creating that very distinctive
feeling for movement in the Scarlatti sonatas, evoked by many writers but rarely ana-
lysed. In this respect at least the composer may indeed be compared with Beethoven
in offering a very marked and readily recognizable rhythmic style. Although, as we
have seen, the composers syntactical awareness can take many forms, there is one
particular avour that stays in the mind. Cesare Valabrega described it as restlessness,
an agile and nervous mobility, while for Sacheverell Sitwell it consisted of an
alliance of rapidity and humour. Scarlatti, he wrote, has the alert nerves of someone
who is used to trafc. No one who has passed his life in the country could have
written the music of Scarlatti. He has no time to waste, and makes his points as sharply
and rapidly as a jazz composer.
56
The comparison with jazz, already suggested in
this chapter, is one of the best means available to grasp this rhythmic avour, full
of irregularities to an extent that few performers seem to realize. Kirkpatrick, who
also evoked this comparison,
57
gave some valuable advice to the player which rarely
seems to have been heeded. Of K. 105 in G major, for instance, he wrote that
it has
a supercial note picture that gives the impression of a predominantly homophonic style
(unfortunately borne out by Longos phrase markings), yet this sonata, like so many of the
others, has all the rhythmic polyphony of the Spanish dance. Almost nowhere in the piece
56
Valabrega, Clavicembalista, 213; Sitwell, Background, 152 and 1367.
57
should accents fall simultaneously in both voices, nor has the bar line any function other
than that of indicating a basic meter that has already been established by the network of cross
accents between the two voices.
58
The supercial note picture may suggest not only homophony but also a regular
hypermetre, as we have seen with K. 323. Such features do not simply take care of
themselves in an accurate reading; they need conscious advocacy. It is this frequent
obliqueness of rhythmic style that makes jazz a good imaginative model for the
realization of such effects in Scarlatti.
One part of the avour of agile and nervous mobility produced by Scarlattis
treatment of patterns involves sheer speed. In K. 386 in F minor, discussed in Chap-
ter 3 as an example of stylistic fusion, the vivid sensation of speed is achieved less
by the Presto tempo marking than by the unpredictable manipulation of motive and
phrase. Understanding such manipulation helps us answer the perennial question of
why repetitions can sound so exciting in the hands of Scarlatti and yet can appear so
square in the hands of others. The working of a basic two-bar module from bars 8 to
19 illustrates this. Although bar 8 clearly begins a new section, delineated by the rst
cadence of the sonata, bars 89 function not just as a new idea but as a variant on
bars 67. This is most apparent in the near identity of the bass lines at 7 and 9, but
may be traced in all the material; the right hand in bar 8, for instance, elaborates the
same c
2
b
1
line as bar 6. Such a blurring of boundaries between sections already
aids the moto perpetuo feeling that is being developed. Bars 1011 make as if to
repeat 89, but halfway through turn into a transposition up a third, leading us to
the mediant. Bars 1213 then seem to present a complete mediant replica of 89,
although the rst right-hand note of bar 12 indicates that bar 10 is the model. The
complexity of cross-reference continues in bar 14, which seems to begin a repetition
of the previous two-bar unit in the same way that 1011 promised to. However, the
right-hand part of bar 15 departs from the expected shape. From this point of view,
the patterning seems to operate in two-bar cycles comprising bars 78, 910, 1112
and 1314, cutting across the two-bar hypermetre and demanding that the listener
process more information more quickly than would have been expected.
At the same time, the left hand in bar 14 has already departed from the anticipated
model; it takes its syncopated rhythm, and the ensuing stepwise descent, from bars
56 in the right hand. Bars 1617 then present the rst precisely aligned reiteration
of material, with their transposition up a step of 1415. The greater directness
of patterning here acts like an acceleration after the previous manoeuvres. Bar 18
presents a further sequential transposition up a step, but at the same time the left
hand reverts to source, transposing the original bass line of 89 to the dominant
minor. A twist from the last crotchet of bar 19 leads to an unexpected half-close at
the start of bar 20. Meanwhile the right hand has also broken the mould, rushing
towards this cadence point in undifferentiated falling steps. In other words, after the
58
Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 303; some instances of this network of cross accents in K. 105 are given in the following
discussion on 304.
Syntax 195
accumulation of nervous energy, making us edge ever further forward on our seats,
the music denies the gratication that would come from a rm cadence point. It
rushes us ever onward. The treatment of the chromatic scale that follows is also
telling. Scarlatti hardly ever gives us a complete chromatic scale collection in his
sonatas, and the omission of various steps in this example furthers the sensation of
impatient speed.
Even more in the second half of K. 386, the music feints in various directions.
Broadly, we seem to be hearing the same material as in the rst half, but the precise
direction of the journey cannot be foretold. Its reworkings offer an exhaustingly
rapid rate of events; they demand immediate readjustments of perspective on the
part of the listener. If we accept the relatively high speed of most of the Scarlatti
sonatas, then a work like K. 386 makes clear that this is not just a physical attribute
mental speed is just as much a determining factor, both for the composition and the
perception of such works.
Perhaps the most exciting moment of all arrives at bars 7981, when the second
limb of the second subject is reduced to pure pulsation, with undifferentiated quavers
in the right hand and minims in the left. The immediate repetition of a one-bar
unit, as at bars 478 and 5860, may be thought of as a holding action. However,
it also suggests the primacy of a pure rhythmic impulse over any of the localized
material which maintains it.
This exibility of pacing is a key element in Scarlattis kinetic art. A comparable
moment occurs in K. 96. After all the detailed inections of material earlier in the
second half and the panoramic changes of imagery throughout, bars 16580 clear the
air through a straightforward oscillation of tonic and dominant. The passage looks
nothing on the page but is brilliantly conceived in context. Although a variant of bars
7893 in the rst half, it stands apart through the consistency of its rhythm and tex-
ture. One might hear timpani strokes in the bass here among other possible references,
but the real topic here is propulsion pure and simple. Its all in the timing.
Such timing is also the hallmark of a comic art, an aspect we have hardly touched
on to this point. In the Sonata in D major, K. 45, a uent and easy toccata style is
interrupted in bar 12 by something very exotic (see Ex. 4.18a). The exoticism lies
in the scale forms used (with a descending tetrachord in the bass, extended by step
upon repetition in bar 14) and the alla zoppa rhythm caused by the strange dragging
imitation between parts. The voice leading is hardly ideal and the syncopations are
far from consistent note the very disconcerting and unnatural pause on the fth
quaver of bar 13. The passage is quite rewritten in the second half (see Ex. 4.18b); the
descending right-hand line from the rst half is reversed and becomes chromatic, for
example. On the second playing of this there is a further variation, with the hiatus
on the tenth quaver of bar 32 being even more awkward.
59
There is also very little
space between the two manifestations of the passage one beat compared with one
bar in the rst half. In addition, there are just two versions of the limping progression
59
Note that Fadini reads this differently, and there is also a problem with placement of the tenor a in her bar 31.
Ex. 4.18a K. 45 bars 1215
Ex. 4.18b K. 45 bars 3033
instead of the total four from the rst half. Nothing could be less appropriate to the
character of the interruption than a literal repetition of the rst-half form. (K. 419
in F major has a similar feature, but one that is less disruptive.) So the composers
changes here, while seemingly perverse, are quite logical in a way, if we apply the
rules of comic timing. An interruption heard twice identically in each half becomes
an established feature rather than retaining its disruptive force. Also logical is the
fact that in bar 32 the interruption now interrupts or cuts short the intervening
normal cadential close we were expecting by analogy with the rst half (in bar 15).
Thus the surprise surprises anew in the second half.
VAMPS
K. 45 and all the works reviewed in this chapter so far demonstrate an inti-
mate understanding of the effects of syntactical patterning, whether wrought by
Syntax 197
under-, over- or non-repetition. How can we apply our awareness of these factors
to the vamp, the most upsetting and seemingly inorganic feature of Scarlattis style?
More than ever when attempting an overview of aspects of a composers style, the
very ordering of the following sonata sections under the category of vamp can dis-
tort their signicance. Every passage of this sort carries such a particular charge that
any label not only mutes their individuality but gives the misleading impression of
a more or less systematic stylistic feature. Any sense of collective identity must seem
especially weak when each vamp presents itself as such a unique, and often seem-
ingly inexplicable, interruption, as a possibly anarchic force. An obvious analogy
would be with the development section of a sonata form, when any recognition
of a distinct category conicts with the particular freedom of realization that is the
developments raison d etre. Yet although this comparison is appealing, as will be ex-
plored below, it skirts the central question, which is one of functionality. Whatever
their various freedoms, developments can be assigned various well understood roles
within the larger argument of a movement. With vamps, on the other hand, it is
often unclear whether they have any functional basis at all. Must they necessarily
relate to the specic context of the sonata within which they occur, or are they
rather self-satisfying, simply to be understood as aberrations from normal compo-
sitional service? They would often appear to be underdetermined by the particular
context.
Such questions must be understood to involve rhetorical as well as structural co-
herence. The vamp of K. 193, for example (see Ex. 1.4b), may seem to have a clear
functional role in the structure of the work, but a close analytical reading could miss
the larger rhetorical point that such ends could surely have been achieved less ob-
trusively. Like all members of its putative species, this vamp seems disproportionate
in affect. Having found points of contact with surrounding material, one suddenly
draws back in realization of its disembodying qualities. What may become disem-
bodied is not just the surrounding material as when the vamps of K. 260 make the
normal seem unreal but ones whole sense of musical time. As has been suggested
already, such sections seem to live for the present, to know nothing of the reection,
distancing and control that allow for the generation of intelligible musical syntax.
They represent a species of what Jonathan D. Kramer calls vertical music, which
denies the past and the future in favor of an extended present, giving us the means
to experience a moment of eternity.
60
If it is a moot point whether a vamp may be
understood teleologically, such uncertainty must also encompass explanations as to
the internal form and extent of these sections. What are we to make of their often
grossly ungrammatical harmonic syntax? Are their proportions precisely calibrated
or, again, does such a question miss the point? Another difculty lies in assessing
the stylistic coherence of the vamp. Several possibilities have already been advanced:
that, as revealed by K. 532, such behaviour may derive from folk models, where
repetition of course carries a different signicance; that they take their cue from the
60
Jonathan D. Kramer, The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies (New York:
Schirmer, 1988), 3756.
free solo sections found in Vivaldi concertos; and, more radically, that their generally
athematic guration and decontextualized harmony place them outside the realm
of what is commonly understood by style altogether.
Those writers who have conceptualized the vamp as a category, or at least rec-
ognized it as a feature worthy of some comment, have normally sought stylistic
explanations rather than attend to the vamps troubling implications for structure
and rhetoric. A clear exception is Eytan Agmon. In his account of the vamp of
K. 319 he considers its instability to reect the higher[-]level instability of the dom-
inant prolongation that underpins this central part of the form.
61
Such a structural
interpretation might very reasonably be extended to many other vamp sections,
but Agmon then offers too ready and unsubstantiated an assurance of the stylistic
cohesion of the vamp with the rest of the work. Among those who seek stylistic
explanations in folk models are Ann Bond and Frederick Hammond. For Hammond
such passages have a clear choreographic analogue in Spanish dance, being animated
by a rhythmic pulse rather than by a directional movement;
62
this implies that our
functionality would be located more in the source than in the applied context.
Bond describes such sections as a peculiarly Iberian feature and likens them to
magical voyages through kaleidoscopic sequences of keys, in which our sense of
forward movement is suspended, under the trancelike inuence of these seductive
maneuvers.
63
Although the type of inuence proposed here is more spiritual than
practical, Bond, like Hammond, suggests a lack of directional thrust and hence a
relatively weak sense of functionality. For Barry Ife, on the other hand, these sections
surely bear the mark of Scarlattis personal improvisatory style.
64
Even bearing in
mind the limitations of the concept of improvisation, as discussed in Chapter 2, it
is undeniable that vamps often give precisely the impression of being extemporized.
Yet they seem ultimately both too wild and too restricted to be accounted for un-
der this rubric. Who, after all, would improvise in this idiot fashion? Improvising
normally connotes variety of material and gesture rather than the monomania that
the vamps by denition display. Such an explanation also fails once again to account
for the place of the vamp in a wider rhetorical scheme. Why should the composer
choose to give the impression of an obsessive improvisation in the wrong generic
context?
Pestellis account of the phenomenon combines Ifes rationale of improvisation
with a grounding in Baroque aesthetics. When he refers to the fatiguing experiment
that left its traces in Scarlatti, Pestelli surely has the vamp in particular in mind.
Such passages were not contrived, however; they owered under the composers
improvisatory ngers. Elsewhere the author suggests a more polemical slant to such
wandering expansions: they represent a return to the tradition of the toccata,
65
in other words, a denial of galant simplicity and sociability. This makes the vamp a
conservative feature both stylistically and even aesthetically, for all its extravagance
61
Agmon, Division, 4.
62
Hammond, Scarlatti, 178.
63
Bond, Harpsichord, 183.
64
Ife, Scarlatti, 21.
65
Pestelli, Sonate, 19 and 52.
Syntax 199
of affect. The Baroque model invoked by Sheveloff the exploratory solo section
of a Vivaldi concerto is not framed in the same manner.
66
As well as looking back, it is possible to look forward when trying to ground the
vamp historically. Rosen refers obliquely to the vamp technique in a discussion of the
slow movement of Mozarts Sinfonia Concertante, K. 364: although this movement
is written in archaic sonata form, meaning that the second half contains no distinct
development and recapitulation sections, a feeling of development is achieved as
in the sonatas of Scarlatti through the detailed intensity of the modulation.
67
We
have already indicated the difculties of aligning vamps with development sections,
but it remains an attractive comparison and one surprisingly little explored. The
link is especially plausible if we concentrate on the rhetoric of development sections
of the later eighteenth century, before an intensive reworking of thematic material
became the standardized procedure. Like most vamps, development sections of this
time offer a point of greatest rhetorical and technical freedom in the middle of
their structures; they are typically more repetitive and less obviously rational in
their syntactical organization than the framing material. Unlike nineteenth-century
development sections, they may well concentrate on pure harmonic exploration,
realized through free guration, so that in thematic terms they form an apparent
interlude. We should bear in mind that this middle section was often given some
such name as free fantasia by theorists of the time, without the moral imperative
to a careful husbandry of thematic resources implicit in the term development.
(In practice, such free developments may contain some thematic references or
residues, although these tend to remain around the edges of the section.) Although
examples of such an approach may be found in all genres in the eighteenth century
(for instance, in the rst movements of Clementis Sonata Op. 25 No. 6 and Haydns
String Quartet Op. 33 No. 4), perhaps the most ready association for many listeners
would be with the rst movements of Mozarts piano concertos, and the arena of
improvisation frequently found at the mid-point of the structure. This is led by the
soloist in non-thematic guration, often arpeggiated, and supported harmonically
by the orchestra. Indeed, it would seem to be concerto form itself which provided
the historical precedent for this type of developmental texture in sonata forms.
68
This in turn gives greater depth to Sheveloffs analogy with the solo sections in
Vivaldis concertos.
When we pursue the concerto connection, however, the analogy between the
vamp and this type of development starts to weaken. The guration found in vamps
can only rarely be understood as any sort of virtuoso display, even though it does
retain the physically effortful quality found in the concerto(-type) examples. Rather,
66
Another, more abstract, stylistic ingredient might be recitative. Although not making any direct connection
with Scarlattis practice, Michael Talbot suggests that Baroque recitative might have been the cradle of radical
techniques of modulation that did not nd general application until the development sections and transitions of
the Classical age. How Recitatives End and Arias Begin in the Solo Cantatas of Antonio Vivaldi, Journal of the
Royal Musicological Association 126/2 (2001), 174n.
67
68
See the account in Rosen, Sonata, 8994.
one returns to the contemplation of Iberian avours, as suggested by the vamps of
K. 193 (Ex. 1.4b) and K. 319. Even those vamps that do proceed from the basis of
concerto-like guration, as in K. 253 and K. 409, seem ultimately to transcend such
an expressive purpose.
If vamps are only awkwardly and partially assimilable into any historical or stylistic
context, they are at least as enigmatic when we try to account for the role they play in
individual sonatas. The following discussions attempt to determine some functional,
organic rationales for a vamps appearance in a particular context. We must always
bear in mind that the disruptive rhetorical force carried by such a passage may
render ineffectual any formal explanation. This contradiction was apparent in our
examination of the vamp in K. 193. Its apparent role as a sort of melting pot for
tensions exposed elsewhere in the sonata, or as a problem-solving device, can be
proposed for a number of other works.
The vamp which begins the second half of the Sonata in B major, K. 244, is one
of the more insistent members of the species, repeating twelve times a gure that is
specic enough in shape to seem thematic. However, it is new, although the context
of repeated two-bar units and the contours of both hands suggest bars 15ff. from the
rst half, a passage which itself almost carries the status of a vamp (its placement makes
it more akin to a stampede). The similarities in pitch of 1518 and 658 suggest
that both passages proceed from the same basis. Indeed, the vamp really usurps the
role of bars 1534 of the rst half, for when this material returns from bars 93 to
102, it is much more clearly directed and contained harmonically, outlining the tonic
minor by means of a fth-progression in the upper voice and a sixth-progression
in the bass (f
2
b
1
and b
1
d
1
respectively). It has become functional. There is a
clear irony in the fact that the vamp enforces a new, less disruptive character on the
rst-half material, but, in so doing, it in turn disrupts the larger structure. It solves
one problem and creates another.
K. 485 in C major seems to represent a clear case of the vamp coming to the
rescue. One would never guess from the galant opening, which uses the Couperin
pastorale schema, that this sonata would turn out to have the widest range of any
Scarlatti sonata: from F
1
to g
3
. One associates the galant with a narrow pitch range,
both of melodic and bass behaviour, yet the texture and sense of spacing here are
unmatched by any other Scarlatti sonata. The nearest equivalents, both also in C
major, are K. 356 and 357. The writing is full of wide intervals and couplings in
octaves, and there is generally a hole in the middle of the texture. This is summed
up by the extraordinary closing gesture, which revives the bass ller heard earlier
(every two bars from 5 to 13) and features both hands playing it two octaves apart.
The fact that it moves up two octaves, in the right hand, before moving back down
again to the same point, in both hands, increases the hollowness this is, as we have
seen, just the sort of cadential padding that the composer normally shuns at all costs.
There is also a lack of ne detail in the individual sections and the larger structure
everything is blocked out rather coarsely and, one suspects, parodistically. Indeed,
after the opening phrase of bars 15
3
, every phrase unit is repeated exactly until the
nal ourish. The harmonic plan also seems pointedly perfunctory.
Syntax 201
Beginning in bar 34 of the second half, the vamp then breaks down this mechanical
syntax, using the broken-octave gure from bar 13 that was perhaps the rst sign of
rebellion, in its anti-melodic nature after the previous sweet contours. This also gives
us a rare instance of a vamp section in which the repeated guration is quite explicitly
thematic. This repeated gure, driven on by harmony that is suddenly restless and
under-articulated, creates one very large phrase reaching from bar 34 all the way
through to bar 46
1
. The close-position chords in the left hand do something to
alleviate all the open sonorities heard before, although the gap in the texture mostly
holds. Perhaps the most impressive feature is at bar 36, where for the only time
in the vamp the right-hand rhythm is abandoned. The two arpeggio gures here
recontextualize the descending triadic gures heard so often in the rst half, giving
them an intensity and shape they never had before. After this the vamp grows more
and more vehement, a display of temperament to compensate for the lack of it in
the rst half.
A more detailed investigation of argument is appropriate for the Sonata in B
minor, K. 409 (Ex. 4.19), with its central black hole the longest and arguably
most extreme of all Scarlatti vamps and unusual explicit reprise of the opening
material. (Bear in mind that the opening material rarely returns in the tonic in the
second half of a sonata.) What forces, if any, hold such seemingly disparate material
together? What sort of sensibility informs the composers choice and manipulation
of material?
The principal strain in the argument of this piece may be said to concern hy-
permetrical manipulation and a concomitant struggle between regularity and ir-
regularity of internal organization. The rst half displays both extreme regularity
and ambiguity in its syntax. This process is set in train by the opening unit, which,
unusually for Scarlatti, may be described as a theme, having a clearly demarcated
boundary and containing several distinct thematic impulses within itself. Thus the
opening unit may be subdivided into groupings of three bars (a sequence cut short)
and a more or less indivisible ve bars. Sheveloff, on the other hand, believes that
the organization of this unit is essentially 4 + 4: the augmented second in m. 4
marks a phrase break in which the A closes the rst four-measure unit, while the
G and F serve as upbeats into the second unit.
69
Although this might seem an
attractive solution, I cannot bring myself to hear the passage in this way. There is
no question that in voice-leading terms the A and F of bar 4 are the necessary
continuation of the descending parallel tenths outlined in bars 13, but the marked
disparity of texture and rhythmic values between bars 3 and 4 and the fact that
the right hand of bar 5 simply continues the descending quavers of the previous
bar suggest that 45 constitute a single, indivisible impulse. There is therefore an
overlap of function at bar 4
1
, but those elements suggesting a fresh start at this
point make the stronger impression. The varied form of the right hands mate-
rial at bars 911 makes the break between third and fourth bars of the unit even
plainer.
69
Private correspondence, 1994.
Ex. 4.19 K. 409 bars 186
Bars 47 then spend much time circling around the dominant, in a manner that
seems quite distinct from the sequential drive of the initial gesture. Bar 8, a solitary
bar of tonic, has to bear the weight of all the contrasting earlier activity, and it
hardly seems long enough to ground the tension. The effect of the resumption of
the opening in bar 9 after this has something in common with our missing-bar
phenomenon. On a broad scale, therefore, a regular eight-bar unit exists, but it
contains some internal discomfort, however one perceives its subdivisions. This in
spite of the assertive nature of the theme; note how the energy of the sequential
Syntax 203
Ex. 4.19 (cont.)
descent is physically and visually manifested in the left hands extravagant leaps up
and down. Typically and necessarily, Scarlatti immediately repeats his formulation,
with the initial right-hand variant almost taunting the listener. The composer often
repeats immediately his most challenging pieces of invention, as if to assure the
listeners that they did not mishear rst time around.
70
As a counter to the somewhat schizophrenic theme, bars 1724 then feature an
almost excessive regularity of phrase rhythm. They combine the features of the two
70
As noted for instance in Sheveloff, Grove, 338.
parts of the theme on several levels. The two-bar unit 1718 encapsulates the two
parts, bringing them side by side; thus 17 corresponds to 1 (more broadly the rst
three bars) and 18 to 4, in both hands. The left-hand pattern is then repeated while
the right hand of bars 1920 rhymes with 6 (or 7) then 8. The left hand at bar 7
is particularly signicant for the hasty attempt it makes at balance within the rst
eight-bar unit, inverting the initial rising octaves and following this with a vertical
octave, adding to the cramped feel at the end of the phrase. However, by this the
left hand shows it has a conscience, so to speak, which is then evident in its four
identical units of bars 1724. The attempt to dispel the tensions that arise through
ambiguity of phrase structure by means of grim reiteration is signicant given the
nature and role of the vamp to come.
Above this the right hand in 1720 acts as a sort of compression of bars 18, as we
have seen, and this is followed by a pseudo-sequence at 214. Bar 22 refers to bar
4 in a more direct way, however, but with A replacing the earlier A. This audibly
irons out the original awkward augmented second of bar 4, yet it also disrupts the
very square enunciation of B minor. While the A hints at the upcoming D major
and therefore acts as a sort of modulatory device, it more importantly develops the
principal sub-plot of the piece, the conict between A and A which lends an edge
to the primary syntactical problems. After all, the A in bar 4, which announces the
disruption to the sequence, is made additionally prominent by the fact that it has
been preceded in bar 2 by an A in the bass. This forms part of a melodic-minor
descent from B to F while the A at 4 forms part of a harmonic-minor version
of the same descending interval. After the difcult A at bar 22, A is reafrmed
in the following bar, by means of another awkward interval (the diminished fourth
DA) and a clash with B in the left-hand part.
This eight-bar unit, seemingly simple in intention but rich in associations, leads
to yet another with similar characteristics. Bars 256 are almost a transposition of
1718 but for the initial g
2
; this has to move upwards and, with another rst-beat a
2
,
suggests rather a parallel with 212. On the last quaver of bar 28 a precipitate shift
towards III occurs as the left hand for once breaks its conscientious pattern and A is
once again highlighted, in the right hand. This central event rather upsets the ideal
of a balanced eight-bar phrase which is I believe one subject of this music; further
confusion is created by the fact that bar 30 rhymes with 28, while bar 29 presents
the pattern in the opposite direction. The right hand at 312 then transposes the
equivalent bars 234, an identity obscured by the differing ornamental suggestions for
24 and 32 provided in the Gilbert edition. These complex relationships between all
the phraseal units act as a destabilizing force, undercutting the large-scale regularity
of the eight-bar phrases and ultimately demanding the cleansing properties of a
vamp.
The conrmatory D major phrase from bar 33, beginning with a repeated a
2
, also
reworks many elements of the theme. The left hand reverts to a two-octave span in
its rising leaps with the arrival at III; it also mirrors the opening in its reversion to
stepwise intervals between pairs of bars after the VI alternations of the intervening
Syntax 205
passages. Octave displacement aside, the opening bass line consists purely of stepwise
movement until the VI of 78. Meanwhile, the right-hand pattern from bar 33
represents a new fusion of elements from the two parts of the theme, the dotted
crotchets from 1 and the stepwise quavers from 4 now being superimposed. This
time, however, the composer tries a different syntactical strategy, reverting to the
falling sequential impulse of the opening bars, but at half the speed. Nevertheless,
the sequence once more fails to complete itself, being lost again on the fourth
sequential degree as the expected C in the bass is replaced by A at bar 39, followed
by an awkward elision through to new material at bar 40. Both of the right hands
voice-leading components resolve, e
2
to d
2
and a
1
to the appropriate f
1
, and the
left hand moves to D, but the textural and thematic disruption jolts the listener. This
revives the situation found in bar 4, where what should be an overlap due to the
voice-leading continuity sounds more like an interruption. Thus while the whole
unit from bar 33 makes up a regular twelve bars, it continues the problematic internal
division of the theme, consisting of 7 + 5 bars.
Given the interweaving of thematic and syntactical features observed so far, it
should come as no surprise that Scarlatti bases the last ve bars of the phrase on
the latter part of the original theme. From bar 40 in the right hand we hear a pair
of descending units very similar to the falling shape at bars 45; in fact the second
of these is at the same pitches as its model save for the substitution of a
2
by a
2
.
Equally, the cadential bars 434 bear an obvious resemblance to 78, demonstrating
the composers extreme sensitivity to the nuances of cadential formulae. If we ignore
Gilberts ornamental suggestions at bars 24 and 32, then the effect of the appoggiatura
in bar 44 has considerable structural signicance, since it rhymes directly with bars
8 and 16. Also noteworthy here in terms of our sub-plot is the doubling of the A
at 42
1
. While this arises rst of all for reasons of registral management, it highlights
the triumph of A over A and also stresses the 2 + 2 construction of bars 4043;
therefore the following bar once more has no companion, just as bar 8 seemed to
require a breathing space after it. The repetition of the whole twelve-bar unit from
45 is structurally appropriate as a rhyme for the dual presentation of the opening
theme.
That Scarlatti recognises the problematical status of bar 44 is evident from the fact
that its equivalent does not appear at the end of the matching phrase. Instead it is
elided with the beginning of the next unit at bar 56. Thus the elision, normally a
device utilized to break up an overly square phrase structure, is here used to give
greater regularity to the hypermetre, to square matters up. The unit starting at bar 56
once more makes great play with a
2
, reinforced by the largest left-hand leaps so far,
up to a
1
at 60 and 62. Otherwise the phrase represents a perfect 4 + 4 construction.
However, this seems a hollow regularity. The alternation of tonic and dominant
harmonies the same strategy adopted in the left hand at 1732 is now taken up
by both hands. Although such reiterative directness is a common rhetorical gambit
at this point of a Scarlattian structure, conrming the arrival on the new key area, it
can hardly pass as a triumphant solution to the syntactical argument. There is none
of the internal complexity which the previous phrases attempted to incorporate and
which seems to be the implied model for the syntactical action of the sonata. Bars
56ff. may be symmetrical but they lack the variety of shape to be thought of as
balanced.
The problems of grouping begin once again with the extension of the phrase
at bar 64, matching bars 56 and 60 and undercutting the apparent symmetry of
the eight-bar phrase. Of course this problem is inherent in the phrase itself: its IV
alternations demand a following I, and the pattern has been so rmly established that
the thematic form it takes seems inevitable. Bars 645 are in fact difcult to align
within the larger structure. If bar 64 begins as a fth repetition of the two-bar unit,
bar 65 breaks with the expected continuation and instead seems to provide a link to
the new material of bar 66. Because of the new material which it ushers in and the
ascent in the right hand which takes us there, bar 66
1
sounds climactic, and a much
stronger hypermetrical downbeat than that found two bars earlier at 64. From this
point of view bars 645 almost function like an extended two-bar upbeat. At least,
this is true of the right-hand part; the total picture is more ambiguous still. While
the right hand begins a 2 + 2 pattern at bar 66, the left hand seems to have a 2 + 2
construction from bar 65, so that the downbeats of the two hands conict, a ne
state of affairs after the unanimity of the previous eight-bar unit. In the midst of
this, the right-hand ascent in octaves ABCD provides a textural and pitch
reminder of the very opening, now reversed. This time the nal bar of the phrase
cannot be hidden under the cloak of hypermetrical respectability; however one
chooses to subdivide it internally, the total phrase from bar 64 only adds up to seven
bars, a classic disturbing example of the missing-bar phenomenon. In retrospect this
provides a sting of hypermetrical tension to undercut the extreme regularity of the
vamp. How could any performer resist adding an invisible bar at this point? Not
just hypermetrically but also technically given the widely spaced writing and in
particular the very difcult leaping gures some breathing space seems essential.
Thus in the rst half all attempts to arrive at true regularity of organization
have been thwarted. All reasonable means of bringing the syntax under control
appear to have been tried, from melodic compression to a rather old-hat linear
intervallic pattern (another sequence that is not self-evident) to a more modern,
buffa-like reiteration of tonic and dominant sonorities. The syntactical play is in-
formed by the same duality of sequential and periodic impulses that we saw in
K. 523 (Ex. 4.6). More drastic action seems to be required if the ideal is to be
achieved. The vamp from bar 71 provides this by representing a hypermetrical sim-
plication (it is really in 12/8, entailing endless divisions into hierarchical groups
of four identical units), one so extreme that the concept of a phrase is lost in an
immediate sense. Also dispensed with is any real sense of melodic exposition, as the
composer concentrates purely on rhythmic properties.
If the vamp provides on the one hand a hypermetrical simplication, on the other
it represents a marked increase in harmonic complexity. It is as if the composer is
working with an ideal of balance of harmonic movement which has thus far been
Syntax 207
weighted to one side, and indeed many of the vamps in the sonatas appear to result
from the need to provide a richer sense of harmonic action than has previously
obtained. K. 485 certainly ts this bill too. On the other hand the section does build
on the one aspect of harmonic complication present in the rst half, the conict
between A and A, upon which the opening sequence had foundered. Thus the
lowest of the three voice-leading components of the endlessly repeated right-hand
gure hovers very much around the region of A/A/B; note especially the dramatic
movement of A to the enharmonic B at 11819. (The semitonal equivocation
around these notes is reected by other layers of the texture, for instance by the
DDE and EEF traced in the bass between 71 and 98.) The vamp is also cut
short in voice-leading terms on the A at bar 142, before we move to a ve-bar
phrase that effects a thematic retransition. With the vamp essentially nishing at bar
142, it is almost the same length as the rst half of the piece (seventy-two to seventy
bars)! The retransition utilizes broken octaves in the right hand to set up the return
of the opening, at the same pitches as the original rst two bars.
This ve-bar phrase obviously upsets the four-square units of the vamp and yields
another odd-bar-out at 147. However, this would be to overestimate the regularity
of the vamp itself. Once one has adjusted to the hypermetre, one perceives three
initial groupings of 4 12/8 (bars 7186, 87102 and 10318), from which point
the hierarchical organization breaks down. From bar 119 there would seem to be
two groupings of 3 12/8; the sense of demarcation between 130 and 131 is very
strong due to the anomalous right hand gure at 130 (signicantly using a
2
and its
lower octave and anticipating the gure at bars 1435) and the clear sense of return
from 131 to the material from bars 91ff. The fact that complications arise with the
fourth of the vamps very large units suggests an extraordinary afnity with the earlier
abortive sequences which also foundered on the fourth step. The vamp, one should
note, also plays a role of not just harmonic but also textural compensation, as it lls
in the largely unused middle registers of the instrument in close position.
This huge unruly section leads to a creative boil-over in the unusual formal
device of a reprise of the opening, one that can obviously be justied in the very
unusual circumstances. However, the exact return does not last. The vamp forces a
new, sweeping form of the opening bars this big sequence empowers the little
sequence from the start, which now proceeds down the whole tonic scale. In the
process the offending A from the fourth bar is smoothed out to an A. Not only
does the sequence nally realize itself in the fullest possible form, but the nal bar
of the unit does not come to a halt as have the endings of almost all the previous
eight-bar phrases; instead the momentum of the sequence sees the bar lled up by
a quaver gure. It would not do, however, to imagine that Scarlatti has now solved
his syntactical difculties. If there are no problems with the internal organization
of this eight-bar phrase, it is because there is none! By its nature such a sequence
is internally indivisible; it also lacks any true harmonic substance, given the parallel
movement of the parts throughout, and contains no cadential articulation. In fact
this apparently triumphant solution sidesteps the matter of phrase construction and
articulation entirely. The decorated repetition of the unit seems to acknowledge as
much with its witty reintroduction of an A to decorate the B in 158, setting off a
chain reaction of similar gures.
From this point the ideal of a syntactically and thematically balanced eight-bar
phrase appears to be abandoned. At bar 164 a new discrete four-bar phrase is intro-
duced to ground the momentum and give some cadential balance to the previous
activity, with the left hand remembering its best manners. The unit ends with an
a
1
b
1
appoggiatura, a resolution not heard thus far. We then hear an equivalent
of bars 1724, which in this context does not sound so abrupt in its introduction;
it is almost as if the insertion at bars 1647 is compensating for all the previous
isolated single-bar phrase endings, as a sort of extended afterbeat. Where the ver-
sion of bars 1724 differs signicantly from its model is in the right hand at 1723.
The displacement of the a
2
back a quaver has several functions. As well as audibly
reminding us that the sub-plot is not yet resolved, it introduces further cross-phrase
confusion by echoing bars 1645 of the prior four-bar unit. The displacement also
means that the two four-bar units at 16871 and 1725 are more symmetrical than
the rst-half equivalent: bars 169 and 173 now match, and in addition 171 and 175
feature rhyming ornamental gures. Indeed, this symmetrical ornamentation has a
structural meaning (which is why the Gilbert extrapolation of the feature to the rst
half is misleading): we are more strongly encouraged now to hear 16875 as two
separate four-bar units rather than as a return to possible eight-bar organization.
This trend is continued in the nal eight bars, which twice outline the same bass
progression as 1647, with the left hand nally achieving some balance between
the leaping octave gure and its cadential responsibilities. Melodically, 1647 also
form the substance of 1769 to enforce the new four-bar tendency. In the nal four
bars attention is focused on nailing the sub-plot. The a
2
is heard for the last time in
bar 180, preceded uniquely by dominant and tonic scale degrees and thus put in a
context in which it cannot create ambiguity. The following g
2
then rises to a
2
in a
reversal of the augmented second of bar 4. This then leads to b
2
, and the nal a
2
in the penultimate bar is explicitly resolved, surrounded on both sides by the tonic
note so that it too can no longer act as a destabilizing agent. The last bar gives us
a unique and appropriate fourfold B, as if to underline the point that here is a nal
bar that scans.
The wit of this reprise is very compressed after the blazing vamp and requires
some quick aural adjustment if much is not to be missed. This plus the apparent
abandonment or sidetracking of the original premise raise once more the question
of the composers sense of an ending. The end to K. 409 is rhetorically weak, in
spite of the relatively strong gestures presented in the nal few bars. To imagine,
though, that with some more small adjustments or perhaps the addition of several
more phrases this could be remedied, if desired, is surely to miss the larger rhetorical
point. In this detailed reading of K. 409 the vamp has been shown to perform a
number of functional and corrective tasks. Yet there remains a gap between these
functional aspects and the sheer anarchic presence of the vamp in its own right.
Syntax 209
It is rough and inartistic, out of scale with the rest of the work and the sonata
was already rather rough in effect, perhaps especially given the prominence of the
wild left-hand leaps. We may conduct a discussion of K. 409 in terms of its main
thematic material, but surely the real main thematic material, both statistically and
affectively, is the right-hand gure of the vamp, repeated seventy times over with
just the two intervening bars of adjustment. It would plainly be misguided to hear
this gure as a direct relation of anything in the rst half, such as bars 18 and 26, or
even as an outline form of bars 45. Even if it were clearly and signicantly related
to any prior shape, its unbelievably excessive treatment would take it well beyond
the realms of developmental necessity.
How, then, do we listen to the vamp? Do we listen to it differently from the other
sections? Perhaps initially we listen to it without any cognitive adjustment, but as the
mixture of stubborn guration and unpredictable harmony continues on and on,
moving well beyond what seems reasonable and rational, we must surely lower or
raise our sights. The gestural excessiveness of this and all other vamps invites quite
opposed reactions. One might feel hypnotized, tuning out at an immediate level and
then tuning in on a higher level, so achieving Bonds trancelike state; it is as if, as
has been said of Ligeti, Scarlatti seeks to eliminate repetition through repetition.
71
Alternatively, one might feel browbeaten and nally agitated. Are such sections to
be heard as dynamic or static? On a larger scale, how does the vamp change the way
we listen to the following music, and, in retrospect, how we hear the whole piece in
our minds ear? It was suggested in the discussion of K. 260, with its multiple vamps,
that the normal music fades into insignicance. This must also be a possibility with
K. 409. At the very least, the vamp relativizes the status of the surrounding material.
Even if we set the greatest store by its functional, corrective aspects, its impact on
the following material in the second half can be judged in two ways. From a positive
point of view, the vamp has a sort of laxative effect, helping the opening theme to
solve its internal structural problems. On the other hand, one might maintain that
the would-be reprise collapses under the weight of the vamps example and that the
subsequent music loses its capacity to carry out detailed if ambiguous operations
over any span longer than four bars.
When trying to assess the place of the vamp in our conception of the whole, we
might bear in mind Sheveloffs denition that such passages sound like an improvised
accompaniment waiting for the entry of an important musical event.
72
Bogianckino
made a similar suggestion. Quoting a passage from K. 260, he felt it seemed to be an
accompaniment to a song, a melody or a more precise line waiting to emerge above
it. Perhaps such a line was in the mind of Scarlatti and his listeners; an unheard line,
though none the less precise and expressive.
73
Such a melody of course never arrives.
The problem with Sheveloffs analogy is that invariably the vamp is the important
71
Alastair Williams, New Music and the Claims of Modernity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 85.
72
Sheveloff, Grove, 338.
73
Bogianckino, Harpsichord, 1012. The author also links such a feature with the emergence of a fortepiano style.
musical event, at least in retrospect, in the amount of contemplation it engenders.
We may not grasp this initially, of course, precisely because of the lack of conventional
melodic behaviour which normally does so much to guide our memory of a piece.
Vamps impress themselves on our minds in different, less accountable ways.
In those specimens with clearer thematic relevance to their surroundings, such
difculties of comprehension can be less acute. The vamp in the second half of K.
511 is based on the surrounding toccata material (and prepared by a mini-vamp
heard in the middle of the rst half ). Since the sonata is effectively monothematic,
the insistent repetition of the same gure in the vamp stands out far less than usual,
although clearly given a less mobile registral treatment than elsewhere. It is thus the
changing harmonic background that makes the passage most memorable. Compara-
ble situations obtain in K. 438 and K. 469, which feature similar vamping guration.
A strong analogy between vamp and sonata-form development may be found in
the Sonata in E major, K. 216. Here the repeated vamp cell is not only thematic,
but it derives from the opening theme itself, from the gure heard at bars 25 (see
Ex. 4.20a and b). Of the three notes heard on the last three quavers of each bar
here, only the nal one is retained in the second half, leading to the same downbeat
appoggiatura motive. The fact that the whole gure is heard three and a half times at
the outset even provides some sort of syntactical precedent for the vamp. Cementing
the connection is the evident structural parallelism between the two passages. The
start of the second half presents a dominant version of the opening, a standard
gambit, and so the vamp is prefaced at 689 by a dominant version of bars 12. Both
the fragmentation and insistent repetition of a thematic module t the mould of a
conventionally understood development section.
74
On the other hand, the sense of purpose in Scarlattis development is less certain
than that. Alain de Chambure comments thus on the start of the second half: The
harmony is made to evolve in a hardly perceptible fashion, rather in the manner of
Schubert in some of his sonatas. On this occasion, the tense vocal improvisation is
turned into a melody.
75
It is difcult to agree that what we hear in the vamp of
K. 216 is a melody as such, but it undoubtedly does have a strong melodic character,
and this is central to how we might hear the passage. Although a fragmented version
of a thematic cell, the repeated gure is characterized above all by its appoggiatura, an
intense melodic device. In addition, after the rst two renderings at bars 6970 and
7071, which retain the repeated note across the bar line, all subsequent versions
74
This is the sort of passage Philip Radcliffe must have had in mind when he wrote that Scarlattis way of using a
short phrase as the foundation . . . of a string of modulations was prophetic of Haydn and Beethoven. Radcliffe,
Scarlatti, 33. Note also Leonard B. Meyers remark that harmonic instability tends, in Romantic as well as Classic
music, to be complemented by motivic constancy. With wider terms of reference than simply development
sections, this rhetorical/behavioural model offers another attractive way of comprehending vamps (and certainly
that of K. 216), except that any motivic denition is of course often difcult and that vamps seem excessive
in their dialectic of instability and constancy. Meyer, Style and Music: Theory, History and Ideology (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 316.
75
Chambure, Catalogue, 89. As is frequently the case in this publication, the French original says something rather
different and perhaps less acute.
Syntax 211
Ex. 4.20a K. 216 bars 19
Ex. 4.20b K. 216 bars 6881
describe a falling third, yielding a more vocal sense of line. It therefore becomes
difcult to hear the passage just as guration; each repetition has its own specic
melodic intensity. From this point of view the comparison with Schubert is apt. The
sensation of each sound seems more important or at least more striking than
any organizing developmental force that arises from their totality. This is akin to the
magical voyage evoked by Bond.
At the same time two other possible models for an understanding of the passage
may be put forward. The shape of the repeated left-hand guration is very similar
to that found in the recercata movements of Alberos six three-part works entitled
Recercata, fuga y sonata. Compare the excerpt from the Recercata No. 5 in C minor
Ex. 4.21 Albero: Recercata No. 5 (unbarred)
given as Ex. 4.21. Not only is the left-hand gure very similar in its own right (down
to the sustained initial bass note), but it is treated similarly too, tracing a pattern of
gradual stepwise descent. Note also that the gures are consistently conjoined with
appoggiaturas in the right hand. Such pronounced likenesses make one wonder
whether, as a historical principle, the recercata/ricercare lies behind the Scarlatti
vamp. Certainly Alberos realization of the genre seems to have some connection to
the vamp. As discussed in Chapter 3, these quasi-improvisatory preludizings evoke
an antique world, although one that was by no means dead in terms of contemporary
Spanish keyboard composition. More generally, they lean on a tradition of improvised
(harmonic) licence that obviously appeals as a source for Scarlattis practice. However,
leaving aside rhetorical differences between the two types of free writing (such as
differing placement within the larger structure and the more focused nature of the
vamp), there is a basic problem that we have encountered before. Scarlattis licence is
not put in a generically allowable context; nor does he acknowledge the apparently
aberrant nature of vamps by means of some sort of internal labelling, even if it were
only con licenza. The absence of either sort of framing to the invention presented
by the vamps suggests either the sort of studied elusiveness we have dened before
or that the vamps should be understood, as far as their appearance on the page goes,
as an organic feature after all.
A second possible historical ingredient in the form taken by the vamp of K. 216 is
offered by Karin Heuschneider. She observes the presence of a passacaglia-like bass
here and in the case of K. 260.
76
If we acknowledge this as a possible model for the
76
The Piano Sonata of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, Contributions to the Development of the Piano Sonata, vol. 1
(Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1967), 27.
Syntax 213
construction of the passage, it is clearly heard in applied rather than literal form. The
passacaglia bass is spread over a long time, comprising a single stepwise descent of a
fourth from V to its dominant, the F of bar 89. The bass in fact overshoots its goal,
moving down to F by bars 7982 then on to F and E. The F is then reinterpreted
as E, which moves up to the local dominant. This type of bass-line movement can
in fact be found in the majority of vamps. To gain the greatest historical purview
over this behaviour, though, we need to widen Heuschneiders terms of reference.
The tendency for the harmonic contortions of vamps to be founded on basses
that move by step, generally descending and often by an octave, suggests the regola
dellottava. (An explicit aligning of Scarlattis practice in the vamps with this precept
does not seem to have been made in the literature.) This widespread formula was
associated both with keyboard continuo playing and with improvisation (and hence
the fantasia). C. P. E. Bach, for instance, advocated organizing ones improvisations
around a bass line of rising and falling scales. What unies these various technical
procedures is the sense that they provide a frame for relatively free invention in
other musical parameters, that they hold the music together, and although the usual
reservations about differences in artistic realization and implication must apply, they
clearly offer a strong historical model for understanding the vamp sections. K. 319,
for instance, as demonstrated by Agmon, offers a vamp organized around a descent
of an octave from c
1
to c, taking the extraordinary form of an octatonic scale.
77
In
the vamp of K. 225, the bass begins on E and moves via D down to C before pushing
up by step to another C in bar 63
2
. Often the manoeuvres are more complicated,
as in K. 531, where the rst descent is diverted back to the starting point of B
before a more straightforward descending octave progression unfolds (bars 6785).
In K. 180, the structural descending octave twists back on itself several times before
completion. Sometimes other intervals are involved, as with the falling sixth from B
to D observed in K. 193. Often enough the technical basis of conjunct movement
is retained even when the total shape of the bass line cannot be so readily grasped.
This is the case with K. 409.
The vamp of the Sonata in G major, K. 124, also illustrates this. Preceded by
a ourish in D major and a pause, the bass simply hover[s] in mid-air around
this structural D,
78
moving between B and E, before it is reafrmed by another
arpeggiated ourish at bars 1023. Few sonatas are more frankly popular in tone than
K. 124. Its repetitions have such urgency that one listens beyond any symmetrical
syntax to the sheer physical energy they generate. The work is repetitive at all
points of its structure, not just at prime articulative moments. There is one section
apart, one which clearly builds to a climax rather than expressing heavy insistence:
the vamp of bars 83103. Exceptionally, it is built on several successive melodic
impulses rather than on a single repeated gure. In addition, its exquisitely painful
dissonances differ greatly from the highly diatonic language elsewhere; the rst half
77
See Agmon, Division, 4.
78
This phrase is used in Edwards, Iberian, 32. For her the repeated chords create a static, intense atmosphere.
This echoes the judgements of Bond and Hammond that such sections are not conceived dynamically.
moves from a very clear I to a very clear V, with nothing else whatever apart from
a dominant minor enclave. As in a number of sonatas already mentioned, the vamp
contains all the harmonic ambition and bite.
79
If it was suggested earlier that vamps
often seem underdetermined by context, it may be that in cases such as K. 124
and K. 485 they arise in response to an overdetermination of harmony and phrase
structure elsewhere in the work. They function therefore as a sort of outlet. This must
be proposed fairly gently, since such a causal explanation is hardly binding; many
sonatas that seem limited in these respects fail to employ vamps. We could also hardly
maintain that there is anything inhibited about the rest of K. 124; expressively, the
vamp may function as much as a histrionic intensication of the rest as a contrasting
world.
K. 253 in E at major resembles the case of K. 124 harmonically but not syntacti-
cally. When is a vamp not a vamp? The one here has such a stronger prole than the
surrounding material that, in retrospect, it is clearly the rst half that represents the
waiting for the arrival of an important event. Similarly, the resumption of the ofcial
material at the end of the second half, from bar 43, seems like a structural rump. The
vamp dwarfs the rest even more than in K. 409; here too it is exactly as long as the
rst half. This rst half seems to suggest a street band, amiably dishevelled in musical
conduct. A number of different, short-lived gambits are offered, held together more
than anything by all the similar linking and cadential phrases. Only with the fanfare
that nally declares itself properly from bar 14
3
does the music achieve any syntactical
comfort, aided by the antiphonal treatment. Harmonically, on the other hand, this
is all as straightforward as imaginable.
The vamp then offers the customary harmonic mobility and elusiveness, as if
to balance the harmonic equation of the whole. Syntactically, though, it presents a
greater rather than lesser degree of denition. The non-vamp material is consistently
written against the bar line; compare the very explicit lling of 12/8 bars by the
vamp, with each downbeat heavily stressed. Once the invention has settled after
the characteristic nerviness of bars 228, the repeated gurations and large-scale
sequential construction feel more comfortable than what was offered for much of
the rst half.
80
In stylistic terms this is the least elusive of vamp sections. It has a strong Baroque
avour, especially once it settles from bar 29, and is easily the most direct illustra-
tion of Sheveloff s proposed Vivaldian descent. The violin-like guration suggests
79
Arthur Haas notes that, with more than two thirds of the work utilizing nothing but I, II and V chords, what
Scarlatti does elsewhere justies this heavy dependence on tonic and dominant. La pratique de la modulation
dans les sonates de Domenico Scarlatti, in Scarlatti: 13 Recherches, 60. K. 124 is also discussed at 578.
80
The corrective sense of the vamp is emphasized by the fact that the composer recapitulates the start not the
opening bar, but bars 23 before the closing material returns. Thus recontextualized, it carries far more impetus
than on its earlier appearance. Note too the reworking in the second half of bar 44 compared to the equivalent
point in bar 3; the extra imitative entry by the bass gives a more transparent sense of organization and anticipates
the antiphonal treatment of the transposed closing phrase which follows. By then cutting from bar 3 to bar 14,
the composer also omits all the less uent material of the rst half. It is in effect replaced by the processes of the
vamp.
Syntax 215
we are listening to a solo episode from a concerto. There is also a very clear em-
bodiment of the regola dellottava in the basss linear progression of an octave from
B to B, without detours and with the latter part emphasized by the scoring in
octaves. In K. 253 the vamp is quite patently a rhetorical match for the outer sec-
tions, given the clarity of its stylistic associations. The rhetoric of the whole clearly
embodies a topical opposition. The composer seems to be pitting a vernacular style
against high art, an echo of an Italian past, not unlike the plot suggested for K. 513
(Ex. 3.13). This reading would also promote the claims of the vamp, in certain
senses, to greater authority and coherence. As we have seen both with other vamp
sonatas and other instances of topical play, this is clearly an uncomfortable opposition
if we try to construct a sense of the whole; either the two are left to rub against
each other, or the vamp wins the day in our ears through its greater incisiveness
of invention. On the other hand, its harmonic mobility and subordinate structural
role (as a prolongation, no matter how memorable, of the dominant) may limit its
claims.
It is the pull between functional and non-functional rationales that makes vamps
both so fascinating and so upsetting. If it would be trivial to declaim in approved
current fashion that they offer nothing but rupture, it would also be trivial to imagine
that their functional aspects can constitute an entire explanation for their presence.
They are more and less than bleeding chunks or perfect servants of the larger form. As
much of the preceding discussion has focused, with epistemological inevitability, on
functional explanations, we will nish with an appeal to their more ineffable qualities.
Siobhan Davies, the choreographer of a number of Scarlatti sonatas, to whomwe have
already referred, writes of her experience: He must have been incredibly excited by
his imagination and the sheer thrill of letting go.
81
Although clearly not meant
to refer specically to our current subject, the notion of simply letting go offers a
wonderful translation of the sense in which vamps place themselves beyond the easy
reach of normal constructs. Whatever their possible historical roots, through their
sheer abandoned intensity they can seem indifferent to considerations of rhetoric,
style, form, even expression.
The notion of intensity can in turn be enlisted in an attempt to explain the
aesthetic moment of the vamp. Wim Mertens has invoked this in his account of
American minimalist music. Citing Jean-Francois Lyotard The intensity exists but
has no goal or content and Gilles Deleuze Each intensity wants to be itself, to be
its own goal and repeats and imitates itself Mertens makes this a central category
for the understanding of this apparently anomalous, unhistorical musical style. We
have already considered briey the link between the repetitive behaviour displayed
by vamps and that embodied by minimalism, and while there are obvious perils in
aligning musical phenomena from such different periods of history, the connection
is a useful working tool given the lack of anything very comparable in the music
of the eighteenth century. The strategy effectively treats Scarlatti according to the
81
Siobhan Davies, A Week in the Arts, The Daily Telegraph, 20 May 1995, A5.
second category of modernism outlined in Chapter 2. Because there is no economy
or reserve of intensity, Mertens writes after Jacques Derrida, there is no historical
category, since intensity is totally outside time.
82
This has an obvious relevance to
the thoughts we might entertain about the ontology of vamp sections. It corresponds
to the sense that they know no economy (the thrill of letting go ), nor history,
nor any goal beyond replicating themselves. For all their possible functional and
organic attributes, they continually threaten to oat clear of them in an autistic
self-sufciency, a repetition without rationality or purpose.
This self-sufcient intensity allows for the two basic reactions to such passages out-
lined before. The vamp may be heard or felt as highly physical, a kind of music that
offers a tangible projection or articulation of bodily energy,
83
one which is unpre-
cedentedly direct because it is so relatively unmediated (by clear stylistic signals, for
instance). On the other hand, the intensity may through its very lack of differen-
tiation become abstracted, so that the vamp in fact invites a sort of out-of-body
experience. This is still rooted in a physical reaction, of course, but one which has
been relocated to the higher level mentioned before. Such an experience might
conceivably be connected to the realms of folk music, and amenco in particular,
suggesting the sort of abstract inuence postulated in the discussion of K. 277 in
Chapter 1. Timothy Mitchell has written that for real acionados of the form, a-
menco goes beyond the aesthetic in the direction of psychic cleansing, mysticism,
and even trance.
84
An abstract experience of a vamp section may indeed involve
such ecstatic possibilities. Whichever sensation predominates for each listener to each
vamp, these sections relativize the status of the material that surrounds them or
with which they surround themselves.
82
Wim Mertens, American Minimal Music, trans. J. Hautekiet (London: Kahn and Averill, 1983), 119, 121 and
1223.
83
Taken from Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995), 27. Citing the art historian Norman Bryson, Kramer reminds us that the distancing of the palpable
body has historically served as a cardinal sign for the condition of being civilized. By this measure vamps fall
conspicuously short of civilized values.
84
Mitchell, Flamenco, 224.
5
I I TATI ONS
DE UNEI NE SATZ
Introduction
What Scarlatti does for syntax he also does for the elements of musical grammar. If
Scarlattis radically relativistic approach to rhythm and syntax has remained under-
appreciated, the same is less true of his harmonic and voice-leading peculiarities.
This is not surprising given our greater attunement to these elements we are
trained from an early age to spell our music correctly, as it were, and to avoid poor
grammatical relations between successive sounds. In these terms musical intelligence
and literacy are dened largely by the resourceful avoidance of such infelicities. Yet
even here, the extent of Scarlattis estrangement fromcommon practice the manner
in which the composer apparently goes out of his way to infringe the laws governing
the continuation and combination of voices is far from common knowledge. The
composers uncertain historical and stylistic position colludes with an uncertain grasp
of his anomalous language to lend him a marginal place in musical pedagogy, a
fundamental current function and means of dissemination for eighteenth-century
music.
1
It is thus doubly no accident that Scarlatti does not gure much in the
teaching of musical rudiments, in the acquisition of harmonic and contrapuntal
skills in tonal music. Teachers will have enough difculty explaining to their charges
the aberrations found in Bach, Handel and Haydn without opening the Pandoras
box that Scarlattis sonatas represent. Edward Dent imagined the likely response:
If Domenico Scarlatti writes consecutive fths, why shouldnt I do so too?.
2
Although consecutive fths are far from the most frequent or disturbing of the
composers licences, such a question does allow us to turn the matter on its head.
Instead of asking why Scarlatti broke so many rules so often, we should rather ask
why most composers did not do so. Why the stability? What factors inhibit the
wider adoption of the relative free-for-all that the sonatas hold out as a possibility?
1
Donald Francis Tovey combined an acknowledgement of the crassly unacademic nature of the sonatas with a
marginal placement of the composer when he noted: Such work, taken by itself, seems as isolated as a dew-pond;
but Mozart, Clementi, and Beethoven assiduously pumped the contents of that dew-pond into their own main
stream. The Main Stream of Music, in Essays and Lectures on Music, collected, with an Introduction, by Hubert
Foss (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), 345.
2
Dent, Scarlatti, 177.
217
Scarlatti was assuredly not the only composer of the common-practice era to
entertain critical thoughts about the immutable laws of music, nor the only one
to ignore or deviate from them as a consequence, but surely no one else offered
such an extreme practical response. Keeping more or less to the letter of the law,
as most composers have done most of the time, may be said to arise in the rst
place for reasons of social communication. The rationale is similar to that offered
to those who display faults of grammar and spelling in their prose writing that
the substance of their work will be judged harshly, whatever its intrinsic merits.
Errors undermine the authority of the whole and our condence in the control of
the writer. Similarly for composers, broadly following rules and precepts provides a
basis for comprehensibility. These are what make a language system possible at all;
communication of course needs constraints. Following these laws to the extent that
one is conscious of doing so at all allows for a smooth delivery of ideas, without
interference, without the reader or listener being distracted by faulty mechanics.
Scarlattis ideas, on the other hand, are to an unprecedented degree concerned
with the very delivery and articulation of material, precisely those inner mechanics
that allow competent utterance and promote competent listening. His invention, as
we have seen in so many circumstances already, is focused just as much on the edges
of an utterance as on its putative substance.
A second force for stability concerns social and professional status. Any analogy
with spoken or written language is weakened when we consider the demanding
nature of musical competence, how much sustained effort is required to achieve full
literacy and statistically how few are able to demonstrate this productively. An abil-
ity to move within accepted constraints is like a badge of professional competence.
Composers of pre-modern times need and want to demonstrate this ability in order
to belong, to be accepted by fellow composers, performers and informed listeners.
Indeed, why otherwise should products offered in a professional capacity be taken
seriously? Scarlattis apparent indifference to such concerns has been accounted for
in many ways, as we saw in Chapter 2. One of the explanations reviewed there con-
cerned his rm grounding in traditional techniques, in effect that learning allowed
liberty. If this does not account for the failure of other well-schooled composers to
follow a similar path, it does get us close to the technical spirit of many of Scarlattis
infringements and procedures. On many occasions, for instance, the learning goes
underground, as seen in K. 402; the ne grain of the music delivers more solidity
than is suggested by the big picture. Nevertheless, one must not miss the broader
sociological point: most composers want their learning to be an active presence, not
an absence. It should be heard and seen.
3
In another respect too, learning, or at least competence, is fundamental to the
technical spirit of the composers dissolute behaviour.
4
Scarlatti does not after all
3
Note in this regard William Webers idea that the codication of stile antico in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries served to counter the socially open-ended nature of the music profession and to create a musical elite.
The Contemporaneity of Eighteenth-Century Musical Taste, The Musical Quarterly 70/2 (1984), 189.
4
Compare Piero Santis characterization of sregolatezza in Santi, Nazionalismi, 51.
Irritations 219
abandon the premises or precepts of tonal language, which would be an impossibility.
What he allows us to do, and this is radical enough, is to glimpse a world beyond
these boundaries. He suggests the cultural contingency of the rules in the knowledge
that they are indispensable. This does not imply that they must be obeyed, since they
so often are not, but that they form the basis for comprehension and judgement. As
Loek Hautus has it in his discussion of Scarlattis licences, deliberate breaking of a
rule implies recognition of it; the exception to the rule must be projected against
a background of regularity.
5
Such recognition of the rules afrms their force at
the same time as we are encouraged to hear beyond them. They remain, in other
words, epistemologically active. For this process to have full effect in a Scarlattian
context, a relatively high degree of competence or learning from the listener must be
assumed. Such qualities must also be granted to the composer, given the frequency
and conspicuous nature of his offences. There is a certain condence implicit in
such rule-breaking, a sense that he can afford to disdain the outward appearance of
high art.
6
Nevertheless, such behaviour might wear rather thin if we were presented just
with a number of isolated infractions, as if a simple rebellious gesture were sufcient
to drive the point home. More instructive is to note the contexts in which such
infractions take place, to see how the composer conceptualizes them within the
larger discourse. This, after all, is the level of the operation at which learning must
be demonstrated, if what Giorgio Pestelli calls the game of complicity
7
between
composer, player and listener is to be sustained. Otherwise, communication really
will be weakened. At the same time, we must not neglect the instantaneous impact
of such features. As with the consideration of vamps, any attempted phenomenology
may easily nullify their unpredictability and individually upsetting qualities. There
is a danger, inherent of course in any attempt to dene a style, that we will become
too tolerant of them; they will no longer be seen as eventful but rather will take on
a systematic character.
A different sort of tolerance has been extended to Scarlattis offences by a number
of writers. There has been a tendency to minimize or even overlook them. The
campaign for Latin clarity outlined in Chapter 2 necessitates looking the other
way, since such features can contribute little to the guiding image of elegance and
lucidity. Ralph Kirkpatrick, in his inuential chapter on Scarlattis harmony, did not
look the other way but found rational explanations for many of the most aberrant
features. This was part of the campaign to give respectability to our composer,
quite understandable in the circumstances. After all, many of these features seem so
unaccountable that it would be quite easy to write them off as examples of artistic
mannerism, as the work of a sprightly buffoon. Too lurid a presentation can only
further marginalize their composer and discourage further enquiry. In the case of one
of the most celebrated passages of wrongdoing, the chain of parallel root-position
5
6
Rosen, Classical, 163. This phrase, once again, refers to Haydn.
7
Pestelli, Music, 88.
chords found in the second half of K. 394 (see Ex. 6.5, from bar 76), Kirkpatrick
provided a schematic reduction to demonstrate its essential orthodoxy:
Frequently a progression that is actually based on a simple enchainment of harmonies fullling
all the orthodox requirements for common tones or suspensions is realized by Scarlatti at
the harpsichord in terms of consecutive fths and apparently entirely nonvocal movement
of parts, as in [K. 394]. Yet regarded in terms of interchange and transposition of parts, such
a passage is seen to outline a progression of the utmost simplicity and orthodoxy, and to be
rich in common tones.
8
Kirkpatrick may be quite right to point to the learning and control which underpin
the progression, but he fails to explain why it is there at all, nor does he acknowledge
its freakish quality. This classic example of disdain, we may safely assume, will never
nd pedagogical use as an embodiment of simplicity and orthodoxy.
Nevertheless, Kirkpatricks explanation does raise one of the qualications that
must attend any study of Scarlattis dissolute behaviour. He reminds us that this is
instrumental music. Instrumental style was quite reasonably allowed to be freer in its
treatment of voice leading and texture than the vocal models that formed the assumed
basis of best compositional behaviour. The precise extent of the latitude remained
a subject of endless theoretical dispute throughout the century. With Scarlatti such
freedom is then pushed beyond what might have been thought of as reasonable
limits, as part of his keyboard realism, to be explored in Chapter 6. We must also
remind ourselves of the advent of the galant outlook on music. This, as we have seen,
entailed an antagonistic separation from the strict style and was, in theoretical terms,
associated especially with the free treatment of dissonance. A larger issue concerns
our collective image of the music of the eighteenth century. As stressed already, we
tend to view it from afar as an era of polished moderation, of exemplary harmony
and counterpoint; this is inextricably tied up with its pedagogical function, not just
in the classroom but in performing terms too. This tidy image is based on a selective
reading and understanding of the musical evidence, viewed through the pedagogical
abstractions that arose in the nineteenth century and that were maintained relatively
unaltered in the twentieth. For instance, despite the work of Heinrich Schenker
who stressed the more horizontal approach to harmony he believed was found in
the best contemporary teaching practices our general sense of the rules governing
the vertical combination of notes would seem to be much narrower than that which
obtained at the time.
Even allowing for this and the other qualifying factors, though, the Scarlatti sonatas
still tend to defeat such measures of historical sympathy. We may well acknowledge
the need for a more expansive view of the musical constraints of the time, but our
8
Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 225. An interesting take on this passage from K. 394 may be found in the arrangement by
Stephen Dodgson in Domenico Scarlatti Baroque Sonatas Arranged for Brass Quintet (London: Chester/Wilhelm
Hansen, 1982). He adds countermelodies on rst trumpet and horn which somewhat hide the bareness of the
voice leading.
Irritations 221
liberality surely has its limits.
9
In addition, it is not just the rules as such that are
subject to stress, but the wider notion of craftsmanship. The sonatas are full of messy
edges, whether syntactical or textural, quite apart from any evident solecisms. These
add up to a music of untidy excellence; they prompt Peter B ottingers twisted slogan
der unreine Satz, by which he characterizes an impure compositional style that
deals in irritations.
10
As suggested in the previous chapter, though, such untidiness may be as much
productive as destructive. If understood as an embodiment of Verfremdung, it may oc-
cur as much for positive historical and expressive reasons as negative, anti-normative
ones. These deforming details lend an edge to the routine of listening; they help
keep our hearing alive. The composers pronounced taste for discrepancy may be
most easily grasped, as we have seen, through noting the corrective efforts of editors
and performers. It may be no more than glancing irregularities that prompt such
corrections. For example, in his edition of the Sonata in E at major, K. 475, Muzio
Clementi tidies away many of the untidy details that help to enact the knockabout
comic sense of the work. In bar 10
1
(see Ex. 5.1a) he removes the rst left-hand
crotchet so that the shape of the whole bar matches the equivalent bars 13 and 16.
Then in the right hand of bar 16
1
he removes a minor infraction of voice-leading
rules, changing the b
2
to a g
2
so as to match the equivalent points of bars 10 and
13. Thus the preceding f
2
now rises properly to the local tonic as did the earlier
sequential equivalents. How does one counsel a performer who is uninterested in
Verfremdung and puzzled by untidy excellence to square up to the evidence of the
earliest sources? Such details after all will tend to niggle away during the early stages
of learning a piece, which involve breaking it down into units of invention as a means
of getting ones bearings. Here it is as if the units will not stand still for inspection
after the model provided by bars 911, each subsequent unit contains one irritating
difference. Persuading the player that such irritations are not only worth the trouble
of retaining, but worth trying to colour signicantly in a performance, might involve
pointing to their positive expressive function. These particular details exemplify a
restless, even hyperactive, creative sensibility that can by keeping the performer
alert generate a more dynamic style of execution.
Another apparently puzzling feature found in K. 475 is changed by Clementi. In
the closing theme (see Ex. 5.1b) he alters the right-hand part in bars 47 and 48 so
that it matches 43 and 44 in the previous phrase unit. The original version, although
it again seems so odd, is far more expressive; in writing his answering phrase to
425 from bar 46, which we would of course expect to match the previous unit,
Scarlatti effectively reaches the equivalent of bar 45 two bars early. Thus we now
hear three successive versions of what was set up as the closing pre-cadential bar.
This increases the sense of comic redundancy already inherent in the material. Such
9
As Peter Barcaba says, whatever our pretended liberality, the revolutionary aspects of Scarlatti will always
seem to be puzzling and against the rules. Barcaba, Geburtsstunde, 382.
10
Untidy excellence derives from Piero Rattolino, Scarlatti al pianoforte, in Domenico Scarlatti e il suo tempo, 113;
B ottinger, Ann aherungen, 756 and 81. See footnote 73 on p. 40 for further comment on this phrase.
Ex. 5.1a K. 475 bars 916
Ex. 5.1b K. 475 bars 4050
buffa-style cadential repetitions can always carry an inbuilt sense of self-parody,
11
but
Scarlatti actually manages to trump this with his own level of reductive travesty. Again
here Clementi is so valuable because he shows just the expectations that Scarlatti is
working against, with or through.
The comedy in fact becomes even richer at the end of the second half (see
Ex. 5.1c). The second phrase unit of the closing material from bar 92, the equivalent
of bars 469 in Ex. 5.1b, moves down an octave but this time does provide a match
for the preceding four bars. Thus we hear three playings of the initial one-bar shape
11
Concerning the issue of whether such cadential repetitions must necessarily be heard as comically redundant
or whether they may in fact be more generously and less pointedly conceived, see the contributions by Wye
J. Allanbrook (Comic Issues in Mozarts Piano Concertos) and Janet M. Levy (Contexts and Experience:
Problems and Issues) in Mozarts Piano Concertos: Text, Context, Interpretation, ed. Neal Zaslaw (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1996), 75105 and 13948.
Irritations 223
Ex. 5.1c K. 475 bars 8598
before the right hand delivers the closing closing pattern in bar 95. Following this,
however, Scarlatti appends two further repetitions of the pattern, so that bars 957
once more present three consecutive playings. He therefore has it both ways now,
working with the listeners symmetrical syntactical expectations by means of the
rhyme of bars 925 with 8891 before restoring the anarchy, as it were. Of course,
this in its own right answers a symmetrical need, creating a rhyme across the two
halves!
12
Once more performers (and editors and listeners) might be encouraged to
look for the spirit that seems to animate such happenings to respond in kind to a
certain slapstick avour behind these particular discrepancies.
Voice leading
Alongside such features we also nd more specic offences, of which those against
the tenets of voice leading are often among the more conspicuous. This is certainly
the case with the parallel fths of K. 394, particularly disturbing since it is difcult
to place them in any sort of stylistic context. Often in the sonatas they have popular
connotations, although this can cover a wide range of affect. As found in works like
12
The nal repetition in bar 97 also has the more positive function of restoring the obligatory register of the
upper voice, allowing a more decisive nish.
Ex. 5.2 K. 247 bars 8595
K. 96, 224 and 242, they represent an eruption of the primitive, with the rudeness
emphasized by immediate repetition; heard singly and in quite understated fashion
near the start of K. 208 and K. 415, on the other hand, they glance wryly at the
pastoral tradition. One of the most remarkable instances of parallel fths occurs in
K. 247 in C sharp minor. This begins as a nely wrought sonata in the Baroque
manner,
13
but eventually covers a great stylistic range. Rather like K. 263, discussed
in Chapter 3, it does so without any rupture. The dotted rhythm rst heard in
bar 3 recurs throughout, underpinning and softening any changes of style and affect.
Compare its appearances at bars 3, 12, 22, 32 and 39, where we move by degrees from
the clearly Baroque to the clearly Spanish a sort of stylistic modulation. Towards
the end, bars 8992 (given in Ex. 5.2) destroy this art of gentle transition. This
transposition of the second subject introduces very marked, even lurid, parallel fths
in the left hand, rst in one direction then the other. The material has always had a
plausibly Spanish character in its repetitions of a short, quasi-melismatic cell, but the
change here makes this suggestion startlingly explicit. It is as though a primitive
spell were being cast over the music. This is an odd place in the structure to unfold
such a meaning, and obviously this makes us reevaluate the tenor of the whole piece,
which has been relatively unied in tone and gesture. Bars 8992 are so exotic that
in the Johnson edition published in London in about 1757 and the two Vienna II
copies of the sonata there is some rewriting to avoid the crudity and incorrectness.
The semiquaver d
1
in 89 and 90 is changed to b, then both d
1
s in 91 and 92 are
replaced, by b and f
1
respectively.
14
Scarlattis younger colleague Albero seems to use consecutive fths in the same
way, as a calculated artistic effect. The fths found in bar 20 of his Sonata No. 3
in D major act as a stylistic transition from the Arcadian pastoral manner of the
13
Pestelli notes the similarity of its idiom to that of the Essercizi; Pestelli, Sonate, 222. Compare also the writing
found in bars 34 with works like K. 69 or K. 147.
14
See Choi, Manuscripts, 78 and also 18081.
Irritations 225
Ex. 5.3a Albero: Sonata No. 12 bars 2024
Ex. 5.3b K. 301 bars 3944
opening to something more urgently rustic. A more ambiguous example is found
in the Sonata No. 12 in D major (see Ex. 5.3a). Are the parallels found in bar 23
accidental, incidental or deliberately bad? What follows is, as in Sonata No. 3, a move
to the minor, then some hectic dance steps, suggesting that the voice leading helps to
change the linguistic register. A comparable instance is found in bar 42 of Scarlattis
K. 301 in A major (Ex. 5.3b). These parallel fths seem to come out of the blue, in
a work of neat gestures that convey a rened populargalant avour. However, the
preceding two bars have offered a passing hint at something more exotic, so that our
fths could form part of the same stylistic moment. On the other hand, they might
also be conceived as a purer form of disdain, not so much referable to the particular
context as what could be simply described as a bohemian touch.
15
The Sonata in D major, K. 178, also contains a good example of what might seem
to be casual incorrect voice leading, rst heard at bar 31 (see Ex. 5.4a). This is clearly
not the worst of howlers and might not even register strongly with many educated
listeners, and so the question arises whether such parallel fths are anything more
than incidental. Both parts are simply enunciating standard cadential formulations
in principle, this is like the situation in the rather less harmless passage in K. 222,
to which we will shortly turn our attention. Yet such a manifestation must gnaw
away in the mind of any listener or player, even allowing for the stylistic context,
which is popular here. The offending bar is repeated twice more at 37 and 39 before
15
To use the term of Henry Colles found in Colles, Sonata, 896.
Ex. 5.4a K. 178 bars 2840
Ex. 5.4b K. 178 bars 738
the rst half is over, so there is plenty of time to catch up with the problem. The
very fact of its repetition, that Scarlatti has allowed the incorrectness in a bar that
by denition we know must recur several times, increases the likelihood that this is
more than a passing whim. Perhaps we are being challenged to make sense of the
incident it has already been noted that the composer often repeats his errors in
this spirit. The nal version of the feature, though, seems to conrm any suspicions.
In bar 77 (see Ex. 5.4b) the offending parts are brought a literal fth apart, so that the
oddity is unmissable. This is a witty moment the composer owns up, as it were
but also rather disconcerting in its placement.
16
This is a conrmation of wrong-
doing and so in a certain sense represents a form of resolution, but it also presents
us with a stronger infraction of voice-leading conduct, just when nal closure is
arriving.
In his edition, Longo does his best to mollify the problem. He leaves the rst-half
examples untouched, but takes advantage of the altered melodic conguration that
precedes those in the second half. He ties the d
2
over the bar line at 745 and then,
conrming the more explicit wrongness of the nal version, replaces the d
2
at bar
76
3
with a d
1
which is then tied over the bar. He thus avoids both the sudden landing
on an open fth on the rst beat of 77 and the explicit sounding of the parallel fths
on the second beat.
We may smile at such editorial contortions, just as we may smile at Hans von
B ulows charge that the composer took excessive pleasure in covert and overt parallel
16
Further wit arises from the fact that the change of octave which brings about these literal fths is a common
rhetorical device in Scarlattis cadential closes, used to bring about a stronger sense of nality through a shift in
registral colour.
Irritations 227
Ex. 5.5 K. 551 bars 3443
fths and octaves, and that the wider voice-leading conduct of his sonatas very
frequently offends eye and ear.
17
As already suggested, though, liberal tolerance has
denite limits in such cases. The moralistic air that surrounds such pronouncements
has never entirely cleared, as is evident in the continued exaltation of the strict
style at the expense of the galant noted in Chapter 3. And it can be the seemingly
more random moments of offence that give us the greatest trouble. It is notable
that most of the Scarlatti examples collected by Brahms in his study of the feature
involve wholesale parallel motion rather than fths or octaves out of the blue, in
contexts where they are harder to explain.
18
Often such contexts feature light, half-
heard collisions, as in Ex. 5.5, from the Sonata in B at major, K. 551. In bar 39
two scales, one travelling twice as fast as the other, are superimposed, leading to
all sorts of strange parallel intervals. The effect is particularly noticeable given the
straightforward obedient imitation between the hands in the previous three bars.
Indeed, it is this respectable procedure that brings about the trouble; the left hand
continues imitating the right at the distance of a beat into bar 39
1
and then presents
a logical continuation of the line while the right departs from the pattern. Com-
parable instances may be found in K. 17 (the piled-up fourths rst heard in bars
2021), K. 184 (bar 20), K. 212 (bars 3033) and of course K. 254 (see Ex. 1.3).
Another type of voice-leading irritation involves missing notes. This is often
found in conjunction with cadential unisons, when expected notes of resolution
fail to eventuate. In K. 132, for instance, the seventh found in the upper voice in
the penultimate bar does not resolve. K. 525 offers a typical lack of punctiliousness
in bar 23 (see Ex. 5.6a), where the a
2
suspension, prepared properly at the end of
22, does not resolve. In addition, there are parallel octaves between the third and
fourth quavers (EF). A g
2
on the third quaver of the bar (paired with an e
2
below)
would solve both problems. Kirkpatrick, no less, and Horowitz both in fact play
this (also in the matching bars 29 and 31), by analogy with the equivalent points in
the second half.
19
Here the composer has himself provided an immaculate solution
to the wrongdoing of the rst half. The performers changes are perhaps motivated
17
B ulow, Klavierst ucke, ii.
18
See Mast, Brahms, 545, 11621 and 186.
19
Deutsche Grammophon: 439 438 2, 1971/1994 (Kirkpatrick); Sony: 53460, 1964/1993 (Horowitz).
Ex. 5.6a K. 525 bars 214
Ex. 5.6b K. 466 bars 1421
as much by a desire to tidy up the discrepancies between the rst- and second-half
versions altogether as to correct the faulty voice leading. As it stands, this is a nice
game of discrepant details and errors corrected in the end, which it seems quite
unnecessary to interfere with.
Another striking hole in voice leading is found in K. 466 in F minor (Ex. 5.6b).
A fth-progression in the bass from C in bar 16 to the G in bar 20 is conjoined
with a four-part rising sequence in the tenor and a three-part pattern in the soprano.
The tenor, the most active and wide-ranging voice, seems to go missing at the
very moment of completion: there should be a minim g
1
at the start of bar 20. In
fact, subsequent events show that the effect of the missing note has been precisely
calculated. The g
1
found in bar 21
1
provides a delayed voice-leading gratication that
also helps to maintain tension between the two separate units of the larger phrase.
The means by which this delayed g
1
is prepared and quit are also signicant. It is
reached by means of an appoggiatura a
1
that forms a strong minor-ninth dissonance
with the bass and followed by a variant involving a
1
, strengthened by a sharpened
soprano note. It is as if this textural layer has become sensitized by the disturbing
absence at the start of bar 20, generating the dissonances and adjustments that follow.
If some of the features discussed above remain fairly localized in effect, there are
many cases where incorrectness casts a shadow over the entire sonata. K. 222 in A
major offers an extreme example. In his 1970 dissertation, Sheveloff introduced his
discussion of this piece with the thought that there are times when Scarlattis licenses
Irritations 229
Ex. 5.7 K. 222 bars 2940
remain unbelievable and almost inexplicable no matter how many times one studies
them. He pronounced himself honestly puzzled by the dissonances in the two-bar
unit of bars 323 (see Ex. 5.7) which include four consecutive sevenths in the
latter bar to the extent of approving of Longos creditable and still useful job in
correcting the passage.
20
Yet in terms of structural placement, this is just the point
at which the composer often introduces rogue or wrong notes in the run-up to
the nal cadence of the half, when the tonal sense is quite secure. We have already
noted examples of such cadential estrangement. Secondly, it is possible to make some
sense of the passage both harmonically and thematically. The basic harmony is clear
enough I in 32 leading (possibly through I
6
at 32
2
) to IV at 33
1
then V at 33
2
. The
upper voice has got out of phase with this; the a
2
at the end of 32 belongs with the
following IV and the b
2
in 33 belongs with the following V. The a
2
is a passing note
in a chromatic rising-third line, interrupted by the consonant skip down to c
2
. In
fact, we have heard almost exactly the same right-hand line already, in bars 78; the
only difference is that the fourth and seventh notes swap around. Nowb
1
leads to c
2
,
the reverse of the earlier alto progression. Its reappearance at 323 is connected
with a game played precisely from bars 78 with establishing the dominant and the
various degrees of oversharpening required or not, since Scarlatti takes us too far
sharpwards. The point surely of the haunting passage from bar 18 onward is that the
dominant attempts to settle into place by repetition. The common tone is placed
20
Sheveloff, Keyboard, 261 and 263.
conspicuously at the top of the texture, giving some stability of contour after all the
previous see-sawing. The turn to minor at 212 is also a means of afrming V as
well as cancelling out the oversharpening.
The left-hand part at 323 has also been heard almost exactly before at bars 234
and, immediately preceding the unit under discussion, at bars 3031, thus providing
a big thematic overlap between the two separate parts of the structure. Loek Hautuss
principle of insistence
21
comes to mind when one considers the combination of
the hands both lines have been heard almost verbatim before, and so now neither is
prepared to give ground, as it were. The other nicety about 3031 (and 234) is that
the intervallic conduct is so blameless the hands move in parallel thirds almost all the
way. Thus both in specic thematic terms and given the play of harmonic indicators
note the AA in 33 the muddle at 323 has its place, although it does not lose its
unbelievable character; and for all the dissonance, this is more stable harmonically
than what has gone before. Not only that, but we have also already heard four
consecutive sevenths, if on a slightly different time-scale; see the two upper voices
at bars 11
2
13
1
! The unit that follows from bar 36 reects the events of the previous
one. The b
1
that lls in the fourth b
1
e
2
(compare the lled-in g
2
b
2
of 323) is
a witty but not wounding contribution to the oversharpening debate. Two of the
consecutive sevenths remain in bar 37, preceded by two consecutive fourths; in the
parallel place in 39 there is a thorough recomposition which solves all the problems.
The previous upper voice is placed in the alto and the bass rests on a dotted crotchet
(it has been in continuous quaver motion from its entry in bar 5). Most signicantly,
the soprano resembles the alto part heard frombars 18
6
onwards this was the motive
associated with the dominants attempt to articulate itself free from interference.
K. 123 in E at major offers even more screeching dissonances, involving parallel
major sevenths (at bars 318).
22
If it is any consolation, they sound worse than they
actually are. The c
3
and a
2
in bar 31 act as neighbour notes to the controlling b
2
,
but they relate to each other in the manner of a consonant skip. The parallel sevenths
formed by this and what the ear hears as a d
2
b
1
succession are not supported by
the notation, in which it is clear that the two notes belong to different voices. Thus
what looks harmless on the page and is in all voice-leading essentials unimpeachable
hurts the ear.
Counterpoint
Such clashes as found in K. 222 and K. 123 can be rescued to an extent by an
appeal to contrapuntal process; they seem to be brought about by parts with their
own thematic integrity that move as if oblivious to each other. Such an analytical
gambit is quite common, as Janet M. Levy has suggested: When counterpoint or
21
See Hautus, Insistenz, especially 1389.
22
A milder version of the same pattern may be found from bar 57 of K. 364, while bars 25ff. of K. 154 offer a
very similar rhythmicmotivic conguration, there involving parallel fths.
Irritations 231
Ex. 5.8 K. 128 bars 1218
voice-leading can be invoked to explain the origin of a chord progression, then
everything from fussiness and complexity to ambiguity and peculiar dissonances can
be understood and legitimized.
23
Although Levy is referring primarily to approaches
to later nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, it is a measure of the strangeness
of Scarlatti that such measures might also be required when dealing with much of
his language. To exempt the approach taken here from such a charge, one might
point to the manner in which the surrounding material plainly seems to prepare and
tease out the sources of the ambiguity. The composer himself uses counterpoint as
a pretext for such a scrape, creating an ironic hidden respectability while denying its
overt manifestation.
After all, no one could maintain that counterpoint in its more respectable guise
can be invoked to deal with the sonatas of Scarlatti. He does not invest heavily in
the patina of craftsmanship by which most composers quite naturally signal their
authority it is applied technique rather than a pure display of it that animates the
composer. In many cases, of course, explicit resolution of a problematic feature is
not sought. Even where it is, the aberrations may come back to haunt us; as is the
case with vamps, their disruptive rhetorical force can easily outweigh their apparent
structural integration. The frightening specimen of voice leading rst heard in bar 14
of K. 128 in B at minor, for example, is provided with a correction almost imme-
diately, two bars later (see Ex. 5.8), and the phrase itself or its answering companion
are reworked on four occasions in the second half. The two nal corrective versions
in bars 59 and 68 are the most convincing apparent liquidation of the problem, but
by then the original offending unit has been heard so many times, in ever different
harmonic settings, that it has acquired a sort of strange stability. This disorientates our
sense of what is normal, lulling us into acceptance; in another instant, though, we
may snap back to musical reality, disengaging from any sense of trust in the whole.
23
Janet M. Levy, Covert and Casual Values in Recent Writings about Music, The Journal of Musicology 5/1
(1987), 20.
The sort of hidden learning dened above is perhaps at its most striking when the
music itself makes a display of counterpoint before seeming to abandon it. This of
course is a very common pattern at the start of sonatas; it has been interpreted earlier
as a manifestation of difdence or disdain, but any such reading can generally only
be made after the event. There are exceptions, in which distancing is achieved by
the form of the imitation itself. K. 362 presents a laconic reductive parody; in K. 422
the ourishing right-hand opening suggests a grand style but the left-hand answer
is lopsided and the right hand strangely silent, making for a disconcertingly naked
texture.
24
In most cases, though, the imitation must be taken literally at the mo-
ment of its execution. It suggests organization, good technique, learning, control,
rhetorical certainty.
In K. 493 in G major a sort of galant counterpoint sets in once the opening strict
imitation has been abandoned. This is more extended than usual, with successively
smaller gaps between the imitation of each point, but surely there is something
pointedly pedantic about the procedure. It gives way in bar 10 to a more natural
phrase rhythm and a texture that is neither precisely polyphonic nor homophonic,
one that reuses the second bar of the opening point. This passage repeats itself with
slight variations each time, building up the momentum (the subtle changes of pitch
and scoring each time suggest that the ornamental differences are also positively
calculated). What is reached via an ascending scale that expands the repeated one-
bar cell (for the rst time delivered without any of the ornaments that accompanied it
in its opening learned guise) is a recontextualizing of the opening tag, now made the
start of a pre-cadential ourish; compare bar 20 with bar 1. This process encourages
the sense that the opening has been heard as not viable and in need of transformation.
What ensues for much of the rest of the sonata is relaxed polyphony, neither clearly
chordal nor formally contrapuntal.
In K. 224 in D major, on the other hand, an easy-going imitative beginning is
succeeded from bar 17
3
by something rather more strictly and earnestly contrapun-
tal. This presents us with bar after bar of overlapping entries of a standard tag (one
also found in K. 150), moving climactically ever higher in the upper voice. This is
followed by a return to a more casual form of note-spinning that is clearly related to
the opening material. In bar 44 we hear a single rhythmic reworking of the tag so in-
tensively treated before, made chic and decorative. Aside from this, the counterpoint
seems to have been exhausted by the earlier episode and disappears.
In the second half, however, the tag is reinterpreted in a decidedly primitive
context at bars 723, with rude parallel fths in the left hand. Of course, the stylistic
change is likely to blind us to this resemblance. The original tag itself, as seen from
bar 96
3
of Ex. 5.9, consists of a suspension prepared on the third beat of the bar,
restruck on the downbeat and then resolved down a step on the second.
25
The
24
That this texture should be heard as incongruously thin given the grand manner becomes clear at the start of the
second half, which contracts the distance between entries and adds counterthemes. Texture and style are made
more compatible.
25
The harmonic rhythm here and the diminutional ambiguity of the two-semiquaver gure mean that one may
also hear the resolution as occurring on the third quaver.
Irritations 233
Ex. 5.9 K. 224 bars 8198
third sequential exotic version seen from bar 81
3
of Ex. 5.9 clearly retains all these
attributes (and the rhythmic conguration is similar). At bars 914 there is a moment
of white heat which forms a climax to the non-functional harmonies of the second
half. It presents parallel E major and F major chords over an E in the bass, a classic
Phrygian progression, but this also brings us back remarkably to the learned world,
since three consecutive versions of the tag are embedded within the passage: thus from
the last semiquaver of bar 91 to bar 94
2
we nd BBA, AAG and BBA. Not
only that, but the clash with the chordal member a second above is also replicated;
thus the C clashes with the B at 92
1
just as the F clashes with the E at 98
1
.
The superimposition of primitive and civilized features in this passage encapsulates
brilliantly the polyglot versatility of our composer. In this sense it is no surprise
when the furore then returns. However, it lasts for only a fraction of the time it did
in the rst half. This makes sense given that the furore has already been presented
in several different guises from the start of the second half. K. 224 therefore offers
a classic instance of applied technique; the learning has not been shelved but has
gone underground.
Giorgio Pestelli cites the opening of K. 437 in F major (Ex. 5.10a) for its evocation
of a Frescobaldian canzona,
26
but the work as a whole seems to provide a purer form
of abandoned counterpoint than K. 493 and 224; there seems to be little attempt
to hold to the textural premises of the start. A more modern manner makes itself
felt almost immediately, and towards the end there is a marked change of tone to
26
Ex. 5.10a K. 437 bars 15
Ex. 5.10b K. 437 bars 1624
something akin to a popular song. Yet K. 437 is full of witty recontextualizations
of the opening point. This is especially true of its rst bar, consisting of a solitary
dotted minim. It is only too easy to embed this in the texture, as in bar 20, where
it is heard in both outer voices (see Ex. 5.10b), or, most charming of all, the nal
bar of the rst half the cadential resting point on c
2
also represents the rst note
of the subject, which will immediately become clear when bar 1 is repeated. If it
is objected that this hardly counts as real counterpoint or real learning, the answer
is that such cheating is fundamental to all contrapuntal art. The very prevalence
of tags in polyphonic writing arises after all precisely to allow for maximum con-
structive potential of the given material and hence maximum integration of texture.
Using a single note as a thematic binding agent obviously takes this learning to an
extreme of economy. Thus the bass at the start of the second half consists of a series
of dotted minims joined into a rising chromatic progression, technically a sort of
stretto!
However, the second part of the two-bar opening theme is not altogether ne-
glected either. Its last three rising quavers are also found in the reworking at bar 20,
in the alto (and tenor). In bars 4950 the altos changing-note gures are very much
like those found at the start of bar 2 (see Ex. 5.10c), and the soprano features dotted
minims; thus the two limbs of the subject are superimposed. Something similar hap-
pens in bars 567, but with the added incorporation of the rising three-quaver gure
from bar 2, and the dotted minim now in the bass. Throughout the sonata the long
note seems to have been exploited for its sonorous value alone. This is certainly the
Irritations 235
Ex. 5.10c K. 437 bars 4957
case with the passage rst heard at bars 2021, which has the separate character of
an objet sonore, and is even more striking at 567, with the sudden registral plunge
of the bass and consequent textural gap. Several commentators have suggested that
bells are being evoked here.
27
It is Scarlattis triumph so completely to disguise a
polyphonic entry, turning counterpoint into colour.
For all this celebration of Scarlattis hidden art, we must remind ourselves how
important the more formal sense of counterpoint has been in the reception of
Scarlatti, and indeed all composers. One only need call to mind the disproportionate
attention and adulation given to the nales of Mozarts String Quartet in G major,
K. 387, and Jupiter Symphony, or the fugues in Haydns Op. 20 string quartets.
28
There is a denite sense that the critical community is more at ease with counterpoint
as a type than as a style, in other words with complete polyphonic entities that
traditionally connote the summit of creative and technical mastery.
29
The Scarlattian
literature has witnessed something of a battle along such lines. Thus Max Seiffert
opens his account of the Scarlatti sonatas by owning that Scarlatti was not much of
a fugue writer. As if to answer these charges, Cesare Valabrega devotes the last pages
of his 1935 book on the composer to a consideration of the Cats Fugue, K. 30,
in which Scarlatti gives a proof of [his ability with] the science of sound, in spite
of his general orientation against such a genre. Even so, he then nishes in an oddly
downbeat way by conceding that Scarlatti does not write Germanic fugues, that they
do not have the complexity of Bachs.
30
The same ideology is served by the views
27
See Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 203, and Livermore, Spanish, 115.
28
This ideological overbalance is also apparent, for instance, in Linton Powells discussion of Alberos keyboard
works, which devotes far more space to the fugues than to the other movement types. See Powell, Albero.
29
For example, a large part of Donald Toveys scorn for Clementis habit of including short canons in his larger
structures seems to arise from the implication that the composer did not have the courage or technique to execute
counterpoint on a larger scale. See Raymond Monelle, Toveys Marginalia, The Musical Times 131/1769 (1990),
3523.
30
Seiffert, Klaviermusik, 420; Valabrega, Clavicembalista, 30912.
of Degrada and Pestelli, understandably keen to re-establish the composers serious
credentials by emphasizing counterpoint at every possible opportunity.
31
Of course, all this is not to suggest that every piece of counterpoint in a Scarlatti
sonata is loaded or skewed in a particular way. For instance, at bar 72 of K. 345 we
hear a brief contrapuntal linking passage in a work that is largely homophonic and
treble-dominated. A very similar one-bar passage, also placed near the start of the
second half, is found in another work in a mostly homophonic popular style, K. 314
(see bar 63). In neither case does the material have to suggest the pointed entry of
a learned style; rather such moments can simply be a manifestation of a technical
instinct or training that uses counterpoint to get around tight corners.
Cluster chords and dirty harmony
Another nicety derived from contrapuntal precept that is apparent in an overwhelm-
ing proportion of keyboard music of the time (and of many later times too) is the
tendency to keep to a similar number of parts throughout. Scarlatti offends most
conspicuously against this, and also against any sense of the limits of dissonance,
in the cluster or acciaccatura chords that have naturally aroused so much critical
interest. There is a tension between the point of view that they can essentially be
assimilated with various historical precedents and the point of view that they are
primarily a modernist feature. The use of dissonant, non-harmonic notes in chords
around cadence points was an established part of Italian continuo practice, and the
rst theorist to describe them in print seems to have been Francesco Gasparini,
possibly a teacher of the young Scarlatti.
On the other hand, to those who read them in a modernist light, any historical
precedents are peripheral, particularly given that in many works the clusters them-
selves are found in clusters, most famously in the case of K. 119 (see Ex. 6.14b).
In such cases the real dissonance comes less from the constitution of the individual
chord as such than from its insistent repetition or alternation with other impure har-
monies, so that there is an accumulation of harsh sonority. Commenting on B ulows
description of the K. 119 chords as ugly and horrible, Roman Vlad counters that
our ears are now used to more than this, since Le Sacre . . . to the extent that in order
to give back to old music its effectiveness and force, we need if anything to accen-
tuate the dissonances rather than remove them.
32
Indeed, although a comparison
with The Rite of Spring can easily be dismissed as anachronistic, it can be argued that
the sensational effect of Scarlattis clusters demands such extreme measures to do
31
For example Degradas assertion of the typically contrapuntal nature of [Scarlattis] compositional mentality;
Degrada, Lettere, 275. As the preceding analyses will have demonstrated, I do not dissent from this judgement,
but for Degrada and Pestelli this counterpoint generally has to be of the demonstrable (strict) kind and they do
not sufciently emphasize the ideological dimensions to Scarlattis and our own response to the whole issue.
32
Vlad, Storia, 25. B ulows reaction is perhaps preferable to a calm acceptance of these dissonances as part of
the style; similarly, the more recent complaint by Georges Beck about les dissonances inhumaines at least aids
Vlads restorative wish. Beck, R everies, 14.
Irritations 237
them historical justice. This is especially the case in connection with such a sonata
as K. 119, where the dissonant chords do indeed seem to be thumped out as in the
famous passage from Les Augures printaniers.
Such interpretations should also be related to performance practice. The counsel
from the theoretical sources of the time was that the acciaccatura notes should not be
held on. Indeed, this was well understood in the case of the so-called passing acciac-
catura often found in solo keyboard contexts. Thus we nd in works such as a Toccata
in F major by Galuppi and a Toccata in G major by Alessandro Scarlatti a notation of
block chords that include acciaccatura notes and the indication Arpeggio.
33
In such
contexts the harmonic notes might be held on after the initial ourish, but not the
acciaccaturas, which fullled a decorative function. In the case of the simultaneous
acciaccatura, the same principle is generally thought to apply. But, as has often been
pointed out, this is not manageable in works like K. 119 and K. 175; it is precluded
by the rapid repetition of such chords. Even in works where such advice might be
followed, it is not clear whether the Scarlatti performer should proceed thus.
34
In
any case, we should bear in mind that harpsichord damping was often so poor that
there is little sonic difference whether these extra notes are immediately released
or not.
The fortepiano sonatas of Giustini published in 1732 furnish an important con-
tribution to this debate from several points of view. They feature acciaccatura chords
notated exactly as in Scarlatti. Aside from the organological implications of this coin-
cidence Sheveloff believes that such chords add bite to the gentler sonority of the
piano for which Scarlatti also conceived most of his crush sonatas
35
they also bear
on their manner of performance and their contrasting usage in Scarlatti. Clusters
are found in the following movements: the Balletto and Sarabande of Sonata No. 1,
Andante, ma non presto of Sonata No. 3, Preludio of Sonata No. 4, Preludio of
No. 5, Allemande of No. 7, and the Allemande and Dolce of No. 11. These clusters
must presumably be held on for the full indicated duration, since passages in the
Preludio of No. 5 offer a counterexample. Signicantly, this is marked Adagio, e
arpeggiato nell acciaccature. At bars 1
4
and 2
1
the acciaccaturas are clearly marked as
small notes preceding the arpeggiated chordal notes. This occurs several times later;
elsewhere the dissonances are written as normal-size notes. The lack of such nota-
tion or any titular acknowledgement of their presence in the other movements surely
means that they are to be given full value elsewhere. As far as usage is concerned,
these clusters always occur at important points of harmonic articulation, either at a
cadence point or near the beginning of a phrase. This is substantially different from
33
The toccata is part of Sonata No. 6 in F major in Baldassare Galuppi: Sei sonate, ed. Iris Caruana (Padua: Zanibon,
1968) No. 5052; the Alessandro Scarlatti example is found in the opening section of his Toccata No. 9 in G
major from the Primo e secondo libro di toccate.
34
For example, Ann Bond writes that the added notes found in the left-hand chords in bars 8082 of K. 490
should be released quickly (without offering any rm musical rationale for this advice), while those found after
the double bar of K. 215 may be held on. Bond, Harpsichord, 199200.
35
See Sheveloff, Frustrations II, 96.
Scarlattis use of them, where they are most commonly found in the middle of a unit
and less frequently at a beginning. Many of Scarlattis most striking uses of clusters
as for example in K. 115 or K. 490 cannot in other words be assimilated into the
traditional patterns of articulative or cadential delineation.
If we turn back to the source of this feature in continuo playing, it may be that
we do not in any case have the full measure of the historical evidence. Lars-Ulrik
Mortensen has recently drawn attention to the marked change in Italian continuo
style that had occurred by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Not only were
very full-voiced realizations common, but the doubling of dissonances was too, even
if it broke the rules. Mortensen maintains that the discretion and unobtrusiveness
in continuo playing so strongly advocated nowadays would have seemed no more
than a curious relic of the past to an [eighteenth]-century Italian musician.
36
This
tradition has an obvious relevance to Scarlattis practice, not just in terms of liberal
dissonance treatment but also in terms of full textures, and then more broadly in the
sense that such sonorities seem to be valued for their own expressive and sensuous
effect. However, Scarlatti does not in general aim for the marvellous fullness so
frequently noted of this style of continuo playing, and this reminds us of the limits
of such a parallel altogether: it does not really explain why the composer brought
such dissonances routinely into notated music. Although we have seen that they do
appear in other solo keyboard music of the time, this tends to be in more delim-
ited and far less striking contexts. In their exuberant excess, the continuo practices
reviewed certainly offer a closer match, but then the question arises: why should
Scarlatti wish to transfer such continuo technique onto the written page when its
whole raison d etre lay in being improvised? Indeed, such features were surely al-
lowable precisely because they were not committed to paper and hence beyond
close visual scrutiny. One other possible explanation for the clusters has been that
they reect guitar technique and, by extension, suggest an exoticpopular stylistic
world.
37
On the whole, however, some conceptual gap remains. As with vamps, a
fairly rm historical context does not seem to be equal to what the sonatas present;
it is difcult ultimately to hear the clusters simply as an intensication of existing
features.
It was stressed earlier in connection with cluster chords that the sensation of
dissonance often results as much fromaccumulation as the unorthodoxy of individual
harmonic entities. In the case of K. 64, for instance, the number of non-chordal notes
is relatively few, but their close proximity disorientates the listener. After the added
notes found in bars 28 and 30, for instance, the ear is easily persuaded that it is hearing
further clusters in bars 31, 32 and 34, yet these are simply chords of the dominant
seventh a dissonance so routine that we normally never even hear it as such. The
lasting impression of the whole is, to borrow a memorable phrase of Degradas from
his study of the late cantatas, of a deliberately dirty harmonization.
38
In other
36
Unerringly Tasteful?: Harpsichord Continuo in Corellis Op. 5 Sonatas, Early Music 24/4 (1996), 677.
37
See for instance Boyd, Master, 183, and Bond, Harpsichord, 182 and 199.
38
Irritations 239
Ex. 5.11a K. 150 bars 5762
Ex. 5.11b K. 198 bars 546
Ex. 5.11c K. 57 bars 96111
contexts, the dissonant sense can also accumulate through many small aberrations,
producing a sort of horizontal dissonance. K. 184, for instance, features so many
small clashes, near false relations and unusual scale forms that the whole work seems
to vibrate with dissonant sound. In many cases this seems to be in the name (or under
the pretext) of exoticism K. 179 in G minor offers one of many other instances.
Such dirty harmonic practice can take many different more localized forms.
In bar 58 of K. 150 (see Ex. 5.11a) the pedal c
2
in the alto, prolonged beyond its
harmonic function in the previous bar, illustrates a common means of generating dis-
sonance. This together with the spacing of the chord creates the harsh sound. In bars
54
3
and 55
3
of K. 198 (Ex. 5.11b) the right hands G and E imply a perfectly plausible
V6/4, only the left hand has already moved on to the (7/)5/3, another common
type of discrepancy. In bar 105 of K. 57 (Ex. 5.11c) we nd a disagreement between
I6/3 of F and a right-hand part that outlines IV with semitonal lower appoggiaturas.
Ex. 5.12 K. 407 bars 198
Note that in the model for the passage, at bar 101, all is correct, but second time
around the right-hand material begins a bar ahead of itself, as it were, and this
causes the clash. The effective superimposition of F and B at major chords here
may be taken so much further in other works that one wants to reach for another
apparent harmonic anachronism bitonality. In bars 1012 of K. 214, for exam-
ple, the imitative counterpoint between alto and tenor takes precedence over the
harmonic sense and we consequently hear a mish-mash of harmonies that sounds
bitonal.
Irritations 241
Ex. 5.12 (cont.)
If most of these harmonic clashes need many notes to make their effect, the
Sonata in C major, K. 407, manages with a minimal texture (see Ex. 5.12). This
skittish work features the most apparently gratuitous of dissonances, the insistent
major seventh rst heard in bar 16, yet this is inspired by a less conspicuous piece of
misbehaviour found at the outset. The respectable device of imitation subtly misres,
setting up problems that are quite systematically worked through for all the apparent
eccentricity. Just after the left hand enters with a tonal imitation of the right, the
right hand strikes a C, which lends some aural confusion to the event. Although we
are still in C major, the F of bar 2
2
being required for voice-leading reasons, what is
offered suggests a play of modulatory indicators. In any C major work F is the rst
important accidental we might expect to hear, as it indicates the basic grammatical
move to the dominant; C would be the next such accidental, in the typical process
of oversharpening which enables the subsequent settling on V to sound relatively
stable. What happens in bar 2 suggests an attempt to go to V and V/V simultaneously,
a crowding of the natural course of events. The too-close proximity of C and F
must therefore be teased out from bar 16 onwards.
The mini-consequent from bar 2
3
in the right hand makes as if to continue the
same textural process, but at bars 45 the hands suddenly play together, in contrary
motion. This much simpler form of counterpoint suggests a marked retreat from the
earlier complications. The behaviour of the two hands in relationship to each other,
in conjunction with the harmonic argument, becomes one of the main themes of the
piece. The very plain C major cadence that follows seems to expose the redundancy
of the earlier accidentals. However, just when we are reaching the equivalent point
of the second, matching phrase, the new F at bar 11 moves us toward a half-
cadence on V of V (using very standard phraseology compare bars 678 and
824 of K. 243, for instance). The whole phrase lasts nine and a bit bars from
this point all phrase lengths are deantly irregular except for those that nish each
half.
Almost by way of compensation, the motivic construction of the sonata is very
clearly dened. If reduced to its lowest common denominator, motive (a) can be
dened as a descent of about half an octave followed by a second (in either direction).
This is heard more simply than it can be described; versions of it may be found at
bars 01
2
, 5
2
6
2
, 11, 12, 312, 44, 50
3
51, 623 and 6871. Motive (b) consists of a
scalic third; see for instance bars 1
2
2, 4, 1314, 16ff., 23, 43, 51, 73. An extension
of this third into a scale may be found at 2022, 2931, 434, 546, and 68ff.
(in both hands).
The Schleifer
39
gure that initiates the obvious wrongdoing at 16 is a version of (b).
According to the understood usage of this gure, the outer notes should receive
harmonic support and the middle one act as a passing note between them. Thus the
a
2
and f
2
should be consonant, but in fact the g
2
is, since it ts with the left-hand
harmony. However, it cannot be heard in this way; the rules of usage demand that g
2
be heard not just as subordinate, but as an embellishment of the embellishment (it is
a passing note from the consonant skip a
2
on the way to the primary pitch, the f
2
).
In other words not only is the f
2
dissonant, but it receives diminutional support to
double the dissonant effect. Suggestions that this passage represents a village band,
or even out-of-tune bugles should not be dismissed, but they divert attention from
the radical aspects of K. 407s harmonic argument, substituting an amiable pictorial
image.
40
39
See footnote 22 on p. 11 for an explanation of this term.
40
See Chambure, Catalogue, 139, and Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 202.
Irritations 243
One should also note that the Schleifer pitches are set up by the right-hand pitch
activity throughout bars 1315, precisely the standard formula that enunciated V
of V; this reinforces the sense that bar 16 represents a superimposition of V and its
dominant (just like bar 2). Thus while the left hand moves properly from the cadence
point on D onto the dominant G, the right hand continues to express D through
the triad members F and A; having originally spurted ahead, it now lags behind.
The f
2
dissonance does not even resolve properly, to the g
2
for which it so painfully
substitutes; it moves in bar 20 to f
2
(the wrong harmonic direction!), becoming
part of V
7
of IV of V. This is followed by witty augmentations of the Schleifer twice
over at 21 then 23, the texture thins, momentum slackens and we nish back on V
of V. This is exactly the point reached in bar 15, so that the harmonic argument
has failed to advance. In order to reach the desired end of a properly articulated G
major Scarlatti must therefore transpose by a fth, so that we start with V of V and
its dominant.
Afurther complication should be pointed out, in that although the left hand at bars
256 seems to move between I and IV of D (and at 1617 between I and IV of G),
its activity may be read in another way, as a move between V and I of G (and V
and I of C in the previous phrase). In this latter reading, while the right hand pulls
sharpwards, the left hand in fact pulls atwards, so that both are a step away on the
circle of fths from where they should be. Thus not only is there an implicit bitonal
clash between triads of A major and D major at 25, for instance, but bar 26 hints at a
clash of G and A majors. Over and above all this, the dissonant note is now C, the
other over-eager accidental of bar 2. This at least has been successfully disentangled
from its bar 2 companion.
The repetition of this unit from bar 34 may seem unbalanced (since the sonata has
been moving in paired phrases) but also makes sense; it leads to another close on V so
that we have two on V/V and two on V. The closing unit brings relief in the form of
very clear patterning. A contrary-motion form of (b) is heard in both parts in bar 43,
then (a) follows in the right hands next bar while the left continues down to form
a scale. In fact, much about this material specically recalls bars 45. Not only does
this introduce an eight-bar unit, but the internal divisions of that unit are as clear as
they could be. Further, it provides at long last a proper dominant equivalent to
the single tonic cadence of the half. The closing phrase also has a specic textural
and indirect registral signicance. The fact that the hands nally make sweet music
together acts as a sort of (temporary) textural resolution. Registrally, the coverage of
the whole keyboard in this phrase forms an antithesis to the previous sense of being
stuck in a groove which accompanied the repeated dissonance. The expansiveness
of tessitura helps to signal the harmonic relaxation.
C is immediately reintroduced after the double bar in a manner that matches
bars 258 (tied Cs heard two bars apart). This seems rather cruel after its effortful
eventual removal from the rst half. In addition, the vertical C/G clash of bar 2
1
is revived by the g-c
2
of bar 51
1
, this being further dramatized by a new insistent
inner voice. It is placed in the context of a diminished triad, formed with the B
heard in the bass. At bar 54 this tritone is given a satisfactory harmonic context:
V
7
of D minor. More fundamentally, the C is at last allowed more straightforward
generative powers, as it leads to a tonality from which the F is excluded. As a further
layer in the directional harmonic game, the seven-bar phrase nishes at 57 a fth on
the sharp side from bars 15 and 24.
Unlike the model, the following Schleifer in bar 58 is consonant in context and
offers a proper voice-leading resolution of the preceding elements: f
2
d
2
constitute
a D minor I after the previous V, and the pair of d
2
s at 58 and 60 answer the pair of
c
2
s at 51 and 53. Not only that, but the Schleifer gap-lls the tritone, with both the
c
2
and g
2
from the start of the second half moving impeccably in by step. The left
hand from bar 58, which reuses part of the opening point (compare bar 1 in the right
hand and bar 2 in the left), is harmonically ambiguous, though. The FA dyads look
back to the previous phrase, forming a D minor 6/3 with the upper voice, while
the alternating EG dyads look forward to the following brief tonicization of A
minor. The introduction of G forms part of the game of harmonic balance as it is
a further step sharpwards on the circle of fths; it also rubs against the surrounding
Bs. The B then takes over in an attempt to cancel out all the too-prominent and
awkwardly managed sharps.
Bar 62 is hypermetrically ambiguous; it seems really to function as an extended
upbeat to 63 using another version of (a) the c
3
f
2
e
2
traced at 62
2
63
1
. The
Schleifer with which it overlaps once more has a possible functional relationship with
both third pairs, either of which could be the prolonged harmony. Now, however,
the order is reversed; the second dyad AC ts with the previous A minor harmony,
while the initial GB moves us toward F major. So for all the relative consonance
there is still an element of ambiguous overlap. We should note too that, alongside
the F major, D and A minor are both relatives of at-side keys (C major counts as
at in this notional context of prolonging V). Another ve-bar unit follows from bar
68, leading to a V of C version of 1415 at bars 70
3
72; this sets up the expectation
of a return to the material of bar 16.
The problem material from bar 73 is much less dissonant than its rst-half equiv-
alent, due to a completely different left-hand part; instead of using the material of
16ff. the composer inverts the two left-hand parts from bar 51. The end result is a
completely clear V
7
of C. This harmonic clarication is aided by a topical relaxation
into a clearly popular mode, as can be heard in the insistent drone fths of the left
hand. Surely it is only now that we can truly hear the village band. Even then
there is a tweak of the tail in the barely manageable left-hand ornament in 76. At
bars 778, though, we nd a real twist having sorted out the rst part of the origi-
nal offending phrase, the composer now complicates the second part. Thus Scarlatti
follows the cleansed equivalent of 1620 (more accurately 258) with a more dis-
sonant version of 2930, prompted by the need to have more at-side emphasis to
counter the CF complex. The offending note is the left-hand b
1
in bar 78; this
creates very clear bitonality between hands, more explicit than anywhere else in the
piece. The B is necessary so as to break the literalness of transposition, otherwise
Irritations 245
the phrase would end in F major. Of course, having rewritten bars 736 and 7980,
Scarlatti could have done the same with bars 778! It is all part of the game.
The closing unit returns intact, almost exactly transposed. This is a necessary piece
of absolute symmetry given the continual adjustments that take place elsewhere, and
once more there is some sense of topical relaxation; the exact repetition of short units
has the avour of comic opera. Except towards the end of these units the tessitura
of the piece is high; the lack of low bass registers accords with the lack of security
in harmonic movement. K. 407 offers a skit on harmonic properties, rejoicing in
an uncoordinated execution of the expected tonal plan. Its real subject concerns the
question How does one modulate?, with the movement to V dramatized through
the most glaringly dissonant of means. All the expected moves are there, as indicated
by the sequence of accidentals, but they are radically disembodied through being
isolated, the normal harmonic background being withheld.
The wit of Classical composers, of whom Scarlatti is perhaps to be regarded
as the rst, is rather like that of the metaphysical poets they couldnt help it,
it was simply a natural way of thinking and writing. It is based once more on
Subotniks supreme condence of a style in which. . . tonality was so secure. In this
style, the weight and power and articulation of tonal areas were exciting in their
own right and were sufcient in themselves to concoct a rousing story, as K. 407
illustrates. The modulation to the dominant in particular was literally an art form.
This need not of course be problematized, as it is here, in order to be effective; the
very act itself was assuming a harder creative edge. Those who miss the harmonic
complexity of Baroque and nineteenth-century language often fail to grasp the
visceral excitement of tonal articulation that is found in what Carl Czerny called
an art then at the height of its youthful powers.
41
Scarlattis condent harmonic practice is also unusual in less sensational ways.
His modulations may be marked by some peculiarity of modal or registral treat-
ment, or may even be surplus to formal requirements.
42
Although such habits may
be understood as the sort of clever playfulness discussed above, they can also be
understood more hedonistically. In other words, colour seems to outweigh the de-
mands of grammar. K. 223, with its ungrammatical chord progressions (discussed
further in Chapter 6), seems to offer an extreme example of this, but many of the
aberrations considered in this chapter may be contemplated in such a light. The
notion of a sensuous approach that transcends grammatical meaning or function has
produced many comparisons with music of the twentieth century, especially with
the treatment of harmony and texture by Debussy and Ravel.
41
Cited in Villanis, Italia, 169. Hans von B ulow endorsed Czernys assessment in the preface to his edition;
B ulow, Klavierst ucke, i. One should not overlook the fact that such remarks indicate the growth of an idealized
view of the eighteenth century, all pre-lapsarian purity and innocence, to which I have referred a number of
times; nevertheless, this perception of fresh power seems to me essential to an understanding of post-Baroque
eighteenth-century harmony.
42
Sheveloff describes Scarlattis modulations as militantly individual; Sheveloff, Grove, 341. Haas, Modulation
and Talbot, Shifts also contain thoughtful discussions of the composers modulatory practice.
Ex. 5.13 K. 188 bars 10423
Just as remarkable, though, as the features that prompt such comparisons are
the many subtly unusual touches captured so well by Kirkpatrick when he wrote
that in the sonatas of the middle period, Scarlatti succeeds in making conventional
harmony sound even stranger than before.
43
In many cases this can be achieved from
without, through the disembodying implications of surrounding unconventional
material, or it may arise through unusual textural or rhythmic gestures. On many
other occasions, though, it seems to be simply the harmonic expression in its own
right that is suffused with an undemonstrative strangeness. Often this is connected
with a subtle, barely glimpsed modal avour. It may be found, for instance, in the
three-card trick heard frombar 20 of K. 183, in which several diatonically ambiguous
notes lend an unusual avour to a harmonic process that is in any case somewhat
opaque. Sometimes this ambivalence is connected with the establishment of a new
key, as with the eetingly unsatisfactory c
2
heard in bar 18 of K. 125, surrounded
by Cs which denote a smooth transition toward the dominant.
44
Here any modal
avour is a by-product of basic tonal manoeuvres. Ex. 5.13, from K. 188 in A minor,
is an exemplary case of subtle oddity. This sonata is dominated by the minor mode,
save for a brief account of C major in the rst half and the return to C promised by
bars 10910. With the D minor of bar 108 doubling as II of C, the next two bars
outline IV and V, and although the bass I is articulated in bar 111, the inner-voice
A here cuts strangely across the expected chordal completion. Similarly in bar 114,
an inner-voice D lends ambiguity to a harmony that ought surely to be F major.
43
44
Sheveloff perfectly describes this C as a very special note, a vague partial negation of the motion towards the
dominant that, while insufcient to arrest it, adds considerable spice; Sheveloff, Keyboard, 417.
Irritations 247
The unusual parallelism of the left-hand voices is hard to account for. It may well be
heard as exotic, but most of the rest of the sonata accomplishes this far more overtly,
and the entrance of a new, distinctive melodic line from bar 111 suggests that we are
hearing a relieving episode amidst the popular reiterations.
Rationales
All of the strange effects or irritations considered so far, no matter how certainly we
might think we can grasp them, continue to nag away in ones mind; Scarlatti would
presumably approve of the collective critical neurosis they have induced. A number
of global explanations have been advanced for his unreiner Satz. The learning
to liberty equation already discussed can be further inected by considering two
Spanish cases of the earlier eighteenth century. The Missa Scala Aretina written in
1715 by Francisco Valls caused a famous controversy; its Miserere nobis features
a second soprano part introduced in dissonant intervals of a second and ninth. A
censure published by Joaqun Martnez de la Roca of Valencia Cathedral began a
pamphlet war that lasted for ve years until 1720, with some seventy-eight being
published altogether. Valls defence was: If in the pursuit of beauty a rule of the
ancients is temporarily disregarded, what evil is there in that? Even Alessandro
Scarlatti was invited to comment, and did so in a 1717 Discorso di musica sopra
un caso particolare in arte.
45
Given the participation of his father and the fact that
the affair took place just a decade before his arrival in Spain, and a few years before
his relocation to Portugal, we may well assume that Domenico was aware of such
polarized feelings. Any easy critical movement from the learning promoted by the
conservatives to the beauty that may result from infractions of the rules must be
reconsidered in such a light.
A similar controversy that took place in 1756 and 1757 between Jaime Casellas of
Toledo and Josep Duran of Barcelona has recently been uncovered. The polemics
began with the criticism by Casellas of a madrigal by Duran for its offences against
the rules of contrapuntal science. In reply, Duran proposed another kind of knowl-
edge, less rational and more sensible and artistic. In support of his freer treatment
of dissonance, Duran listed a number of illustrious Italians, noting the emphasis
placed on originality and inspiration in Neapolitan conservatories. As well as citing
his teacher Durante, he also mentioned Scarlatti in justication for his freedoms.
46
(In the context of such a polemic it seems doubly odd that Scarlatti himself should
seem to claim the contrapuntal high ground in his 1754 letter to the Duke of
Huescar.) Such theoretical and aesthetic disputes make one wonder whether some
of Scarlattis licences were informed by a consciousness of this particularly (although
hardly exclusively) Spanish debate. (Recall in this connection the world of K. 402,
45
See Hamilton, Spain, 21823,

Alvaro Torrente, A Critical Approach to the Musical Historiography of
Eighteenth-Century Spanish Music (Cambridge: unpublished, 1995), 1213, and Zuber, Blumen, 16.
46
Anna Cazurra, The Polemics between J. Casellas and J. Duran Regarding Italianism in Spanish Music of the
Eighteenth Century, paper read at the conference Music in Eighteenth-Century Spain, Cardiff, July 1993.
discussed in Chapter 3.) On a larger scale, any notion again of Scarlatti work-
ing from the most respectable of technical bases runs counter to such historical
evidence.
An associated rationale for Scarlattis liberties is implied by Durans allegiance to
a new Italian school, but has rarely found voice in the more recent past. This is to
understand the liberties as a sort of Italian pragmatism, a cousin of the shoddy work-
manship that stands in implicit contrast to the Austro-German technical world.
47
Thus Ann Bond writes that Scarlattis writing is full of loose ends unresolved
discords, parts that disappear, and so on. Like all Italians, he writes for immediate
effect and does not worry about academic detail in situations that pass too quickly to
be observed.
48
Although the suggestion of an anti-academic orientation is sound
enough, the implication that such loose ends arise quite innocently or are simply
culturally determined seems inadequate to the scale and nature of the operation. As
we have seen, it is precisely in the conception and manipulation of such features that
the composers learning does appear.
Associated with this rationale in turn is the appeal to continuo practice so elo-
quently advanced by Kirkpatrick. In this interpretation the loose ends reect the
almost unlimited [liberties] that can be taken in the conduct, in the omission of
parts, or even in the occasional introduction of doubling consecutives in the inner
parts. Perhaps, he wrote in an appeal to insider knowledge, only the experienced
continuo player and harpsichordist is prepared to understand it.
49
Even if we accept
the terms of this argument, we must ask What kind of continuo playing? The
assumption that continuo practice is a monolith, outside time, style and country, has
been nicely punctured by the work of Mortensen cited earlier. More broadly, we
must again wonder why this explanation should hold more for Scarlatti than any
other keyboard composer of the time, all of whom we may assume also had plenty
of continuo experience.
Another explanation too issues directly from the keyboard. Luigi Villanis, noting
Czernys complaints about the incorrectness of some passages, averred that these
were liberties often granted to the virtuoso.
50
Are virtuoso gestures exempt from
the rules of good conduct? In bars 379 of K. 56 (see Ex. 5.14) the left-hand sevenths
on the second beat move up a step on the fourth beat. The right hand meanwhile
features correct resolution of the sevenths. This may be a joke on our perceptions,
since with the urry of hand-crossing by the left hand, such crudity of voice lead-
ing may pass unnoticed. In such a case the virtuosity almost acts as a pretext for
the infraction rather than a simple causal explanation, so that again any sense of
47
Libby, Italy, 15. For a fuller quotation see Chapter 2, p. 59.
48
Bond, Harpsichord, 182.
49
Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 238. This global explanation has been enthusiastically endorsed by Roberto Pagano.
Kirkpatricks intuition of basso continuo practice as the stylistic matrix of Scarlattis keyboard writing would
alone be enough to make him the true interpreter of Scarlattian poetics; his text continually refers to the
experienced continuo player to resolve problems that continue to be insurmountable obstacles for musicolo-
gists with a less rened . . . and complete critical armoury. Pagano, Dizionario, 634.
50
Villanis, Italia, 169.
Irritations 249
Ex. 5.14 K. 56 bars 379
innocent departure from the rules is compromised. The difculty with all these sug-
gestions is that they are rather blunt instruments. None can conceivably apply only
to Scarlatti. If we accept their explanatory force, we have to ask, once again, why
such factors did not allow for more Scarlattian ventures from other composers.
Of course it is not just the modern critical community that struggles to come to
grips with such features. Even once the disputes between ancients and moderns, as
illustrated by the Spanish cases considered above, had lost some of their force later in
the eighteenth century, there was still the difculty of how to come to terms with
the freedoms found in the new instrumental style. In an English context, as Simon
McVeigh comments, it was only towards the end of the century that there was an
attempt to explain the whimsical contrasts of modern instrumental music, which
accorded neither with the sublime nor with the beautiful. He points to the new
aesthetic category of the picturesque developed in 1794 by Uvedale Price. Although
this could carry its literal meaning, as found for instance in Haydns folk material, its
more important attributes were capricious contrast and lack of symmetry. Price, in
An Essay on the Picturesque, highlighted sudden, unexpected, and abrupt transitions,
a certain playful wildness of character, and an appearance of irregularity in the work
both of Haydn and of Scarlatti.
51
The phrase playful wildness evokes the spirit of
many of Scarlattis adventures most aptly, and indeed the category picturesque may
be usefully invoked in both its senses. Of course, the literal sense of the term must be
treated with some reserve, and even the applied sense may lend too friendly a face
to many of the composers misdemeanours. Nevertheless, Prices concept reminds
one that Scarlatti and Haydn can be protably linked both aesthetically and also
in a sense historically, given the warm reception of the music of both in England.
An equivalent term, the ornamental, was coined by William Crotch in the early
1800s. For him, Scarlatti was the originator of such a style, in sonatas in which all
is calculated to amuse and surprise, to create a smile if not a laugh.
52
A further assessment of the spirit that such freedoms seem to serve comes from
another sphere, Barbara Trapidos novel Temples of Delight. The mother of Flora
Fergusson, a friend to the books central gure, was at the time of her marriage a shy
young music student with. . . a graceful, gliding carriage bearing witness to many
51
Simon McVeigh, Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993),
160.
52
See Annette Richards, The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), 110. She notes that Scarlatti was also often paired with C. P. E. Bach in English criticism (113).
years at the exercise bar in ballet classes. Mr Fergusson, on the other hand, was a
miser, an educated and scholarly man of the drier and dustier sort[;] . . . it distressed
him to part with money. After marriage Floras mother threw herself into domestic
duties that left her with little time for music:
Her Scarlatti scores languished, leprous with neglect, in a damp gas cupboard from which
they emerged only with the move to the prime locality four years later . . . So the house
was devoid of music. It went without saying that the elderlies, who regularly banged on
the ceiling with broom handles at the sound of a footfall on the oorboards, would have
considered Scarlatti sufcient grounds to petition for the Fergussons eviction. . . She had
assumed, for the rest of her days, a kind of greyish camouage which worked its way deep
into her being . . . She held her mouth permanently drawn into a tight, disgruntled little knot
like an anal sphincter.
53
In a nice variant on the game of ancients and moderns, Floras mother was a dancer
and she marries a man with an accountants mentality. Her abandonment of the
music of Scarlatti is equated with a loss of vitality, grace, generosity and colour,
made even plainer when we read later: Youll starve, my girl, her mother said,
and she drew up her mouth in that mean, pinched little gesture, born of all those
decades of repressing Scarlatti in the gas cupboard.
54
Scarlatti becomes the symbol of
a rich and authentic life. He is also, to adapt this to our particular current purposes,
very unclerical in his creative work quite the opposite of everything that is mean,
dry and pedantic.
TEMPO AND SCALATTI S ANDANTES
The uncertain status of some of the tempo markings given to sonatas forms part of
the universal set of ambiguity surrounding so many Scarlattian operations. A small
number of writers have picked up on this difculty: that many Andantes and Allegros
seem to approach each other in actual speed.
55
Andantes often seem to be quicker
than we might expect, and the ubiquitous Allegro marking seems susceptible of very
different interpretations.
56
Naturally one could not claim that this is an ambiguity
unique to Scarlatti; just to take several examples from within his orbit, Alberos
Sonata No. 18 in B minor is marked Andante but seems to demand a quick and
aggressive approach, while the rst movement of Seixass Sonata No. 31 in D minor
(1965) has material of a pronounced Allegro cast yet is marked Largo. We also noted
earlier in this chapter a Giustini movement, from his Sonata No. 3, that was headed
Andante, ma non presto! Similar apparent ambiguities are in fact frequently found
53
Trapido, Temples of Delight (London: Penguin, 1990), 513.
54
Temples of Delight, 99.
55
See Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 293, and Pestelli, Sonate, 218.
56
Note Hermann Kellers remark that, for Scarlatti, Allegro seemed to be an almost neutral, exible concept;
Keller, Meister, 64. See also Howard Schott, Playing the Harpsichord (London: Faber, 1971), 115 (the sonata
K. 24 is misidentied as K. 27).
Irritations 251
in the music of the rst part of the eighteenth century.
57
Contemplating such cases,
and the extent of them, can suggest that there has been an irrevocable slippage of
meaning and usage in many tempo designations. On some counts, though, we can
be sure; it is quite evident that an Andante marking denoted a considerably quicker
speed in the eighteenth century than it came to do subsequently. Thus the Allegro
andante appended to K. 343, for example, should not be seen as problematic in
itself; nor apparently the Andante allegro given for K. 151, except that the work
with which it is paired, K. 150, also in 3/8, is marked Allegro yet seems to require
a much less lively one-in-a-bar execution. When we nd that the primary sources,
V and P, sometimes disagree on tempo indications, we might feel that such a matter
was not even conceptualized in the eighteenth-century mind, so that it was treated
with what looks to us like relative indifference. Finally we must acknowledge that
tempo in any era is a fraught business, that it often nds a relatively low level of
intersubjective agreement, as we all insist on the integrity of our personal taste, or
the correctness of our body clocks. Georges Beck, for example, asks why Scarlatti
places Andante at the start of K. 86 when it is clearly an Allegro,
58
yet the given
indication seems to me to correspond quite adequately to the owing character of
the music and its proper performing speed.
What lends this issue a keener edge in the case of Scarlatti is the celebrated lack
of slow movements. As already noted, the overwhelming majority of sonatas carry
designations of Allegro or quicker, while tempo indications slower than Andante are
almost unknown. This is not just a question of markings on the page, however; it is
more crucially one of affective character. Scarlattis slower movements, his Andantes,
do not by and large appear to deliver those qualities of solemnity, lyrical warmth,
concentration, respite and inwardness that we variously expect to nd in a good
proportion of slower music of his and other eras. Indeed, it sometimes appears that
the composer does not even recognize or allow the distinct affective character so
cherished by listeners and other composers. Thus a number of his Andantes seem to
offer passages of misplaced Allegro music. Bars 1418 of K. 213 in D minor show
one example of this, in a work that denitely ranks among the composers slower
specimens of Andante tempo. This passage could easily be felt as one-in-a-bar gu-
ration, so unlike the heavy crotchet harmonic rhythm that predominates elsewhere
in the 4/4 metre. Although it seems gesturally thin in this context, this is not to
say that it cannot be justied or made effective in performance; one could main-
tain that its very bareness creates a type of tension that ts well in a work that
contains many harsh angularities and strong dissonances. Bars 212 of K. 259 in
G major also seem to lack sufcient tension in context, but this is a rather different
case from K. 213. All the material from this point to the end of the half is conceivable
at an Allegro tempo indeed, in his recorded performance Mikhail Pletnevs tempo
57
See for example Peter leHuray, Authenticity in Performance: Eighteenth-Century Case Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), 368.
58
Beck, R everies, 16.
is frankly Allegro
59
so that K. 259 appears to offer an example of an Andante
marking that is hard to come to terms with. However, the opening material of the
sonata, all Arcadian innocence, is clearly of an Andante typology. Ralph Kirkpatrick
recognized this difculty when he wrote that harmonic progressions that knit well
and sound simple and clear in fast passages sometimes seem to lose their momentum
at a slowtempo, unless heard in terms of the long span of tonal structure.
60
However,
the diagnosis seems more convincing than the suggested adjustment of perception.
Although one must consider whether Scarlattis Andantes can even be conceived
as a category given the implications of the tempo ambiguity discussed above, many of
them do in fact seem to form a race apart. They qualify as irritations not necessarily
on the technical grounds covered earlier but on two other counts. They often
suggest a listless and uncentred expressive character, and this is turn can act as an
irritant given the affective expectations we bring to slower movements. A common
perception, for instance, has been the difculty faced by the performer planning a
Scarlatti programme when there are so relatively few works that can offer the right
sort of respite or variety.
61
One rationale for this perceived absence that must be
entertained lies in the fact that Scarlatti wrote almost entirely a series of separate one-
movement sonatas. Given such self-sufciency, considerations of inter-movement
balance need never have arisen. Indeed, the attractiveness of the pair theory to those
who believe it was a creative rather than clerical matter surely lies in the way that it
overcomes this disconcerting aspect of Scarlattis sonata production.
The question of expressive character has occupied Pestelli in particular. He writes
that slow movements do not adapt well to the Scarlattian art, suggesting an inability
to relax. This incompatibility of character between Scarlatti and the slow move-
ment, however, did not prevent [him] writing beautiful specimens in which rhyth-
mic restlessness becomes the principal poetic motive. Pagano takes what he believes
to be the harmonic orientation of the slower movements as the basis for an intriguing
characterization of melodic style: Even if many of the melodies of the slower sonatas
show stylistic connections with the most characteristic features of Italian vocal style,
the choice of harmony as the basis of the poetics lends melodic elements a role that
is often decorative, sometimes nostalgic, in certain cases parodistic.
62
Paganos commentary presupposes the central role of melody in slow movements,
as the prime focus for the heartfelt expression to which we are accustomed. It will
not do to suggest that such an affective expectation is anachronistic; to take another
example from Scarlattis immediate orbit, the slow movements in the sonatas of
Seixas have much greater expressive immediacy.
63
The melodic tendencies proposed
59
Virgin: 5 45123 2, 1995. On the other hand, Christopher Headington describes K. 259 as being like a stately
and melodious minuet; notes to recording by Dubravka Tomsi c (Cavalier: CAVCD 007, 1987), [ii].
60
61
See Rousset, Statistique, 79, or Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 3223.
62
Pestelli, Sonate, 218; Pagano, Dizionario, 637.
63
They are described by Brian Allison as more dramatic and expressive than those of Scarlatti. Carlos Seixas:
The Development of the Keyboard Sonata in Eighteenth-Century Portugal (DMA dissertation, North Texas
State University, 1982), 18.
Irritations 253
by Pagano together with Pestellis rhythmic restlessness help us to approach and
dene the markedly unsentimental character of many of the Andantes. They do
have intensity but they do not have warmth, at least not of a straightforward sort.
The relentlessness with which we found Cecil Gray expressing unease in Chapter 2
is nowhere more tangible than when we contemplate the affective properties of these
works. Perhaps this is yet another area of accepted relaxation or creative automatism
where our composer shows constant vigilance.
But this is not so much a binding denition of expressive character as a hint at a
avour conveyed by so many of the Andante sonatas. They are certainly not lacking
in lyricism many give the sense of a well-dened individual lyrical voice that we
noted early on with K. 277 (Ex. 1.2) but this often tends to be somewhat passive.
The greatest lyrical fervour is often in fact found in faster or livelier pieces. One
instance of this passive conduct is the habit of concluding each half of a slower
sonata with successive downward couplings of a short phrase unit, which seem to
allow the music to drain away rather than nish cleanly. Examples may be found in
K. 158, 197, 234 and 481. On a different plane we have already dened the passive
attitude to time embodied by a sonata like K. 404. Indeed, the intense expressive
austerity discussed in that connection offers another conceptual category that we
may protably explore. Acertain sense of fatalism, of a melancholia ritually expressed,
imbues many of our Andantes, in such works as K. 234, 426 and 546. This often
arises once more from repetition. The very contained syntactical sense of K. 234, for
instance, is created by the use of just two basic ideas, which are repeated internally as
well as recurring in various forms in each half. This yields a certain grave formality
which is reinforced by a relatively austere harmonic language. Rafael Puyana remarks
that this austerity derives from an old Spanish tradition. The intense loneliness
which Jane Clark evokes as an essential element in the sonatas is also dened in
relation to Spanish tradition, if through the very different agency of folk music.
64
This quality might seem quite opposed to those outlined above, but the composite
Andante avour we are pursuing derives much of its fascination from the tension
between personal and impersonal expressive modes. One of its by-products is the
restlessness already mentioned.
Many of our Andantes contain pronounced old or archaic elements, which tends
to reinforce the terms of Puyanas austerity. K. 185, for instance, begins in the manner
of a chaconne. The opening of K. 296 in F major presents a typical Baroque gambit,
one associated with Corelli, in which sustained upper voices are set against a falling
bass line.
65
Scarlatti makes the held top voice(s) of the trio sonata model idiomatic
to the keyboard through repetition, and the combination of falling stepwise motion
and repeated notes is felt in many subsequent passages. Yet for all the surprises and
odd features that follow this model opening, the sonata lacks dynamism. The many
64
Clark, Boyd Review, 209.
65
See Mortensen, Continuo, 672. Compare this opening material with that found at the start of Marcellos Sonata
No. 8 in B at major or Seixass Sonata No. 6 in C major (1965).
repetitions are curiously lacking in cumulative effect; they seem to exist for their
own sake rather than for functional purposes. The music seems to hover rather
than to unfold with a sense of clear direction. It is as if the composer is trying
to write a piece of music without any ideas in the accepted sense; instead, more
abstractly, the notes dene space and time, a concern that is reminiscent of the vamp
principle.
The only really sharp edge to the structure of K. 296 is encountered in the build-
up to and climax of bars 512. This is one of the most frankly Spanish passages in
Scarlatti, a rare open acknowledgement of source. It shows that the Andante quality
we are trying to dene may not obtain through an entire structure. Andante for
Scarlatti seems to be cognate with a certain expressive groundlessness, difdence
sometimes, that is quite unlike the energetic certainty of gesture that informs many
of the quicker sonatas. This of course can be a virtue it produces the poetic
motive of ambivalence and restlessness. Sometimes, however, as here in K. 296, the
music snaps with varying degrees of violence. This may involve outright rupture
although this is more likely in those idyllic works that lie at the edge of our current
concerns, such as K. 215 or K. 277 or what I dene as a lyrical breakthrough, to
be discussed in Chapter 7. In this case, as found in sonatas like K. 426 and K. 408,
there is a strong, but always brief, suggestion of the emotional frankness we expect
to nd in many slower movements.
The Sonata in D major, K. 534, shows all the elusive qualities of its species. This is
certainly a piece that fails to declare itself, whose expressiveness lies in its uneasiness
and ambiguity. It contains several ourishes that hint at the French overture, as
with the imitative points at bars 12, 56 and 1011. Interspersed with the Baroque
posings are many Spanish touches; the chains of acciaccatura gures heard throughout
might be galant in another context, but the guitar-like harmonies (as in bar 12) push
them in another direction. The interrupted progression to IV
6
(instead of VI) at bars
18 and 34 certainly sounds exotic, although what follows up to the cadence point is
standard galant cadential diction.
The many imitative and contrapuntal touches during the Spanish passages are
difcult to read are they simply to be taken as part of the unfocused rhetoric of
the sonata as a whole? This is certainly not a democratic mixture of elements as
found in K. 96; rather, it sounds thematically restless. The events at the start of the
second half are typical of this strain. The Baroque ourish leads directly into an
exotic descending scale in sixths (sounding like a lament) above a repeated low A,
easily the lowest note of the piece. This singular event is cut off by a return to the
opening ourish in the bass. The right hands imitation, the rst not at the octave,
is in turn cut off by an abrupt shift to the minor and a return of Spanish diction.
The subsequent half-cadence is reached by means of a tenor suspension gure heard
on a number of occasions through the sonata a strangely disembodied reference
to a learned style. The continuity of thought is fairly consistently tenuous in this
manner.
Irritations 255
Like K. 534, K. 544 in Bat major is marked Cantabile. For Massimo Bogianckino
this sonata seems caught up in the threads of an indenable malaise suggesting a sort
of tedium that musical expression had most certainly not known before.
66
A sense
of malaise is indeed palpable, as in K. 534, although the present work is clearer in
its expressive contours, with a long climactic passage after the double bar and two
very long silences. The initial material is heard four times in the rst half, starting
twice on the tonic and twice on the dominant. The phrase from bar 7 has a more
overtly pathetic shaping, with its repeated sighs and the build-up of textural and
tessitural intensity. Yet from bar 12 this music dies away (just how graphically will
depend on how the performer takes the Arbitri instruction applied to a brief urry
of semiquavers). The appearance of the transposed opening material from bar 14,
especially after such a long silence, might suggest a retreat from the previous shaping.
Its exact repetition from 18 furthers the feeling of unexpansiveness.
From the start of the second half the head motive nally leads to something
more expansive, introducing a phrase of sustained intensity. With the transposed
forms found after another long silence from 33ff., which also of course refer to the
opening, we realize that this is a piece that starts again and again. It seems weighed
down with gestures, realized in desultory fashion. Concentration is achieved only
with the lyrical blossoming in the rst part of the second half.
But how can it be desultory in spite of the minimum of material used and the
frequent repetitions? There is an odd temporal perspective inherent in this sonata.
On the one hand, K. 544 consists of just a handful of phrases, with a good deal of
internal repetition. In this sense the work is almost miniaturistic in the manner of
K. 431, yet there seems to be a disproportion in the relation of part to whole. The
dominant area of the rst half, bars 1422, consists only of one phrase, repeated with
the customary overlapping. One might normally expect such a passage to be merely
a part of a larger section it might function as a closing theme, for example, or the
start of the second-subject group. On the other hand, the piece seems interminable
in its stops and restarts (repeats need to be taken for the full effect). Thus there is a
sense that the piece is both too short and too long.
A small-scale embodiment of this elusive, enigmatic temporal sense is found in
the Arbitri indications. These also seem strangely proportioned. They are far too
slight to represent some sort of release after the intensity built up prior to their
appearance. They seem more throwaway gestures than the resolving ourishes which
the rhetorical situation would seem to demand. To elaborate them, perhaps even
into the pause bar, would surely destroy the effect, which is that the real release is
provided by the silences. Time, not music, is the healer, as it were. The unexpansive
freedom of the Arbitri shapes must surely stand as it is. Andr as Schiff lls in the
pause bars after the Arbitri indications on the second playing of each half with
cadenzas based on written-out trill gures.
67
This is plausible and stylish enough,
66
Bogianckino, Harpsichord, 96.
67
Decca: 421 422 2, 1989.
but it masks the radical bareness of the conception of the piece; in being historical,
Schiff obscures the real historical moment of the silences. Where else at this time
does one nd such loaded non-sound?
ONAMENTATI ON
The inconsistency of ornamental indications found in the principal sources for the
sonatas needs to be examined from two angles: it is a matter both of performing
principle and of compositional purpose. We have already noted a number of instances
where performers and editors unquestioningly tidy up such inconsistencies, and it
has been suggested that the apparent untidiness may serve particular or more general
compositional ends. It is this inconsistency that concerns us here rather than how
Scarlattis ornaments are to be realized, on which subject there have been a number
of studies.
68
As with other of the composers peculiarities, his ornamental practice
can be partly but not fully rescued by an appeal to historical context. Imprecision
and inconsistencies of ornamentation, and of notation altogether, abound in music
of the eighteenth century, in spite of any number of treatises on the subject not that
notation can ever exactly be precise. As what we call the work concept crystallized
in the following century, alongside changes in the dissemination and reception of
the musical product, the status of the score changed. As scores came to exist no
longer just for immediate use but also for continued contemplation, composers
were moved to provide tidier, more painstaking, written versions of their work.
The libertarianism of eighteenth-century ornamental notation and practice, which
has vexed and sustained many scholars through their careers, may thus reect this
different cultural dynamic. It is also quite logical in its own terms there was no
reason not to be relaxed about something whose precise realization was by denition
in the gift of the performer.
69
In Scarlattis particular case the status of the score is of course yet more provisional,
in the absence of autographs which can lend greater authority to claims about
notation. However, it would be too easy to use the source situation as a smokescreen
for the ornamental aberrations we encounter, magically tidying up all on the basis of
perceived uncertainties in the chain of transmission. A certain cultural imperialism
may even play a part in such judgements, with the works having been copied in
68
Fadini, La graa dei manoscritti scarlattiani: problemi e osservazioni, in Domenico Scarlatti e il suo tempo, 183206,
offers a good overview; the virtual chapter Ornamentation in Scarlatti, found as Appendix IV in Kirkpatrick,
Scarlatti, 36598, needs circumspect handling, since it is now thought to rely too heavily on the treatise of
C. P. E. Bach. See, for example, the glancing remark by Kenneth Gilbert C. P. E. Bach is surely irrelevant for
Scarlatti in his Preface to Domenico Scarlatti: Sonates, vol. 1 (Paris: Heugel, 1984), ix.
69
This suggests that the very term inconsistency is inappropriate, since it is surely loaded by a more recent
preference for uniformity. A comparable case, raising comparable matters of principle, is given by James Webster
in The Triumph of Variability: Haydns Articulation Markings in the Autograph of Sonata No. 49 in E Flat, in
Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven: Studies in the Music of the Classical Period. Essays in Honour of Alan Tyson, ed. Sieghard
Brandenburg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 3364. He states that Haydns articulative variability is consistent
with fundamental aspects of his musical style (33), something we might also claim for Scarlatti.
Irritations 257
Spain by unknown scribes (They didnt know what they were doing out there in
Madrid). Yet those who have looked most closely at the main sources reiterate a
belief in the care of their notation, certainly in the case of the scribe who copied the
sonatas of the second layer (from K. 148) in P and V. Emilia Fadini writes, citing
Kirkpatrick in support, that Scarlatti notated ornaments with extreme care.
70
This,
however, stops short of directly confronting the most unsettling feature: the absence
of an ornament altogether when it has already featured in a parallel passage or when
our stylistic sense leads us to expect one. Can such an absence also be carefully
conceived?
71
While such absences are far from unknown in other cases, the Scarlattian picture
is characteristically more extreme. It is thus no accident that Howard Ferguson offers
the following reasoned summation precisely during a discussion of Scarlatti in his
book Keyboard Interpretation from the Fourteenth to the Nineteenth Century: As is usual
in [eighteenth]-century music, ornaments are sometimes missing when consistency
would lead one to expect them. In such places the player must decide whether this is a
copyists slip which should be remedied, or whether there is perhaps some reason for
the omission.
72
The open-mindedness that Ferguson advocates is, though, slightly
less liberal than it seems. The occasions on which a clear musical reason exists for
an omission will be few. In most cases instinctive musicianship will take over, and
the natural reaction will be to create uniformity. After all, once furnished with an
ornament, a cadential or motivic conguration will generally sound incomplete, at
or featureless without it. This is what Howard Schott implies when he writes of
Scarlattis ne notational variations that are often internally inconsistent within a
composition and frequently at odds with the players musical feeling.
73
Although
such issues can and ought to be debated as a matter of general musical principle
one persons inconsistency is anothers variety in the particular case of Scarlatti
it seems to be just the players musical feeling that the composer is making sport
with. Ornaments may disappear and reappear with disconcerting irregularity, in a
fashion that can seem precisely calculated to invite a perplexed reaction from the
player or score reader. Yet this ornamental practice has its own consistency with
the creative ethos we have dened elsewhere. The studied carelessness, the almost
aggressive detachment from routine should come as no surprise. Indeed, perhaps we
may conceive of an ornamental aesthetic rather than just an ornamental practice.
To repeat a point made in other contexts, though, what is being asked of the
performer who would like to trust the evidence of the sources is and should be
hard to swallow. It is easier to talk in grand abstractions of the composers variety and
70
Fadini, Graa, 195.
71
Sheveloff is just about the only writer to square up to the issue of missing ornaments: Scarlattis potential for per-
versity in such matters seems unfathomable, he is as likely to avoid a trill at exactly the point at which every listener
expects one; his jesting with art often includes such reverse ornamental effects. Sheveloff, Frustrations II,
115.
72
Keyboard Interpretation from the Fourteenth to the Nineteenth Century: An Introduction (London: Oxford University
Press, 1975), 136.
73
Review of Fadini edition, The Musical Times 129/1748 (1988), 539.
informality than to translate this even only occasionally into ornamental practice.
Thus Christophe Rousset states that taking liberty with the composers [ornamental]
suggestions would t with the tone of the preface to the Essercizi and the general
ambience of the sonatas. Agreed, as long as this does not simply mean liberty
to standardize the form and appearance of ornaments, as Rousset the performer
resolutely seems to do.
74
Equally, in a discussion of that familiar topic, whether trills
(in Scarlatti) should begin on the main or upper note, Kenneth Gilbert warns against
imposing on Scarlatti [a] uniformity of practice which everything we know about
his art would tend to deny,
75
yet as an editor he loses few opportunities to add
ornaments in square brackets by analogy with parallel places earlier or later in the
same piece. Indeed, the Fadini edition, which almost never inserts such suggestions,
has been criticized for failing to do so.
76
What makes the spirit of Scarlattis practice difcult to grasp is that different
sources may disagree on the notation, or, more relevantly here, non-notation of
ornaments.
77
The new Lisbon source provided by the Libro di tocate, for instance,
often differs signicantly in this respect from V and P, which differ from each other
often enough. This apparently unsystematic approach, the possible logic of which
has already been stressed, might easily suggest to the positivist that we must return
all evidence to the larger frame of eighteenth-century liberalism, that there is no
case to be constructed for Scarlattis exceptional usage of ornament. Yet, although
the ornamental indications and absences of any particular sonata might thus be
open to correction or completion, globally there is more than enough evidence to
encourage the performer and scholar to take such inconsistencies seriously. In any
case, the point of this exercise is not to encourage complete delity to V and P or any
other reading of a single sonata, nor is it to deny that in some contexts the addition of
parallel ornaments is a good solution; rather, it is to suggest that even ornamentation
should be subject to constant vigilance. Where does the great eighteenth-century
shibboleth of good taste t in with this? The very notion of taste implies freedom
of choice, and performers do of course in the act of tidying reveal their own taste
a predilection for symmetry and naturalness that happens to be universally shared.
It would be nice, though, to hear some who did not simply provide the customary
well-trained chorus of matching ornaments, who were prepared to lose some of this
freedom in the name of another one.
The most persuasive indicators of Scarlattis perversity are those situations where
the manipulation of ornament can be shown to have a structural impact on the work
at hand. Such readings have been proposed for a number of works already, such as
K. 409 (Ex. 4.19) and K. 493 (discussed earlier in this chapter). Many more examples
of inconsistency do not, however, appear susceptible to a specic rationale. An
74
Rousset, Statistique, 78, and compare Roussets practice in his recent recording (Decca: 458 165 2, 1998).
75
Gilbert, Preface, ix.
76
See Hammond, review of Fadini edition, Music and Letters 69/4 (1988), 565, and Pestelli, Fadini Review, 463.
77
To offer one simple example, see the different readings of bars 1011 of K. 450 offered in Choi, Manuscripts,
13940.
Irritations 259
Ex. 5.15 K. 515 bars 4756
instance of this may be found in bar 54 of K. 515 (see Ex. 5.15). In the Gilbert
edition shown here, the trill has been shifted to the rst beat to correspond to that
found in bar 50 of the parallel phrase, yet, as is noted in the editorial commentary,
both P and V place their trill on the second beat in the right hand. It would be easy to
assume, as Gilbert presumably has done, that this is a simple and not very momentous
case of scribal error; but since we are very unlikely to uncover evidence that will
conrm this, it is just as defensible to accept the reading and try to understand
its implications. Such a discrepancy seems to exist for its own sake, simply in the
immediate jolt that it gives to our perceptions. It might therefore be viewed as one
more tiny piece of information towards the composite picture of Scarlattis creative
malpractice. In other words, it is purposive aesthetically if not structurally. However,
its effect need not be wide-ranging in this sense alone; in enlivening our conception
of the whole sonata in which it is found, it may indeed have an intrinsic structural
role, if one that is difcult to quantify.
Such a situation is no different in principle from similar cases of inconsistency
found in the notation of other composers works. What makes it less innocent
is our knowledge of more conspicuous and loaded aberrations in other sonatas,
and realistically, if there is to be any reassessment of performing habits, it is these
aberrations which must be addressed and interpreted. The opening four bars of the
Sonata in C major, K. 461, offer a ne instance of the structural implications of
non-parallel ornamentation (see Ex. 5.16). It is difcult to imagine any performer
not amending bar 2, adding a trill so as to match what the left hand does at 4.
78
At
one level this may be taken, like the example in K. 515 above, as the sort of messy
detail that enlivens our perception of the whole, both individual works and the
entire corpus. There are, however, several more specic arguments in favour of just
what the sources transmit. Simply in terms of colouring, the added ornament in the
78
This is what both Christophe Rousset and Trevor Pinnock do. Decca: 458 165 2, 1998 (Rousset); Archiv: 419
632 2, 1987 (Pinnock).
Ex. 5.16 K. 461 bars 17
left-hand echo individualizes the lower registral space, suggesting a more active and
vivid eld of sound. The answering echo in fact poses a question rather than simply
completing the pattern. In addition, this ts with a principle specic to this sonata,
in that it sets up a textural topic of opposition between the hands, as we saw in the
case of K. 407 (Ex. 5.12). The forms this takes the most obvious being the frequent
use of contrary-motion scales will be discussed further in Chapter 6. This plot
suggested for the added left-hand trill at bar 4 is simply but wonderfully conrmed
by the fact that it is the left hand which continues the phrase from bar 5; having
taken the ornamental initiative, it now assumes thematic leadership. This time there
is no answer from the other hand; the left hand simply repeats its unit at bars 78.
The less articulate right hand is reduced to a two-note cadential commentary.
K. 446, a Pastorale in F major, explores the effects of non-parallel ornamentation
in a more playful way. This is found in the second subjects left-hand gure from
bar 13
4
, in which a typical siciliana rhythm in the tenor register alternates with
single low bass notes. In the rst phrase the thrice-repeated dotted gure is always
ornamented; in the second from 15
4
this ornament disappears, only to reappear on
the third repetition to witty effect (as if to say only kidding). Observing what appears
in V and P (and in the Fitzwilliam Cambridge copy too) adds enormously to the life
and character of the passage. It individualizes the sense of line and register, giving
a simple accompanying gure a mind of its own, so to speak. This is particularly
signicant given the generic basis of the sonata. In a simple pastoral style, we would
not expect an accompaniment to be at all self-conscious; it should be purely and
plainly functional.
That this is a conscious playing with expectations, on a level at which we do not
expect surprises, might be conrmed by what happens in the equivalent passage
in the second half. This time the pattern is the same until the sixth hearing of the
gure, where, in a double bluff, the ornament is not revived. A performer may
well nd the evidence of the sources too irritatingly sporadic to be taken seriously:
isnt this a typical example of scribal shorthand, the addition of the ornamental
complement to the dotted gure being left to the musical intelligence of the player?
What weakens such a claim, though, is the reappearance of the trill on the third unit
of the second phrase in the rst half. Without this, there would be every justication
for matching the ornamental pattern of the complete phrase to the preceding model.
With it, though, there is the strong implication that a simple embellishment has left
the sphere of executive discretion and is subject to precise authorial control. Again,
Irritations 261
Ex. 5.17 K. 212 bars 6177
though, this need not mean that the performer should feel constrained to replicate
this exact sequence of ornamental hide-and-seek. A number of other realizations
that retained the spirit of the ornamental enterprise would be possible. The one
unstylish solution, it should be clear, would be to inect the dozen appearances of
the gure identically each time. With the observance of repeat marks, the potential
for perversity in an imaginative performance is then exponentially increased.
For a nal example we will turn to a passage where all the ornaments are indicated
but conspicuously fail to rhyme with each other. In K. 212 Fadini and Gilbert both
systematize the ornaments of the rst three parallel phrases of the second half (shown
as Ex. 5.17). Gilbert changes the appoggiatura g
2
given by both P and V in bar 68 to a
b
2
so as to match the V reading of bar 72. On the other hand, Fadini retains this g
2
in
68, but then for 72 she chooses the e
2
given by P rather than the g
2
given by V. Thus
while Gilbert make the two bars match by upper rather than lower appoggiaturas,
Fadini does the opposite! If Fadinis is the more respectable editorial procedure,
consistently following the P reading, at least Gilbert does not add an editorial trill
in square brackets at 68 as Fadini does. Averaging out the differences, as Fadini and
Gilbert both do, produces a uniformity that is found in neither individual reading
of the sonata. Of course, it may be charged that I am being positivistic in my own
way, in defending the precise traces of these works on the page. If so, this is a brand
of positivism that has hardly been explored in the case of our composer.
As for the execution of ornaments themselves, one area that has hardly been
touched is the possible relationship of Scarlattis ornamental signs to Spanish
Ex. 5.18a K. 343 bars 513
Ex. 5.18b K. 439 bars 3944
practice.
79
This is particularly relevant to the discussion of trills; many of the small
notes clearly take their place in a folk style (which may of course be Italian as well
as Iberian) and can hardly be contested as such. How many of these neutral trill
signs, though, might be executed in a popular or even amenco manner? This is
not just a matter of exploiting opportunities in contexts where the lower-life top-
ical signs are clear, though; on countless occasions Scarlatti seems to offer passing
exotic inections which might also be ornamented appropriately. These inections
are particularly common around cadence points. Ex. 5.18 shows two brief examples
taken from K. 343 (bar 53) and K. 439 (bar 41), in which the larger contexts are
manifestly not exotic.
If we identify the apparent need for a more localized ornamental avour, bearing
in mind the debate in Chapter 3 about the claims of realismversus those of stylization,
how might this be achieved? It has been suggested in the case of K. 238 (Ex. 3.1) that
such ornaments might be executed in a less precise manner, perhaps by slowing down
the speed of the embellishing notes; an overlapping possibility is a more expansive
treatment that could involve quasi-melismatic elaboration.
A second executive issue, that of adding ornamentation altogether, may also be
particularly relevant to such exotic contexts. Sometimes secondary sources offer
79
Rafael Puyana notes the need to determine the extent to which Scarlatti was steeped in an ornamental tradition
of Spanish origin, but this is a rare acknowledgement of the matter. When, on the other hand, J. Barrie Jones
writes that ubiquitous mordents and grace notes seem to a non-Spaniard to be the quintessence of Spanish music
from Scarlatti (as an Italian long resident in Spain) to Falla, this seems to be a unique piece of commentary. Jones
is the only writer brave enough to categorize any of the composers ornamentation in explicitly Spanish terms.
Puyana, Inuencias, 56; Jones, Granados, 23.
Irritations 263
variant readings which may encourage performers in this regard. The Lisbon copy
of K. 124, for example, features many extra grace-note ornaments at the exotic minor
enclave at bars 35ff., which seem perfectly idiomatic in their evocation of a more
highly embellished melodic style. The ornamental variants found in the Cambridge
copy of K. 386, at bars 35
4
and 78
34
, might also suggest to the performer some
panache and imagination in the wider realization of ornaments.
80
The different
execution of the termination of the trill at 35
4
as opposed to the rhythm
found in V and P might be thought a rather theoretical variant that could barely
register or even be possible given the Presto tempo. However, precisely for these
reasons, such notation might imply a less strict temporal execution of the ornament,
involving some rubato. In bar 78
34
the right hand has alternating E and F quavers,
with a trill over the nal F, a more elaborately melismatic version of what one nds
in the primary sources.
Finally, one should signal the arrival of a potentially signicant new piece of ev-
idence in the long-running argument over the meaning of the indication tremulo.
Only a few of the contributors to this debate do not believe that this word indicates
some variant to a trill.
81
The recently published Lisbon reading of K. 118 might seem
to support the possibility of a separate meaning. K. 118 indicates tremulo in connec-
tion with a rising crotchet passage in the right hand that is heard on six separate
occasions over the course of the piece. At bars 62ff. of the Lisbon copy the tremolo
indication found over all comparable previous passages is replaced by trill signs over
each note. But this could be read in two ways. The rst interpretation would be that,
on the last hearing of this passage, a different form of ornamentation is demanded,
for the sake of variety; it suggests that trill and tremolo are indeed distinct. Also
signicant is the fact that in the earlier Lisbon passages, unlike in the other sources,
the two signs never overlap. On the other hand, the notation might have come about
in the following way: the copyist put a trill sign over the rst minim of bar 62, as
had happened previously in bar 8 (the tremolo sign arriving over the following note,
unlike their simultaneity in Fadini and Gilbert at this point). He then placed one in
error on the following crotchet, having previously used the indication tremolo to
indicate a continuation of the trill pattern, and so had to add all the subsequent ones
for the sake of neatness and consistency. This would reveal the identical implications
for performance of the two signs.
80
Note in this respect Fadinis comment that the poverty of ornamental signs in Scarlatti enforces a plurality of
possible solutions, suggesting that their frequent lack of secure denition virtually forces some freedom out of
the performer. For many, of course, this may afford a less agreeable prospect than the table des agr ements typically
provided by composers of the French school. Fadini, Graa, 206.
81
David D. Boyden, for instance, feels that it does not seemreasonable that Scarlatti would make this distinction . . .
unless the word tremulo had a meaning additional to or different from trill. Barbara Sachs believes that the
most logical meaning of the term, as it customarily applies to the string technique of repeated notes, need not
be dismissed. Boyden, Review of Scarlatti: Sixty Sonatas in Two Volumes, ed. Ralph Kirkpatrick, The Musical
Quarterly 40/2 (1954), 264; Sachs, Scarlattis Tremulo, Early Music 19/1 (1991), 92. For a few of the many other
contributions to this debate, see Fadini, Graa, 2036; Gilbert, P eriple, 130; Frederick Neumann, Orna-
mentation in Baroque and Post-Baroque Music, with Special Emphasis on J. S. Bach (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1978), 3525; Sheveloff, Keyboard, 38596; and Carl Sloane, Domenico Scarlattis Tremulo , Early
Music 30/1 (2002) (Correspondence, with reply by Howard Schott), 158.
SOUCE MATTES
The source situation of the Scarlatti sonatas undoubtedly represents the master cate-
gory of irritation. The tone for this has been set by the extensive work of Sheveloff,
who even claims of the recent editions by Fadini and Gilbert that in view of all the
source-related and stylistic issues that are far from settled, the appearance of all these
denitive publications comes as a major irritant.
82
Although this might seem to
be a classic case of the not yet positivism outlined in Chapter 1, the music and
circumstances of our composer are so exceptional that it is difcult not to have some
sympathy for this position that ones whole sense of style and hence a feeling for
the plausibility of various details can collapse when faced with the difcult decisions
that arise when presenting an edition of almost any Scarlatti sonata. Of course no
one, least of all those who have engaged most closely with the sources, would hold
out the idea of an eventual Urtext as the nal solution to the irritation. Not only is
this plainly impossible in Scarlattis case, given the lack of autographs and the un-
certainties surrounding the individual sources and their interrelationships, but the
whole notion has fallen from favour. It is now accepted that different versions or
readings of a work can have their own integrity, as responses to different performing
or cultural environments we can no longer speak so certainly of better versions,
improvements, corruptions and the like. It is precisely such a realization that has
helped to compromise the notion of a work, monolithic and authoritative, as the
centre of all musical activity. It is now not the text that counts so much as the forces
shaping the text, including its very denition or conception as such, as well as the
agency of the performer.
One consequence of this is that the editorial method of collating various sources
to produce a composite best reading has also fallen from favour, as Alexander Silbiger
notes in a gentle criticism of the Fadini edition. For the sonatas of Scarlatti, though,
this is a relatively academic question, since in most cases the variants are of secondary
importance and usually concern only inaccuracies, omissions and inconsistencies and
not different artistic ideas.
83
But these small details are artistic ideas, both in prin-
ciple and very specically in the Scarlatti sonatas: as has been suggested throughout
this study, the edges often occupy the centre of the invention. Even though the
Urtext is now a somewhat shaky concept, there is much more at stake in Scarlattis
case, given that these small details concern the very basis of his style, of which
we are far from having a secure grasp. As was suggested in the opening chapter, it
may be thought a postmodern luxury to disdain an Urtext when texts for canonical
composers have generally been well established, or at the least the parameters of their
style fairly grasped. In this sense this very attitude has its own clear historical mo-
ment, in that it is driven as much by the perception that a particular line of enquiry
has been exhausted as by a genuine intellectual dissatisfaction with its premises. Thus
it performs an operation of Verfremdung on the canonical art music with which it
continues largely to occupy itself.
82
83
Review of Fadini edition, Nuova rivista musicale italiana 14/4 (1980), 660.
Irritations 265
Richard Taruskins many thoughts on authenticity widen this debate to concern
not just issues of textuality but also performing style. In disabusing us of the false
belief that authenticity can derive only from historical correctness, he points to the
authentic role of oral tradition in creating the identity of a composer or a musical
style, noting that traditions modify what they transmit virtually by denition. While
there can be little doubt about his claim that the demand for clean texts and clean
performance made by authentistic culture is rmly rooted in twentieth-century
taste
84
and hence authentic in its own right at what point does Taruskins
tradition become distortion? Of course one may respond that every era distorts ac-
cording to its needs, but what when these distortions of such features as Scarlattis
ornamentation, phrase rhythm or texture have the net effect of making the com-
poser less distinguishable from his contemporaries? With respect to the adding of
bars at cadence points, for example, it is a triumph of Scarlattis trickery to generate
a seemingly unshakeable tradition that relates so precisely and consistently to some-
thing that is not notated. What when the larger tradition has provided no secure
sense of style within which variants and variations may be understood? Not only
that, the extra-bar practice causes fundamental structural changes, whereas many of
the legitimate variants which produce an understandable reaction against the Urtext
principle may not carry the same aesthetic weight. Would it be acceptable to add
beats and bars here and there to The Rite of Spring on the basis of a particular un-
comprehending performance?
My quarrel, it should be clear, is not with the affective side of Taruskins interpreta-
tive tradition: varying approaches to Scarlatti that involve such qualities as sensational
speed, over-ripe elegance or sober responsibility all distort in their different ways
and may be accepted as such. It is rather with what could be an indiscriminately
relativistic approach to a style that looks to have so much inbuilt relativism of its own.
If the Urtext mentality involves making some value judgements about the status of
variant, anomalous or unclear details, if not necessarily stipulating an ideal rendering
of them, then this is what Scarlatti often requires. Taruskin complains that the Urtext
ideology sties the creativity of musicians,
85
but the consistent correction of so much
ne print in the Scarlatti tradition sties the creativity of the composer! This is par-
ticularly difcult to grasp because so many of the composers innovations involve
subtraction of features that the tradition then restores. While one accepts that to
maintain the vitality of old music material changes may be required, the freedoms
of our tradition, as was shown in the discussion of ornaments, tend to involve a
dutiful conformity to an all-purpose good musical behaviour. The performances of
Mikhail Pletnev offer an interesting example of this. He retains the liberties of an
old (Russian) virtuoso tradition, many of which are genuinely illuminating and help
to maintain vitality, but many others represent in fact a form of accountancy as
we saw with his rendering of K. 523 (Ex. 4.6). The most liberating, creative option
for the performer may in other words be to take all the strange and counterintuitive
details offered by the sources seriously. In a sense it would be more honest (and in
84
Tradition and Authority, Early Music 20/2 (1992), 311 and 314.
85
Tradition and Authority, 320.
tune with the postmodern spirit) to present Scarlatti through the Longo, B ulow or
Tausig versions outright than to claim a sham real Scarlatti that then proceeds to
offer such a selective delity.
That the state and status of the sources preclude even the thought of a literal
Urtext has already been illustrated through the previous examination of ornaments
and through earlier discussions of various sonatas, such as K. 53 (see Ex. 4.17), with its
problematic sequence. The case studies that follow will, I think, afrm that constant
vigilance is required, that one cannot edit Scarlatti sources solely on a basis of musical
common sense. This may work in many other cases, but the composers proclivity
for taking a fresh look at the smallest of details rules it out.
The Sonata in F major, K. 256, presents an extremely delicate source problem in
its penultimate bar. As noted in Chapter 3, the dotted style that is prominent in the
rst half gives way to the galant. However, this dotted style is itself topically mixed;
although the opening motive has the whiff of a Baroque tag, it is surrounded by
horn calls, so that the whole sounds more rustic than learned.
86
Over the course of
the rst half the rhythms assume more and more the aspect of the high-art dotted
style. The unusual turn to A minor for the end of the rst half (particularly since V
has already been securely established) emphasizes the severity of the learned topic
that is more rmly enunciated here. The initial part of the second half then seems to
undermine the stylistic certainty of the rst half s close. At bar 51 the dotted rhythm
dramatically relents, and, although it soon returns, the cadential bar 60 suddenly
introduces a conguration heard nowhere previously in the work (Ex. 5.19 shows
the sonata from this point to the end). From this point no further dotted rhythms
at all are heard. Indeed, all the subsequent material sounds fresh, meaning that there
is no trace of balanced binary form. The straight quavers of bars 612 along with the
stolid bass line graphically indicate the loss of authority of the old style. An extended,
two-bar galant cadential preparation follows in bars 634; this seems disconcertingly
slack after the predominant dotted rhythms of the work thus far.
87
The material at bar 69 is very square and sounds new, although it may represent
a transformation of the horn-call material heard so often earlier. The new triplet
semiquavers of bar 71
1
, helping to create that admixture of rhythmic elements that
is so characteristic of the galant, lead to yet another version of the same cadential
ourish, the emerging circularity further distancing the music from the continuity
of the dotted style. David Fuller has noted the late incorporation of triplets into the
work. Should these galant triplets throw all the dotting into soft focus, he asks, or
are they meant as a rhythmic contrast to a prevailing dotted vigor?
88
The question
is posed really as a performance-practice puzzle, with no hint given of any aesthetic
dimension. Indeed, in his recording of K. 256 Scott Ross dots the semiquaver gures
86
For Pestelli this is one of several sonatas with similar incipits that suggest the villanella; Pestelli, Sonate, 252. This
seems a plausible attribution, even if only because it reminds us that dotted rhythms may be associated with the
opposite of learned or high style. For an example of this see the middle section of Zipolis Pastorale for organ,
where the dotted material clearly depicts rustic utes or fes (which are asked for in the registration too).
87
Peter Williams notes the galant character of the passage in Williams, Fourth, 1067.
88
Fuller, Dotted, 104.
Irritations 267
Ex. 5.19 K. 256 bars 6078
at 6970 and 723, obviously perplexed by the wholesale change of affect that has
come over the music.
89
After the symmetrical repetition of bars 6971 in turn, bar 75 alludes to the
contrary-motion gure heard at 612; the right-hand broken octaves at 76 seem
an almost frivolous-sounding decoration of this. In bar 77 we nd a compacting
of the chromatic rise of 63
3
64
1
with the following, by now familiar, cadential
gure. However, the contradiction between the right hand (D moving up to G)
and the left-hand harmonic support (C, F and A) renders the second beat extremely
disconcerting. (Somewhat less oddly, the third beat lacks a third in the harmony.) The
ending seems to be very dismissive, with this nonchalant misharmonization it is as
89
Erato: 2292 45309 2, 1989.
far as can be imagined from the mood of the close of the rst half. But are we faced
with a case of scribal error? Fadini corrects this by placing the rst three notes of the
right hands second beat a third higher. Longo corrects in a different way, by making
the whole right-hand second beat a turn around f
2
. Yet all three sources, P, V and M,
give the same reading, which Gilbert reproduces in his edition. This surely speaks
well for the authority of the reading, yet it would also be possible to evaluate the
correspondence in a different way. Instead of providing corroboration, the identical
readings could suggest an unthinking delity, the mechanical reproduction of an
original error. Fadinis correction would seem to attribute the rst three notes to a
Terzverschreibung, a quite common situation whereby a scribe places a note or notes
one space or line too high or low on the stave. However, it would seem according to
the editor that only the rst three notes of the gure are misplaced by a third. This
surely suggests a rather unlikely sequence of events, especially given the threefold
replication of the error across the different sources.
The ending would be odd even if we go along with Fadinis correction the
previous two bars see to that. The cadential pattern at bar 77
23
has already been heard
ve times from bar 60, thus making the circularity and over-articulacy of syntax in
the total stylistic context very plain. The Gilbert/V/P/Mversion would thus provide
an appropriate dismissal of the feature, seeing off the galant as emphatically as the
dotted style has already been seen off. Nevertheless, the force of Sheveloffs emphasis
on textual responsibility hits home here. The two fundamental camps those who
would wish to believe nothing in the sources that is apparently bizarre or anomalous
and those who would wish to believe everything, to take all on trust are both
harshly exposed in such a case. At what point does the seemingly silly or maverick
detail cease to be creative and become poor transmission? If accepted, such a detail
has a resonance for our understanding of the composer far beyond its existence in
this sonata. It is of course naive to suggest one decides editorially on a case-by-case
basis; a global perception will determine such a decision, but this perception arises
from an accumulation of signicant details, of which this is undoubtedly one. This
is the riddle of the chicken and the egg.
The Sonata in D major, K. 490, offers a formidably complex source situation, al-
though many of the disagreements within and between sources concern ornamental
ourishes in a work whose rhetoric invites freedom of execution. Even if all sources
transmitted the same readings, in other words, there should be plenty of room for
ornamental and temporal variations given the style that is being invoked. There are
endless variants of bars 45 and 47, for example (including more in the Cambridge
copy shown in Plate 1). It is well established that K. 490 evokes the amenco proces-
sional genre of a saeta.
90
The very number of different readings rather conrms how
strange this language must have been to copyists, with the composer giving many
approximations to cante jondo style.
90
Before Jane Clarks assertion of this, Kirkpatrick wrote of drum beats marking the bass of a processional, and
before that Edward Dent wrote that the opening suggested a popular melody, given the treatment it receives.
Clark, Spanish, 20; Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 201; Dent, Edition, 222.
Irritations 269
K. 490: version in Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Mu Ms. 147
(formerly 32 F 12), 579
Plate 1a
Plate 1b
Plate 1c
The Cambridge copy of K. 490, not taken account of by Fadini, contains some
interesting variants, some reecting those in the Viennese sources, but others unique.
One of the most interesting is in bar 10, where the right-hand rhythm matches that
of bars 3 and 7 (compare the Gilbert version shown in Ex. 5.20a): would this have
been a natural inference to someone schooled in the performance-practice niceties
of the time, or is this a tidying up? What is especially enticing about this variant is
that Robert Donington had quite independently proposed that bars 10 and 12 of
K. 490, although notated undotted, were meant dotted; and in her recording
Wanda Landowska dots the second beats of bars 10 and 12.
91
In any case, this variant
is clearly one which implies a different artistic idea: without dots, bars 912 slow
the momentum before it picks up again with the reintroduction of the drum rhythm
in bar 13. With dots, on the other hand, the musical process of the entire unit from
bars 1 to 16 feels much more continuous.
92
91
Doningtons remarks are quoted and discussed in Sheveloff, Keyboard, 3757; EMI: 7 64934 2, 1949/1993
(Landowska). By way of local colour, Landowskas recording, made in Paris near the start of the Second World
War, includes the sound of three blasts from anti-aircraft guns during bar 47.
92
The other most noteworthy and startling variant involves bar 40 and its equivalent in the second half, bar
85, which are notated as dotted minims without a following rest to make up the four beats of the bar. If this
move to 3/4 represents carelessness, why does it occur twice? In bar 38 there are strange marks above the four
bass Ds they might indicate staccato but are probably small strokes meaning trills. In any case the repeated bass
notes perhaps ought to be clearly detached to match the timbre of a drum.
Irritations 271
Ex. 5.20a K. 490 bars 511
Ex. 5.20b K. 490 bars 7882
Ex. 5.20c K. 490 bars 337
Seunghyun Choi places a number of readings of K. 490 from W II beside those
of P and V, suggesting that the Vienna versions are sometimes to be preferred. Choi
asserts that the c
3
given in bar 81
4
of Q 15115 (also found in M and W G, another
Vienna copy) is to be preferred to the d
3
found in P and V (shown in Ex. 5.20b)
it presents a better reading than the other manuscripts.
93
But why? The P and V
version of bar 81
4
differs from the rst-half equivalent (bar 36
4
, shown in Ex. 5.20c),
but the next bar will anyway too. Instead of the reaching over that originally produced
a composite top line of ascending perfect fourths in 357, the top part (presumably
for reasons of registral management, no f
3
being available) has the c
3
fall to the
c
3
in the next bar. The d
3
at bar 81
4
gives a kink in the melodic line as if to offset
the disappointment of the unfullled expected rise of a fourth. Doesnt this give a
stronger contour? Chois preferred W II version rhyming more closely with the
rst half is rather clumsy in effect and in its blank yielding to the presumed registral
93
Choi, Manuscripts, 1423. This is backed up in Eva Badura-Skoda, Il signicato dei manoscritti Scarlattiani
recentemente scoperti a Vienna, in Domenico Scarlatti e il suo tempo, 5051.
realities of the keyboard written on or for. P and V reshape the whole phrase so that
one scarcely notices. The Cambridge version has a small note d
3
at the start of bar 82
which perhaps further renes the join. There is another small note, e
2
, in bar 80
of this source. This also binds together the recast phrase, further removing any
potential awkwardness.
The appoggiaturas present at bars 80 and 82 in Cambridge also chime rather nicely
with bars 70 and 75, for instance, as well as with the right-hand incantation in the
vamp at the start of the second half, and are clearly here more organic than the
other readings. At the very least this is a thoughtful reading, one that, aside from its
specic contribution to the difcult phrase from bar 80, shows an understanding of
the stylistic continuity underlying the varied melodic materials. If we accepted this
reading, it would have clear structural weight precisely in bringing together, in bar
82, the underlying repeated-note drum-beat saeta rhythm with the appoggiaturas in
one single part. On the whole the Cambridge copy is closer to V and P than are
the other sources. Indeed, it seems in a number of details to be more subtle and
integrated a reading than any other, so that secondary becomes more than ever a
technical term to describe its value. To take another instance: the Lisbon version
of K. 98 features a decorated repetition of a phrase near the end of the rst half,
from bar 48. The other six sources offer a straight repetition of the phrase. This can
hardly be a casual or accidental reading, and such decorated repetitions in Scarlatti
are really rare.
94
Copyists are not normally prone to such invention from where can
this come if not the composer? This is certainly a matter that boosts the authority
of the whole source, not just the particular reading of K. 98.
95
A nal offering to the irritations of the source enterprise is the Sonata in C major,
K. 271. Here is a classic case of where editorial decisions ought to be informed by
analytical awareness. One would add stylistic awareness too, but it has been noted
that this can be a circular operation. The passage concerned is found from bar 35
(Ex. 5.21a); Fadini and Gilbert share a distrust of the sources lack of Fs but intervene
in precisely opposite ways. Thus Gilbert puts cta accidentals above the offending
notes in 35 and 36 and inserts a sharp silently into bar 38 (mentioned in the critical
commentary); Fadini, on the other hand, inserts sharps at bars 35 and 36 (mentioned
in the critical commentary) and uses a cta accidental at 38! Gilberts is perhaps the
more musical take on the passage, since the sources F() is more alarming here
than in the previous bars, but one wonders why neither editor could be consistent in
their interventions. It is easy enough to explain the matter as copyists laxness; one
could justify it by noting the lack of Bs in the corresponding second-half version.
94
As noted in early discussion in Chapter 4. Boyd, referring to this example, believes it sanction[s] the judicious
use of embellishment in other contexts; see Boyd, Ross Review, 268.
95
On the other hand, look at the seeming carelessness in the surrounding context bar 45 contains no d
1
, which
is certainly possible, but there is also no alto d
2
; then the decorated repetition offers no left-hand g
1
, or anything
else, on the rst two beats of 50. In the tonic equivalent of this at the end of the second half all is present
and correct, as it were. The number of apparently careless errors of copying must throw doubt on the possible
authority and indeed interest of the variants.
Irritations 273
Ex. 5.21a K. 271 bars 3350
On the other hand, it is dangerous above all in Scarlatti to assume that parallel places
will behave in parallel ways.
96
In addition, F is indicated in 39 and 40, and the
entire passage is repeated with exactly the same pattern of missing and present Fs.
One should also bear in mind, following on from the notion of parallelism, the fact
that Scarlatti often mollies unusual contours in the second half of a sonata.
97
On
a smaller scale, a urry of unexpected chromatic activity at this point is a stylistic
ngerprint of the composers (as discussed in Chapter 4, with regard to works like
K. 180 and K. 242), but again we are on dangerous ground.
Instead of such general notions, therefore, we might look to the particular world
of this work, and perhaps just beyond to the work it is paired with. The harmonic
plan of K. 271 is extremely simple; there is no attempt to go anywhere other than
V in the rst half, and the harmonic activity in the second half before the tonic is
resumed holds no surprises. This might t with the decorum of a perpetuum-mobile-
style toccata. Yet the sonata is all about the articulation of harmonic movement,
trading in the same witty minimal C major mode that we saw with K. 407 (Ex. 5.12).
In the bars preceding the problem passage, G major has been reached almost too
easily, on then in, with no oversharpening. If the nal cadential ourish is to
have any force, then some change of colour will be required. Frequently at such a
point Scarlatti would dip into the minor. Here, assuming the unsharpened Fs to be
96
As noted in Sheveloff, Frustrations II, 103.
97
This point is made with respect to K. 115 in Hautus, Insistenz, 141.
Ex. 5.21b K. 271 bars 5172
deliberate, he cancels the leading note of V so as to suggest a return to C major
(note the V to I in C outlined by the bass at 356), so that G will be brighter on its
reafrmation, while at the same time introducing sharps on its rst and fth scale
degrees G and D, so that it will sound more rmly established once these rogue notes
are cleared away. Note the wonderfully dippy bass line, which darts back and forth as
if not sure which way to turn. The G and D might also hint at the oversharpening
which has not been present, but muddled with the undersharpening represented
by the F. A good deal of registral play enriches this argument. There have been so
many prior references to the pitches f
2
, g
2
and a
2
in a rm G major context that
it is hardly surprising that bar 35 breaks away. The upper component of the sixths
guration at bars 479 then constitutes a correcting and afrmative response.
Scarlatti acionados will note the unusually long retention of the dominant after
the double bar and the still more unusual strong cadence in V at bars 567 (see
Ex. 5.21b). This passage can be understood as a direct response to the problem
that arose in the rst half. G major was undermined, and the nal few cadential
Irritations 275
bars do not carry enough weight to make good the undermining, hence the rm
articulation of the dominant at this stage. More than that, the point at which the
opening line of the second half deviates from its rst-half equivalent leads to a leap
up to an A followed by a scalic descent (left hand, bar 53). When this is repeated
by the right hand in a more signicant register in bar 56, it is apparent that we
have an explicit correction of the earlier unit (bar 35 from the second right-hand
semiquaver).
However, the game is not over. At bar 58 the rst gesture away from V involves
naturalizing the F; all the hard work is quickly destroyed! The left-hand unit in this
bar seems new in pitch contour and rhythm, but again it may be compared with
bar 35. The new offbeat rhythm is a consequence of the offending unit at 35, which
really begins on the second semiquaver of the bar; the pitch structure of an octave
leap followed by falling steps is clearly very similar to the earlier shape. A further
stage in the argument is heard at 678, where the offending shape back almost
exactly in the form heard at bars 356 is placed in a secure C major context, with
the same bass line as in the original. Particularly remarkable is that the reworking is
buried in the middle of a two-part melodic and intervallic sequence stretching from
bars 66 to 69, a typical syntactical trick. The right hand of bar 69 gives us a further
variant of the problem bar.
The passage beginning at 71 is then almost identical to that heard at 1421. The
previous one implied a move toward V; this one suggests the resecuring of I. This
double function of identical material has particular relevance in the context of this
sonata given its concern for the articulative weightings of tonic and dominant.
This technique is found at the equivalent point of the structure in K. 270 (see bars
91ff., and note if you will the very similar cadential shapes preceding the two at
bars 8990 of K. 270 and 6970 of K. 271). Furthermore, K. 270 has exactly the
same attribute of missing Fs before the double bar. One could also nd thematic
equivalencies if desired compare bars 14ff. and 22 of K. 271, for example, with the
ubiquitous shape in thirds and sixths in K. 270. Such relationships, however, do not
prove the existence of a pair in the sense that the two works form one larger unit
(they are paired in the four principal sources), but they may suggest chronological
proximity of composition.
Thus analytical interpretation although it is not a respectable rationale for ed-
itorial decision-making, nor is it without its own dangers of circularity may be
able to conrm the probable rightness of the copying. Without the sting provided
by the Fs the whole sonata would change character: it would become a rather dry,
if dashing study. Scarlatti is playing with the merest of means, a frequent topic
when eighteenth-century composers deal with C major, and a few small inections,
properly heard and carefully treated, provide a richness of implication in this work
that appears to make the slightest of efforts, as a manifestation of Scarlattis disdain.
6
UNA GENUI NA M

USI CA DE TECLA
FI NGEMUSI K AND MEE VI TUOSI TY
1
To play or to compose? The star turn in the Sonata in A major, K. 65 (Ex. 6.1), the
passage beginning in bar 3, is no sort of theme or recognizable piece of invention
but owes its genesis to the sheer joy of playing. It corresponds to a common strain
in the literature according to which Scarlatti thought through his ngers, and his
inspiration came through the symbiosis of hands and keyboard (hence Roberto
Paganos term Fingermusik
2
). What we have here is, if not a nger motive, then a
hand motive. Commentators tend to assume, though, that the matter is as simple as
that, that physical invention takes over to the exclusion of more obviously considered
methods of creating music (as we saw with the rationale of improvisation introduced
in Chapter 2). This admirably emphasizes the physical immediacy of much of the
composers music, which is after all one of its most novel and revolutionary attributes,
but the idea that Scarlatti was a slave to his ngers ultimately wears a bit thin. A
work like K. 65 makes clear that he was well aware that the legitimacy of such an
approach is open to question. Digital freedom is not a given here but is subject
to a process of argumentation; it is one element that must ght against others to
assert its right to exist. It is juxtaposed with some standard Baroque diction, the
purpose of which seems to be to suppress the unthinking virtuosity; however,
the passage keeps on popping up, always in or on the tonic and quite invariant
in its form in this sense it functions rather like the huge chords found in K. 525
(discussed in Chapter 4). The interventions on behalf of compositional respectability
(as heard for example from bars 18 and 47) feature intense textural, voice-leading and
harmonic activity, against which the invariant hocket-like subject sounds ippant
and supremely unconcerned. In this tone and in its neatly uniform appearance it is
far removed from the toccata, which would be the only way to rescue the material
historically; K. 65 does not after all present the self-sufcient, generically legitimated
free guration of the true toccata style.
3
The interaction of the two elements brings
1
Much of this rst section was presented in a paper given at Kings College, London in March 2001.
2
Pagano, Dita, 87.
3
The guration is very similar to that found in the fourth movement of Marcellos Sonata No. 9 in A major, from
bars 13 to 20, but Marcello treats his material sequentially, creating a passage of brilliant keyboard effect, whereas
Scarlattis is an isolated object.
276
Una genuina m usica de tecla 277
Ex. 6.1 K. 65 bars 174
to mind rather Giorgio Pestellis theatricality one could envisage a piece of stage
business involving a notary and a clown.
The critical reception of Scarlattis keyboard writing has in fact been distinctly
schizophrenic. On the one hand we nd the sense that the composer lets his ngers
do the talking, alongside the emphasis on improvisation and pedagogy as sources for
the artistic product. On the other hand, we are assured that the sonatas comprise
more than mere virtuosity. As well as representing a major strain of wider musical
culture that demands investigation in this chapter, the latter also responds defensively
Ex. 6.1 (cont.)
to the digital category. At one time, as we have seen, the primary critical emphasis lay
on Scarlattis exploitation and development of keyboard technique, often examined
by means of ctitious surveys of technical features.
4
This led to the sort of verdict
found in an old edition of Groves Dictionary: He was not a great master in the art of
4
Pestellis words, in Pestelli, Sonate, 144. Rita Benton had noted in 1952 that a review of the pertinent literature
leads to the conclusion that primary emphasis has been placed on Scarlattis contributions to the advancement
of keyboard technique and on the brilliance and scintillation of his harmonic and technical equipment. Benton,
Form, 264.
composition, but one of the greatest masters of his instrument.
5
A more imaginative
expression of such a judgement was given by Oskar Bie in 1898:
In Scarlatti we seek in vain for any inner motive, nor do we feel any need of an emotional
rendering on the part of the performer; his short pieces aim only at sound effects, and are
written merely from the love of brilliant clavier-passages, or to embody delicate technical
devices. They are not denizens of Paradise, who wander, unconscious of their naked beauty,
under over-arching bowers; they are athletes, simply rejoicing in their physical strength, and
raising gymnastic to a high, self-sufcient art. We admire them. . . not too much, yet with
a certain eager anticipation of the next interesting and unusual feat of skill. We wonder at
their mastery of technique, and the systematic development of their characteristic methods;
we rejoice that they never, in their desire to please, abandon the standpoint of the sober
artists; but our heart remains cold. There is an icy, virgin purity in this rst off-shoot of
absolute virtuosity, which kindles our sense for the art of beautiful mechanism, for the art of
technique per se.
6
Implicit in this judgement is that, in order to produce real musical art, one must
get beyond the body, beyond the cold mechanics of outer sensation, to inner realms.
For Bie this is the realm of the heart, connoting the emotional warmth usually
indicated nowadays by the term expressive. Another inner realm that can play little
apparent role in the production and reception of such athletic art is the intellect. It
is against this exclusion of the heart and mind from the artistic equation that the
mere virtuosity school protests. Thus we are assured that the sonatas are not mere
idle displays of virtuosity, but works in which the substance of the musical thought
is never devoid of intrinsic musical interest, that virtuosity is rarely exploited for its
own sake.
7
Again, one must be sympathetic to such defensiveness, given a situation whereby
Scarlatti was known only through a small portion of his output (the generally brilliant
Essercizi and a limited number of other virtuoso confections) and not taken too
seriously as a creative artist. Yet, rather than questioning the cultural dynamic that
produced such a marginal placement, such commentary accepts the terms of the
debate. This is particularly hard to take in the case of Ralph Kirkpatrick, who in
between rescuing Scarlatti from the associations of mere virtuosity produces the
most wonderful evocations of the physicality of the composers keyboard writing.
His absolute condence in the chronology suggested by the sources was also useful
in constructing a narrative in which the composer himself gradually moved beyond
the crassness of the early flamboyant works. In the sonatas of the middle period
found in Venice V, VI and VII (K. 266355) we nd that more and more Scarlatti is
emancipating himself from the very sound effects that he cultivated so masterfully,
while some of the late sonatas feel as if they had been composed away from the
harpsichord, so as not to become entirely enslaved by the conformations of the
hand.
8
The anxiety to distance the composer from cold mechanics has become
5
Cited in Luciani, Sinfonismo, 43.
6
Bie, Pianoforte, 7071.
7
Gray, History, 139; Rostand, Queff elec Notes, 10.
8
Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 165, 168 and 169.
almost comic, with the ideas of liberation not just from the physical body, but from
sonority itself, the very stuff with which all composers must work.
Another contributing factor to the mere in mere virtuosity is the status of
keyboard instruments and their music. In a short article on the opera presented
in London in 1720 as Narciso, Andrew McCredie wrote that it was to be hoped
that recoveries of fragments of other operas would help to present Scarlatti as a
composer gifted with a more richly diversied genius and technical equipment than
[have] been hitherto attributed to him.
9
This reacts to the common notion of the
composer writing little but keyboard music from the time of his arrival in Spain
(even if that now seems to have been much less the case anyway), and is revealing in
its implication that greater generic breadth automatically connotes a better creative
technique or, at the least, brings greater respectability to it. We might compare
this with the misconception, still common enough, that Chopin is limited in
some fundamental artistic way by his concentration on keyboard composition. On
a different level, keyboard instruments in general are obviously more susceptible to
the charge of being mechanical, both in the means of sound production and in the
way this is perceived to inuence the creative material, and hence less musical. The
burden of proof, in other words, is higher in these instrumental circumstances.
These tendencies must also be put in a wider frame. They relate to our uncertain
grasp of musics physical properties, as discussed in Chapter 1, to our tendency to
slight the materiality of music. Virtuosity is simply a part of this picture, but our
cultures ambivalent attitude toward it offers the most conspicuous evidence of the
larger difculty. The problem is most acute when virtuosity cannot be understood
as integral to a musical argument but simply stares back at us from the page, in
the form of mere passagework, scales, arpeggios, elaborate divisions of notes, or
registral extremes. Unless they have been deepened or heightened in some way,
such manifestations cannot in all conscience be enjoyed, so many relevant discussions
seem to imply. The ideal condition of virtuosity, it would appear, is to aspire to a state
of invisibility or intangibility, when it is subsumed under the name of some higher
musical function or thought. Otherwise it all too easily occupies a sort of moral low
ground, like a heathen in need of conversion. It may be that such an ambivalence
about virtuosity enjoy it at your peril was heightened by modernism and its
corresponding musicological expression, yet it has existed for much longer than that.
Oddly enough, it seems to have gathered force in the nineteenth century, precisely
the age of Paganini, the piano virtuoso and the operatic diva. A relationship of
attraction and repulsion seems to have set in, and this is apparent in the nature of
concerto and operatic cadenzas, which typically become both more abandoned and
more integrated. A cadenza constitutes by denition a locus classicus for virtuosity,
its historical basis being the display of individual technical prowess. Yet already
in Beethovens cadenzas we nd more and more thematic integration, certainly
compared with those left by Mozart, which may all but ignore the surrounding
9
Domenico Scarlatti and his Opera Narcisso , Acta Musicologica 33/1 (1961), 29.
material. Indeed, it is almost as if the greater integration is a pretext for the greater
virtuosity.
This tendency towards a more responsible style of cadenza has continued to the
present. Performers who write and play their own specimens rarely show off in
the physical or technical sense but rather take the opportunity to display something
else, their admirable, musical restraint in the face of such a temptation. This often
produces an intellectual brand of cadenza, of which I recently heard the ultimate
example. This was a cadenza to the rst movement of Mozarts Piano Concerto in
C minor, K. 491, in which the performer began with a fugue on the movements
main theme. Anything further from the supposed spirit of a cadenza could hardly
be imagined, nor anything more perfectly illustrating our suspicions of virtuosic
expression. Athletic prowess must be either denied or deected.
Such concerns do not, however, bear solely on the later reception history of
Scarlattis sonatas; they are not anachronistic when applied to Scarlattis time.
10
In
other words, my opening duality of play and compose stands, even if we ac-
knowledge that, above all in keyboard composition, there was no clear-cut distinc-
tion between composer and performer. Accusations of unnaturalness were already
a common response to virtuoso display. The unnatural could quite easily tip over
into the supernatural and inhuman. Such a avour informs Thomas Roseingraves
famous account of hearing the young Scarlatti play in Venice. Scarlatti himself is
described as a grave young man dressed in black and in a black wig, physically apart
from the assembled company as he stands silently in a corner; when he sat down
to play, Roseingrave thought ten hundred d[evi]ls had been at the instrument; he
had never heard such passages of execution and effect before.
11
This imagery, as
David Sutherland notes, makes Scarlatti appear as a virtuoso of the Paganini type,
with a demeanour calculated to suggest familiarity with the arts of black magic.
12
Although such imagery was common enough, its cultural moment a mixture of
admiration and unease should be taken seriously.
13
In addition to such perceived
inhumanity, virtuosity was of course open to the charge of lacking musical substance,
and it is with this perception that Scarlattis own preface to the Essercizi plays. From
the point of view of the profondo Intendimento disclaimed by the composer, the
works themselves might have seemed provocatively insubstantial. In one particular
respect they are literally lacking in depth, in their concentration on high registers
and consequent lack of solid bass-line activity (although this feature bears a more
positive explanation which will be suggested later on).
10
For some contexts for this see Pagano, Dita, 817.
11
This account to Charles Burney is cited in Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 3031. Malcolm Boyd notes the difculty with
Venice being the venue for this encounter in Boyd, Master, 21.
12
Sutherland, Fortepiano, 255n. See also Ife, Scarlatti, 8.
13
In different generic circumstances, Pestelli has noted how the noble characters in eighteenth-century Italian
comic opera, especially when they put on an air of arrogance, adopt the vocabulary of opera seria, with a
great deal of difcult vocal display. This helps the early identication of wickedness . . . with melodic virtuosity,
inhuman because of its mechanical nature, later taken as an example by Mozart in Die Zauber ote with the Queen
of Night. Pestelli, Mozart, 489.
Ex. 6.2 K. 65 bars 36, 245 and 289
K. 65 therefore appears to set such mechanical display precisely against more
respectable creative means, thereby making the critical argument about the place
of virtuosity unusually explicit in musical terms. Not for the rst time, a Scarlatti
sonata seems to map out quite clearly the debate between ancients and moderns.
The musical argument of K. 65 also concerns space the tight control of movement
of the Baroque diction, recognizable material from the world of true composition,
versus the registral expansiveness of our so-called subject. It also concerns time the
repeated material has in effect no syntax and is, as it were, indenitely extendible for
as long as the ngers fancy (note its clearly excessive repetitions and duration from
bar 3), while the Baroque matter is driven onwards. The rst instance of Baroque
diction is from bar 18, where the rising chromatic movement eats up the registral
space covered by the hocket. Chromatic steps are the narrowest possible movement
in contrast to what we have previously been hearing. Note how the bass moves
down to A in bar 19, which was the lowest point of the rst hocket unit (compare
bars 3, 5 and so forth), while the right hand moves up to the a
2
also heard in the rst
hocket unit and then one step beyond. At bars 235 and then 2730 a return to the
hocket material takes place, but in rhythmically contracted form. Scarlatti now gives
us the leaps that were heard but not played at the start. The three-octave ambitus is
retained in the left-hand leaps while the 5/36/4 patterns are put exclusively in the
right hand (see Ex. 6.2). The cadential peroration is back on more familiar ground,
written in the idiom familiar from the Essercizi.
The second half begins with an inversion of the opening ourish, a familiar gesture
in Baroque binary forms, and the left hand in bar 38, whose equivalent in the rst
half began the hocket passage, now leads to a burst of imitative counterpoint. The
quick return to the tonic with the second unit of the second half, in bar 41, is also
a familiar gesture; it was a standard harmonic gambit in a binary form to return
briey to the tonic at this point, sometimes in conjunction with the opening theme.
However, the fact that it is the hocket that comes back is comic, almost a joke with
the convention, since this material is no theme it surely lacks the substance and
respectability to mark the structure in this way. The rst bit of counterpoint at bars
3940 has thus been quickly brushed aside. Note that although this is quite different
materially to the chromatic passage, both must be understood as working for the
same side: the second-half material is like an invention, while that in the rst half is
perhaps supposed to represent typical toccata-like writing.
The second contrapuntal intervention, from bars 47 to 54, is far more sustained;
it represents good solid working of the material. This is then brushed aside by what
amounts to a recapitulation of the opening, from bar 55. As occurred earlier in the
second half, the initial passage on A is cut by two bars, but this time we also get the
answering unit on E compare bars 615 with 11ff. in the rst half. At bar 65 we
continue directly with the contracted version of this material, whose derivation is
made evident by the fact that both passages here share the same pitches: GB and
AC pairs alternate, surrounded by boundary notes of e
2
and E.
Thus Scarlatti has cut from the equivalent of bar 17 to 27 of the rst half; this
not only makes clear the unity of the two virtuoso ideas but, by suppressing the
intervening chromatic material, suggests that the physical side is now to prevail. We
should note that formally the standard procedure here would be to transpose the
rst-half material into A major; instead, bars 279 return verbatim at bars 657,
remaining on E. By not doing this, Scarlatti suggests that this contracted form of the
hocket material shares the same tendency to be untransposable or at least inexible
in its form.
14
However, at bars 689 we hear a slightly altered form of 534, which was the
last representation on behalf of compositional respectability. This should come as no
surprise: the virtuoso material, being in essence asyntactical, depends on the standard
diction for the application of closure. All the previous cadences have required it.
From here we cut to a transposition of 334, which is then extended by a left-hand
imitation in the two following bars, which rather rubs in the point. Thus, although
we may want to make this a sonata about the triumph of the irrepressible physical
gesture over the rather routine older diction, the nal message is more subtle. The
freedom of the unthinking hand-motives, for all that they dominate the rhetoric
of the work, is illusory; in the context of a closed musical form they depend on
tried and true means of writing music. In their idiot repetitions they are unable to
bring about closure. The new may triumph expressively, but the old has the last say
formally.
To speak of idiot repetitions in K. 65 reminds us that the star turn in this sonata
is hardly in fact the most virtuoso of gestures.
15
It is childs play in a double sense.
First of all it offers the performer the opportunity to simulate the presence of three
hands, but is hardly taxing in its execution. Secondly, it seems literally childlike in
its unselfconscious absorption in physical activity. We must all have noted the unre-
ective manner in which a child will repeat patterns at the keyboard; this sheer joy in
playing (Spielfreude) is expected to be tempered by a growing maturity, as the player
becomes aware of the cultural restraints on unmediated physical expression. In the
opposition of play and compose signalled at the start of this chapter, play must
in turn be understood in this double sense not just playing of a musical instru-
ment, but play in the childs self-sufcient manner. It is an outlet for exuberance and
fantasy beyond which the individual eventually passes, in the name of more consid-
ered communication with the outside world. Peter B ottinger offers some instructive
14
The unthinking retention of rst-half material at pitch in the second half of a sonata is quite a common
phenomenon in Scarlatti. It is discussed further in Chapter 7, pp. 3423.
15
It seems, though, to be reected in bars 57 and 911 of the Sonata of Alberos Recercata, Fugue and Sonata
No. 1 in D minormajor.
thoughts on the poetics of Spielfreude in the sonatas of Scarlatti. In the nal section
of his essay on K. 296, where he muses on the mechanics of the keyboard, he con-
siders this childlike relationship to sound and its physical production, writing of the
naive enjoyment of individual notes as if they were new snow untrodden and
intact. Compositional constructions, the way in which the reective adult world
arranges such sensations of sound, would then represent a mistrust of this naivety,
and Scarlattis attitude a mistrust of mistrust; the salvation of the naive by making
it subversive.
16
In other words, we nd a calculated innocence (a double meaning
B ottinger renders with the term Doppelb odigkeit), a self-conscious unselfconscious-
ness which can be seen more plainly than usual in the way K. 65 manipulates its
material.
Of all the urgently physical and virtuoso gestures found in the sonatas it is the
large leaps and hand-crossings that are particularly susceptible to mistrustful inter-
pretation. For Georges Beck the consistent abuse of this pointless device in the
Essercizi proves their early provenance. K. 29 is the most extreme of all sonatas from
this standpoint, with the left hand crossed almost unrelievedly over the right; if in
this sonata the hands are swapped, everything becomes easy. What Scarlatti writes
is almost unplayable. These are the amusements of a child prodigy who. . . wants to
astound the public with his technical prowess.
17
K. 29 certainly forms a climax to the use of left-hand-over-right passages in the
Essercizi and elsewhere, which are here highly perverse and unnatural. Unlike the
hand-crossings in K. 120, for example, that found in works like K. 29 and K. 7
is not audible it must be seen. Being sustained rather than involving to-and-fro
movements, it is also different in type. It is really sheer cruelty on the player, digitally
and mentally confusing, and without the consolation of having a dashing display
value. Hans von B ulow actually got rid of the hand-crossing in his arrangement
of the sonata as No. 1 of his Suite No. 3 and this in the century of the piano
virtuoso!
18
Indeed, even current players censor the most extravagant works of this
kind by to a great extent avoiding them in live or recorded performance. The taste
for danger and gambling that is often read into such features was neither congenial
to the old virtuoso tradition, nor does it t the streamlined smoothness of todays
concert world. Many performers might indeed wish to make use of stunt doubles
on such occasions.
More guarded expressions of mistrust tend to emphasize the element of good
taste, that devices such as hand-crossing are sparingly employed.
19
While it is true
that many of the composers keyboard effects are carried off in a spirit of appar-
ent nonchalance,
20
and elegantly realized (compared with the more abrupt use of
16
17
Beck, R everies, 13.
18
Achtzehn ausgew ahlte Klavierst ucke, in Form von Suiten gruppiert (Leipzig: Peters, 1864). Also instructive in this
regard, as Piero Rattolino points out, is Leopold Godowskys arrangement of K. 113, which was enormously
difcult to play, but eliminated the particular terrifying difculty of the original, the left hands crossing leaps.
Rattolino, Pianoforte, 115.
19
See for instance Ife, Scarlatti, 21.
20
Paul Henry Lang notes that Bart ok was particularly devoted to Domenico, and frequently played his music in
his concerts with superb understanding and with the required nonchalant virtuosity; Lang, 300 Years, 589.
virtuoso devices found, say, in the sonatas of Seixas), when hand-crossing is intro-
duced in a particular sonata, it is almost always taken to the nth degree. Aside from
this statistical excessiveness, there is often also an excessiveness of affect, an almost
obscene surplus of physical energy that seems to refuse all mature inhibition, or
indeed good taste. But because, as we have dened it, there is always a double
layer to such displays, they are calculated and hence artistic in their effect. Like
all the irritations considered in Chapter 5, they are a calculated challenge to our
priorities and perceptions from a hidden position of strength. Sebastiano Luciani has
come up with one of the best genuine musical rationales for the leaps and hand-
crossings: although they seem to be determined by keyboard virtuosity, they are
really determined by the contrast and opposition of parts, as part of the composers
dramatic symphonic style.
21
While obviously born from the usual need to rescue
mere virtuosity, this explanation touches on the structural arguments involving
register that can arise from Scarlattis keyboard athletics. We have already seen the
importance of registral play in a work like K. 65.
To endorse such an explanation should not be seen as some sort of high-level
collusion with the governing cultural dynamic against mere virtuosity; it is rather
to suggest that there can be well and badly managed virtuosity, just as any sort of
musical gesture or material may be well or badly realized. Nor must one imagine
that such keyboard activities have to be of demonstrably structural import. One
mode of understanding which takes the purely physical side at face value interprets
the relevant sonatas in choreographic terms. It was Kirkpatrick who articulated this
denitively, with a wealth of metaphors of movement that bring to life the manner
in which Scarlatti seems to aim for the imagined freedom of bodily movement of
a dancer. Such a choreographic rationale, which has been afrmed elsewhere in
the literature,
22
has the strength of moving (Scarlattis) music away from a necessary
reliance on literary models, as noted in Chapter 1, or even visual analogies, towards
the ontological possibilities of music as dance. The sense of music as some sort of
coherent rhetorical presentation, or narration, is evidently weakened by the phys-
ically intrusive devices in which Scarlatti delights, and this is undoubtedly a prime
reason for the slighting of musics corporeality altogether.
K. 327 in C major offers a ne example of the performer being forced into
gestures that enact the physical movements needed for dance itself. This is most
plain in all the sweeping arpeggiated left-hand movements, especially when these
accumulate towards the end of each half of the sonata. Note also the oscillations in
the tenor from bar 25, for example, or the bass movement at the beginning of the
second half, where the hovering repeated Gs lead to a swinging between C octaves.
21
Luciani, Sinfonismo, 44.
22
For instance, Kathleen Dale, writing in 1941, notes that the dance-like pieces not only sound like dances, but,
to the player, they feel like dances, too. This is because the hand and arm movements entailed are extremely
active; Boyd notes the sheer physical engagement that the player experiences in performing the sonatas. No
other keyboard music of the eighteenth century, and very little of any other century, is so choreographed to
employ the ngers, hands, wrists, arms, shoulders and even the waist of the performer; and Hammond writes
that hand-crossings create a new kind of choreography. Dale, Hours, 121; Boyd, Master, 1856; Hammond,
Scarlatti, 182.
The individualization of parts and registers brought about by such dance gestures
presents great opportunities for a performer to orchestrate the different colours in
the texture. There are even suggestions of stamping, which demand a boisterous
attack; the performer should not hold back. This is a difcult task for a modern
pianist in particular, who sees a small texture and may all too often respond in
kind.
Several other approaches that do not shy away from the physical side of Scarlattis
keyboard devices may be mentioned here. Edward T. Cone has noted how, by
deliberately exploring dynamic or mechanical aspects of performance, composers
have on occasion emphasized the kinetic-sonic correspondences that underlie in-
strumental gestures and gives Scarlattis hand-crossings as an example of this. If this
suggests a refreshingly direct glance at the composers foregrounding of musical me-
chanics, a later thought in the authors same discussion is revealing in a different way.
Cone counsels the need for a performer to avoid undue concentration on balletic
aspects of performance to the point where the music becomes a background for
the dance.
23
This shows a familiar anxiety that the music may be swallowed up
by physical gesture and, in being so, somehow lose its integrity; yet in Scarlattis
particular case, the novelty lies precisely in the way in which dance gesture can be
foregrounded and become the music. For Massimo Bogianckino, the histrionic
approach felt in some of Domenico Scarlattis crossing of hands and acrobatic feats,
as well as a sense of gesture and dance, are reminiscent of the commedia dellarte.
24
This offers a nice complement to the Spanish avour that animates Kirkpatricks
dance imagery, since a sense of clowning may inform such passages as much as the
passionate energy of Kirkpatricks model. We might also note one likely histori-
cal basis for such keyboard fare that it was an attempt to match the cross-string
technique that was such a feature of contemporary virtuoso violin writing.
25
The
second movement of Marcellos Sonata No. 9 in A major, for instance, evinces some
hair-raising examples of violinistic leaps, but a comparison with Scarlattis leaps is
instructive. In Scarlatti the leaps are less plainly violinistic they only rarely sound
like a sort of translation from another instruments terms and, unlike the taste-
ful and technically understandable infrequency of their appearance in the Marcello,
Scarlatti tends to saturate a work with them.
If the choreographic analogy offers a strong positive model for the understanding
of the physicality projected by so many features of the sonatas, it must also be
acknowledged that it has its limits. Above all, it does not allow for the mediated
character of such material, no matter how forceful or irresistible its presentation
may be. As suggested above, this material is contextualized in a self-conscious way,
whether this is a relatively explicit or implicit procedure. This does not mean, of
23
The Composers Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 1378 and 139.
24
Bogianckino, Harpsichord, 85n. One might also consider the possible specic inuence of comic intermezzo
features; Charles Troy cites a burlesque comparison aria by Domenico Sarri from Limpresario delle Canarie in
which the character Nibbio has to leap between bass and coloratura registers. Troy, Intermezzo, 98.
25
This is noted, for example, in Dent, Edition, 195.
Ex. 6.3a K. 112 bars 1121
course, that the composer in turn assents intellectually to the established priorities.
Rather, he recognizes the cultural reality that virtuosity is regarded as not enough
in itself, that pure physicality is deemed unripe or uncivilized; and so these features
need framing or pointing in some way for their aesthetic moment to be grasped. The
Sonata in B at major, K. 112, in its obsessive use of one technical/balletic feature
for long periods of time, seems to present a classic instance of Spielfreude. Ex. 6.3a
shows the rst appearances of the basic two-bar module from bar 13. Also used, with
less frequency, is a contracted one-bar version of the same material. The opening
twelve bars present a symmetrical construction, to which the following endless
repetitions seem to relate neither thematically nor stylistically. From bar 13 it is as
if a sudden physical impulse spirits the work away from any expected continuation.
In art music the art should be to subsume such a seemingly inorganic feature under
more musical considerations, to integrate it with the musical argument. The
composer impudently does the opposite everything in this sonata that is not part
of this gesture, which is increasingly little, is less than memorable, and it is the simple
physical gesture that stays in the mind, that becomes an object of contemplation.
Mere virtuosity is all.
The second half graphically illustrates the increasing hold of the basic virtuoso
shape. The opening section of the second half, beginning with a rough inversion of
bar 1 in the same manner as K. 65, lasts for just four bars compared with the twelve
bars in the rst half. We then hear sixteen consecutive versions of the primary two-
bar module, broken only once at bars 779; although there are some changes of
contour and harmonic shaping, the essential repetitive impetus of the idea is not
compromised.
The only other parts of the sonata which are not entirely subject to the dominance
of the virtuoso shape are the respective closing sections. Although they maintain
bar for bar the same rhythmic motive established in bar 13, there are no leaping
hand-crossings and this, together with the use of familiar cadential phraseology,
Ex. 6.3b K. 112 bars 10213
results in a sense of relaxation into a more normal texture and rhetoric. Such an
effect is exploited frequently. In K. 15 in E minor the hands are for the most part
upside down, in the same dyslexic manner noted in the case of K. 29.
26
However,
they resume their natural positions for the closing theme at the end of each half,
which is of a popular open character. After the Baroque sequential motion of all
the earlier material, pushing ever forward without cadential articulation, we are
presented with simple alternations of tonic and dominant. The relaxation of hand
disposition coincides with the relaxation into the square closing material, which is
topically more informal. In addition, harmonic consonance coincides with a sort
of pianistic consonance. The structural harmonic goal is similarly emphasized in
K. 112.
Bars 1058 present the transposed equivalent of the rst half s closing material
(see Ex. 6.3b). With bars 10910 we might expect a third playing of the closing
gure to match 4950 in the rst half, but instead we get a new two-bar unit,
repeated to match the transposed 2 +2 construction already heard. The unexpected
falling-arpeggio triplet-semiquaver shape reintroduces the main virtuoso gure of
the piece and so wittily emphasizes its total dominance. Thus, just when we think we
have left all the virtuoso affects behind for the ofcial business of closing the form,
the gure reasserts itself, with a more complete bass line in support. This also has
a harmonic point the motive closes itself in the tonic after being heard countless
times in association with other chords and harmonic areas. Not only that, but bars
109 and 111 also match in pitch the rst two appearances of the virtuoso gure at
bars 13 and 15 (compare Ex. 6.3a). This mixture of intrinsic and extrinsic functions
offers a wonderful example of B ottingers Doppelb odigkeit.
In K. 126 in C minor the long sequence of matching arpeggios heard in alter-
nating hands from bar 32 functions as a release after all the previous close stepwise
26
This is Frederick Hammonds term; Hammond, Scarlatti, 169.
Ex. 6.4 K. 180 bars 1346
movement. Exceptionally, they suggest a quite clear generic parallel, with a dou-
ble violin concerto compare, for example, bars 11ff. of the third movement of
Vivaldis Summer from Le quattro stagioni. For all the plainness of pitch contour,
these gures once more overshadow all the composed material. As so often, the
very inarticulacy by conventional standards, the very brute insistence, adds to the
gestural power of such passages.
This feature in K. 126 may be compared with the unthinking D major arpeggios
that occur in bars 3941 of K. 180 (see Ex. 6.4). Preceding a vamp, these bars are
once again in a way the most striking moment of their piece, since it is difcult to
show any real logic to the threefold repetition. The sense of a physicality not open to
rational intellectual explanation exuberance without intentionality is especially
marked since there is a strong sense of cutting from the equivalent of the rst two
bars of the piece bars 378 replicate 12 at the dominant to an exact repetition
of bars 24 and 26. Even the intervening bar 25 is cut out. The composer gives way
to the player, so to speak, as if he cannot wait until the appointed time to resume the
rippling arpeggios and then enjoys the physical sensation too much to want to stop.
This is an even more marked example of infantile gratication than the opening
of K. 65.
This passage forms a very efcient contrast, though, with the vamp that is to
follow; the most expansive and spacious leads to the narrowest and most constricted,
the most consonant to the most bitingly dissonant. Thus although it seems to lack
thematic, formal and syntactical logic, the passage has a spatial logic. It forms part of
a plot of physical gestures, just as if the piece were choreographed; this is a category
that will be examined in the following section of this chapter.
Ex. 6.4 (cont.)
How, though, do we interpret the arpeggios that open the second half of K. 394
(Ex. 6.5)? They are like a bolt from the blue, and do not even seem to be conceived
in the governing tempo of the sonata. The passage seems to represent an extreme
example of sheer Spielfreude. To think of it as some sort of cadenza would surely not
be equal to its rupturing force.
27
In another context we might indeed be able to
understand it as unexceptionable toccata-type writing, but we have already heard a
tautly conducted rst half in a racy, mainly contrapuntal style. Thus the beginning
of the second half feels like a release, as if the composer in a sense ceases to compose.
Instead, we embark on a picaresque adventure of pure playing.
The improvisatory sense is strengthened by the fact that after a gap and pause,
the arpeggios in bar 70 shift down a third. We have already moved from B minor
a rmly articulated dominant to A major (D major?), then there is a further jump
to F major. (The harmonic ambiguity here is comparable to the equivalent spot
of K. 261, to be discussed in Chapter 7: are we hearing a diatonic dominant or
a quasi-modal tonic?) The impact of this improvised raw material is reected in
what follows from bar 76. With the rules of syntax, good continuation and so forth
having been shattered, the following material, as we saw in Chapter 5, shatters the
27
F. E. Kirby calls it a cadenza-like passage in Kirby, Keyboard, 162.
Ex. 6.5 K. 394 bars 6486
rules of voice leading and diatonic harmony. The whole linguistic system seems to
have unravelled. It only gradually pieces itself together again in the subsequent music
from bar 83. Here is the supreme example of the sheer thrill of letting go . What
is stressed thereby is the agency of the composer in crafting an artistic product in the
rst place; at any future moment, so the start of the second half implies, he may again
cease to work within the precepts that allow for civilized artistic communication in
the rst place.
Ex. 6.5 (cont.)
KEYBOAD EALI SM
An overarching category which can illuminate many of the incidents discussed so
far is the intrinsic nature of Scarlattis keyboard writing. The sense that much of
what is distinctive in the sonatas happens in the name of what Macario Santiago
Kastner calls una genuina m usica de tecla
28
genuine keyboard music has been
well evoked in much of the critical literature. The full implications of this category,
though, have not often been thought through. Most frequently, as we have seen,
it is only bits of the larger story that have been captured and then misleadingly
framed, such as the litanies concerning mere virtuosity, technical exploitation,
pedagogy and improvisation. Such strands of thought have often had the effect, even
if inadvertent, of diminishing the composers creative achievement in the sonatas. On
the other hand, many of Scarlattis most remarkable effects are not readily imaginable
in non-keyboard terms. His advocacy for physical expression, for example, and the
ambiguity between composed and merely played material are only really possible to
this extent in a solo keyboard context, where the composer, as was usually the case
at that time, was also the performer. Less obviously, such phenomena as the missing-
bar trick or textural reduction at cadence points would not readily and practicably
translate to any ensemble context. But just because many such effects are intrinsic,
and therefore limited in their wider musical application, this should not allow the
implicit condescension with which they may sometimes be viewed by the larger
musical world. One often enough comes across a tone that implies that such features,
when identied, are relatively harmless hermetic eccentricities, without resonance
for the big picture. Of course all the historiographical problems outlined at the
outset of this study play a part in this, but our ambivalent attitude to keyboard
instruments, especially nowadays the piano, is also fundamental.
This ambivalence is born historically from the relative parvenu status of keyboard
instruments, organ excepted, and is exactly what Scarlatti grapples with in his attempt
28
Kastner, Repensando, 137.
Ex. 6.6 K. 503 bars 18
to create una genuina m usica de tecla. A concise example of this may be found
early in the Sonata in B at major, K. 503 (Ex. 6.6). At bars 57 we would expect
something more worked than the complete silence of the right hand while the left
hand answers the rights bars 34; this creates a yawning gap in the texture. At all
subsequent points it provides a rough equivalent of the left hands prior material in
a sort of invertible counterpoint; compare bars 1314, for instance, or 489, which
is the second-half equivalent of bars 56. The inactivity of the right hand is not a
minor matter do any other composers do this sort of thing?
We might compare this with the start of K. 422 (mentioned in Chapter 5), where
after such a long opening gambit the subsequent silence of the right hand while
the left hand imitates must be heard as an active one, with the composer refusing
to full our expectations of contrapuntal interplay, or at least textural growth. We
are not given enough to listen to. In the present case any sense of disdain seems less
plausible. What is certain is that this cannot simply be explained pedagogically or
technically, the left hand being given the spotlight so as to encourage independence
of the hands. There is a technical explanation of a more abstract kind that Scarlatti,
starting with a fanfare and then moving to set up some two-part writing, decides to
remind us of the physical reality that there are two separate entities, the two hands,
involved, and not some sort of composite performance medium. This might chime
with his reported remark about Alberti and other keyboard composers being able to
say what they need to just as well in other mediums.
29
This consciousness that there are potentially two distinct personalities involved,
of the sense of the physical reality of playing the keyboard, amounts to a textural
topic in the sonatas. What, Scarlatti seems to ask, is the real identity of my keyboard?
There must be something more than transcription and evocation of other genres
and mediums (vocal as well as instrumental). This is of course in itself part of the
29
Cited in Pagano, Dita, 8990.
keyboards genius, its own true identity no other instruments can so easily evoke
so wide a range of reference. Nevertheless, alongside such traditional extroversive
meanings
30
there is the introversive technical reality, a sort of inbuilt stereophonic po-
tential. The frequently skewed treatment of counterpoint in the sonatas especially
the abandoned opening imitations may issue from a sort of resentment of what is
seen as a primarily vocal technique, or one involving several separate parts or players
in an instrumental form, foisted onto the keyboard. Scarlatti inherits this historical
situation the ricercare tradition. He can combat it with the toccata, which is one
view of bars 57. These bars represent in other words an assertion of the keyboards
rights, the intrusion of what I call keyboard realism. There is after all no reason for
the hands always to cooperate in creating the ction of another form or medium.
Scarlatti is the rst to assert so radically the keyboards rights to and possibilities of
intrinsic material. Hence, for instance, the leaps and hand-crossings, in this sense
undertaken as a demonstration of the keyboards musical independence through the
medium of technique. This is not the same as the normal commentary on Scarlattis
exploitation of the keyboard and all its technical devices. The composer is not just
inventing under the spell of his fertile ngers; he is trying to make more authentic
music with his medium. The trademark descending arpeggio in the left hand at bars
78
1
of K. 503 is remarkable in this context; the left hand itself achieves closure
of the phrase without any textural complement and by quickly ranging over three
octaves. This seals the triumph of the instrument and of the two-handed player.
The composers distance from specic generic associations, as explored in Chapter
3, is also relevant to this instrumental reform. The very persistence of the title sonata
is signicant in this regard, with Scarlattis invention being neither named after
nor conceived according to standard keyboard models like suite, toccata, concerto,
prelude, fantasia, variations and so forth. From this historical standpoint the title
sonata is like a declaration of independence, as if each piece begins with a blank slate.
Nor should we overlook the free-standing status of each individual work (although
the issue of pairing will need further treatment in the following chapter). Daniel
E. Freeman, in reminding us of the susceptibility to stylistic inuence from non-
keyboard genres that characterizes so much eighteenth-century keyboard music,
comments that such genres were often imported, it seems, to lend a certain grandness
or profundity to many works.
31
The keyboard, perceived to be intrinsically lacking
in such attributes and of ill-dened personality altogether, therefore had to lead a
vicarious musical existence. The Scarlatti sonatas, on the other hand, refuse to be
beholden to borrowings from the rest of the musical world.
If the leaps and extravagant hand-crossings are one expression of a genuine key-
board identity, so are the often associated freedoms of register and voice leading.
30
Frederick Hammond, who gives a list of such outward references, believes that the orchestra and other in-
strumental reminiscences inspired much of Scarlattis extension of keyboard sound beyond its normal limits of
reference, but this does not really distinguish Scarlattis approach in kind from that of many other keyboard
composers of the time. Hammond, Scarlatti, 178.
31
Freeman, J. C. Bach, 233.
Ex. 6.7 K. 46 bars 6771
The Avison arrangements for string orchestra, discussed in Chapter 4, often point
up the free disposition of such elements in Scarlattis intrinsic keyboard style. A sim-
ple example may be found in bars 1516 of K. 180 (see Ex. 6.4 earlier). Here the left
hand imitates the right hands line at a distance of two crotchets, but its c
1
does not
resolve up by step as did the right hands c
2
but falls nearly two octaves to a D. At
one level such an occurrence acts as a typical aberration from good compositional
practice, but in the current terms it may also be seen as an idiomatic resolution of the
leading note, particularly since the leap to a low bass note is an already established
pattern. It is as if Scarlatti pointedly denies the vocal basis for the agreed rules of
musical behaviour: in a limited vocal range it may make sense for such rules to be
observed, but why should they hold on the keyboard, when there is such a range of
pitches and registral resources to play with? Of course such freedoms, as we saw in a
comparable example in bars 3031 of K. 402 (see Ex. 3.12), were a part of the mod-
ern instrumental style of the time altogether, but Scarlatti characteristically pursues
such features more urgently. An extraordinary effect is created by the left-hand scales
at bars 68 and 71 of K. 46 (Ex. 6.7), where the leading-note A is left hanging when
the bass register from the previous bar is resumed. This is all the more striking since
the register of the rising scale is itself reached by an abrupt leap. This again seems to
proclaim the independence of the keyboard from normal voice-leading conduct; the
thrill of the sudden plunge down over two octaves is more important. Yet even this
pure physical sensation has some logical basis in the medium of composition.
One example of the composers independent registral thinking is especially promi-
nent in the Essercizi. This is quite apparent from the look of the page in the original
publication; it is the frequent lack of bass register to which we referred earlier. It
is very prominent in works like K. 11, K. 19 and especially K. 20. Here the bass
register only sounds at real structural points, and for most of the time there are few
notes below middle C. Why, Scarlatti seems to ask, should the keyboard inhabit the
range roughly of orchestral or choral music, with bass lines in the bass register? Why
too a fullish texture? The frequency of allusive two-part writing in the sonatas has
often been noted and variously interpreted;
32
it can certainly, as we have already
suggested, act as an obstacle to and for performers, especially pianists.
32
For example, Peter Barcaba sees the two-part writing as a bridge to Classical counterpoint, Georges Beck sees it
as a lazy Italian type of keyboard texture that demands to be lled in, and Pestelli sees it as part of the composers
subtraction, as renement rather than simplication. Barcaba, Geburtsstunde, 385; Beck, R everies, 15;
Indeed, Scarlattis left-hand parts altogether tend to be written more in the tenor
than a traditional bass region.
33
There is also the well-known tendency to employ
registral extremes, especially at the upper end of the keyboard. These are not simply
employed for their sensuous effect, as we nd so often in Schubert, for instance,
but precisely because they emphasize what the keyboard can do and other musical
mediums can do far less readily or not at all. In these respects too the composers
exploitation of register liberates the keyboard from its customary role as a forger.
Another aspect to the realization of an intrinsic keyboard style involves the fact that
there are not only two hands involved, but two sets of ve ngers. This entails more,
though, than the customary reference to improving technical devices. Roberto
Pagano takes the most literal notion of Fingermusik as a point of departure for a
consideration of Scarlattis new objective of rational playing devoted to employing
all the ngers of the hand. This follows fromhis belief that the composer tends to use
the hand as often as possible in its natural position.
34
Such rationalism opposes the
older ngering practices with their distinction between good and bad ngers. The
author takes the example of K. 228 in B at major, in which the real protagonists
of the sonata are the ten ngers. Thus we nd for example a quarrel between
quintuple units, as determined by the number of ngers on each hand, and the 3/8
triple metre at bars 45ff.; the hands then take revenge in their following quintuple
shapes, rst of all beginning on the upbeat, then on the downbeat from bar 57. This
amounts to what Pagano denes as a sort of deliberate serialization of the use of the
ngers, in which the ve-nger row can determine structure and syntax what the
author calls the possibility of nding a rationale for phrases in the . . . use of hand and
ngers.
35
Pagano is thus suggesting an interpretation and a search for meaning on a more
technical plane, that technique can in other words function as a sort of topic. Topic
may be too weak a word given that every note and bar must necessarily involve
technique.
36
Technical invention and innovation are generally slighted in accounts
of changes of musical style since we have an ideological preference for a more
absolute or abstract musical thought, the notion that merely physical factors could
also drive such development is less congenial. Such a rationale may in fact be es-
pecially appropriate for the keyboard, given the particular physicality involved in
playing it, typically using for example wider movements than other instruments and
offering such a pronounced measure of digital gratication. The danger of Paganos
thesis lies not so much in any intrinsic weakness but simply in that from the wider
ideological perspective it reafrms that Scarlattis concerns were narrow, lacking
33
This is noted in van der Meer, Keyboard, 139.
34
Pagano, Dita, 88 and 90.
35
Pagano, Dita, 1017. Peter Williams has also written of the need for an awareness of the way the keyboard
creates motifs and themes; see Williams, Boyd Review, 373.
36
This is a point that is not quite grasped in Farhad Abbassian-Milanis work on the relationship of playing
and composing in the Essercizi. Although he quite rightly wants to demonstrate the inextricability of the
two, technique still tends to imply foregrounded guration, generally relatively difcult and not thematic.
Abbassian-Milani, Essercizi.
signicance beyond the story of the development of keyboard technique. Yet virtu-
osity, or at least technical prociency, may in itself be conceived as a form of learning,
a physical equivalent of those factors thought to constitute true musical learning. In
both cases the aim can involve both a display of the accomplishment and, in other
circumstances, a uency that hides the effort of acquisition.
TEXTUE AND SONOI TY
The other part of our genuina m usica de tecla involves not the means of production
but the sound itself generated by the keyboard. This can prompt a more literal
reading of the title Scarlatti gave to all his keyboard works, sonata deriving from
sonare, meaning to sound.
37
This can easily be overlooked in the concentration
on technical means in the narrower sense. When Charles Rosen complains that
critics often write as if Liszts innovations in piano technique were merely ways
of playing lots of notes in a short space of time, instead of inventions of sound,
38
the same could apply to Scarlatti. For example, when Cesare Valabrega divides his
consideration of Scarlattis keyboard writing into the usual categories, he might seem
to be overlooking exactly this fundamental aspect, yet the descriptions themselves
are often well attuned to Scarlattis sonorous invention. In his discussion of scales he
writes thus of bars 1920 of K. 454 (Ex. 6.8a): the triplets rush towards the A in the
bass, to which they seem to be attracted as if by a magnet . . . The rush of semiquavers
is extinguished in the A, thrown down from the heights of the keyboard. Such a
poetic metaphor may well bring a smile to our lips, but it is a useful corrective to
any tendency including Valabregas elsewhere to categorize this simply as a piece
of guration or even virtuoso padding. Similarly, in bars 324 of K. 24 (Ex. 6.8b)
the E major scale forms a series of rainbow spirals.
39
Again, this at least encourages
us to hear the passage as a musical idea, a particular disposition of sound, rather than
just in terms of some technicalpedagogical framework.
Charles Rosen also notes the historically exceptional nature of Scarlattis attending
so closely to sound. To argue his claimthat the Romantics permanently enlarged the
role of sound in the composition of music, he interprets the pre-existing situation
thus: tone colour was applied like a veneer to the form, but did not create or shape
it. There were a few cracks in this solid view which conned the basic material of
music to the neutral elements of pitch and rhythm: among the interesting exceptions
are those moments of pure play of sound in Scarlattis sonatas, where the keyboard
instrument mimics trumpets, drums, oboes, and guitars.
40
While there can be little
doubt about Rosens isolation of Scarlatti as such in this historical context, the
examples chosen precisely miss the point. The most radical play of sound in Scarlatti
does not often involve overt extra-keyboard reference.
37
This is pointed out in Denby Richards, notes to recording by Virginia Black (United: 88005, 1993), 6.
38
Rosen, Romantic, 508.
39
40
Rosen, Romantic, 40 and 39. It is not entirely clear why pitch and rhythm should be more neutral than timbre;
presumably Rosen means they are less instrument-specic.
Ex. 6.8a K. 454 bars 1521
Ex. 6.8b K. 24 bars 326
An example of this may be found in the Sonata in C major, K. 465, with its
dominant-seventh arpeggios heard rst in the right hand then answered by the left
in bars 25ff. (see Ex. 6.9). The material is hardly novel but the larger effect is just
that. Over eight bars of pure dominant seventh is an unusual sonority pre-Beethoven
and also for Scarlatti himself. The fact that it is presented in imitation is also striking,
since imitation is normally and naturally reserved for more composed material
(as with the opening exchange of the work). There is once more something almost
infantile about the texture here, as though a child were discovering for the rst
time the thrill of creating such a sound. Note also that the dominant seventh is
not resolved harmonically until the end of the following phrase, at bar 43 and then
at 100 in the second half. This phrase (from bar 36) begins by prolonging the
previous dominant, when the normal harmonic rhetoric would be to resolve such
an explicit seventh chord pretty well immediately the dissonant seventh is also
stressed by its position on the downbeat at the apex of each arpeggio gure (see bars
26, 28, 30 and 32). This furthers the sense that it is being used non-functionally,
Ex. 6.9 K. 465 bars 2435
so to speak, simply as sound, to be savoured asyntactically.
41
Rosens pure play of
sound would be better applied here than to those contexts suggesting trumpets and
drums.
There can, of course, be no denying the extent and effectiveness of Scarlattis
references to the outer musical world; it is a paradox that his keyboard writing can
be so outwardly referential yet still so unprecedentedly intrinsic, that it can combine
both outer and inner realism. However, we must bear in mind the frequently
ambiguous and uncertain identity of the sonatas topical signals. Ultimately what
seems to count is not so much the precise nature and fact of the evocation as the fact
that, as we have already dened it, such an approach constitutes an open invitation to
the ear. This also means an open invitation to the player to create or discover sound
effects. This is something that reaches beyond the fact that the very sound(ing) of
music is by denition in the gift of the performer. Christian Zachariass recording of
the Sonata in F minor, K. 183, reveals a wonderful example of such a hidden sound
effect, of suggestiveness but not statement in the notation. He turns the left-hand
minims at bars 314 and so forth into bell sounds (see Ex. 6.10) they could just as
easily not be played or heard as such.
42
They have no necessary or obvious relevance
to the other material of the sonata (which is topically very elusive anyway), but are
like a sudden intrusion of an objet sonore. The main means of understanding such
an apparently random phenomenon would be to incorporate it into the category of
sounds of the world. This is in itself new, part of the genius of (keyboard) music as
Scarlatti conceives it. The very place of sound itself in the total artistic conception,
its very palpability, is also new, as Rosen suggests, but it is uid and suggestive in
conception rather than being dened according to pre-established affective or topical
schemes. When Stephen Plaistow commends Mikhail Pletnevs readings for the way
41
Something very similar indeed is heard in Seixass Sonata No. 10 in C (1965) at bars 31ff., but there it is not an
isolated object, merely one of many dazzling effects.
42
EMI: 7 63940 2, 197985/1991.
Ex. 6.10 K. 183 bars 2837
they make . . . sound immediately command character, he overlooks the fact that it
is the very nature of Scarlattis conception of sonority that has encouraged this in
the rst place.
43
Rosens conation of this pure play of sound with the imitation of particular
instruments is understandable given that one of its most striking manifestations is
Scarlattis penchant for open sonorities, giving the sense of a music that resounds for
all the world to hear. Ex. 6.9 above offers a distinctly pure instance of this open-air
mode, but in many cases it is not surprisingly linked to an evocation of popular
musical style. This is the case in bars 26ff. of K. 188 in A minor, which is also one of
the composers most exhilarating three-card tricks. Its bracing effect derives from the
low bass, the gap between the hands, the fths that end each unit and the implied
cross-rhythms of the compound-melodic right-hand line. These features produce a
rustic tone, with suggestions of stamping, that is uncannily direct. The prominent
use of open fths and of octaves is particularly common in evoking this popular
sonority.
However, such attention to sound does not always produce a listening experience
that can be thought of as conventionally pleasant. In a work like K. 487 the keyboard
is treated in a frankly percussive manner there is no other way to describe the left
hand of bars 916, which jumps between four-note cluster chords a fth apart.
The left-hand leaps in octaves, rst heard at bars 4958, would warrant the famous
Roseingrave description of ten thousand devils, and this is the piece he ought to
have heard. If he was excited by what he did hear (obviously either one of the early
sonatas or a piece that has not come down to us), imagine what he would have
made of K. 487. One has to remember what else was being written in the name of
keyboard music at this time (whenever that was) compared to any piece by Bach,
43
Plaistow, Pletnev Review, 72.
Ex. 6.11a K. 444 bars 348
Ex. 6.11b K. 480 bars 738
for example, let alone Couperin, this seems like an assault upon the instrument and
upon the sensibilities, given the coarse urgency of the repetitions and the relish for
sheer diabolical technique. The nal two-octave ascending scale in bar 163 (almost
certainly to be executed glissando) is a virtuoso ourish that is needed to cap the
display amusingly, Scarlatti is almost anticipating what any self-respecting piano
virtuoso trained in the grand tradition would add without prompting.
Less sensationally, the decorum of the keyboard is also put under threat in a sonata
such as the boisterous K. 406, whose wide tessitura and relaxed invention are a far
cry from most types of keyboard composition of the time, whether learned, virtuoso,
pedagogical or pictorial. K. 406 may be a number of these things, but above all it is
almost aggressively at ease with its populist stance. The keyboard manner found in
such works often makes one think that the nearest equivalent to such music is the
jazz-inuenced piano writing of some twentieth-century composers, starting from
a high-art position but using the vernacular to revivify their art.
On many occasions Scarlattis octaves have not an open, but a crowding effect upon
the sound, generally when they are embedded in a wider or thicker texture. This,
one of the most distinctive characteristics of the composers keyboard writing, has
barely been recognized by writers and performers. This is perhaps not surprising,
since their provenance and effect are often difcult to interpret. Sometimes they
involve doubled pedal points, as in Ex. 6.11a and b, from K. 444 (with the dotted-
minim As in the middle of the texture) and K. 480 (with octaves now between
the top and an inner strand), but they may also involve doubling of an independent
moving line. In such cases the octaves often inhabit a grey area between colouristic
doubling and parallel voice leading, between the claims of sonority and of grammar.
An instance of this may be found in K. 112, with the extraordinary effect of the
parallel octaves rst heard in bars 17
3
18 (see Ex. 6.3a). As so often, these occur in
a context in which the part-writing has previously been more or less independent.
Ex. 6.11c K. 19 bars 4054
K. 19 contains an example of octave doubling that is very similar in form but
quite different in expressive force (Ex. 6.11c). The model can be found in bars 910
and 1112 of the rst half, based on parallel sixths between the voices as the left
hand crosses over the right. In the second half, the addition of thirds above in the left
hand as it crosses over produces the strangely affecting sonority found at bars 523 and
545.
44
That we are supposed to hear this as an unusual effect rather than some sort of
self-evident piece of textural thickening is strongly suggested by the fact that we have,
only a few bars earlier at 44
2
45
1
and 46
2
47
1
, heard the same appoggiatura gure.
At those points, though, it was complemented by a line of exemplary contrapuntal
behaviour which turned the upper part into a simple suspension, prepared, restruck
and resolved. When, a few bars later, this contrapuntal complement has disappeared,
it is difcult not to be disconcerted. That the constituent voices nevertheless retain
some sense of independence, making the effect still stranger, is shown by the icker
of rhythmic difference between the left hands repeated notes on the second and
third quavers of each bar and the right hands sustained crotchet.
As suggested above, the stylistic import of such textural octaves is not always clear.
The most likely suggestion is that they are popular, rustic or exotic, and sometimes
this is made very clear, as in K. 131 (Ex. 6.11d). Here the primitivism is reinforced
44
In his arrangement of K. 19 Charles Avison cuts bars 51
4
55, although the melodic line of bar 52 is taken as the
basis of a link to the equivalent of 56ff. This is the rst and only cut in his version, which appears as the second
movement of Concerto No. 7. Did the weird consecutives put him off?
Ex. 6.11d K. 131 bars 4550
Ex. 6.11e K. 223 bars 215
by the rough harmonic details surrounding the parallel octaves in bar 48 (and is
corrected in the second-half equivalent). On the other hand, although K. 223
certainly has a popular manner, the octave doublings at the cadence point in bars
234 (see Ex. 6.11e) do not seem marked in the same way. This sort of example is
in a way more subversive; since it serves no obvious affective purpose, it is all the
more likely to occasion the sort of collective critical neurosis evoked in the previous
chapter. Perhaps too it is a better example of the primacy of sonority all we can
honestly say of it is that sense seems to yield to sound. For Ann Livermore, such
doublings are not so much rustic as deliberately archaic in effect, like musicians
playing together in close pairs.
45
This certainly helps to complete the impression
that they are inaccessible to our sensibilities.
That this device may in turn be unpleasant rather than simply piquant is well
illustrated at the start of K. 449 in G major (Ex. 6.11f ). The sudden use of octaves at
bars 6 and 8 is rather a shocking sonority. As we saw most clearly in K. 19, Scarlatti
offends against a basic part-writing lawor instinct, which is to counterpoint a leading
part with complementary intervals such as thirds and sixths. In bar 6 the right hand
fails to distinguish itself in this way from the left hands imitative reply. Because the
ear hears octave equivalence the sense of independent part-writing is compromised.
Bars 89 are even more troubling with the parallel octaves between upper voice
and tenor. The composer shows he is aware of the offence by the conduct of the
parts in another imitative gambit at bars 1317, which is perfectly acceptable. If we
contemplate this predilection for octaves in many part-writing contexts from further
away, we may even understand it as a sort of intervallic Verfremdung lending shock
value to the most basic musical interval is very characteristic Scarlattian thought and
supports Pestellis theorem that the composers genius consists in taking away rather
45
Livermore, Spanish, 116.
Ex. 6.11f K. 449 bars 119
Ex. 6.11g K. 28 bars 416
than adding.
46
This predilection is clearly born of the same impulse as the unisons
that end the halves of a very high proportion of the sonatas. Indeed, these unisons
can also make bare octaves sound shocking.
One nal example of this fascinating textural ngerprint, from K. 28, is given as
Ex. 6.11g. Here the octaves formed by soprano, tenor and bass on each downbeat are
juxtaposed with the implied four-part harmony on the second and third beats of the
bar. The effect is both harsh and earthy. The potential for sonorous manipulation
offered by such a passage is almost always passed over by performers, presumably
because they do not even recognize this hidden sound effect. A plausible way
to treat such a passage (in which a touch-sensitive instrument is a help but not
indispensable) would be to treat the Bs as a single sonorous unit and place them on
their own separate dynamic plane.
46
Pestelli, Sonate, 137. Pestelli is speaking here of the Essercizi, but this may fairly be extended to the whole of
Scarlattis sonata output.
One remarkable instance of the composers genius for taking away is found in the
phenomenon of the missing bass note. As already suggested in Chapter 4, in asso-
ciation with K. 523, this is one of the most delicate aspects of the source situation,
which determines that any positive commentary on the feature sails very close to
the wind. Since the missing notes in K. 523 form a clear pattern, this is much less
treacherous than the more typical situation where only a note or two is missing.
Sheveloff is the only writer to confront the problem, dividing the examples into
those that occur at mid-utterance as in bar 17 of K. 13, where the bass would
seem to step off a cliff and those found at a cadence point. In this category he
discusses the absent bass note in bar 65 of K. 210. (Ex. 6.12 shows this in the Gilbert
edition, with the bass note present as found in V; as Sheveloff points out, though, the
note has unquestionably been added by a foreign hand.) Perhaps, he conjectures of
this example, Scarlatti intended to prepare for this cadence, setting it up powerfully,
only to frustrate it at the moment of consummation; the composer then adds an F
at the equivalent cadential points of bars 72 and 75, so as to delay the arrival of the
tonic in all voices until the last bar of the sonata. Nevertheless, Sheveloff concedes
that such explanations require greater suspension of disbelief than most of my col-
leagues and musical acquaintances have been able to muster. Even I hope it turns
out to be a scribal error.
47
Indeed, we might well feel that such things are beyond
the control of even the most self-conscious of composers. It is undeniable that an
adverse physical reaction accompanies the spiriting away of such seemingly essential
notes. In effect, the musical phrase accumulates and builds towards . . . nothing.
In this particular case, though, the writer overlooks several details which strengthen
the case for the absence at bar 65. The pre-cadential bars 71 and 74 match what we
heard at 64, but the following bars are then decient at the other textural extreme;
thus the previously absent bass note now sounds, and it is the upper voice, with its F,
that spoils the articulation of the cadence. Then, however, Scarlatti alters the thematic
form of the nal cadential bars. Bars 78 and 80 rhyme with the corresponding point
at the end of the rst half, but the alternate bars 79 and 81 do not. They should take
exactly the form found in the pre-cadential bars 64, 71 and 74 with which we have
just been concerned. However, Scarlatti substitutes in both cases a new cadential
formula. It would seem to be that the old pre-cadential gure has become tainted
by its three prior appearances. Since it has become associated with a misring of the
cadence, it would seem that something fresh is required to accomplish a strong sense
of closure. Will anyone else buy this rationalization of the irrational?
Less shocking examples can occur in the context of an arpeggiated ourish that
touches on the suppressed bass note during its course. Such omissions, while still
disturbing, are relatively more harmless. Examples may be found in K. 162 (bar 93),
K. 264 (bars 116 and 119), K. 268 (bar 26) and K. 474 (bar 46).
48
Even more clearly
47
Sheveloff, Uncertainties, 159, 161 and 165.
48
An indication of the tricky source situation may be found in the fact that the Lisbon Libro di tocate adds a number
of new candidates to this list. Some, such as the bass note not found in the last bar (43) of the rst half of the
Ex. 6.12 K. 210 bars 6282
than with K. 210 above, such absences can be understood as a way of throwing
articulative weight onto events yet to come, of maintaining momentum.
That this technique may issue from the composers pronounced sense of
materiality, from his passion for provoking all manner of physical reaction from
the listener, is apparent too in K. 384. At the beginning of its second half M and
W add a common-sense G in the bass at 26
1
which is lacking in P and V. The
lack of the note may again be hard to take, since it would mean that the major
structural cadence from the second-time playing of the rst half to the rst-time
playing of the second would simply evaporate; Frederick Hammond in fact describes
its absence as impossible.
49
However, its omission can be justied in terms of the
plot of the piece. The rst half is Arcadian; it features delicate fanfares at the start,
idyllic hovering material at bars 711
1
(a mode also found in the corresponding sec-
tion of K. 215, for example), then a decorative galant demisemiquaver gure. The
second half starts with a melancholy sigh it seems to mix Baroque and Spanish
features, the accumulation of repeated appoggiaturas at 2931 sounding Spanish and
the bass suspensions like something from a Baroque arioso style. Through material
and mode this is arrestingly different from anything in the rst half it sounds as des-
olate and world-weary as any example of Jane Clarks Spanish loneliness. The high
bass line accentuates this effect of entering a more personal realm. Thus the missing
reading of K. 215, might work dramatically given the upcoming disruption as we are about to argue in the
case of K. 384. However, the evidence that this might have been hastily copied no tempo indication and ties
extensively missing tends to make one lose condence. On the other hand, the bass note missing from bar 9
of K. 442, even if wrong, would be perfectly idiomatic. This occurs at the start of a downward ourish similar
to those indicated above and leads to the expected bass pitch, an octave lower, three bars subsequently.
49
Hammond, Fadini Review, 565.
bass note at 26
1
simply highlights and enforces the separation of the two topical
worlds.
We might again nish the discussion by considering how keyboard players could
deliver such features in performance. In bar 70 of K. 209 in A major the expected
bass note at the cadence is absent in V and P. Fadini respects these sources and leaves
a blank; Gilbert adds it in, although noting the absence in his critical commentary.
In his recording of the work Andreas Staier goes along with Fadini and does not
insert an e. Not only is this bold application of Texttreue commendable in itself, but
Staier tries to make expressive sense of the absence.
50
He hesitates on the solitary
upper-voice e
2
at 70, and then the repetition of the phrase begins uncertainly, under
speed. This gives the effect of a musical question mark, of a surprising and upsetting
absence. At the point of cadence at the end of the parallel phrase, when the bass
note does appear, Staier makes the turn to major make particular sense, as a return
to the stability of the governing mode. His left-hand semiquavers at bar 78 are
slightly speeded up as if to express condence and enthusiasm at the solution to the
problem; a sudden rush of energy accompanies the release of tension. The cadence
is made and the mode is recovered. Thus the passage from bar 62 emerges as an
especially shadowy minor-mode enclave. Cadences are of course the focus of all
sorts of manipulation in the tonal era, but while most composers interrupt or deect
them in various ways to gain breadth and variety, surely Scarlatti is the only composer
to abort cadences in such a blatant and wrenching manner.
After these case studies we turn to some of the ways in which Scarlattis materiality
works in the production of a broader argument. One of these is, as already indicated,
for the two hands to be in opposition. This utilizes the inbuilt stereophonic potential
of the medium: there is no reason why the two hands should always behave with
a sense of corporate responsibility, as if in an ensemble context. We have seen how
inter-manual antagonismcan produce the dissonance and harmonic ambiguity which
drive the structure in K. 222 (Ex. 5.7) and K. 407 (Ex. 5.12). Also in Chapter 5 we
saw how the non-parallel ornamentation at the start of K. 461 (shown in Ex. 5.16)
set up a similar textural topic. This is reected in two subsequent features. The scales
that feature throughout are rhythmically matched but are always in contrary motion,
thus creating a literal sort of opposition. Secondly, the much-cited section after the
double bar features a clear division between the melodic material of the right hand
and the Alberti bass of the left, a rarity in the sonatas. The two hands here are not
just disjunct in terms of material; one could claim that there is an implied stylistic
opposition too. Thus while the left hand ts exactly with the new taste represented
by the Alberti guration, the suspensions in the right hand suggest an older style,
even a quite archaic one given the parallel fourths heard in bar 59. The fact that both
this sonata and K. 381 introduce an explicit Alberti accompaniment in conjunction
with a turn to the minor suggests more generally a distance from the device and
50
Teldec: 0630 12601 2, 1996. Emilia Fadini herself attempts something similar in her recent recording (Stradivarius:
33500, 1999).
its stylistic context. If it is associated with the galant, the galant is also associated
primarily with the major mode, so that there is some sense of contradiction in its
use here.
51
The dashing runs down the keyboard at the end of each half of K. 461 are a very
frequent occurrence in the sonatas. They merit some consideration here since they
show how Scarlattis keyboard may exploit its wide range to obtain an idiomatic
form of closing rhetoric. They generally comprise downward couplings of short
phrase units, with some sense that the composer keeps progressing downward until
he runs out of room. What is particularly instructive about the respective closes in
K. 461 is that they do not match exactly; the second contains one more downward
shift, one further two-bar unit. This somewhat compromises the absolute symmetry
of the two passages in the balanced binary form. The reaction to this fact might
be to minimize the import of the difference and to claim that the impression of
symmetry is still given. This is certainly true, but, if this is a matter of no real
moment, why does one nd such asymmetries so infrequently in other composers
works of this or a later time? If one then takes it more seriously, it might be seen as
a minor act of rebellion, a characteristic instance of what Walter Gerstenberg notes
as the composers orientation against Papiermusik.
52
But there is also a more positive,
intrinsic reading to be given that such imbalances show how the registral capacity
of the keyboard drives the syntax more than concerns of symmetry.
This is a small-scale embodiment of a larger principle of organization that can
be felt throughout the sonatas, one suggested already in this chapter with respect
to works like K. 65 and K. 180. This involves a binary opposition between space
and connement, producing a style of argument that is not necessarily of a linear or
teleological nature. It shows us how music can unfold spatially as well as temporally.
Such oppositions can be abrupt or continuously interwoven in the registral fabric.
Among the examples of abrupt contrast is K. 548 (Ex. 3.6): we have already noted
how the strange clusters and dissonance of bars 3033 are relieved by the diatonic
sixths in the right hand and octaves in the left hand. This classic antithesis of conne-
ment and space is already expressed by the differences between the opening fanfares
and the Spanish material from bar 22.
Among examples of interweaving may be cited K. 413, where the left hands
galloping leaps are the spatial opposite of the surrounding nervy repetitions and
repeated notes, and K. 535, in which the plunging arpeggios are countered by
ascending scales (Ex. 6.13 shows how the two features are contrasted at the start of
the second half). In this case we need to revise our terms of reference somewhat, since
the scales are hardly conned in their coverage of a compound fth. Nevertheless,
one may still speak of an opposition between width and narrowness of intervallic
51
One could also note that the gure is used to energize rather than as a device for textural and rhythmic cohesion;
this recalls Rosemary Hughess remarks about Haydns sparing employment of the Alberti bass and his tendency
to make it an agent of momentum. Rosemary Hughes, Haydn (The Master Musicians), rev. edn (London: Dent,
1970), 1434.
52
Gerstenberg, Klavierkompositionen, 136.
Ex. 6.13 K. 535 bars 3647
gesture. This is sharpened by the fact that in their most common form the scales
are distinctly exotic (see bars 447), the unadorned repetition making them sound
even more so. This exoticism is liquidated only by the closing theme of each half,
which gives us ascending diatonic scales in a foot-tapping popular guise. After the
simple diatonic alternations of the previous appearances of the opposing arpeggio
gure in the rst half, the harmonic sense of those found in bars 3641 is much less
clear. In fact, it goes beyond the limits of functional diatonic tonality. (Compare the
chords found at the equivalent point of K. 223.) Just as vamps seem to leave behind
syntactical rules in order to give vent to a pure motor impulse, here harmonic syntax
seems to be set aside for the sake of pure physical gesture.
It should be apparent that our spatial opposites tend to carry other connotations
with them. Thus connement is associated with dissonance, tension and possibly
exoticism, while space tends to connote consonance, resolution, diatonicism and
relaxation. This is not always a straightforward equation, though. K. 322, as discussed
in Chapter 3, is almost entirely narrow texturally and yet seems to correspond
to none of the properties associated with connement. Indeed, the one relatively
expansive gesture, the diminished seventh in bar 63, is also the one moment of
marked dissonance. Nevertheless, because this texture gives no sense of depth of
eld and hence feels somewhat unnatural, there does exist a strange kind of tension,
as explained before.
There is also a broader difculty in that space appears to be the privileged term
in this binary equation, the more natural and universal one. This might be partly
a matter of nomenclature, with connement (or even a synonym like narrowness)
tending to convey a negative charge. This would be inappropriate given the frequent
sense of relish for closely packed textures. On the other hand, given the other
associations of the two properties, and the diatonic system within which they are
situated, such inequity may be inevitable: the notion of consonance, for example, is
clearly privileged over that of dissonance.
The Sonata in C minor, K. 115, displays a markedly Spanish carriage, with the
suggestion of snapping heels and a somewhat histrionic display of temperament.
53
Its
opening ourishes mix arpeggios and steps, the contrast between the two animating
an intensive study of space and connement. Steps are associated with melodic
intensication, and dissonances or vertical steps are also important in this respect;
note immediately the strange multiple clashes of bars 2
3
and 6
3
. Both build up a web
of tension released by the arpeggios. This is most apparent in the section immediately
following the double bar; the nagging tremolos and trills and the vamping left hand
(the battery described by Pestelli as a marker of folk music
54
) are dispelled by the
G major arpeggio sweeping across both hands. Such a passage helps to produce a
syntax of texture that has the force of a more conventionally primary parameter such
as harmony. If bars 1 and 2 mix the two basic elements in parallel gestures, bars 3
and 4 oppose them, 3 with its quasi-diminutions of the earlier stepwise line and 4
with its arpeggio.
Bars 910 then continue the argument a series of rising steps, forming an almost
complete chromatic scale, is followed by an arpeggio that falls back to the initial g
1
.
In the subsequent passage the appearances of the arpeggio are chained to a pattern
of stepwise descent from g
2
to c
2
(marked out on the melodic downbeats of bars 10,
12, 13, 14 and 15). Note the explicit lling in of the C minor arpeggio of 15
1
in the
following two beats; even more clearly than at 910, the two spatialintervallic types
are being juxtaposed. Bars 1618 then offer a mix of angular and linear movement
after the prior separation of the two (the pitch structure of the right hand being
close to that of 34
1
and 910).
Bars 21ff. seem to function as an ironic contrast to the opening, especially given
the preceding pause and the change of harmonic meaning of the continued G
major.
55
After the swagger and strutting of the opening section, this contains no
53
Rafael Puyana notes the cante jondo inuence; Puyana, Inuencias, 54.
54
55
Ralph Kirkpatrick notes that the G major arpeggio of bar 19 is neither tonic [n]or dominant, but suspended
between the two; Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 315.
grand gestures; it is amiable rather than ardent. Stepwise movement takes over, but
now it is an agent of relaxation. The horn calls in the left hand are notably clean
after the smudged steps of the rst section. Bars 235 seem to rework the prominent
stepwise pairs of 12: rstly the falling specimen from bar 1 in bar 23, where it
becomes a toccata-like series of pairs involving repeated notes, and then a mixture
of rising and falling steps at bars 245. This could be regarded as a trivialization or
at least lightening of the passionate declamation of the shapes at the start.
From bar 32 the opening ghts back. The left-hand rhythm and the right-hand
falling semitone are familiar from bar 1, although the arpeggio has been lost. One
should note the greater insistence of the syntax no equivalent of bar 3 is allowed,
which would after all lead to the arpeggio and the more overtly dissonant nature
of the clusters. This mass of tightly packed sound, concentrated in the middle of the
keyboard, is the strongest embodiment yet of connement. In the place of the initial
arpeggio we hear a gure whose diminutional structure is far from clear: is the d
2
or the c
2
the harmonic note?
56
The denied expectation of a bar 3 equivalent in this passage is dependent on also
hearing bars 21ff. as a variant of bar 1. Compare the harmonic rhythm of 21 along
with the pronounced move from I to V from fourth to fth quavers; slightly less
obviously, the basic melodic pattern at bar 21
23
yields dotted crotchet b
2
leading to
quaver a
2
. The repeated one-bar unit is then followed at 23 by sequential patterning,
thus matching bar 3. In other words, bars 213 follow the syntactical model of the
opening while playing with its constituent parts; note also in this respect that 21 and
22 reverse the arpeggio then stepwise pattern of 1 and 2 (rather in the manner of
910). Bars 32ff., on the other hand, are nearer to the material of the opening but
deny its syntactical make-up.
More oblique thematic references can be found at bar 40, which proves a match
for 21 and therefore, less directly, for 1. The sonata seems to be taking on a variation-
like aspect. However, it is not just the thematic elements as such that drive the work:
it is notable that the more spacious arpeggios take over at this point, almost to the
exclusion of clear stepwise movement. (Of course, the very term thematic tends
to skew my argument, implying a hierarchy of musical invention: I am suggesting
a plot in which thematic entities and spatial gestures are inextricable.) The left
hand at this point is not simply to be led under leaps, difcult; rather it sets the
seal on the reinstatement of the arpeggio and is thus fully intrinsic to the spatial
argument of the piece. So the previous harsh compacted sonority is countered by
material that has textural depth (with the low bass notes way below the rest of the
material) and gestural brilliance (the left-hand leaps assuring a dashing impression).
Bars 389 might be thought of as a transition between the almost purely stepwise
and claustrophobic 327 and the almost purely arpeggiated and open 40ff. we hear
pairs of thirds moving by step, a halfway house between the two types of spacing.
56
Bars 345 are clear in this respect, so we might extrapolate back to 323, except that the d
2
at 32 ts with the
implied G chord and at 33 it receives harmonic support for its case.
Bars 445 then have the same harmonic underlay and descending contour as 389,
but with the stepwise movement ghting back in its more relaxed guise. Such a
relationship furthers the sense of variation structure.
After the direct opposition of the two elements immediately after the double
bar, as noted earlier, we are presented with the largest-scale syntax of the work,
a very long melodic paragraph. We hear a very explicitly Spanish use of stepwise
movement, with various cues implying the thwarting of the arpeggio. The threefold
repeated gure (at bars 60, 68, 70, 72) is syntactically reminiscent of bar 3, bringing
the whole unit more overtly into comparison with the opening of the sonata and
thus making the subsequent absence of the arpeggio more obvious. Instead, at bar 61
we seem to have a combination of the two stepwise pairs of 12, the falling c
3
b
2
being superimposed on the rising f
2
g
2
.
The next cue is provided by the rising chromatic scales of bars 657; these recall
the shapes of 9 and 11, but the immediate repetition here does not allow room for
the arpeggio that followed in the original context at 10 and 12. From bar 68 until
bar 76 there is in fact nothing but strictly stepwise melodic motion in the right
hand with the exception of the rising sixth at 73
3
74
1
, while the same is true of
most of the left-hand lines. That the section reworks bars 9ff. is suggested by the
left-hand battery and the re-emergence of bars 1618 at 768. These three bars
now clearly act in turn as a transition between spatial types (emphasized by the
new left-hand cluster chord on the downbeats), the following G major arpeggio
being given its grandest spacing yet. It acts very clearly as a release after the intense
stepwise movement. In a discussion of K. 115 Karin Heuschneider suggests that this
development is made up to a large extent from new material. Only an occasional
motif refers to the exposition.
57
This commentary sets into relief the very subtle
and indirect nature of the composers thematicism; and yet on the other hand the
material is derived from the spatial characteristics already articulated.
The version of the second subject found from bar 92 has been noted by Hautus as
revealing the underlying harmonic reality of the original, more dissonant version.
58
This softening introduces a nal section that seems to move towards less angularity
and more of a marriage between the two spatial types. Note how bar 98, based on
the starting point of 38, moves from the half-arpeggios to a stepwise turn gure.
Likewise, bar 99 should reply to the pure arpeggio of bar 40 but instead functions
as a wonderful combination of bars 1 and 2. It juxtaposes the rst two notes of
the arpeggios of 1 and 2 respectively, then presents the two-note pairs (e
2
d
2
and
b
1
c
2
) in order, again at pitch. The left hand, though, now leaps by almost four
octaves in the space of a semiquaver! The continuation at bar 101 is different too
instead of an equivalent of bar 3 or bar 42, we have a transposition of bar 45, so
that the plainly stepwise follows straight on. Bars 1056 rework 16 and 76, but
with a more open, leaping bass line and a right hand that expresses its leaps in a
clear stepwise compound-melodic form. This systematizes and controls the impulse
57
Heuschneider, Italy, 23.
58
towards spaciousness. The nal C minor arpeggio, the rst since bar 8, matches the
expansive dominant version heard in bars 7980.
59
Thus K. 115 moves towards the
relative equilibrium of its opposing spatial elements.
60
K. 119 in D major, one of the most celebrated sonatas, is animated by a similar
plot. This is another instance of a work that threatens the decorum of the key-
board, displaying an animal vitality, nervous energy and aggressiveness that are truly
breathtaking. One can only speculate on the social context of such a piece: was it
for Mara B arbara to play? Or Scarlatti? To whom? K. 119 especially its ferocious
cluster chords from bar 56 has a sort of eighteenth-century heavy-metal, head-
banging aspect which might make it seem out of place in a current context of the
harpsichord recital.
The opening sets up the sonatas textural topics of insistence versus progression
(with pedal points set against moving parts) and space versus connement like
an aesthetic of dance. (See Ex. 6.14a.) The composer here sets up big gaps both
horizontally and vertically, which are later opposed by crush chords that populate
the open areas. There is a balletic energy to the opening, an uncoiling of energy in
the series of ever higher leaps off the ground, which thus contains both aural and
visual elements. What is the alchemy that makes even the initial arpeggios so lled
with life? Inspired irregularity has much to do with it, and this is a strong example of
Scarlattis creative virtuosity with common chords and guration. Bar 1 is not part
of the symmetrical pattern that follows in the right hand from bar 2; at the other end
of the phrase Scarlatti misses out a step (a
2
f
2
) in the ascending arpeggiated pattern
and proceeds directly to the climactic d
3
a
2
. It is as if the mounting excitement of
the ascent inspires an extra spurt of energy that creates the ellipsis. The rustic open
left-hand chord plays a part too, as well as the ambiguity of the rst-beat notes in
the right hand do they belong with the repeated chordal sonority or the rest of
the right-hand line (is the tune really )? The sense of space evoked by this
material is then conrmed by the wide-ranging left-hand scale at bars 710. Bars
19ff. present another manifestation of duality the parallel downward movement of
the lower parts against a static top part, as in the later crush section.
Bars 315 then embody the most vivid traversal of registral space, the wide-ranging
upward arpeggio being countered by a quick downward scale of almost four octaves.
This is succeeded by a dance of runaway character that begins to set up dissonances
(the sonata has been very cleanly diatonic up to this point). Although only a few
notes are dissonant in each cluster in the passage from bar 56, the succession of
them and thickness of the whole texture greatly disorients the ear (Ex. 6.14b). After
this alien harmonic and textural invasion, space is cleared again, with a series of
references to earlier material.
59
These closing bars are very similar to those of Alberos Fugue in C minor.
60
Might Haydn have known this piece? The rst movement of his Sonata No. 62, in the relative major of this
works tonality, features a very similar second subject based on horn calls which also appears in unexpected
ways as a star turn after pauses. The mosaic-like syntax, with everything reused, is also present in the Haydn
movement, as is the very rich texture. K. 115 does exist in two Viennese copies (Q15115 and Q11432).
Ex. 6.14a K. 119 bars 112
Ex. 6.14b K. 119 bars 5265
From bar 97 in the second half we are given suspensions in best Baroque style
here is a proper way to use crushes! Emphasizing this reading, the left hand features
the syncopated rhythm of bars 36ff., the section that introduced the textural clutter.
From bar 107 there is a sudden lightening of atmosphere; the passage combines the
right-hand shape of 814 with the accompanimental rhythm of the crush section,
gradually assuming that likeness more and more until the succeeding section from
bar 124 is just like bars 65ff. The trilled inner part clearly corresponds with the
section from 56ff. Note that it studiously avoids the second-quaver emphasis of the
model; this is especially marked from 113. There is a possible technical joke at 107ff.
too. It presents the opposite difculty to the leaping left-hand gesture previously
associated with this material at 814, and now the challenge lies in hands that are
superimposed, a complete spatial reversal of the leaps. In all these senses the passage
is a parody, one that gradually loses its grip as the clusters reassert themselves.
Once more, from bar 130, density gives way to spaciousness, with a quick traversal
of the whole range of the keyboard. The feeling of width and relaxed brilliance is
more pronounced here than ever. As if in response to this, the subsequent dissonant
chords are now even more shocking and cluster-lled. Bar 176 then offers one of
the clearest examples of the textural force of the suddenly thinned cadential arrival
after this epic crush of notes we hear two solitary Ds, widely spaced. Some sort of
full D major chord must surely follow to resolve the thick texture.
Our training may encourage us to hear this sonata as a collocation of technical
devices and guration. My suggestion that we attend to spatial arguments is intended
to show the richness and intelligibility of such material, so that the word mere need
never cross our minds when we try to interpret its signicance. Of course a spatial
plot is not an absolute. Like a harmonic plot, it is always present, only more or less
striking and involved. Equally, the two basic properties used to set the boundaries of
this discussion, space and connement, are not absolutes either. K. 119 and K. 115
show how they may be transformed, creating a series of gradations between the two
notional extremes. It is K. 119 that features the more dramatic spatial typology.
Ivo Pogorelich, though, has a rather different image of this monumental work;
from bar 36 he is sweetly melancholic, and the subsequent clusters are crisply and
smoothly rhythmic. Even the many arpeggios are not straightforwardly brilliant,
as they should surely be, but nessed. This is one of the more extreme examples
of the pianistic tradition of culinary interpretation of the Scarlatti sonatas. Such
performances are often enveloped in a remote grace that makes of the eighteenth
century, as suggested elsewhere, a nostalgic object. They can also exemplify what
Richard Taruskin calls, in a somewhat different context, the ideal of eet coolness
and light that is wholly born of ironized [twentieth]-century taste.
61
Pogorelich,
like so many pianists, also seems to feel inhibited by the prevalent thin texture of
the sonatas and a perception of eighteenth-century moderation and is clearly not
using the full resources of his modern grand. Surely preferable to this somewhat
distant, charming approach would be a rewriting of the sonata with fuller textures,
so that what was huge and scary on any keyboard of Scarlattis time becomes so again
on the modern equivalent.
There may in fact be particular historical reasons for this common pianistic ap-
proach (often enough shared by harpsichordists) to the sonatas, so well entrenched
that one even nds reference to it in E. F. Bensons 1920 novel, Queen Lucia, in
which the central character is pictured thus:
When she played the piano, as she frequently did, reserving an hour for practice every day,
she cared not in the smallest degree for what anybody who passed down the road outside her
house might be thinking of the roulades that poured from her open window: she was simply
Emmeline Lucas, absorbed in glorious Bach, or dainty Scarlatti, or noble Beethoven.
62
Of course this description is laced with irony for the self-regard of Queen Lucia
and her schematic view of the great keyboard composers, but it nevertheless en-
capsulates a common image of Scarlatti. The historical reasons for the image may
be contemplated through a consideration of K. 9 in D minor, the work already
61
Tradition and Authority, Early Music 20/2 (1992), 311; Deutsche Grammophon: 435 855 2, 1993 (Pogorelich).
62
E. F. Benson, Lucia Rising (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 4.
mentioned in Chapter 2. This sonata has a limpid idealized quality occasionally
found in later galant essays by the composer, but here existing without any foil.
It presents a complete world without contradiction, as do many of the Essercizi.
Widely known as Pastorale, K. 9 is only too susceptible to culinary interpretation
a touch-me-not, slightly precious quality, making a fetish out of the remoteness
and perceived graciousness of the past. (The title of Avisons arrangement, Giga [.]
Allegro, however, suggests vigour; obviously the sonata was not particularly pastoral
to his ears!) Such an interpretative approach has often coloured the performance of
the sonatas altogether, but K. 9 would appear to invite it, given its seemingly stylized
and idealized utterance. There are no anomalous or startling details that impinge on
the foreground of the music, which is so often the composers way. Surely if there is
a completely Arcadian piece in the sonata output, this is it.
There is a tradition of playing this sonata rather more slowly than Allegro
although Allegro in Scarlatti can indeed cover a multitude of tempos.
63
If most
performers offer a very nostalgic take on K. 9, this sonata really does seem to belong
more to the nineteenth century than to the eighteenth, given its history of plentiful
editions and celebrity.
64
Avisons title is an important piece of evidence in suggesting
that the pastoral imagery was a later development. Perhaps, in being so well known
almost from the start, probably the best known Scarlatti sonata, K. 9 has set terms
appropriate to itself but inappropriate to most of what followed. Perhaps the same
could be said of the Essercizi as a whole, their very publication and wide subsequent
promulgation establishing the image of a composer who is neat, eet, dry, sparkling
but without passion.
As a nal contribution to the assessment of Scarlattis keyboard style, here is a list of
some of the other textural and sonorous ngerprints that are found in the sonatas:
1. A pattern of unfolded sixths (see K. 188, 235, 320 and 449) that is generally
popular in avour.
2. The Essercizi cadence, in which several staggered voices chase each other towards
a cadence point. This lends a Baroque touch to the larger stylistic picture (K. 4,
246, 293, 337, 365).
3. A pattern of repeated notes mixed with generally falling steps that often suggests
toccata language (K. 306, 405, 413, 464).
65
We have just seen this in bar 23 of
K. 115.
63
Pogorelich, for instance, takes it very slowly, more Adagio even than Andante, while Dubravka Tomsi c and Dinu
Lipatti also take a notably soft-focus approach. Joanna MacGregor takes it quite quickly, but even this does not
destroy the feeling of inhabiting a perfect, self-contained world, so it is not just a performance tradition that
creates this rosy view. Deutsche Grammophon: 435 855 2, 1993 (Pogorelich); Cavalier: CAVCD 007, 1987
(Tomsi c); EMI: 7 69800 2, 1947/1988 (Lipatti); Collins: 1322 2, 1992 (MacGregor).
64
For instance, Piero Santi believes he can detect a reference to K. 9 in Gabriele DAnnunzios 1913 story La Leda
senza cigno; Santi, Nazionalismi, 54n. Note also Tausigs arrangement, criticized so heavily by Heinrich Schenker
in Schenker, Meisterwerk, 1613, as well as the very fact that Schenker himself chose this sonata to analyse.
65
This pattern, which can also resemble a chain of sigh gures, seems to have been recognized as such only
in Valabrega, Clavicembalista, 1967, and Pestelli, Sonate, 2478. Federico Celestini shows that this guration,
supported by a bass that moves in parallel steps, is also frequently found in Haydn. Given the relative rarity of
the pattern, this is a striking and suggestive similarity. Celestini, Haydn, 11415.
Ex. 6.15a K. 447 bars 519
Ex. 6.15b Pasquini: Variations bars 812
4. The tabula rasa effect of a sudden open fth, generally heard in the tenor register
early in the second half of a sonata (K. 247, 263, 426, 490).
5. A feature that is often similarly placed and scored, and one that seems to have gone
entirely unrecognized, is one of the composers most distinctive ngerprints the
suspension/syncopation gure in the tenor. Is it a relic of Renaissance polyphony?
It takes the same form as what Knud Jeppesen terms Palestrinas primary disso-
nance with syncopation.
66
The suspension is prepared most commonly on the
fourth beat of the bar, tied over to the following downbeat and resolved down
by step on the second beat. Very often these occur at the beginnings of sections,
often indeed the beginning of the second half. More generally, the start of the
second half frequently sees the immediate attening of the dominants leading
note, a quick move back onto (if not into) the tonic being standard (see the dis-
cussion of K. 65 at the start of this chapter). The tenor gure, generally involving
66
This is cited by Eveline Andreani, who notes the use of the gure in the Kyrie of Scarlattis Madrid Mass a
somewhat different context to that at issue here; Andreani, Sacr ee, 100.
an

8
6 progression in V, is a specialized expression of this. See the beginning

of the second half in K. 520, 522 and 539; also K. 447, bars 525, K. 443, bars
710, K. 441, bars 518. The gure is normally associated with common time,
but see the start of the second half of K. 492 for something similar.
This specic tenor gure seems to be conned to the higher-numbered sonatas
(for a less specialized form see K. 279, bars 3031 or 345), which may be
suggestive for chronology. Of more interest, though, is the different contexts in
which it is used. We may see it in its classic form throughout Scarlattis own
Madrid Mass, where it is found most prominently in one of the inner parts at
cadence points; see, for instance, bars 769 of the Kyrie, 1001 of the Gloria
or 1314 of the Benedictus.
67
If it is reasonable to align the examples found
in the sonatas with this practice, then it shows once again Scarlattis extreme
independence of musical thought, since it is not used in the normal functional
manner. Although the conformation of parts often suggests the approach of a
structural cadence point, Scarlatti tends to use it immediately after such a cadence,
during a period of harmonic transition or agitation. Ex. 6.15a shows an example
of this from the rst half of K. 447 in F sharp minor. In bars 912 it is heard in
the soprano with a more traditional function, in the approach to repeated tonic
cadences; from bar 13, though, the tenors more characteristic use of the gure
helps to bring about a harmonic and stylistic modulation from the invertible
counterpoint of the opening to the urgent folk idiom that closes the rst half.
Indeed, the very repetition of the gure helps to remove it from its functional
roots. As a concise counterexample, Ex. 6.15b shows the appearance of this
stylistic relic in a set of keyboard variations by Bernardo Pasquini (16371710),
who is supposed to have taught Scarlatti in Rome.
68
The tenor suspension in
bar 9 shows how easily and uncritically such a habit could resurface in a different
generic context. The learned roots of the gure are also evident in its employment
throughout the Nobis post hoc section of Scarlattis Salve regina of 1756, where
it is used in a typical alla breve style.
6. The use of chains of falling thirds may be thought of as a classically intrinsic
keyboard idea, measuring out physical space on the keyboard in a sort of innocent
doodling. See K. 56, 394, 422, 469, 537 and 554 (Ex. 4.1). In many cases these
thirds aim towards the dominant.
7. As covered already, the sonorous withdrawal at cadences, which few pianists can
resist lling in. For example, Mikhail Pletnev adds a B minor chord to the last
bar of K. 27, in the great nineteenth-century virtuoso tradition of touching up
endings, giving them a personal stamp. In fact, nothing could be more idiosyn-
cratic than the solitary B in bar 68, which sounds in our minds ear long after it
67
Walter Schenkman has noted the survival of this gure in the rhythmic vocabulary of Baroque cadences, where
it normally takes a simple 878 form. Rhythmic Patterns of the Baroque: Part II, Bach: Quarterly Journal of the
Riemenschneider Bach Institute 5/4 (1974), 1516.
68
This example forms the start of Variation No. 1 from piece No. 57 in Pasquini Collected Works for Keyboard,
vol. 4 (Corpus of Early Keyboard Music), ed. Maurice Brooks Haynes (American Institute of Musicology, 1967).
has ceased to be heard. Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli also plays a loud, quickly
arpeggiated, B minor chord. Even Murray Perahia joins in in his recent perfor-
mance of K. 212, lling in the last chord this is one concession to the virtuoso
tradition that few pianists can avoid making, it would seem.
69
The performer
may feel entitled to put a signature on the performance, as it were, at a moment
when surely no one can begrudge a little relaxation, yet this denies the hold that
Scarlatti wants to maintain until the very end. The satisfaction of an ending well
reached, the end of the tale, is not to be allowed. Such thoughts are not anachro-
nistic; although the composer was obviously not aware of the nineteenth-century
virtuoso tradition of elaborated endings, comparable ourishes did exist in the
keyboard music of his time, and they were very frequently notated, yet he almost
always presents us with the least expansive possible conclusion.
8. Another ngerprint not really acknowledged is what I call fretting inner parts, of
which examples may be found in K. 136, 177, 430 and 501. On some occasions
these have a popular character, akin to the octave doublings already discussed, but
they often also act as transitional textures. At bars 76
3
to 83 of K. 327 we nd
one of these passages of adjustment where the voices seem to realign themselves,
to settle prior to the start of a new section. This, however, represents the brief
intrusion of a learned idiom, indoor music which undermines the decorum of a
popular, outdoor style! There is a similar use of neurotic transitional counterpoint
at the start of the second halves in K. 96 and 457.
9. More clearly related to the textural octaves is the use of pedal notes, not so
much of the sustained or repeated sort, but single notes. These may simply be
taken as reinforcement but also offer the opportunity for the performer to score
them in a different colour. We saw an example in the tenor d of bar 39 of K. 523
(Ex. 4.6), omitted by Pletnev. The Sonata in C minor, K. 56, offers a wealth of
these solitary, short-lived pedal points. Here they have an unbuttoned popular
avour and are found, as is common, mostly in the middle voices. In this case,
however, they are not just references to popular textures. They act thematically,
which is especially clear when they occur off the strong beats. Examples of this
motive can be seen in bars 610, 1315, 1618, 1921, 267, 457 and 534.
Again, this device need not be popular in affect even if it generally seems to be
popular in inspiration. Kirkpatrick sums this up imaginatively when he writes:
Often in inner voices, occasional pedal points, as if played by horns or by the
open strings of a guitar, gleam like polished highlights on rough bronze.
70
69
Virgin: 5 45123 2, 1995 (Pletnev); Grammofono 2000: 78675, 1943/1996 (Michelangeli); Sony: 62785, 1997
(Perahia).
70
7
FOMAL DYNAMI C
BI NAY-FOM BLUES
It is doubtful if the Scarlatti literature has been so consistently unilluminating as on
the matter of form. Many writers have been mesmerized by the consistent use of
balanced binary form in most of the sonatas, which has in various ways been seen as
a problematic feature. (In balanced binary the material that closes each half matches
and so creates a structural rhyme.) The musicological malaise about mid-eighteenth-
century music has rarely been so apparent as in many of these discussions; they are
underpinned by the sense of the composer as a transitional gure, with his use of
binary form resting comfortably neither with the Baroque conception nor with the
Classical sonata style that acts as the promised land. Indeed, a number of writers
have explicitly characterized this issue as the problem of form, so conating our
problems of historical comprehension with a composers-eye view of the formal
means at his disposal.
1
A related perception concerns the limitations of the binary form within which
the composer is held to work. Thus the sonatas are circumscribed formally and
create a mechanical impression; the composer himself is unadventurous in formal
structures, with even Pasquini and Alessandro Scarlatti showing far greater variety
of musical form.
2
This binary shaping has been seen as problematic or limited mainly
because of the inuence of one of the master narratives of eighteenth-century music
historiography, the inexorable development towards sonata form. Thus simple binary
form is held to have led to something better and richer, the rounded binary that
is dened by the clear double return of opening material in the tonic about two
thirds of the way through the structure, and sonata form is a thematically specialized
version of this. However, the binary forms of the Baroque (as typically found in
suite movements, for instance) have not invariably been regarded as unsatisfactory
in this respect; what makes Scarlattis structures seem problematic is that so many
other aspects of his writing the harmonic articulacy, the pronounced thematic
variety suggest sonata style. Yet Scarlatti can hardly have been aware that he was
1
Thus for Walter Gerstenberg the composers keyboard music revolves around a single artistic problem, that of
the sonata, and a section of Hermann Kellers 1957 book was entitled Das Problem der Form. Gerstenberg,
Kirkpatrick Review, 343; Keller, Meister, 7680.
2
Hammond, Scarlatti, 186; Valabrega, Clavicembalista, 96; Bond, Harpsichord, 180; Kastner, Repensando, 151.
320
Formal dynamic 321
using what we would now dene as the subspecies of one historical form; after all,
the fact that many subsequent composers consistently employed what we call sonata
form in certain movements is hardly a matter for comment.
3
This does not connote
limitation or present a problem. If sonata form in the eighteenth century is as much
a fundamental mode of thought as a consciously applied formula, why should the
same not be true of Scarlattis balanced binary form?
Although the exercise of a little historical relativism may absolve the sonatas from
the above charges, there is nevertheless something to the perception of uniformity.
It involves the almost total absence of the many other formal types available to a
keyboard composer of the time. This abjuring of almost all the known keyboard
forms (such as variations and suites) has been discussed already; it is almost as if
the rather neutral designation sonata is evidence of disdain. There is also a more
positive interpretation, though that many of these other forms map out a more
xed course that the composer would not commit himself to. The choice of sonata,
which as a title does not necessarily dene either formal or affective type, is less a
limitation than a declaration of freedom, and, as we saw in Chapter 6, it also happily
coincides with a strong emphasis on sound and gesture.
More literal interpretations of this consistency tend to reect the Formenlehre
tradition, implying that Scarlattis formis a xed mould.
4
These confuse consistency
of outer form (which is in any case overestimated) with the formal dynamic that is
created through these structures. A corollary of this is the belief that, in the words
of Kathleen Dale, gures . . . seldom undergo any organic development; themes
are juxtaposed rather than developed, according to Alain de Chambure.
5
The very
terms of reference for notions of form and development, as the word Formenlehre
itself makes plain, derive from a way of reading the Austro-German tradition. Thus
development implies rst and foremost a certain kind of rhetoric and treatment of
material in the centre of a structure. The possibility, for instance, that juxtaposition
may itself be a broader form of development is not entertained. A wider cultural
dynamic also shapes and reinforces such an apprehension of Scarlattis forms: as a
Latin musician his province is the additive and the synthetic rather than the organic
procedures of the Austro-German.
One positive way out of these difculties has been to appeal to the determining
power of musical elements other than the traditional harmonic and thematic ones.
Roy Howat, for instance, writes that Scarlattis exceptional sensitivity to colour and
for musical evocation became a priority for him, providing a balance quite different
to the architectural qualities of a Bach or Handel.
6
One could certainly not dissent
entirely from these emphases in the light of what has been presented in previous
chapters, but they do not tell the full story. What has been suggested throughout this
book is that Scarlatti makes architectural capital out of all these elements, whether
3
This sentence is derived from my Binary Form, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edn,
ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), vol. 3, 578.
4
Silbiger, Handel, 95.
5
Dale, Contribution, 41; Chambure, Catalogue, 56.
6
Howat, Ross Notes, [3].
it is musical imagery, dissonance, syntactical style or keyboard sonority. They can be
shown to play a structural as well as a sensational role. This can be difcult to grasp
because we readily associate structure or form only with well-roundedness, with
a sense of completion, in the use of musical features. In any case, such assertions
only reinforce the distinctions laid down by the mainstream tradition, in which
structure is a fundamental category and colour a sort of ill-dened extra layer.
Thus while structure is held to be susceptible of detailed demonstration as if it
were a mathematical proof colour can only be approached by evocation. The real
problem is the very facile opposition of the two quantities, and the cultural camps
with which they are linked. We would tend, for example, to associate Debussy with
colour and Brahms with structure, as if Debussys creative thoughts do not entail a
structure or Brahmss creative thoughts do not embody certain kinds of colour.
It would be easy enough to regard all the foregoing material as symptomatic of
concerns that now appear neither urgent nor interesting. Indeed, the very notion
of form is under attack, in the sense that it is the guiding mechanism that delivers
the music to us, this in turn implying the condition of autonomy, the necessity of
a unied experience of musical art, the presence of hard ontological edges to the
musical product. If it is to be rescued for present purposes, we need to step back from
its normative and evolutionist usages to try to interpret it more generously. Form
can be read as a shaping of experience or as the expression of a world view, one that
controls and is controlled by the nature and choice of material and its disposition over
time. In this sense form need not, as Leo Treitler has it, be anked by all its quali-
ers (rational, logical, unied, concise, symmetrical, organic, etc.).
7
Such qualiers
must, however, come to the fore precisely when we try to reckon with the formal
dynamic contained in the Scarlatti sonatas, since they seem to offer the rst sustained
musical evidence of what John Docker calls the Enlightenments awareness . . . of the
multitemporal, its conceiving of the present as contradictory, with remnants of the
past and rudiments and tendencies of the future.
8
The abrupt changes of temporal
and spatial perspective found in the sonatas, whether achieved by means of topi-
cal, textural, thematic, harmonic or syntactic manipulation, positively demand that
we question their coherence, their rationality. It is precisely the advent of a mixed
style that revitalizes notions of unity and coherence, since the style seems in a way
premised on their denial. In fact, it might be claimed that unity and coherence are not
likely to be epistemologically active categories in a consideration of Baroque music;
the rhetoric and sense of process in Baroque music generally preclude the possibility
of their absence. So while Treitlers qualiers may not necessarily be afrmed in a
consideration of the formal properties of the mixed style, and Scarlattis realization
of it, they must be invoked. Not to do so trivializes the cultural moment of this new
mode of musical thought.
7
Leo Treitler, The Politics of Reception: Tailoring the Present as Fullment of a Desired Past, Journal of the Royal
Musical Association 116/2 (1991), 287.
8
John Docker, Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), 184.
Formal dynamic 323
This is particularly a danger given the governing disruptive paradigmof contempo-
rary hermeneutics. Reacting against the assumptions of formalism and modernism,
musicology now prefers to discover ambiguity and asymmetry wherever possible.
Although we may thus be out of sympathy with formal taxonomy and the progres-
sive historical narratives that tend to underpin this, it is historically the very arrival
of topical variety (if not disruption) and formal self-consciousness in the misnamed
Classical style that encouraged such modes of thought. Form only becomes a cate-
gory in its modern sense when the variety of musical material within a piece demands
this sort of intellectual superstructure. As stated in Chapter 3, it is axiomatic to this
study that much about the Scarlatti sonatas demands to be considered in the light of
this Classical style, for all the factors that might make us resist such a classication.
Some of the historical value that accrues to the sonatas lies therefore in their embod-
iment of this new musical thought. In other words, they are to be valued partly as
agents of change and their composer as an innovator. This might seem to reinscribe
just the sort of progressive narrative that has made it so difcult to get to grips with a
good deal of especially eighteenth- century music, including Scarlattis. Yet we need
not shudder at the thought as long as progression does not entail the full baggage
of the organism model of history, complete with its periods of owering, maturity
and decline. Thus what comes later need not be better, what comes earlier need
not be inferior. However, it would be difcult to deny the absolute value given
to change, innovation and originality, which seem to be fundamental to Western
culture of the last few hundred years.
9
Much as we may feel that we can stand back
from such implications intellectually, with the widely advertised loss of faith in grand
narratives and in progress altogether, implications of progress do indeed underpin
the rhetoric of contemporary musicology. Not only are there implicit claims for a
new improved way of thinking, but there is the accompanying excitement of fresh
discovery and perhaps an enjoyment of the shock of the new.
10
The relationship of Scarlatti to the greatest symbol of Classical musical thought,
sonata form, encapsulates the difculties inherent in these historical considerations
but also marks the need to be bold. Michael Talbot shows himself unafraid when
writing that
the real barrier to identifying the structure of the Scarlatti sonata as a particular early version
of sonata form is not so much analytical as historical; the music itself presents features that,
in their sum, are far more consonant with the sonata principle and practice than with the
symmetrical binary form employed by Bach, Rameau and Vivaldi . . . but our failure to place
Scarlatti in the mainstream of historical development inhibits this recognition.
11
9
Compare Janet M. Levys speculation that economy, a largely unquestioned positive value in so much writing
about music, may well be a fundamental value in Western culture. Great from small, full and grand from a tiny
cell, husbanding energies or possessions, the most from the least, complex from simple all of these images seem
to reect real values in everyday life. Covert and Casual Values in Recent Writings about Music, Journal of
Musicology 5/1 (1987), 10.
10
For further discussion of the ideology of progress that underpins such change see my review of James Websters
Haydns Farewell Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style: Through-Composition and Cyclic Integration in his Instru-
mental Music, Music Analysis 13/1 (1994), 127.
11
Talbot, Shifts, 345.
Although Talbot does not say that analysis as such is thoroughly dependent upon
models that are historically grounded, and indeed that the music itself cannot be
perceived without the operation of equivalent intellectual or cultural models, his
note of encouragement has already been reected in this study. A certain amount
of sonata-form terminology has been used without too much blushing. The crucial
distinction to bear in mind at this stage is that Scarlatti has second subjects but
generally not rst subjects. The second subjects may be positioned at the point
where the recipe would lead us to expect a closing theme, but they function in
much the same way. The fact, as we have already noted, that the most memorable
ideas often occur at this point bespeaks the determining importance of a harmonic
argument, articulated by thematic means.
The process by which this memorable thematic entity is reached is harder to
assimilate with the sonata-form model. A Scarlatti sonata often witnesses a gradual
focusing of creative energies, after beginning with various sorts of skirmishes (such
as opening imitations or a stampede). Often this material is or more exactly,
seems to be relatively indeterminate thematically, if not necessarily in the force
of its expression. It is only later, perhaps not until the end of the rst half, that we
arrive at something more clearly shaped and thematic in its behaviour (in other
words, reiterated as a unit or set apart by a combination of means).
12
It is then this
material whose return in the tonic in the second half suggests the rmest comparison
with the model. The fact that the tonic does not return in conjunction with the
opening material need not be conceived as so decisive a difference. After all, the
rehabilitation of Chopins sonata-form structures has involved an acceptance of a
similar formal quirk that the return of the second subject in the tonic, not the
rst, is the dening structural moment. One could argue that this in fact is always the
case, structurally if not rhetorically: the recapitulation of a rst subject is frequently
enough disguised or altered (see the rst movement of Haydns Symphony No. 80
for one example, or consider the case of the subdominant recapitulation as found
in Schubert or Boccherini), but prominent second-subject material must return
explicitly, if generally undramatically, in the tonic.
This is, of course, a tricky equation to get right: one does not want to lump
Scarlattis structures with sonata form simply as a shorthand way of indicating their
intelligibility or in order to appropriate some of the prestige associated with the
form; on the other hand, there is no reason why a presumed cultural isolation or
uncertainty as to the extent of the composers inuence should mean that he remains
tangential while less signicant gures carry the badge of historical importance. It
would be quite fair to think of Scarlatti as an exponent of sonata style, as long as we
concentrate on the sense of process rather than think, in the old prescriptive terms,
of xed formal requirements.
In other words, analysis of forms need not ineluctably become a normative opera-
tion, although in practice it generally has. It has tended to equate formal perfection
12
The last few sentences are also based on Sutcliffe, Binary, 578.
Formal dynamic 325
with clear symmetries and easy balances, so that the procedures of a Scarlatti are
likely to be misrepresented. We have noted in many contexts the composers pro-
nounced dislike of formal denition, manifested in such features as great curves,
elisions, topical ambiguity or mixture and all the irritations of his style. Because
form is so often casually associated with good creative behaviour, with overt crafts-
manship, Scarlatti can all too easily be viewed as a sort of musical playboy. Thus the
sonatas emerge in an experimental light, as if they were akin to rough drafts. Yet
this roughness may represent the perfect formal encoding of the creative thought,
of the attitude to the musical materials held in the structure.
THEMATI CI SM
It has been suggested that we may assess Scarlattis structures in the light of sonata
style, and that sonata style should not simply be viewed as a foil for our deliberations;
rather, it represents a formal and cultural dynamic that is embodied in the composers
keyboard works themselves. The way in which thematic material is shaped is a central
part of this; indeed, its very articulation as such, encouraged by shifts in harmonic and
syntactical practice, is a crucial factor. It may be contrasted with an earlier conception
of a theme as part of the general motion of the piece, not an entirely independent
or contrasting segment of it.
13
A collective impression of the Scarlatti sonatas would
seem to leave little doubt about the independent character of their themes. This
allows for memorability and so makes them agents of a new, listener-oriented, sense
of form. However, for a conguration of notes to work in this way, it must not
only sound like a theme, it must act like a theme. This behaviour, as suggested
above in the denition of second subjects, involves some sort of repetition that will
anchor the material in the listeners mind. On many occasions in Scarlatti, however,
this fails to happen. This is encapsulated in Kirkpatricks unwittingly contradictory
statement that some of [Scarlattis] most striking and impressive thematic material is
stated only once.
14
We have noted an outstanding example of this in the opening of
K. 554 (Ex. 4.1). The contradiction involved here is that if something plainly occurs
only once, then it cannot be said to be a theme. Themes shape a musical discourse
by their recurrence; they help us to make some sense of the time and material that
intervene between their appearances.
This contradiction between characterful writing linked to the expression of a
harmonic argument and the unpredictable usage of this material leads to a directness
of character but an indirectness of function. This results in a music that is open
yet elusive, recalling the topical considerations of Chapter 3. Only with what we
have called Scarlattis second subjects is this ambiguous sense of invention generally
13
Benton, Form, 267. There is of course a kind of segmentation, but it involves permutations of uniform gures,
the sort of technique evoked by Laurence Dreyfus in Bach and the Patterns of Invention (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1996).
14
relieved, and in a way even they partake of this ambiguity, given their often frankly
popular character. It is as if they are being reproduced rather than composed.
The ambiguous properties of Scarlattian thematicism can be glimpsed in very
diverse contexts. Many works, as has often been said, seem to be overowing with
invention, and the sheer amount of material they offer to the listener is a novel
factor in its own right. They exemplify Pestellis theatricality, in which the sonata
becomes the oor of a stage,
15
yet for all their variety, they often seem constructed
according to a R etian secret art. This tends to involve the sort of applied technique
dened in relation to K. 224 (Ex. 5.9), in which the learned tag was remarkably
reworked into several primitive forms in the second half. An as it were unprincipled
variety of the surface, a comic notion, seems to be more important now than overt
fullment of uniform musical processes.
One category of Scarlattian thematicism makes little pretence of offering any
settled invention at all. A work like K. 336 in D major is constructed out of scraps,
with no thematic content as such; irregular phrase lengths play their part in its
unsettled procedures. The one prominent bit of material is a closing phrase (found
also in K. 300) that is repeated until it nds its rightful position at the end of the
half. Its repetitive syntax makes it a typical closing unit. The recurring pattern is like
a tease we keep on expecting signicant new material but it never arrives. Since in
such works material may assume a thematic function by default, it involves the sort
of Verfremdung that has already been shown to be one of Scarlattis most consistent
creative operations. K. 278, 375 and 424 offer further characteristic examples.
Another ambiguous play on thematic properties occurs in those many sonatas
that seem to live by one characteristic gure, whether we think of it as a star turn
or an objet sonore (see K. 168, 331, 365, 382 and 418). Although there can here be
no question about the focussed thematic identity of such gures, their treatment
can belie this status. Often they are given in a long concatenation that suggests
the Baroque technique of Fortspinnung, but the material is far from being of the
formulaic cast that would normally receive such treatment it is individual and often
idiosyncratic. This may eventually lend the star material a disembodied avour, of a
sort that we may also nd arising from the repetitive practices of vamp sections.
The star turn in K. 168 in F major dominates the argument more affectively
than statistically. It makes a rst, solitary, appearance in bar 9, embedded in a larger
thought (see Ex. 7.1a). Its diminutional structure (its relationship to the harmony that
is being prolonged) is also clear at this point. From bar 13 it takes over, being heard
four times in succession in three consecutive phrases; the diminutional structure is
now more disconcerting, with frequent echapp ee effects.
In the second half the star turn changes its form on each of the three hearings,
to theatrical effect. On each occasion the left-hand accompaniment and number of
reiterations of the gure are different. In the rst half, from bar 13
1
(or 12
4
!), it
was always heard four times in succession: now it is heard three, two and ve times
15
Formal dynamic 327
Ex. 7.1a K. 168 bars 815
Ex. 7.1b K. 168 bars 6067
respectively. This is as good an example as any of the composers disdain for notions
of xed invention. After its rst two reduced appearances in the second half it seems
clear that there is an attempt to lessen its inuence. After the threefold manifestation
it is followed by a pointedly extended version of the melodic cadential material that
followed it in the rst half (compare bars 1516, for instance). After the second
version, now comprising only two units, the sonatas opening syncopations return
in extended form, now covering seven instead of ve bars. Then, as if further to
emphasize the attempt to marginalize the star turn, the closing material from the
rst half returns well out of sequence, over a dominant pedal.
However, the gure is not to be denied and it counters with ve consecutive
reiterations (see Ex. 7.1b). As if to emphasize its authority, the left-hand accompa-
niment now comes on the beat, in minims, making the discomfort of the harmonic
situation more apparent. Although the treatment of the star turn in K. 168 has been
characterized as an instance of the composers aversion to overt thematic control, a
more positive rationale was hinted at above with the reference to the theatrical. As
bets a star, this thematic entity is temperamental in its refusal to adopt a consistent
Ex. 7.2 K. 474 bars 154
prole. This bespeaks a sort of thematic psychology in which the material is so vital
and so characterful that it is, as it were, beyond precise control. From this perspec-
tive, the more formally controlled thematic representation that we typically nd in
the work of other composers appears mechanical. It is not Scarlattis practice that
is contradictory, but the norm, which effectively mutes the premise of individuality
on which modern thematic practice should by denition be based.
For a larger-scale examination of Scarlattis unorthodox thematicism we turn to
the Sonata in E at major, K. 474 (Ex. 7.2). Its rst bar seems to subscribe to two
common categories of the Scarlatti sonata opening. There is imitation and the initial
material seems to be subsequently ignored. However, it is a wonderful example of
an opening that turns out to be intrinsic to the argument.
There is certainly something rather unsettling about the rst few bars. The imi-
tation in bar 1 is as concise and small-scale as could be imagined (using the same tag
Formal dynamic 329
Ex. 7.2 (cont.)
heard at the start of K. 493); it is followed by an abrupt gear change to something far
more expansive registrally, intervallically and affectively. The syncopations and wide
melodic leaps come from another world the change of direction in the right hand
from fall to rise seems to enact this opposition. Adding to the strange effect is the
implied hemiola in bars 23. Gianfranco Vinay and Giorgio Pestelli both link this
sonata with the style of sensibility.
16
Sensibility should be taken, for all the different
16
See Vinay, Novecento, 122, and Pestelli, Sonate, 257.
Ex. 7.2 (cont.)
associations it raises, as an intensied form of what is essentially a galant language
(as one nds also in K. 132, for example). Both imply a search for a more natural
expressiveness.
17
Scarlatti does indeed seem to be playing with different layers of a
basic lyrical vocabulary, and the conjunction of opposed gestures at the start one
miniaturistic, the other expansive presents a problem that is worked through by
the rest of the sonata.
Bar 4 immediately moves to counter the effect of the previous right-hand line,
with its histrionic leaps. The three ascending stepwise pairs of bars 23 (d
2
e
2
,
17
Pestelli comments thus on the relationship of galant and sensibility: The moving force of the galant style was based
on [a] complex ideal, centred on subjective emotion and going beyond the ear-attering banality . . . of many
of its concrete manifestations. This worthy origin really contained the germ of its replacement [by sensibility]:
a slight intensication of this sentiment was enough for the galant to become an old, frivolous world. Pestelli,
Mozart, 11.
Formal dynamic 331
Ex. 7.2 (cont.)
f
2
g
2
, a
2
b
2
) are balanced by three descending pairs on the rst half of each beat,
with the grace notes acting as a further palliative they suggest renement and
good melodic manners after the rather raw preceding bars. The eeting tonicization
of IV also plays a part; it acts as the well-established means of retreat or making
good. Bars 56 then describe the same arc as 24: bar 5 in particular reworks the
ascending impulse of 23 into a simple scale, marked with a rare slur to underline
the transformation of the rough into the smooth. The tone by the cadence point in
bar 7 and in what follows has settled into a rather poised and graceful sensibility.
(The horn fths that are found in the left hand of bars 8 and 9, a half-hidden sound
effect, offer an unusual reinforcement of this.)
From bar 10
3
, however, the melodic shapes of 23 intrude. In bar 11 the three as-
cending stepwise pairs in the right hand, nowchromatic, clearly refer to and intensify
the earlier pairs. The bass thirds now ascend too to provide further intensication.
The simple cadence point that follows refers at least obliquely to the opening bar in
the rhythm plus ornament of the rst two beats. On the other hand, its drawn-out
falling semitone B to A counters the previous rising shapes in the same manner that
bar 4 did.
The second subject sounds very Spanish, with its turn to minor, Phrygian in-
ections, snapping rhythms and suggestions of the melismatic melodic style of cante
jondo. Although the composer often uses Spanish material for its rupturing force,
in this case it simply introduces another lyrical layer. Bar 13 seems to smooth out
the shapes of the rst few bars. The snapping demisemiquaver rhythm in the right
hand, with the same falling third, simply reworks that of bar 1, and the immediate
repetition on the second beat brings the original left-hand imitation into the same
single melodic line. The third beat of bar 13, mainly moving upwards by step, could
be conceived as a laconic reference to 23. From bar 15
2
we have a much more
direct equivalent of 23, with the rising steps in the right hand and the (initial)
contrary-motion scale in the bass. This meshes with the chromatic version of this
contour heard in bar 11. It also covers a similar ambitus, arriving on a climactic b
2
like the lines heard in bars 3 and 11.
18
The closing material again reworks the opening elements. The compound rising
steps in bars 22 and 23 systematize the awkward compound melodic shape of 23,
but, more remarkably, the bar 1 gure is incorporated quite literally, rst of all
reversed in the alto at 22
3
23
1
and then descending in the soprano at 23
3
24
1
(g
2
f
2
e
2
d
2
). Embedded then in the totally formulaic pre-cadential continuation
is a sequential parallel to this, in the fall from e
2
to b
1
(at 24
12
), the same pitches as
outlined in the opening gure! The more settled character of the reworked material
here is aided by the new rm rhythm of the bass; its prolongation of I of B also
answers the earlier hovering around V of B (or a Phrygian tonic).
The start of the second half takes its cue from this solution, and bars 2932 form
a big arc of the sort attempted as a means of gap-lling from bars 46. This clearly
forms the most expansive melodic gesture so far, and the melody not only regains the
previous peak of c
3
from bar 3 but continues up to e
3
. The descent of bars 30
3
31
is organized around falling thirds: e
3
c
3
a
2
f
2
then e
2
c
2
a
1
f
1
. Compare this
with the g
2
e
2
c
2
a
1
f
1
d
1
contour around which bar 6 is organized. The sense
of precise reference implied by some of my connections is not, of course, entirely
18
In his arrangement of the sonata as the Serenade of Count Rinaldo for the ballet Les Femmes de bonne humeur
Vincenzo Tommasini gives the second subject to two on-stage utes and a guitar. Vinay suggests this makes it like
a languid serenade which emphasizes the folklore element in a wider context of sensibility. Vinay, Novecento,
122.
Formal dynamic 333
the point. Rather the composer is working with a basic wave-like contour, a lyrical
gestalt, that is constantly being transformed on the basis of certain initial impulses.
The second subject re-enters quite naturally in bar 33. Not only have the minor-
mode inections returned at 2931, but the pitch contour of the cadence point in
bar 32 sets up the initial melodic cell of the following bar. This creates a characteristic
grey area of thematic denition. The apparently formulaic bar 32 turns out to be of
more specic relevance than the listener might imagine. Just as the second-subject
material is about to reach its most expansive point, though, it is halted by a reworking
and sequential treatment of the initial bar. The series of cover tones together with
the sequential reiteration rather constrains the melody. This containment is like an
opposite to the expansive sweep achieved in the rst four bars of the second half. It
is only with the pre-cadential bar 40 (a variant of 31) that greater freedom is again
obtained.
The composer makes several highly signicant changes of detail in the recapitula-
tion of the second subject, showing that, although the second subject may dominate
the second half, the rst subject has been present throughout. Being unsatisfactory
in its exposition, its role has been of course to be diffused and realigned through
the subsequent material, in the name of a more natural lyrical ow. At 45
3
and 50
3
Scarlatti, having already rewritten the rest of the bar, alights on trills on E which
undoubtedly refer to bar 1. These do so less in a conventional thematic sense than
in terms of pitch and gesture, and they are not the rst such references in the second
half. Bars 32 and 41 must be included in the equation. All four of these are cadential
gestures involving a trill, and all four are based on an ED succession. Further, the
last three embody a 43 succession over the bass; that in bar 32 describes a 65,
which has the same effect. Thus not only has Scarlatti used the opening shape as a
motivic subject, he has also used it as a pitch subject. A more extraordinary occur-
rence, though, combining both types, is the rewriting of the arpeggiated bar 46. The
last few notes in the left hand seem at rst to make no sense, to be an excrescence.
Andr as Schiff clearly feels this way; he omits the trill, and so do Vladimir Horowitz
and Christian Zacharias.
19
However, this gure quotes the opening four notes di-
rectly at pitch and with the initial trill! (This trill is also found in the new Lisbon
version of K. 474.) The signicance lies not just in the quotation, but in the new
context. It is now used purely as a transition; the other versions we have just been
considering use it as a (pre-)closing device. The opening cell is thus now completely
integrated into the syntax problem solved! This is a memorable example of the
composers brilliantly unorthodox, imaginative thematicism.
Perhaps this is why the closing material is heard just once its resolving properties
have now been rather put in the shade, even though with the transposition its
similarities with bars 13 become more pronounced. Among the details claried by
19
Decca: 421 422 2, 1989 (Schiff); Sony: 53460, 1964/1993 (Horowitz); EMI: 7 63940 2, 197985/1991
(Zacharias). However, Schiff commendably omits the e on the rst beat of bar 46, missing in V and P but
inserted by Gilbert into his edition.
transposition to the tonic are the upper-voice rise in bars 512 from e
2
/d
2
to c
3
(compare bars 23) and the altos reversal of the bar 1 tag, nowat the same pitch as the
original. The laconic closing arpeggio that replaces the expected repetition of the
closing unit provides a characteristically unafrmative ending to the thematic tour
de force. However, there are plenty of ways in which the seemingly athematic nal
bar makes good sense: it answers the falling arpeggios at 17 and 46, replacing their
diminished-seventh harmony with the consonance of the tonic triad; and it answers
the downward octave coupling of the rst bar, gracefully lling in the fall from e
2
to e
1
. More signicantly, though, this is a rare example of Scarlatti writing a closing
arpeggiated ourish but this conventional gesture is enlivened by its relevance to
the terms of the piece. Perhaps the most important aspect is not any similarities
to earlier events, but the fact that it contains no steps. After all the gap-lling and
winding conjunct movement it represents a relaxation, dissolving the tightly knit
lyrical vocabulary that has been the subject of the piece.
FOMAL POPETI ES AND PACTI CES
The way in which Scarlatti begins a piece of keyboard music has been considered a
number of times in this study. A high proportion of sonatas open with short-lived
imitation or free guration, or a combination of the two, generally without apparent
thematic relevance to the rest of the piece. This merits further consideration here
as one of the composers most distinctive formal practices and since the exceptional
nature of this opening rhetoric can hardly be overemphasized. Even the most as-
similationist readings of this habit, variously drawing on the gestural traditions of
keyboard forms like the toccata, fantasia and prelude or emphasizing the impro-
visatory licence that can encompass them all, founder on its incompatibility with
the sonata genre. These other forms were a way of legitimating such freedom, but
a sonata was certainly not expected to act in this manner. Even if we leave aside
such generic scruples, though, it is hard to nd another body of music that can seem
so difdent about the act of announcing itself to the listener; and what music did
Scarlatti know that was not controlled by its opening? An opening offers after all a
prime point of rhetorical denition for any musical utterance. If we think of any
piece of music in our minds ear, there is a good chance that the rst material to be
recalled will come from the start. And if we look at the practice of Iberian contem-
poraries such as Seixas or Rodrguez or even Scarlattis nearest companion spirit,
Albero, there is little to parallel what we nd in the Scarlatti sonatas.
20
Openings
may indeed be similarly congured, but they are invariably integrated with the larger
whole; in most cases the opening is straightforwardly generative in typical Baroque
fashion.
20
Precisely this point has been made with respect to all three composers. On the practice of Seixas, see Allison,
Seixas, 19, and William S. Newman, The Sonata in the Classic Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1963), 2756; on Rodrguez, see Pedrero-Encabo, Rodrguez, 386; on Albero, see Pestelli, Sonate, 230.
Formal dynamic 335
As has been stated before, such openings may have tremendous elan and energy
so that the difdence is a formal rather than affective attribute as with K. 531 or
K. 221 or the fanfares of K. 358. On the other hand, an opening may seemmechanical
and indifferent. Some performers even respond to this by a manipulation of tempo.
Andreas Staier treats the rst two imitative bars of K. 414 as a preludizing or warm-
up, like a roll-call of the two hands, before assuming the basic tempo, into which he
accelerates at bar 3. Fernando Valenti frequently translates such opening material into
suggestions that the performer (composer) is half asleep; witness his slow realization
of the opening arpeggio of K. 123 or the initial imitation of K. 498.
21
The latter opening quality need not be so negatively conceived, however. In many
cases it seems more appropriate to hear the material as simply normal or even neutral.
Such phatic implications act as a trap that draw us into a world of familiar sounds,
even if the expected thematic articulation is missing, so that any later startlement
is all the more effective.
22
The Sonata in G major, K. 324, seems to offer a perfect
example of the formulaic opening that lulls us into a false sense of security. If the
individual units used are formulaic, though, the total effect is not; the music its from
one gambit to another. The sonata suddenly takes off with the chain of sixths played
by the right hand in bar 12 and we are then presented with a series of horn calls,
partially superimposed in the two hands, in the manner of the coda of Beethovens
Les Adieux Sonata. After the listless procession of ideas from the start we suddenly
hear a real compositional idea, a true objet sonore, one which gives the sonata an
electrifying sense of direction. Other ways of conceptualizing the neutral quality
of such openings involve the dance and jazz models alluded to in previous chapters.
Both simply require the initial establishment of a sense of movement from which to
develop.
This sense of an opening might be reinforced by calling to mind the Essercizi. It is
customary to regard the ordering of these thirty sonatas as a progressive arrangement
in terms of successively greater difculty and length.
23
Has anyone pointed out that
they become stylistically more far-fetched and even outrageous? The gap between
K. 1 and K. 2 and, on the other hand, K. 29, where the virtuosity demanded is
almost frightening, and K. 30, the strangest of all fugues, is enormous. Assuming
that the ordering was done with care by the composer, which seems likely given
the circumstances of the publication, would it not be diminishing, if sadly typical, to
imagine that this was done just for pedagogical reasons? If we take the Essercizi for a
moment as a sort of multi-piece, we could see a correspondence with what Scarlatti
often does on the level of an individual work. Unexceptionable, often routine, even
casual beginnings lure us into his world, which tends to become more and more
fantastic and animated. K. 29 is the clear culmination of the use of left-hand-over-
right passages through the collection, which, as we have said, are here perverse and
unnatural in the extreme. The virtuosity has a harder edge than in the obviously
21
Teldec: 0630 12601 2, 1996 (Staier); Universal: 80471, [1950s]/1998 (Valenti).
22
This is Wilfred Mellers term; see Mellers, Orpheus, 86.
23
Hammond, Scarlatti, 181.
comparable K. 24. There is a technical strain to K. 29 which will be matched by the
harmonic and voice-leading strain of K. 30. We commonly think of the Essercizi as
a relatively unied set of pieces, but from K. 24 on, only K. 25 seems to inhabit the
more familiar world of the earlier ones. K. 27 (Ex. 4.4) is after all just as radical in
its own way.
From this point of view, Sheveloffs observation that each half of a Scarlatti sonata
charts a move from relative instability to stability may need to be qualied.
24
We
might nd openings disconcerting in various immediate and longer-range ways, but
they can also convey an air of innocent familiarity, creating the familiar paradoxical
mixture of the accessible and the inaccessible. Thus the instability of the very opening
becomes more a matter of structuralthematic function than of affective, or of course
harmonic, character.
On other occasions, though, the problematic nature of a sonata opening may take
on a harder edge, even if there is no immediate air of challenge in the material.
Among examples encountered so far, one might point to the rst bars of K. 193
(Ex. 1.4a) or K. 474 above (Ex. 7.2). One phenomenon of particular interest is
to begin with a gesture that is in some way syntactically inappropriate. In K. 523
(Ex. 4.6) the impropriety involves the lack of a companion phrase unit to the other-
wise perfectly unproblematic material; in K. 111 (also discussed in Chapter 4) we
are faced with constant repetitions of a unit whose syntactical function is simply
ambiguous. The Sonata in F major, K. 524, starts in medias res with a three-part de-
scending sequence. Indeed, the rst twenty-four bars consist (aside from the cadence
at 810) of nothing but transitional material. If one could dispute the syntactical im-
plications of the material given in the rst two bars, then its transposed treatment
over the following four bars undoubtedly represents a transitional procedure.
25
Only
the second subject from bar 25 provides a closed thematic invention. It is square and
jolly, with a beginning, continuation and close.
In the case of K. 524 the difdence of opening rhetoric is prolonged in an
extraordinary way that few other works can match. Another F major work, K. 106,
comes close to leaving the same desultory impression in its opening manoeuvres,
but this begins not with a middle but with a repeated closing unit. K. 275, also in
F major, begins likewise with a closing phrase, but this is more disruptive since it
is only a half-cadence (see Ex. 7.3a). The effect is very abrupt. These rst two bars
show how impropriety of syntactical signs can override harmonic respectability
we move quite unexceptionably from I to V at the start, but, even more than in
the previous cases, there is a feeling that we must have missed the real start. With
the close of the subsequent phrase unit at bar 6 matching bar 2 (which now seems
like the end of an antecedent phrase), this feeling is strengthened. In this sonata the
correction is offered fairly speedily: the alto part at bars 1819
1
matches the right
hand of the rst two bars (Ex. 7.3b). Again the wittiest aspect lies in the fact that the
resolution is masked by, or absorbed into, the commonplace nature of the material.
24
See Sheveloff, Grove, 341.
25
Rather proving the point, compare this with bars 1118 of K. 462.
Formal dynamic 337
Ex. 7.3a K. 275 bars 110
Ex. 7.3b K. 275 bars 1620
A further correction of the opening formula is found at bars 36 and 38, where it is
embedded into a perfect cadence and repeated, which is in its syntactical nature.
26
There is no aspect of the Scarlatti sonatas that is more Haydnesque than this sort of
manipulation. Compare what is found in these three works with, to name just a few
examples, Haydns Symphony No. 97, which begins with a closing phrase, or the
String Quartets Op. 33 No. 4 and Op. 64 No. 3, which seem to begin in the middle
of an utterance. Such works too betoken a fundamental change in the relationship
between the composer and his material.
A creative consciousness of the dispensable opening can be manifested in still
more indirect ways. Ex. 7.4a shows the opening bars of K. 215, with the slightly
unusual imitative enunciation of a galant gambit in Lombardic rhythm. The balanced
binary form is created by the rhyming of bars 3441 (in the Gilbert edition) with
829. However, bars 759 could also count as part of the structural regurgitation.
Scarlatti here recapitulates the left- and right-hand parts of 2931 separately and at
pitch, except of course that the As become As: see Ex. 7.4b and 7.4c. Thus bars
757 correspond to the left hand of 3031, extended by a bar, with the right hand
suggesting a verticalized form of the offbeat cadential gures heard subsequently in
26
Note that K. 274, 275 and 276 appear under a single heading in M and W, as three movements of one work.
This might appear to take some of the sting out of the opening of K. 275, but at best it can only effect a slight
lessening of the impropriety; it is not as if middle movements are much more likely to begin in such a manner.
Ex. 7.4a K. 215 bars 17
Ex. 7.4b K. 215 bars 2834
Ex. 7.4c K. 215 bars 7481
the rst half. Then bars 789 correspond to the right hand of 29
3
31, combined with
a rising-fth bass also drawn from the subsequent cadential material (compare bars
378). More intriguingly, though, bars 759 also constitute a gestural recapitulation
of the opening bars, which were essentially two rhythmically decorated descending
Formal dynamic 339
scales. This could explain why we now nd two successive descending scales instead
of the simultaneous presentation heard at the equivalent point of the rst half. Not
only that, but the pitch structures are almost identical: the left hand at 7578
1
falls
from b
1
to E, which simply extends by an octave the b
1
-e found at 2
3
4
1
, while
both right-hand lines trace the same descent from b
2
to e
1
. This is not only another
demonstration of structural wit; it suggests a particular sensitivity to formal balance
demanded by what is a complicated and disrupted structure (the second half of
K. 215 opens with one of the most famous sequences of crush chords).
Scarlattis conception of the opposite formalrhetorical juncture of a sonata, the
close, is also, of course, highly unusual. As with openings, this has been viewed
from various angles, both direct (through such devices as textural and syntactical
subtraction) and indirect (such as the effects of topical opposition or a vamp on the
sense of an ending). The common thread is the sense of holding back, a certain
undemonstrativeness, although with endings the impact tends to be more negative,
due to the rmer expectations we bring to this point of the form. The grand
peroration, such as we nd in K. 246, is unusual indeed; although many sonatas
move towards a climax in various ways, it is rare for them to nish on an up. Instead
there is often a sense of withdrawal (K. 27, 132) or a sense of open-endedness (K. 99,
202, 416). This does not mean that the composer fails to show a taste for resolution
virtually demanded by the aberrant nature of so much of his material for instance
in the way he mollies unusual contours in K. 115, 222 and 395 but this does
not entirely displace such qualities. My earlier analogy between the Essercizi and a
multi-piece might also seem appropriate in this context. As suggested already, K. 30
is a pretty ambiguous way to sign off the collection.
This characterization of Scarlattian endings must be qualied in several ways.
First of all it is not simply a convenient expression of the postmodern taste which,
preferring contradiction and open-endedness, tends to deny the effect or even fact
of structural closure. Such closure, it has been argued, was by no means the tired
device it may appear to our jaded tonal palates. Achieved by means of strong har-
monic and thematic articulation, it was new and exciting in Scarlattis time, a creative
opportunity to be relished. In musical terms, our aversion to or impatience with
such terms of reference may also derive considerably from their manifestation in
large-scale nineteenth-century forms, when closing rhetoric became so much more
marked and effortful. This was due both to the greater length of structures and
the attenuation of tonal vigour. Even the strongest of eighteenth-century closes
can appear undemonstrative by comparison. In addition, there is little doubt that
Scarlatti himself revels in the opportunities for such strong articulation. In fact, his
very denial of certain rhetorical norms and expectations is itself a form of empha-
sis. Opening and closure could not be problematized until their signicance for
an articulated harmonicthematic musical process had been grasped. So structural
closure is never in doubt aside from the undeniable fact of harmonic return, the
very tendency to move toward stability as dened by Sheveloff and the presence of
memorable second subjects testify to this. What Scarlatti tends to do is something
found in other, later tonal works: composers will often counterpoint the inevitable
grammatical closure with an affective or rhetorical openness. This is, however, more
common in the internal closes of multi-movement works (but not in nales, with
the seeming exception of Haydns Farewell Symphony). For instance, the close of
the rst movement of Schuberts A minor Sonata, Op. 142, contains a strong sense
of unnished business, even though ending securely in the major. This throws the
weight of denitive rhetorical closure onto events yet to come.
Such qualities may even be glimpsed in other Scarlattian genres. Annabel
McLauchlan has noted that the extremely perfunctory close to the nale of La
Dirindina would seem to leave the characters ridiculed and the audience in won-
der at so insubstantial a close.
27
Similar conrmation is provided by the comparison
drawn by Francesco Degrada between the settings by Scarlatti and Francesco Mancini
(16721736) of the rst recitative of the cantata Piangete, occhi dolenti. He notes
how Scarlatti avoids both the impact of the harsh dissonance chosen by Mancini to
open his cantata and the very dramatic gestures of his nish.
28
So what formal operations may be glimpsed in between these two poles of possi-
ble uncertainty? A number of rst- and second-half features should be noted at this
juncture. Almost too fundamental to be mentioned is the dramatizing of the move
to the dominant, except that Scarlattis advocacy of this process needs to be explicitly
acknowledged here. K. 407 (Ex. 5.12) could hardly be improved on as an example
of what entertainment this can provide for listener and analyst. Another extreme
example of this sort is K. 270, in which the difculties involved in reaching the
dominant seem to form part of an affectionate rustic parody. More commonly,
the dramatizing takes the form found in works like K. 410 and K. 418. The move to
the dominant is only securely completed after a prolonged play of harmonic indi-
cators, in both cases pivoting around the crucial fourth scale degree; when raised, it
pushes us towards V, when attened again we are drawn back towards I.
In a signicant number of cases, however, a major-key work does not proceed to
the dominant at the double bar. (Minor-key works move to the mediant or dominant
minor, as do several major-key works, and occasionally to the dominant major.)
Instead it reaches a minor III or VI. For example, K. 130 moves fromAat major to C
minor and K. 545 fromBat major to Gminor. That the audacity of such procedures
is barely recognized the introduction of Terzverwandschaft (third-relations) is still
associated with later generations suggests that the Scarlattian versions somehow do
not really count. There could be few clearer examples of the role played by Scarlattis
uncertain historical and stylistic position in assessing features of his writing. It is as
if his use of the device is best led under mannerist experimentation.
29
27
She notes too that an ending of such brevity is unmatched in all other intermezzi examined. McLauchlan,
Dirindina, 234.
28
29
Malcolm Boyd describes the use of the mediant minor as a rare conservative feature, comparing it with the use
of this tonality in da capo arias. Boyd, Master, 16970. Although the mediant minor is frequently in use for the
B section of a da capo aria form (if only at the close of the section), there is a world of difference between this
Formal dynamic 341
In a work like K. 457, with its move from A major to C sharp minor, the feature
demands to be heard as both radical and intrinsic to the harmonic argument. After a
pause fairly early in the second half of the sonata, bar 49 witnesses a magical effect,
both harmonically and motivically. We hear the rst proper major-mode coloration
for a long time, and it is that of E major, the dominant. It takes the formof the section
beginning at bar 4. To give added stability to this dominant, bar 50 repeats 49 exactly,
whereas bar 5 immediately varied bar 4 as the rst stage in a typical stampede
an eloquent change, or non-change, of detail. Because the whole passage is an
equivalent of 4ff., we then move at 51 to a submediant, C sharp minor, inection
of the dominant. The logic of the transposition is that now the dominant and the
substitute dominant are placed side by side, and the C sharp minor here usurps E
major directly in a manner that was only present at an abstract level in the rst half.
One other generative feature that we should call to mind here is the use of
modal opposition. This is one trait that can be given the most secure historical
grounding, as Michael Talbot has demonstrated in his study of the feature. He
concludes, though, that Scarlatti goes beyond contemporary fashion to pioneer the
use of those devices in a structurally signicant way.
30
This often coincides with a
pronounced opposition of topical types; as we have seen, the minor is often associated
with the exotic or Baroque, while the major tends to be more accessible, modern
and, naturally, comic. Such allegiances are exploited to irresistible effect in numerous
sonatas, of which K. 101, 193 (Ex. 1.4), 249, 429, 444 and 545 are among the most
memorable. In a number of cases this modal alternation takes the rst-half form
of majorminormajor; this creates the effect of the three-part exposition which
became such a common rhetorical pattern in sonata forms until about the 1780s.
K. 135 is a good example of this type.
The category of modal opposition can also of course overlap with the use of
unusual secondary keys discussed above. In some of these cases the really signicant
moment arrives when the mediant- or submediant-minor material of the rst half
is modally translated in the second half. In K. 249, which moves from a tonic B
at major to D minor, the second-half version of the highly Baroque-sounding D
minor material is fairly literally transposed, but it immediately sounds quite different,
less formidable and angular. This is helped by the fact that it is succeeded by a very
different peroration a real lieto ne compared to the dark drive of the rst-half close
and preceded by the most vivid realization in all the sonatas of what John Trend terms
the Scarlattian dry cackle of laughter (bars 11035, especially the rst six bars).
31
When trying to evoke some of the formal procedures typically found in the
second half of a sonata, we run up against the familiar difculty of how to avoid being
reductive when this tendency is inherent in the enterprise of formal characterization.
placement in a ternary form and closing the rst half of a binary form in the mediant minor. Michael Talbot
notes the use of such third-pairs in Vivaldi. Vivaldis particular cultivation of Eg and Ce pairs seems in fact to
nd a counterpart in Scarlattis use of B, which often moves to d. See How Recitatives End and Arias Begin
in the Solo Cantatas of Antonio Vivaldi, Journal of the Royal Musicological Association 126/2 (2001), 187.
30
Talbot, Shifts, 42.
31
Trend, Falla, 149.
This is all the more tricky in the case of Scarlatti, since few writers have failed to note
his freedom in this respect; but this in turn is unsatisfactory, since freedom is an airy
abstraction that tells us little of the possible purposes of a libertarian formal dynamic.
Most composers, after all, choose not to be free in this respect, nor is this necessarily
a bad thing. To understand Scarlattis freedoms, we need not only to examine the
contexts of individual works but to ponder his more abstract distaste for formal
denition of all kinds. Only with the late sonatas (those found in the last volumes
of P and V) is this constant vigilance relaxed. Formulae become more self-evident,
second halves feature extensive literal transpositions of rst-half material, and the
structural sense becomes simpler and broader altogether. This easy tone, together
with a preponderance of light, popular, seemingly Italianate invention, suggests that
these works do indeed belong together in a particular period of composition.
K. 520 and K. 540 are typical of this strain.
One recurrent second-half feature, the vamp, shows the difculties inherent in a
simple assertion of freedom. Without wishing to open once more the Pandoras box
that the vamps represent, they suggest very clearly this duality between a freedom
pursued for more or less functional ends and a freedompursued for its own sake. On a
less spectacular scale, we might note a common pattern whereby the second half takes
the rst as a working model but offers very different inections or weightings of the
same sequence of material. This was observed in the second half of K. 386, discussed
in Chapter 4. Should we be struck by the differences of treatment, or are these, as
Kirkpatrick seems to imply with his reference to the impressionistic restatement
of material,
32
of no particular structural moment? In that most composers attempt
little of the kind literal recollection of the earlier sequence of events being the
norm it seems more reasonable to assume it is driven by a creative purpose rather
than just a lack of punctiliousness. We may easily invoke historical considerations at
this point the pre-lapsarian state before the work concept took hold, and hence
the different status of the score, the greater casualness of notation due to different
patterns of musical promulgation but again the same question returns to haunt us.
If these considerations have such explanatory power, why did other composers not
follow the same path?
Another formal trait, one that suggests a clearer purpose, is the accelerated second
half, as dened in the case of K. 305 in G major (see Chapter 3). The sense of
acceleration, which seems to respond to the dynamics of the dance, is built into the
structure: the second half is notably shorter and generally less varied than the rst.
The second half is thus not so much any sort of rhyme with the rst even though
extensive transposition is common, as it aids the impression that nothing can impede
the growing momentum as a direct continuation and intensication of it. Other
instances of this practice may be found in K. 214, 244, 295, 327, 427 and 447.
A second-half habit that seems to have gone unnoticed is the retention, rather
than transposition, of pitch structures from the rst half. We have seen an example
32
Formal dynamic 343
Ex. 7.5a K. 302 bars 425
Ex. 7.5b K. 302 bars 847
of this above with K. 215 (Ex. 7.4), in which a second-half passage did not so much
transpose its rst-half equivalent as rework the same conguration of notes (although
this was then overshadowed by the reference to the very opening of the piece).
K. 65 (Ex. 6.1) offers another instance. One form of this habit occurs in conjunction
with the return to the tonic, taking place somewhere just before the mid-point of
the second half. It generally involves recollecting the phrase that led up to the
establishment of V and exploiting the double meaning of its half-cadence, since the
harmonic sense is generally that of being on rather than in the dominant. In the rst
half it leads to a tonicization of V(or, very commonly, a teasing continuation of V/V);
in the second half it leads us just as smoothly back to I. This is a witty economy of
thought that is frequently found in later eighteenth-century forms. Examples may
be found in K. 207 (compare bars 2730 with 738, which extends the phrase),
K. 256 (bars 14 and 55), K. 301 (bars 1315 and 424) and K. 389 (bars 1518 and
525, although the recollection turns out in retrospect to start earlier than this).
A more idiosyncratic version of this habit occurs later in the second half. Here the
retention of pitch occurs at a point when we would expect a wholesale transposition.
Indeed, the two are often mixed in such instances. K. 302 offers an example; the rst-
half material shown in Ex. 7.5a, a second subject initially poised on V of V, returns
in the second half as shown in Ex. 7.5b. What is retained is the pair of thirds c
2
e
2
to
b
1
d
2
and this induces a complete recasting of the harmonic sense: a VI pattern in
G major is replaced by a IV pattern in C major. It seems as if the composers ear is
drawn back to these pitches because they form a particularly memorable contour in
the rst half. A sort of muscular memory also seems to operate, involving the feeling
or colour of particular notes as experienced by any keyboard player and the types of
movements involved in arriving at them. Thus what is retained in the second half is
not just the two thirds themselves, but the upward stretch involved in reaching them.
A stunning example of this practice may be found by comparing bars 3032/346
and 7072/746 of K. 472, in which a whole sequence of right-hand pitches is
retained across two separate phrases, only being reharmonized by the left hand.
At this point we must revisit the matter of the composers mechanical or
unadventurous balanced binary form. While we have noted that a more or less
literal account of all second-subject or secondary-key material is by no means as
common as the literature would imply, literalness should not be itself regarded as
problematic. At least a certain amount of it is necessary to full the formal dynamic
inherent in the new style of Scarlattis time; it is also an essential part of this styles
comic rhetoric. Thus popular reiteration and rhyme tend to replace learned rework-
ing, and this is particularly apparent, appropriately enough, in major-key works.
In minor-key sonatas material tends to be worked more allusively, both because of
the typically older/Baroque associations of minor-mode material
33
and because of
the more extensive recasting required when originally minor material is made to
return in the major. In any case, literalness is no guarantee of formal balance, and
certainly not in Scarlatti. The opening of the Sonata in D major, K. 258, is grand
and thorough in its working of a quasi-invertible counterpoint between the hands.
Its slightly ponderous air is dissolved by a marked change of style in the passage at
bars 1925. The metre very clearly changes to duple and the tone becomes much
more informal. It has the avour of a country dance with its leaping bass octaves.
34
Both of these sections are totally ignored in the second half, which rst of all works
the subsequent rst-half material and then provides an extensive literal transposition
of it (compare bars 3248 with 7286). It is very easy simply to note that this
corresponds to a prevalent procedure in the Scarlatti sonata output on paper it
seems to create another balanced binary form but the shaping of the second half
altogether gives pause for thought. What is omitted here comprises fully one half of
the rst section of the sonata. It can only be disturbing when what was presented
so rmly (this applies to both the rst two ideas) can be so completely abandoned.
Only the rising sequence of bars 5663 recalls the opening gesturally. This opening
after all is not one that settles by degrees but seems quite secure in its mission. From
this point of view the sonata can only feel radically unbalanced. Alternatively, it
connotes a strong sense of progressive form at odds with the many descriptions of
Scarlattis binary structures, which normally suggest a static conception.
This applies even more to K. 261 in B major. The action of this sonata is deeply
disunied; it seems to embody the principle of open experience as dened by Wilfred
Mellers. After an offhand opening, the rst half is pleasant but low-key until the
sudden animation provided by bar 28. This presents the rst real idea of the sonata,
so that the rst half altogether provides a good instance of Scarlatti offering second
but not rst subjects. Mellers suggests this represents a tootling, footling street tune
it is certainly one in spirit if not in fact.
35
The left hand seems to parody the alto part
33
For one example of this see Peter Williams account of the particular association of the chromatic fourth with
D minor in Williams, Fourth, 12, 79 (and passim).
34
Sacheverell Sitwell notices this too: K. 258 is solemn and curious, with [the] sudden interpolation of a Schuh-
plattler, almost a clog dance, surely not of Italian or Andalucian inspiration. Sitwell, Baroque, 284.
35
Mellers, Orpheus, 85. Alain de Chambure suggests, also quite plausibly, that it rings out like a bugle call;
Chambure, Catalogue, 123.
Formal dynamic 345
of the sequence heard before in bars 1619, ironing it out into a frenetic repetition
that is clearly comic in effect. The certainty of this populist idiom sweeps away the
prior efforts.
The opening sonority of the second half comes from nowhere, both harmonically
and texturally; a unison on the dominant F is followed by a seven-part chord of
A major. Contrast is an inadequate word for the effect and the implications of the
ensuing section, which tears the sonata apart. It is structured along the lines of the
three-card trick. Stylistically it suggests a guitar rasgueado, with its repeated notes, but
does not allow the comfort of any specic folk identity, with the almost complete
lack of any melodic character. Thus it cannot be understood as just a low-life episode.
Among the many other disturbing elements are the fact that the cute repeated notes
of the rst-half tune become an aggressive, undifferentiated hammering, a strain on
any instrument, and this is especially striking given their juxtaposition with thick
chords. In addition, the exact repetition of three big crude blocks of sound gives
the section an expressive certainty and purposefulness that obliterates the rst half,
in spite of the difculty of determining the harmonic functionality of the material.
From bar 67 material from bar 9 of the rst half returns, but it has, as it were,
entered a state of shock. For example, the left hand loses its equivalent of 9
2
, then
re-enters too quickly at 69
2
. Metrical confusion results. The sequence that reappears
at bar 72 is cut short. There follow a broader sequence, an attempt to establish the
tonic, the return of concentrated repeated-note guration, a long dominant pedal. A
number of fourths and twice-repeated notes suggest rst-half material (for instance
compare bar 89 with bar 12), but essentially we hear a number of quite new gambits,
all seemingly attempts to recover a sense of equilibrium. After a long dominant pedal
from 85 to 92, the expectation of a tonic harmony is not met; instead there is a move
to a rst-inversion chord of the parallel minor. None of this material has a strong
prole or is near the cutting edge of invention. This may all be thought of as a
cleansing process, Scarlatti composing with time so as to allow us to readjust; the
material itself is largely irrelevant. We nally get back on the rails through our street
tune, which returns at bar 99.
Thus the most real material of the sonata occurs in the rst part of the second
half, but in terms of art music it is barely material at all. In this sense it calls to
mind the same issues as a vamp but even more obviously disorders our perception
of a whole. The street tune, whose return of course gives us our balanced binary
form, makes as if to suggest a happy ending, even if only in the sense of a comically
dismissive gesture; but it seems conned and small-scale after the earlier second-half
earthquake. In the rst half it was bracing and liberating. Of course it functions
ironically in that it is needed to restore a sense of form, a precondition of artistic
intelligibility in most tonal genres, but in a way the music does not return to the
opening key. Indeed, there are quite a few sonatas in which the nal rhyme is the
only thing left intact in the second half; see also K. 489, for example. If Scarlatti shows
himself to be a revolutionary through this sonata, it is not in the attempt to show
us a new or better way; it is rather in the sense that he demonstrates the limitations
Ex. 7.6a K. 500 bars 537
Ex. 7.6b K. 500 bars 11823
of any self-enclosed artistic statement using time and tonality as its vehicles. As we
are challenged to make sense of such ruptures, the whole notion that music might
express anything in a purposive way is called into question.
On a more modest aesthetic scale, and turning once more to the issue of material
that does not match in the expected way across the two halves, we nd that this is
often the case with the closing units of each half. Given the often formulaic nature
of such writing, one might doubt whether a departure from the rst-half closing
material can be of any great moment. If the composer is simply replacing one popular
formula with another, is there any harm done? K. 500 in A major offers an example
of where the lack of end-rhyme (yielding a not altogether balanced binary form)
is clearly to be heard as such (see Ex. 7.6a and b). In this case, the prior closing
theme has been faithfully transposed (11018
1
), and the two nal bars (1223) do
present a rhyme, if inexact, with the last two bars of the rst half. Thus one might
feel that any other differences of shaping are simply readjustments before the nal
cadence point and are not to be heard as signicant departures. Half end-rhymes,
where the essentials return but are differently realized or inected, are so common
in the sonatas that this is quite an important perceptual matter. The issue is really
made more urgent here because the material concerned, bars 535 in the rst half,
is winningly memorable one of those trademark reiterative ideas usually marked
by some quirk of rhythm or texture. At bar 118 in the second half, where we would
expect a return of this material, we hear something less distinctive. This could recall
a number of earlier features but is probably cognate with the unfolded rising fourths
as found for example in bars 86ff., which also lead to a cadence point.
Then at bar 120 we hear the material of 53 transposed so our gratication has
merely been delayed, it would seem but, as we discover, there are no companion
bars and so this can hardly constitute a structural rhyme. Rather, its effect is of a
magical, eeting recollection. This then resolves itself on the rst two beats of the
following bar, with the f
2
d
2
b
1
of bar 120 moving to e
2
c
2
a
1
in bar 121. But
Formal dynamic 347
there is no minim a
2
at the top of the texture (compare bar 55), indicating that
the incident is not being dwelt upon, and the more anonymous-sounding quaver
guration returns. This shows Scarlatti playing powerfully with expectation and
memory; it moves the moment of composition well away from any notions of
improvisation and leaves no doubt that the non-rhyming feature should register
with the hearer. We hear a rhyme, but it is too late, too short; it then receives what
is, on this small scale, quite a grand resolution, but then the moment has passed and
the work moves on to its close. Afterwards we might even wonder if we heard it at
all. This is a trompe loreille that says a great deal about the composers formal appetite.
At the furthest extreme of structural freedom in the second half of a sonata lies
what has been termed progressive form; a number of sonatas examined thus far
have been said to embody such a formal dynamic, for instance K. 277 (Ex. 1.2) or
K. 263 (Ex. 3.4). To speak of progressive form might seem tautologous, since any
tonal structure with a harmonically open rst part ought to qualify. Most binary
constructions, whether a balanced-binary suite movement or a sonata form, are by
denition progressive, since they are based on the departure from and return to the
tonic, creating a single tonal trajectory from beginning to end. The same applies to
a one-part form such as fugue. (Ternary forms and additive forms such as variations
or rondo will not qualify in the most literal sense, as the tonic is recaptured at
a number of points en route.) We have spoken of rhyme in general as though it
were only a symmetrical element, as its name would tend to imply, but where it
involves transposition from another key to the tonic it is also progressive. From the
Baroque on, such matching of material across the total structure is a way of making
the harmonic return thematically explicit and hence imprinting it on the ear of the
listener. However, progressive form is here meant to apply to those constructions
where many of the expected symmetrical elements in the nal part are absent or
transformed in such a way that a work sounds as if it were through-composed.
One of the most impressive examples of progressive form is the Sonata in E
major, K. 206 (Ex. 7.7), especially since the formal dynamic is made quite explicit
in a climax that occurs right at the end of the work. K. 206 has rightly caught the
imagination of a number of writers. Mellers comments:
The tempo is slow, the sonority plangent, twanging and whining like a street beggars guitar,
with abrupt contrasts of texture, nowthin and bell-like, then suddenly massive and dissonantly
reverberant. The music stops and starts, like life itself. The common man, even a gypsy
beggar, nds his voice, which may be tender, pathetic, desperate, as well as aggressive. Not
for nothing does the end sound unexpectedly grand: heroes are no longer restricted to the
upper classes.
36
Kirkpatricks remarks have a similar underlying basis:
Scarlatti takes the listener into his condence . . . When after a sunny opening he suddenly
throws a cloud over the music at measure 17 by modulating from the dominant of E major
to that of E at minor, we can only dimly pregure the outcome . . . Poetic feeling has even
36
sprung the bonds of formal symmetry, as if the passionately expanded and altered termination
of the piece in minor were the only real form of expression. We are caught up in experience,
not protected from it by an orderly, pre-digested philosophy.
37
I too believe that K. 206 turns around the matter of expressive immediacy, except
that here the very right to and propriety of individual expression must be heard as a
subject rather than taken as a given. The rst sixteen bars, though, are idyllic. Various
features attest to this. The opening canon may be heard, at least in retrospect, as a
symbol of an ordered world or of high civilization. The closed projection of the
tonic over the rst seven bars adds to the sense of solidity. The triplet congurations
may hint at the galant, as the ornamentation of bar 6 certainly does. The falling
left-hand octave gure at bar 7 is of a type encountered before (in K. 398 and
K. 513, and compare also bar 14 of K. 170); it seems to be consistently associated
with idyllic, if not Arcadian expression. The only slight disturbances to this perfect
world come at bars 5
3
6
1
. These disturbances are picked up, only too appropriately,
later in the rst half. The right-hand line at 5
2
6
2
becomes the closing idea of 46ff.,
and in both cases the left hand proceeds in scalic contrary motion. More than this,
both passages fan out from a single focal pitch that really belongs to both voices, the
b
1
heard on the second beat of bar 5 and the b heard on the second beat of bar 46.
If we bear this reading in mind, the left-hand part may also be heard to be echoed at
3940 and 434; bar 5 forms in effect a b
1
minim then an a
1
crotchet tied across the
bar line exactly as in the later passages. The sense of these references will become
clear shortly.
The unit that follows the rst phrase is more elegiac, but still has decorum.
However, the parallel fths outlined by the basic voice leading of the outer pitch
extremes of 811 suggest a slightly looser style. Bars 810 in fact expand the earlier
triplet motive, rising a third then falling a fth in each bar, a relationship that attests
to a relative unity of expression. The introduction of E at bar 12 means we have a
model of harmonic good behaviour solid enunciation of the tonic, followed by the
appearance rst of
4 (connoting V) then of
1 (connoting V of V). The turn heard

at bar 12 is equivocal in its meaning it may continue the embellishing decorum
but it also hints at a Spanish avour, and will assume symbolic meaning as such later.
Bars 1517
2
present an exaggeratedly stable dominant, which demands to be read
as a summation of the world of the piece so far.
The last two beats of bar 17 make as if to reactivate bar 15, but an enharmonic
cataclysm takes place, comparable to that described in K. 261 above suddenly
we are confronted with the dominant minor ninth of E at minor. The world of
the piece is turned upside down, perhaps symbolized melodically by the way bar 18
reverses the melodic rst halves of 8, 9 and 10. The comparatively low register of the
left-hand chord is also noteworthy. We have moved from a very sharp key to a very
at one, with all the typical associations one might expect from the contrast. The
monotonous left-hand oscillation from 20 supports a compound melody so explicit
37
Formal dynamic 349
Ex. 7.7 K. 206 bars 1122
it must really be heard as two separate impulses compare this with the smooth
melodic style of the opening. There is then an attempt to retrieve the harmonic
situation by means of the circle of fths D( =C)FB. The sense of attempted
retrieval is then made explicit. Bars 27
4
28 rework bars 17
3
ff. enharmonically but
also reactivate the material of bars 811. The sequentially falling grace-note pattern
and left-hand pitch structure of 811 are both compressed. The continuation into
bar 29 underlines the re-emergence of decorum, signalled by the more standard
ornamental ourish at 29
4
30
2
. We are back on V of V, ready for restoration of
equilibrium by melodic means.
Instead we have more V of V. At 30
4
31
4
there is a wonderful recontextualiza-
tion of the very opening; compare the FFCF succession with the EEBE
presented at 1
2
2
1
. As opposed to its airy setting there, here it is rhythmically dis-
torted, made clumsy and personal, and choked by the texture. A bout of modal
Ex. 7.7 (cont.)
equivocation follows (involving G, A and A), the cross-relations made more
painful by the rhythmic stasis. The close of the unit from bar 33
4
presents a reminder
of two prior elements: b
2
a
2
in upper voice (as at 1718 and 278) and, in the alto,
the ornamental gure from the end of the phrase four bars earlier (29
4
30
2
). The
latter relation is made absolutely clear on repetition of the phrase, as the altos added
appoggiatura at 38
1
matches that heard at 30
1
. The left hand at 34 echoes its falling-
octave gure from bar 7, a foil that reminds us of the distortion of what was a more
idealized utterance. The repetition of this four-bar unit at 34
4
38
3
becomes more
Formal dynamic 351
Ex. 7.7 (cont.)
dissonant through the added ornamentation, which is here used to intensify rather
than as graces. Most signicantly, bar 35
1
is now a distortion of 8
4
and so forth.
The same technical spirit is found in the second subject from bar 38
4
, its minor
mode an inevitable result of the previous coloration. The left-hand line reworks its
material of 56 as explained, while the right-hand crotchets on triadic degrees may
refer to the start. The fact that the rst two crotchets are unaccompanied may be the
strongest link. Certainly the succeeding triplets refer to what succeeded the crotchets
Ex. 7.7 (cont.)
at the start of the piece, with an identical contour for the rst six notes (40
4
41
1
).
One should note as well the clear sense of a return to two-part counterpoint. So in
many respects the second subject revives the opening section, but it is compromised
by its mode and by the overt opposition between the two voices. It is caught between
two modes of expression, which Scarlatti seems to alternate, just as major and minor
oppose each other symbolically.
The two-part texture is continued at 46, in the extreme form of giant contrary-
motion scales which, as explained, derive fromand then expand upon the disturbance
Formal dynamic 353
Ex. 7.7 (cont.)
found in bars 56. The passage also expands upon the clash of different scale forms
found at bars 31ff. note the presence once more of G, A and A. The very
bareness as the crotchets continue without a foil creates tension, one that seems to
express inarticulacy and unworldliness.
Bar 49 conrms bars 56 as the source for this outburst: the interval of a tritone
moving to a sixth in the top voices may be compared with the a
1
d
2
/g
1
e
2
sounded at 6
12
. The triplets plus grace notes of bar 50 again suggest the world of the
opening, meaning that three ideas in succession feature more-or-less conventional
galant phraseology at their closes. The nal unit from bar 56, which nally returns
us to B major, conates the Spanish-sounding turn with descending arpeggios from
b
2
that refer to several points in the rst section. Thus the whole rst half of K. 206
vacillates between two modes of lyrical expression.
The beginning of the second half offers a milder form of the rupture at bar 17,
with the same move from B (as unison pitch and key) to foreign elds. Here the bass
moves up by semitone instead of down, to B. Bar 62 presents bar 61 in ornamented
diminution. This is another reference to the gure heard at 8
4
, already signicantly
reworked at bars 25, 28, 35 and 50, but now it is insistent and wont take its place
amidst other melodic elements. The added F in the left-hand chord at 63, preventing
the full resolution of the preceding diminished seventh, adds to the growing exotic
avour of the music. At 689 the turn gure from bar 12 offers another instance of
melodic isolation; it is nowthe affective focus, with the parallel fths belowstartlingly
raw. The following passage from bar 71 gives full and passionate expression to the
previously more latent Spanish avour; the turn gure now takes its place in an
integrated melodic context at 72
1
, as does the cell isolated at 613 in bar 74. Over
the bar line at 723 and 745 we hear a clear reference to the cadential gure from
29
3
30
2
, but unlike its previous, more formulaic, cast, the gure now seems to be
caught up in experience. It is passionately transformed. Given the exotic context,
though, and features such as the falling semitone in the bass, a closer parallel might
be with 3334
1
and 3738
1
. But even in these terms a comparison is telling; the
ornamental gure is now no longer masked by the upper-voice cover tones. The
falling left-hand octave gure at bar 75 again sharpens these comparisons.
Then the second and third units of the opening section return, transposed so as
to lead towards rather than away from the tonic their own hints of immediacy thus
nownd a more congenial context. The whole passage nowhas a continuous chordal
accompaniment, as opposed to the consistently missing rst beats before. This gives
greater warmth and directness, recontextualizing what was previously more galant;
also relevant is the greater intensity of the sequential harmonies at bars 76 and 77.
Then there is a cut to a transposition of bars 30
4
ff., but this is not down a fth to V of
I, but down a second to the tonic. Thus, like the original passage, the same harmony
is retained across the two phrases, but the effect is very different now. In the rst
half bars 2930 produced a half-cadence that seemed to demand a subsequent move
to V, so that the harmonic continuation was a shock. This was coordinated with
the shock of a new style. In the present passage, though, the E major reached at 83
is a tonic, preceded by a V6/5 chord, and so the continuation is perfectly smooth.
Although the false relations still cause a shudder, there is no real sense of stylistic
rupture from 84; the right hand takes its place quite reasonably among the prior
melodic events of the second half, while the left hands accompanying rhythm has
now already been heard at 61 and 65.
From bar 91
4
there occurs a very signicant intervention an attempt to displace
the appearance of the second subject which is now due by analogy with the rst half.
Formal dynamic 355
It is like a last-ditch attempt by the forces of decorum to prevail. We hear in bars 923
what sounds like a simplied version of the shapes found in bars 769, as if reducing
them to a more schematic outline, without the rich overlay of appoggiaturas and
seventh chords. The succession of ornaments in the following bars 94
3
95 furthers
the sense of reversion to the opening world: it is just as we heard in bar 6! This is
a salutary reminder of the unusually central structural role ornaments may play in
Scarlatti in general, and in this work in particular, premised as it is on a detailed
examination of melodic behaviour.
These events are immediately countered by a texturally rich version of the
contrary-motion scales from the rst half and by the Spanish turn shape from bar
72
13
, repeated to emphasize its strength. The second subject that may now enter
from bar 99
4
is changed for reasons of registral management, and this form, which
lends a feeling of greater melancholy, is kept on the repetition of the phrase an octave
lower. At 107 another dramatic interruption occurs, the repeated tritone a new
element at this late stage of the structure. Bars 108 and 110 then match the cadential
bar 106, producing an effect of naked insistence. The contrary-motion scale passage
from bar 111 is not transposed, but retained at pitch (before later necessary modi-
cations) a memorable example of the habit of second-half pitch-retention. The
passage leads at 114 and 118 to a cadential bar shorn of triplets; these, it has been
argued, refer to and symbolize the ordered galant world of the beginning, which has
now disappeared entirely. The cadential bars 106, 108 and 110 seem to have played
out the last remnants of the melodic triplet.
From bar 119 it feels as though the melody has achieved complete freedom of
expression in Mellers terms, it nds [its] voice. There is no real sense of melodic
patterning and an enormous melodic range from c
3
to f, with an impressive im-
passioned leap at the start from c
2
to c
3
via e
2
. The sense of directness, indeed of
naked anguish, is aided by the fact that the single-note appoggiatura is the only form
of ornament found from bar 100 to the end. As noted at the outset, the progressive
sense of form leads to a climax at the end. This occurs in conjunction with a most
unusual change of mode to minor, which is inevitable in view of the plot. This
ending is a triumph for the lone voice transcending the Arcadian-galant conven-
tions of expression presented at the beginning, for a presumed low art, living in the
present, over a civilized one that can control its emotional representation. However,
as one may see from all the push and pull of detail along the way, the process is less
schematic than this sounds.
38
DI ALECT O I DI OLECT?
A question that arises from time to time, with some urgency, in a close study of
the language of the Scarlatti sonatas concerns the status of material that they may
38
Wanda Landowska interprets the dualism of K. 206 in terms of a little opera, constituting a dialogue and struggle
between the voices of a woman and a man. Landowska, Music, 252.
have in common. With the majority of resemblances there is of course no problem
of denition; they will involve shared formulas (especially those used to articulate
cadences) or topical signals (even if, as we have seen, these are often ambiguous).
Many others we will recognize as distinctive ngerprints of the composer, and they
produce what we mean by a personal musical style, a linguistic idiolect as opposed to
the dialect of formulas and topical references. It would seem fair to suggest that the
Scarlatti sonatas contain a relatively high proportion of idiolect, hence the common
perception of his originality. This quality does not inhere merely in thematic material,
of course; it may lie even more in harmonic practice or rhythmical style. In addition,
as we have seen throughout, the most pronounced individuality in fact lies in those
points of a musical argument where other composers could seemingly not conceive
of leaving a personal stamp, in the management of basic properties of phrase rhythm,
cadences and opening gestures.
What concerns us here, though, are the more evident types of invention entities
that are more or less thematic and generally melodic. Sometimes strong resemblances
of specic shapes between individual works make one wonder whether modelling
on a particular external source is involved. For such a suggestion to have any force,
sonatas must have several turns of phrase in common and, in most cases, a similar
expressive climate. If an underlying model may be reasonably postulated, this may
compromise the specic force granted to particular shapes in a close reading. This
can only obtain to a limited degree, though; without re-engaging with all the issues
concerning inuence and the role of creative choice that were raised in Chapter 3,
one must acknowledge that pre-existing material still has to be allocated to this rather
than that context, its meaning not exhausted by an identication of its source.
This ambiguity of language is most striking in the case of those sonatas that present
a seemingly personal lyrical idiom, often involving Iberian touches. This becomes
an urgent issue at this point given the reading just offered of K. 206. One can trace a
number of strong resemblances of material in other works which raise the question
whether much of the piece is simply based on an underlying folk model, or series of
models. The phrase that opens each half of K. 166, for example, is strikingly like that
found at the start of the second half of K. 206, and its cadential close at bars 78 and
489 recalls the subsequent 745 in K. 206 (as well as 2930 in the rst half). The
fact that K. 166 is marked Allegro ma non molto and is patently quite different in
expressive character seems in this instance to strengthen the case for a shared external
model, one that is so xed that it can be realized in quite different ways. Even the
contrary-motion scales that seem so intimately entwined in the argument of K. 206
may be found in similar form in other sonatas; see K. 139 from bar 30 and even
more from bar 71. They also feature in K. 274 in F major, where they are heard from
bars 14, 37, 41 and 49 and now feature a similar right-hand fall towards the subse-
quent cadence point. Those heard from 37 and 41 are particularly close to the form
of K. 206, fanning out again from a unison of the two voices. However, the contrary-
motion scales in K. 274 are not at all anguished in character; once more, this seems
to increase the likelihood that they refer to some pre-existing source rather than
coming from the arsenal of the composers own creative gures.
Formal dynamic 357
Ex. 7.8 K. 498 bars 6063
More striking even than these likenesses, though, are those found in a work like
K. 466 in F minor. Compare for example the melodic approach to and realization
of the cadence at K. 206/2830 with K. 466/1011, 367 or 3840. The very
trill-plus-appoggiatura formula found at the end of the unit in K. 206 receives the
same subsequent treatment in K. 466, being placed beneath an upper-voice pedal
note; see K. 206/37
4
38
1
and K. 466/45
4
46
1
. Other links between material that
is relatively formulaic also start to seem quite persuasive; compare K. 206/50 with
K. 466/27 (also found, for instance, in K. 238/35 and 41). Furthermore, compare
elements of the pitch structure and even more the syntax of the whole closing
phrases in K. 466/3034 and K. 206/559. All these resemblances of especially
melodic diction tend to suggest the opposite of the other comparisons a particular
lyrical mode more than a common external (folk) model, even if it may issue partly
from one. It is like an idiolect of solitary lyricism. This restores the sense of the
plot proposed for K. 206, that it moves from a culturally sanctioned higher style to
a more personally inected form of low art, which Mellers in fact hears from the
outset.
Such a conclusion suggests that the two conceptual categories of dialect and
idiolect may indeed overlap. The more consistently certain external features are
heard, the more they become a part of the composers personal style quite naturally,
really, since their very choice is of course a function of that style. Among the more
obvious instances in Scarlatti are fanfares (see the discussion focussed around Ex. 3.2)
and the repeated half-cadence with Phrygian touches that occurs in scores of sonatas.
Ex. 7.8, from K. 498 in B minor, shows a typical example. Often, as here, it is as
much the very repetition of the device as the avour of the harmonic inection that
gives it its folk avour. This feature is at once plainly derived from popular dialect
and one of the composers own signature techniques.
Another work that gives pause for thought about the hazy borderline be-
tween shared and individual material is K. 426 in G minor. Note the following
correspondences:
1. The vamp from bar 134, which tries to mediate between the different sections of
a stylistically broken work, is very similar to those found in each half of K. 359,
suggesting a possible folk inspiration to the device here.
2. The dramatic rise in the right-hand line of the vamp from bar 150 also occurs
in the equivalent points of K. 359, as well as in the vamp-like section of K. 340
(compare bars 1315 of that work). This strengthens the sense of an underlying
model to these sections.
3. The rst four bars of K. 425 resemble bars 1518 of K. 426; each of these units
is periodically reiterated through the work.
4. The closing material of each half of K. 426, with its distinctive leaping octaves,
is echoed at the corresponding point of K. 494, but this need not mean that
both derive from a particular dance type; the composer may simply be reusing a
particular shape to different expressive ends.
5. There is a fundamental thematic afnity between the opening material and that
found throughout K. 148.
39
K. 102 also uses this basic material; compare K.
102/5ff. with K. 426/8ff. In addition, K. 102 also features the same ritual repeti-
tions of the same bass line at the same closing points of each half. The incidence of
identical material in three separate works strengthens the likelihood of a specic
model having been in the composers mind. Jane Clark believes K. 426 reects
Portuguese folk music.
40
The bass gures and syntactical sense do in fact suggest
the music of Seixas; see his Sonata No. 51 (1960), for example.
This work shows again how issues of material identity are raised most urgently by
sonatas in a lyrical vein, perhaps partly because we traditionally, if misguidedly, expect
such music to suggest a more personal expressive style. But this very expression can
only be heard because it is constructed in accordance with well understood signals,
such as the dying sigh or more generally the appoggiatura, or the move from major
to minor. The difference with Scarlatti, in the light of K. 206 and K. 426, is that
he seems to prefer to lean on demotic signals to create such effects, as if creating a
personal mythology out of the elements of popular music.
In K. 439, an ambivalent and fascinating work, the second half features at bars
6062 a plunging three-octave arpeggio gure in the left hand counterpointed by
a trilled pedal note in the right hand. This is an insertion that seems to compensate
for the lack of the expected left-hand arpeggios in the transposed version of the
second subject at bars 57 and 58. There is no question about the integrated thematic
status of this material; such dramatic plunging arpeggios have featured at a number
of prior points. In a play of space and connement, they seem to be used to alleviate
the nagging closeness and heavy intensity of the stepwise movement found through
most of the piece. Bars 6062 seem to set the seal on this process. It is therefore
almost disturbing to nd the identical material turning up a number of times in
K. 332 (rst heard at 2830
1
). This case illustrates well the problems we face in
getting to grips with the details of Scarlattis musical language; one would like to
make a case for the K. 439 version as an intrinsic part of one work, yet its identity
with K. 332 suggests a quotation or an explicit topical reference. Is the composer
simply quoting himself?
LYI CAL BEAKTHOUGH
K. 206 also embodies on the largest scale a formal feature found in a number of works
that seems to have escaped recognition what I call the lyrical breakthrough. Such
39
Noted in Hammond, Scarlatti, 181.
40
See Clark, Clark Notes, [6].
Formal dynamic 359
moments, normally quite short-lived, are marked by a sudden intensication of the
melodic line, offering a directness and fervour of expression that have been either
absent or contained up to this point. A feeling of liberation or of blossoming can be
felt. This sort of letting go can be related to the formal dynamic of vamp sections,
but the lyrical breakthrough normally retains a sense of decorum. The melodic
organization of such passages is generally unmethodical, but sometimes the sense
of freedom comes, as in a vamp, precisely through the insistence of the patterning
(as in the examples found in K. 257, 279, 472 and 527). Indeed, in some cases, such
as K. 426 and K. 439, the breakthrough is realized through a vamp that has a more
melodic and less gurative character than usual. The type of patterning depends on
the prior context; thus the breakthrough may seem to gather up the threads of the
previous music or to disperse them.
How different is this feature from the natural lyrical high points found in other
music? In many respects these passages may not differ markedly at all, whether in
their internal rhetoric or indeed in their larger role of providing a dening moment
of melodic eloquence, which may act as a turning point for the form. What they
do demonstrate, though, that is quite Scarlattian is the composer manipulating levels
of formal control. Scarlatti, as we have observed on many occasions, is interested in
formal constructs of all kinds whether topic, cadence, beginnings and endings or
voice leading, and ultimately style itself and pursues the boundaries of their de-
nition. Thus the lyrical breakthrough always occurs in a context that is in some way
impersonal or inexpressive it pushes against some element of structural, expressive
or topical control. By suggesting a more personal lyrical voice, it deconstructs or
transcends the musical environment from which it emerges.
We also need to place this feature in the wider emotional world of the sonatas,
setting it against the heartlessness identied by Eric Blom and the relentlessness
identied by Cecil Gray (one comes to long for a sombre, shadowy passage
41
), and
the more unyielding qualities of Scarlattian discourse. To identify such expressive
properties is not so much to reinscribe the Latinate mythology of grace, clarity,
rationality, logic and the rest against the more evident emotional warmth of the
Austro-German, but to call to mind the constant vigilance of the composers art. It
is thus a question as much of technical as emotional tone, with all the denials, sub-
tractions and ambiguities we have identied in the manipulation of various musical
parameters. These produce an art that is supremely unrelaxed. Extraordinarily, this
coexists with an art that is unprecedentedly open to a range of popular inuences and
inections, many of which connote precisely the opposite quality. The unrelaxed
quality is most immediately evident in the tempo character of the sonatas; in fact
it holds most securely, as was suggested in Chapter 5, in the composers Andantes,
precisely where we might expect to nd a warmer and more sustained sense of
musical gesture. Thus we may also speak of a notably unconfessional art. This is not
in these terms an anachronistic label; it connotes the lack of personal frankness also
dened in Chapter 5, the quality that we expect to nd expressed, or at least enacted,
41
Blom, Valabrega Review, 423; Gray, History, 140.
above all in slower music. Even if we compare Scarlatti just with his closest musical
companion, Albero, the greater warmth of the younger composers rhetoric is plain.
This unconfessional aspect again has a contradictory counterpart, since the sonatas
also give the impression of being unprecedentedly individualistic in approach.
From these points of view the lyrical breakthrough represents a marked softening.
This is not to be understood sentimentally the composer lowering his guard, so to
speak. It is more a question of tone, that sovereign view of all human activity and
expression that is the hallmark of a comic art. (In a discussion of Mozarts Cos` fan
tutte Charles Rosen denes it thus: there is no way of knowing in what proportions
mockery and sympathy are blended, the art . . . is to tell ones story without being
foolishly taken in by it and yet without a trace of disdain.
42
) That said, one must not
underestimate the startling power that is manifested in some of these breakthrough
moments, the burning intensity and anguish that they convey. This is certainly the
case with the end of K. 206 and the passage already mentioned in K. 439 (bars
4751), perhaps the most emotionally charged climax in all the sonatas.
The lyrical breakthrough seems to occur in two distinctive contexts. The rst is a
context that is already lyrical, but with some sense (at least in retrospect) of formal or
topical constraint. It is in this category that we also nd the more sustained examples
of this formal dynamic, where the breakthrough denes the whole structure. In
works such as K. 206, K. 208, K. 277 (Ex. 1.2) and K. 279, there is no question that
a well-dened lyrical voice is present from the start; what is at issue is how closely
its expression is controlled. Such works seem to trace an ideal plot type involving
the increasingly personal inection of a means of lyrical expression that is in some
way communal and codied. In all these cases the means is what we can call the
galant. This is itself premised, as we have seen, on the notion of individual sensitivity
or sensibility in its reaction against the perceived character of Baroque expressive
means. The tone of Scarlattis reaction is that he accepts the premise and also looks
beyond it, by means of the breakthrough dynamic. The acceptance lies in the sense
that the initial galant character is so lovingly drawn. Nothing is sweeter and more
charming than the rst pages of K. 206 and K. 277.
In the more concise versions of this type of breakthrough Scarlatti generally works
with other well-dened stylistic types, often of a character that is elegiac and some-
what antique. In K. 185, which initially suggests a chaconne, a lyrical climax arrives
at bars 512, of a sort not expected in this style. The dening shapes of the piece
falling movement in general, and the falling three-note arpeggio in particular are
here countered by an expansively rising F minor arpeggio, and there is a notable
cessation of the left hands accompanying chords. The following scalic descent from
c
3
was heard three times in the rst half, but instead of being pathetic and paren-
thetical in effect, it is now part of a broader melodic line. In other words, there
is a breakthrough in directness and breadth of expression. The absence of any
42
Rosen, Classical, 31617. This concept was also discussed in relation to the modest sonatas in Chapter 3,
pp. 1056.
Formal dynamic 361
Ex. 7.9 K. 234 bars 2131
accompanying parts, so that the line approaches its peak against a silent background,
and the lengthy run of continuous quavers unencumbered by the ties onto strong
beats that are so prevalent elsewhere strengthen this sense of directness. In K. 434
the antique contrapuntal manner, already put under strain from the beginning of the
second half, is dramatically abandoned from bar 70 with the introduction of octave
doubling to the left-hand line. The right hand breaks through by in fact becoming
less articulate in a conventional sense. Its reiterated long notes and upper appog-
giaturas suggest a amenco style; compare the start of the second half of K. 490.
K. 234 has a rather ritualistic feel to its G minor melancholy. Only two basic ideas
are used, and they are repeated internally as well as occurring in various forms in
each half. All these levels of formality mean that bars 249 (see Ex. 7.9) seem to
convey a markedly personal voice. Note the conjunct intervals, the syncopations,
the comparative freedom of internal structure, the vamping left-hand chords. This
lyrical blossoming is akin to those frequent moments in Albero which suggest a
Spanish melisma over a strummed accompaniment. The distinctness of the sections
in K. 234 (there is another such passage in the second half) is emphasized by their
incompatibility with the preceding harmonies. In bar 24, for instance, the melody
completes its cadential duties by moving to

1 but the bass is a tritone away from the
D we expect. However, at the end of each blossoming there is no sense of break
in fact bar 29
3
sets up the return of the passage from bar 19 that preceded the lyrical
moment.
Ex. 7.10 K. 19 bars 6574
The second context in which the breakthrough occurs is as a sort of foil within
one of Pestellis inexpressive works. We have encountered a good example of this
in the Sonata in F major, K. 257 (discussed in Chapter 4), in which bars 5258
1
seemed to represent the one moment of freedom. As noted there, the underlying
sequential patterning means that there is still an overt measure of control. Such
syntax also underlies a comparable passage in K. 472, a work that is gracious in tone
yet in fact rather maverick: it presents what sounds like a series of doodles, avoiding
anything that might make a thematically denitive impression. A sense of greater
urgency arrives with the more dynamic manipulation of the material from the start
of the second half, and in bars 4851 there is a feeling of anticipation, of settling
down before the main event. This main event, from bar 52, offers the listener the
rst memorably shaped melodic material of the sonata. It is as if a window is opened
onto another world, that of the most basic and natural form of musical expression
song. It is then just as suddenly closed. This sudden relaxation is so notable because
K. 472 is a work that in its gentle smiling tone suggests lyricism but doesnt really
provide it except at this eeting moment.
K. 19, although it conveys a certain melancholic character in its F minor opening,
is another work from the Essercizi that seems especially obsessed with patterns both
sequential and repetitive. Here the effect is disembodied and nude, fullling the terms
of Pestellis simile that many of the Essercizi are like toccatas dried out and placed
under glass.
43
The lack of much activity in the bass, as discussed in the previous
chapter, promotes this sensation. Together with the dryness of syntax and texture,
this produces animation without real momentum. Such a quality can be asserted
more condently of K. 19 than many of the other Essercizi, since it does not quite
form a self-sufcient world. It knows another way. The foil is provided by the lyrical
breakthrough of bars 6671 (see Ex. 7.10). This is initiated by clearly the lowest bass
note of the sonata so far, which has some symbolic value as such. The melodic line
is free-ranging, there is a marked dissonance between c
1
and d
2
at 678, and the
43
Pestelli, Toccata, 289.
Formal dynamic 363
repeated three-part chords in the middle of the passage yield the thickest texture of
the sonata. The sense of sudden freedom here is highly poetic. Compare this with
the nude repeated units that begin the second half (bars 4047), also lyrical in style
but clearly much less expansive. However, this intensity is glimpsed but briey; it is
already ebbing away by bar 70.
A related phenomenon, somewhat outside our current terms of reference, is the
sort of lyrical broadening that is quite often found in more boisterous works. This
has in common with the breakthrough dynamic the feeling of melodic frankness,
but without the same sense of prior containment. In K. 187, from bar 103, there is
a clearing into full-throated folky openness; it acts like a point of focus for all the
surrounding animation, rather than a point of difference. The same applies to bars
469 of K. 278, where there is no marked change of tone, but a denite increase of
singing intensity.
In K. 380 in E major the breakthrough dynamic again occurs on a larger scale, in a
context that cannot straightforwardly be described either as lyrical or inexpressive.
However, there cannot be too much doubt about the topical references to fanfares,
and to the trumpets and drums that perform them. These could be imagined playing
in quite a formal environment, but it has been just as common to hear a processional
of humbler cast.
44
In a suggestion of more upmarket pedigree, the sonata was also
used in the BBC documentary of 1985 to accompany images representing the jour-
ney to Seville after the royal marriage of Mara B arbara in 1729.
45
K. 380 must in
fact be the most played and recorded of all the sonatas. Its popularity (leading to the
old nickname Cort` ege, which reinforces the more formal imagery) has certainly
helped to cement the pictorialist reception of Scarlatti the panorama tradition de-
scribed earlier. The work might indeed seem to partake of a sort of pictorialism ` a la
Rameau, but Scarlatti changes our perspective and our relationship to the material
over the course of the piece. The point of view alters in the second half, as if the
observer becomes a participant, as collective activity is overtaken by a lone voice.
After the plain enunciation of topic in the rst eight bars, the scales heard at bars
911 are of uncertain import. Do they represent some sort of ceremonial ourish?
Perhaps they represent nothing concrete in a pictorial sense, but as gestures they bear
a striking resemblance to the falling scales found in K. 490, both at the beginning
and then intermittently throughout (see Plate 1). As it is quite well established that
K. 490 refers to the saeta, a processional form, it may be that this material does have
some ceremonial pretext. The following section, from bars 12 to 17, reharmonizes
a repeated head-motive, a typical Scarlattian technique that often forms part of an
early stampede. Thus it is clearly composed rather than just referential, as the scales
might appear to be, yet if one compares again with K. 490, one nds something
44
See for example Lionel Salter, notes to recording by Wanda Landowska (EMI: 7 64934 2, 1949 [notes 1993]),
7, and Mellers, Orpheus, 86.
45
Thompson, Scarlatti. Ann Bond writes too that K. 380 brilliantly evokes the sound of tympani and trumpets of
an eighteenth-century court; Bond, Harpsichord, 181. Rafael Puyana, who plays K. 380 for the BBC programme,
suggests elsewhere that it has the rhythm of a Majorcan bolero! Puyana, Inuencias, 54.
Ex. 7.11 K. 380 bars 1958
remarkably similar in bars 13ff.! We nd the same rising bass line, repeated chords,
harmonic function and indeed melodic contour. These strong similarities constitute
one of the most intriguing examples of the ambiguity between dialect and idiolect.
In the context of K. 380 alone, the new features found from bar 12, syncopation,
suspension and more progressive harmonic movement, feed into the second half.
At bar 22 (see Ex. 7.11) we hear the rst strongly shaped melodic impulse of the
sonata, cleverly beginning with a compression of bar 20. This burst of lyricism not
Formal dynamic 365
Ex. 7.11 (cont.)
quite a breakthrough is surely not entirely compatible with a processional topic.
This is emphasized by the (retrospective) sense of a four-bar unit from bars 22 to
25, yielding a 3 + 4 phrase structure from bar 19. Then at 26 we hear a stray bar, in
the same melodic guration as bar 22; this would seem to represent a continuation
of the lyrical impulse (note its G sharp minor sonority). However, it is cut off by
the return of the fanfare at bar 27. The discomforting syntax of the whole eight-bar
unit undermines the clean-cut nature of the governing topic. We should note also
the rhythmic freedom found at the apex of the lyrical phrase, which can be read in
the same way. The repetition of this whole unit from bar 27 (minus the last stray
bar) is part of the ritual tread of the work so far.
Bars 345 then provide a thematic and harmonic answer to 19ff., with I answering
V. However, bars 367 do not represent a return to lyricism, for all that they resume
the continuous semiquavers and rework the contours of bars 235. The contours
are mechanized, as it were; they lose their spontaneity and exibility, and are made
agents of propulsion. Compare the manner in which bars 234 pay no heed to strong
beats, and especially the disruptive effect of the yearning leading note at bars 23
23
and 31
23
. The repeated b
2
from bar 36, heard nine times within each two-bar unit,
insistently tries to expunge this lingering a
2
. Only once this is done do we move to
the equivalent b
2
g
2
f
2
compare 37
1
with 23
3
24
2
. On another level we should
observe there are no As at all in the whole closing section from bar 34, in fact no
notes foreign to E major! So K. 380 offers more than a xed musical image; there is
an argument, but it is so far contained and implicit, as decorum more or less prevails.
The second half begins with a favoured device, hovering movements above a
dominant pedal (often, as here, V of I). It forms part of a suddenly more informal,
personal presentation of the basic material of bars 19ff. There is a hesitancy about the
syncopations, and the martial rhythms lose their rigour with the new exibility of
pitch contour. Note the differences in the respective melodic leaps in bars 41 to 43
sixth, third, tritone and also the variety of voicing of the left-hand chords. This is a
tentative lyrical blossoming. It leads to a literal recollection of bars 19ff., but now in
the minor; this completely alters its character in a manner that is quite Schubertian,
the new left-hand octave doubling accentuating the changed colouring. The setting
of the fanfare in a minor key undermines it; it is dissonant with the connotations and
conventions of the topic. The more personal inection of this passage is emphasized
by the ornament of bar 47
3
, matching that at 45
3
. These give a stronger, more
continuous melodic sense to the right-hand line altogether; in particular, the rst
two beats of bar 47 remain the Hauptstimme, rather than attention passing to the
echo-imitation in the left hand.
Thereafter the music takes wing; the processional retreats to the stylistic back-
ground (the left hands crotchet pulse) as the lone voice is heard. The motto rhythm
is quite transformed by being treated not as repeated notes but in uent melodic
steps. Equally, the stepwise movements in the bass create a sense of greater harmonic
freedom, especially when the harmonic rhythm quickens to crotchets from bar 52.
The reachings-over heard in bars 52
3
and 54
3
help the top line to push further and
further upwards; they express the need for the voice to soar, as against its functional
reiterations in the procession. This is a grand development of the ascending impulses
found in bars 223 and 312. There is a hugely expanded syntactical sense too,
bars 4157
1
making up one big phrase. Bars 468 are now merely an episode, thus
reversing the priorities of the rst half.
In his commentary on K. 380 Guido Pannain notes the sudden seriousness and
lyrical effusion and singing intensity interrupting the caustic humour of the earlier
musical imagery. He must be referring to this part of the second half, and thus is
the only writer to note the contradictions inherent in the material here.
46
There
46
Larte pianistica di Domenico Scarlatti, Studi musicali 1/1 (1972), 144. Howard Ferguson, who describes
K. 380 as a slightly fantastic processional dance, also notes a uctuation of tone around this point: The
Formal dynamic 367
is also only one performer who really substantiates this reading, Mikhail Pletnev.
Performing bars 50ff. as a melodic intensication is almost inevitable, but Pletnev
also treats 225 as a marked lyrical contrast. Other performers force these melodic
lines into the realm of the processional, so that they are not differentiated from the
surrounding tattoos.
47
The pre-cadential bar 56 recalls bars 25 and 33, so conrming the relevance of
the foregoing section to the lyrical topic introduced and then countered in the rst
half. The nal melodic note of the bar, signicantly, is an a
2
that is now fullled,
leading directly to b
2
before the reassertion of the processional. Several subsequent
changes in this transposed section are worthy of note. Bar 64 forgoes the VI we
would have expected by analogy with bar 26 and gives us a plain I. The previous G
sharp minor sonority at bar 26 linked up with the new fanfare colour of bars 468;
after the lyric catharsis there is now no need for this complication. At bars 72
1
and
73
1
the right hand replaces its repeated notes with an arpeggiated fall, recalling the
phasing-out of repeated notes in the middle section. Can such weight be placed
on such changes of detail? Even if one demurs at such suggestions, it can hardly be
denied that the second part of the second half of K. 380 does not carry the authority
of the rst halfs second part, which continues a mode of thought rmly established
at the beginning. By denition it must weigh differently after the events that precede
it. By means of the relatively sustained lyrical breakthrough, the martial is now one
element of a wider world rather than the pictorial focus of the sonata. Thus it seems
that the composer, in another demonstration of tone, shows both the attractions
and the limitations of illustrative music.
PAI S
Ralph Kirkpatricks pair theory, according to which sonatas in the same key that are
adjacent in the principal sources form indissoluble larger artistic wholes, and were
conceived as such, has been referred to eetingly on a number of occasions in this
study. Placing a discussion of it at this point reects my feeling, one shared by perhaps
the majority of Scarlattians, that this is now a dead issue, both from a documentary
and aesthetic point of view: these pairs must be rejected. There is no question about
the practice of pairing as such in most of the older sources, but the notion that any of
the pairs thus found have an intrinsic musical status is hardly tenable. Leaving aside
the more detailed considerations to which we will shortly refer, the very fact that
restrained, courtly mood momentarily becomes less impersonal with the entry of the new high voice [at 52
3
],
and again in b. 54; but decorum is quickly restored with the return of the trumpet rhythm on b. 57. However,
I believe that the process is both more dramatically conceived and starts much sooner than Ferguson allows.
Ferguson (ed.), Style and Interpretation: An Anthology of [Sixteenth- to Nineteenth-]Century Keyboard Music, vol. 2:
Early Keyboard Music (II): Germany and Italy (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 54.
47
Virgin: 5 45123 2, 1995. That a certain exquisite dryness is something of a tradition in the rendering of
K. 380 in particular may be gathered from John Caldwells comment on Maggie Coles recorded performance
that she evokes a real military march . . . rather than the usual fairy footsteps. Review of recording by Maggie
Cole (Amon Ra: SAR 27), Early Music 15/3 (1987), 427.
each work carries the separate title Sonata (of which this study has made much)
in the primary sources alone is a grave blow against the theory. Nevertheless, it has
continued to receive support from some writers,
48
it is still commonly asserted in the
popular literature (including recording notes), and performers on the whole observe
the standard pairs as found in V and reected in the Kirkpatrick numbering.
When Richard L. Crocker wrote in 1966 that a sonata was too short to stand
by itself; Domenicos solution was to put sonatas in pairs,
49
we nd a rare explicit
statement of what really drives the pair theory. As mentioned in Chapter 5, it helps
to overcome this disconcerting aspect of the sonata production; the arrangements
by B ulow and Longo of the works into suites are simply an exaggerated version
of this desire to give the sonatas safety in numbers. Nor should we think this a
trivial consideration. Short, free-standing works are not only difcult to write about,
reecting an ingrained cultural and musicological preference for larger or longer
forms,
50
they are difcult to programme. A simple analogy may be made with the
German song repertory of the nineteenth century. Song cycles receive innitely more
performance and criticism than individual songs by the same composers, a disparity
that is most obvious in the case of Schubert. After all, even if performers reject the
standard pairs, it is almost inevitable that they will feel the need to nd some criteria
for the arrangment of sonatas in a recital; not to search for some larger-scale shaping
would be tantamount to viewing the sonatas as a series of Webernesque moments.
However, there were more musical arguments for the status of the V pairs.
Kirkpatrick wrote that the real meaning of many a Scarlatti sonata becomes much
clearer once it is reassociated with its mate; the complementary pairs share an
overall unity of style or of instrumental character or [of] harmonic color, while in
the contrasting pairs there is generally a basic difference in tempo, often with the
second of the two movements functioning as a sort of nale or Nachtanz. There
were also what Hammond calls common motivic or harmonic procedures that
may unite the sonatas of a pair.
51
But what are they? Not a single detailed com-
mentary exists in support of any particular pair. Instead we nd gestures towards
opening thematic connections or an outlining of the sort of broad relationships
dened by Kirkpatrick.
52
In a sense such vagueness of connection is very much to
the point. After all, when assessing the relationships between individual movements
48
See Hammond, Scarlatti, 17980; Pagano, Vite, 419; Schott, review of Fadini edition, The Musical Times
136/1834 (1995), 671; van der Meer, Keyboard.
49
Crocker, Style, 349.
50
Bruno Nettl notes that (Western) music historians are very much concerned with the excellence of the music
they study and that complexity . . . and magnitude are fundamental criteria for the establishment of greatness.
See The Institutionalization of Musicology: Perspectives of a North American Ethnomusicologist, in Rethinking
Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3067.
51
Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 143; Hammond, Scarlatti, 180.
52
For instance, Malcolm Boyd notes one of the few instances in which it is possible to recognize a deliberate
thematic connection between K. 516 and K. 517, a similar outlining of a D minor tonic at the start of each
which seems quite unremarkable; notes to recording by Trevor Pinnock (Archiv: 419 632 2, 1987), 5. Hammond
writes: K. 297, in 3/8, contrasts the wide-ranging modulation of K. 296 with an insistence upon the tonic and
dominant areas (emphasized by the employment of the closed form), but echoes the rst-half minor cadence of
its partner by cadencing both halves in the minor. If K. 297 responds to the harmonic adventure of K. 296 by
Formal dynamic 369
of a multi-movement work, overt thematic or indeed harmonic links cannot be
the rst concern. Before showing how movements may belong together in such
a sense, it must rst be shown how they are different. This provides a rhetorical
coherence through well-entrenched patterns of contrast rather than structural co-
herence through similarity. Multi-movement works live in a rhetorical sense by
various checks and balances, through complementarity of metrical, affective and
tempo characters. It is only once such rhetorical interdependence is established that
we can look for more precise similarities, for consistencies of larger or smaller shape.
Framed in these terms, the Scarlatti pairs might be thought to acquire renewed
plausibility, yet many writers have rejected them at this level as well as in terms
of material connection. Lionel Salter writes that every experienced harpsichordist
knows that many of these pairings are far from effective in performance, David
D. Boyden that the individual sonatas of many of the pairs do not have enough com-
mon musical features to bind them to each other in a decisive way. Joel Sheveloff,
taking a narrower view of historical context than that outlined above, notes that
in the Italian two-movement sonata model favoured by composers like Alberti and
Rutini there seems to be no clear pattern of movement types or of thematic links.
Thus, if Scarlatti was inuenced by such a model, there is no touchstone against
which to measure the credibility of the pairs, some of which. . . seem to belong
together for clear musical reasons.
53
It is telling that Sheveloff, essentially a sceptic
on the question, goes into no detail on these particular pairs.
54
Before pursuing such clear musical reasons we ought to review some of the doc-
umentary and comparative weaknesses of the theory. Even within the two primary
sources, V and P, one nds different pairings of works or the same pairs differently
ordered. It is when one reviews the secondary sources, though, that the message
really hits home. These often corroborate the pair-wise arrangement as a rationale
for ordering but provide damning evidence about the status of particular pairs in
the primary sources. For instance, the Turin manuscript pairs K. 76 and 71 in that
order when neither is in fact paired at all in V 1742 and when their succession of
3/8 and 4/4 time signatures inverts Kirkpatricks contrasting plan;
55
the Madrid
manuscript MS 3/1408 features four pairs of works widely separated in V and P;
56
the Cambridge manuscript MU MS 147, like others, mixes reproduction of some
established pairs with new ones such as the conjunction of K. 438 and K. 446, both
in F major (the latter begins on the system immediately following K. 438 and then
has Fine written at its end). On the other hand, Vienna II contains few pairings
at all, nor does the Lisbon manuscript. This source almost seems to take pains, as
an emphasis on I and V, this is a harmonic connection (or correction) that could be made by substituting any
number of other F major works by the composer. Hammond, Scarlatti, 185.
53
Salter, In Search of Scarlatti, The Consort 41 (1985), 48; Boyden, Kirkpatrick Review, 262; Sheveloff, Grove,
347.
54
This is also the case in a context in which he clearly had the room to do so, and provided a longer list of possible
integral pairs: Sheveloff, Frustrations I, 43036. However, these pages provide the most detailed and convincing
arguments to be found against the full-blown Kirkpatrick theory.
55
See Pestelli, Fonte, 118.
56
See Boyd, Sonatas, 64.
it were, to split up the pairs found in the primary sources. Sonatas 469 in Lisbon,
for example, are equivalent to K. 410 (B at major), 397 (D major), 396 (D minor)
and 411 (B at major). If K. 397396 are still meant to constitute a pair, this now
gives us a D major Minuet followed by a D minor piece, quite the opposite of the
contrasting rationale for pairing in which the lighter work, probably in triple time,
comes second. If one wanted to ascribe all these departures from the standard pairs
to scribal ignorance or lassitude, or imagine that they reect earlier or unknown
or (as yet) unordered primary copies, this would still not explain the discrepancies
found between P and V.
On the other hand, Lisbon also offers what would seem to be one of the strongest
documentary conrmations of the pairing principle (outside several indications
found in the primary sources
57
). No. 33 of the manuscript contains K. 474 in E
at major followed on the next page by K. 475 under a single Sonata heading. But
one wonders whether this is due to the fact that otherwise the collection would have
contained sixty-one sonatas; sixty clearly ts with the prevailing model of presenta-
tion in that it is two lots of thirty (a magical number found not just in the Essercizi
and the P and V volumes, but also in Alberos Venice sonatas, and one followed by
Kirkpatrick in his edition of Sixty Sonatas, divided into two volumes). Note too that
K. 474 has the old-style key signature of two ats but K. 475 has three, a signicant
discrepancy. More important than this, one should note the markedly cramped script
of these copies compared with all the surrounding sonatas, which might reect a
separate stage of realignment in the production of the copy.
On a more detailed level, paired works sometimes feature registral disparities
which would seem unaccountable if the two sonatas had been written at the same
time and conceived as a whole. Christophe Rousset comments on one such case:
One could imagine Scarlatti searching through the oddments in his drawers to
form pairs belatedly, as with K. 536537, where in the latter he avoids the f
3
in
the second half which ought to be transposed from the c
3
of bar 63. Why avoid
this note if it was playable two pages earlier [in K. 536]?
58
The comparative weaknesses of the pair theory involve a glance at the practices of
other composers within Scarlattis orbit. Seixas, for instance, wrote no fewer than fty
multi-movement works, sometimes with segue indications between movements.
59
We have already noted too the fact of Alberos explicit three-movement struc-
tures entitled Recercata, Fuga y Sonata. Not only that, but such multi-movement
structures often show clear thematic interconnections. Sometimes these may in-
volve some strong chimings between movements that recall a common practice
in the Baroque suite. In Giustinis Sonata No. 11 in E major, for example, the
Dolce, Allemande and Gavotte all proceed from the same point. Marcellos Sonata
No. 2 in G major features very strong links between the movements; in particular,
57
These are discussed in Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 142.
58
Rousset, Statistique, 77. Boyd also gives some examples of such anomalies, while suggesting that other pairs
do in fact reect the same keyboard compass, in Boyd, Master, 1634.
59
See Allison, Seixas, 16.
Formal dynamic 371
the rst, third and fourth all feature dominant pedal points with parallel thirds or
sixths above. In Seixass Sonata No. 59 in A major (1980) compare the linking bars
found at the end of the rst halves in both outer movements; further, the Minuets
that follow the main movements in Sonatas No. 14 in F sharp minor and 16 in G
minor show clear thematictextural connections (involving respectively the use of
hocket-like material in parallel intervals between the hands and the use of linking
passages in thirds and sixths). We must also note the fact that in different sources the
same Seixas binary-form movement may be paired with different following Minuets,
suggesting again that it was copyists, not composers, who created the larger works.
60
While this may compromise the integral nature of some of Seixass two-movement
forms, it obviously strengthens the sense of a broader practice in which specic pairs
were dispensable.
It is in the early Scarlatti multi-movement structures that are comparable to
those of Seixas that we may in fact nd similar thematic connections. In K. 83, in
the second half of the main movement, the repeated cadence gure from the rst
half is interrupted and deected to allow for a much longer dominant pedal, which
helps to ground the harmonic action of the movement. From bar 73 there is a very
pronounced sense of winding down, almost like a fade-out (see Ex. 7.12a). The
main motive of the sonata, used in the right hand alone from 73, is now no longer
static but falls by step through one strand of its compound-melodic structure its
insistence is dissolved, as is its exotic character. This memorable passage is clearly
echoed in the following Minuet that appears under the same title, at bars 100103
and 11721 (see Ex. 7.12b). This suggests that Scarlatti was quite capable of explicit
and vital connections between the parts of a multi-movement work when he wanted
to be and when he conceived them as such.
Another counterexample to the general absence of such connections may be
found in the Sonata in C minor, K. 73. The opening Allegro, suggesting some sort
of dance genre, features a star turn in the form of a hemiola gure at bars 1316.
Its metrical dissonance is played with in all sorts of ways in the second half before
being denitively corrected at bars 456. The following major-mode Minuetto can
then be understood as a witty conrmation of the triumph of metrical regularity. Its
charming nursery-rhyme tone and syntax form a pointed part of a larger argument.
More than that, it reiterates again and again a rhythmic cell that surely derives
from the star turn of the Allegro. Nevertheless, it has its own subtle ambiguities of
grouping, in the conicting downbeats between the hands from bar 50. The right-
hand sequence moves in two-bar units from 50, the left-hand sequence in two-bar
units from 51.
Likewise, the subsequent minor-mode Minuetto, the third part of K. 73, does
nothing but reiterate its own, much plainer form of the Allegros governing cell!
60
Perhaps implausibly, Macario Santiago Kastner suggests that this happened when the two movements are not
connected by a clear common motive or theme, which assumes rather a lot of the copyist. Kastner, Seixas 1980,
xv.
Ex. 7.12a K. 83 bars 7079
Ex. 7.12b K. 83 bars 11724
This sounds like a parody. Note especially the similarity of bars 84
2
85 and 93
2
95
to the nal cadential bars of the Allegro, from 44
3
; the latter feels like a conation
of elements of bars 44
3
47. Is this reading too much into a seemingly hybrid work
that has been classied by Sheveloff as a melo-bass sonata
61
(note the gures given
in the nal part)? Perhaps only if one is beholden to notions of immaturity and
progress and generic purity. Besides, none of the other multi-movement sonatas
(in three or more movements) has proportions like K. 73 nor the same arguable
sense of forming a larger whole. Note that neither of the minuets could stand up by
themselves, especially given their lack of internal gestural differentiation and their
generically unusual monorhythmic construction.
62
From the viewpoint of such works as these, would so self-conscious a composer as
Scarlatti not have calibrated his pairs more precisely if they were really conceived as
such? Even on the rhetorical level, there is rarely any sense of necessary connection.
A few possible cases where this might seem desirable have been considered, such
as K. 99 and K. 490, in which there is a strong sense of unresolved tension at the
end of the sonata. But even this depends on our sense of an ending in Scarlatti.
61
Sheveloff, Frustrations I, 413. This attribution is conrmed in van der Meer, Keyboard, 136. Rodolfo Bonucci,
on the other hand, regards K. 73 as a very unlikely violin sonata; Bonucci, Violino, 257.
62
Alain de Chambure, who calls the sonata a suite of three pieces, suggests some thematic interrelationship
between the three, but in different terms from here, noting the powerful accent on the strong beat of each bar.
Chambure, Catalogue, 45.
Formal dynamic 373
So many sonatas appear to trace an entirely self-sufcient progression of ideas that
they demand no continuation. For example, in the light of our earlier discussion
of K. 206 (Ex. 7.7), what could K. 207, the work with which it is paired in
P and V, possibly add? It is quicker and in 3/8 and so would appear to provide an
ideal Nachtanz; its harmonic simplicity (A is the only accidental of this E major
piece) might even be thought to offer the perfect antidote to the complications of
the previous work. Yet, at least to my modern sensibility, to add on K. 207 in a
performance would simply trivialize K. 206, which is patently a world unto itself.
One of the stronger arguments in favour of pairing as a principle has been rather
underplayed by its proponents. This is the presence of unique pairs of works in
certain keys, specically C sharp minor (K. 246 and 247) and F sharp major (K. 318
and 319). There are also only two sonatas in A at major (K. 127 and K. 130) and
B at minor (K. 128 and K. 131); these are paired in P (II 2122 and 2930) but
not in V 1749, from which Kirkpatrick took his numbering (they form Sonatas
30, 33, 31 and 34 respectively of this volume). The V ordering in fact juxtaposes
K. 127 with K. 128 in B at minor. These two works have a good deal in common
thematically, far more, in fact, than almost any of the same-key pairs proposed
from the order of the primary sources. The designs of the two sonatas are also very
similar the repeated triplet gure that contrasts with the opening and recurs within
the rst half at bars 9ff. of K. 128 has an obvious parallel in K. 127. Do these two
works therefore form a pair? The juxtaposed arrangement of the sonatas in V in
fact offers an inspired refutation of the theory the fundamental difference in key
must override any other possible connections. To restrict our argument to the pairs
on which P and V agree, though, it is difcult to believe the existence of precisely
two sonatas in C sharp minor and F sharp major is entirely a coincidence. If it is not,
then they are either pairs after the Kirkpatrick theory or at least in a looser sense
that the composer, conscious of the prospective or already existing arrangements
for copying in same-key pairs where possible, wrote two works that could keep
each other company without their necessarily having to constitute a larger unit.
Another possible large-scale conclusion from such evidence is that there was simply
no systematic approach on the part of the composer (as far as we can judge this from
the primary sources), that, while some works may have been conceived as intrinsic
pairs, many others, and surely most, were not. If so, this would be quite characteristic
of Scarlattis approach to formal structures of all kinds.
If we consider the two works in C sharp minor, K. 246 and K. 247, there is no
doubt whatever of their strong compatibility. There is a similar mood and plot to
both, as each starts from Baroque premises then moves to repetitive types of writing,
of more popular character, that are rather outside the original terms of reference.
Both manage this by a process of stylistic modulation, without marked ruptures.
However, in K. 247 there is a strange shock near the end, in the form of parallel
fths in the left hand (see Ex. 5.2). K. 246 has nothing to rival this, but it does
build toward a more overt kind of climax, noted earlier in this chapter, through
an increasingly abandoned treatment of the popular material. The fact that the two
works share so much makes them an interesting pair but still does not mean that
they must belong together in performance or be thought of as constituting one larger
structure. Indeed, they are surely too similar to be thought of as a two-movement
sonata in any customary sense of the term. In this sense they fail the rhetorical
test; they lack any fundamental complementarity, with the result that it is difcult to
envisage a binding sequence for their performance. K. 246 could just as easily follow
K. 247 as precede it. A better analogy for their relationship would be to regard them
as two poems on the same subject.
63
It is difcult to feel the same strength of relationship between the F sharp major
sonatas, K. 318 and K. 319. However, they do feature clearer thematic resemblances,
such as those between the respective closing themes of each work, so close that they
sound like variants on one another. Admittedly part of the resemblance, the bass-line
pre-cadential motion, is a common one and so related to that found in many other
sonatas as well, but the likeness of the supporting right-hand contours encourages the
feeling of a gestalt shared by the two works. Eytan Agmon suggests a strong thread
of harmonic argument running from one work to another in the manipulation of
the notes C
, D and D, especially as found after the respective double bars. For

him, this lends support to Kirkpatricks hypothesis,
64
but there are other explanations.
Such a shared feature may indicate no more than the common pattern of a composer
favouring certain harmonic twists and characteristics in certain keys, such as Haydns
consistent use of C or G major interruptions in E major works, as well of course
as certain types of material and affect. We have noted earlier in this chapter, for
instance, the existence of three F major sonatas that all begin with a syntactically
improper unit (K. 106, 275 and 524).
That the reuse of certain keys may bring back old expressive associations, both from
a composers own previous works and those of other contemporary and earlier com-
posers, is a pattern that may be invoked when considering the relationships between
other same-key sonatas. We have already commented on the relationship between
two C major sonatas, K. 270 and K. 271 (Ex. 5.21), near the end of Chapter 5.
K. 495 and 496 in E major also clearly share some material, most notably a dashing
triplet arpeggio. On a slightly different note, at one point in the sources there is a
cluster of F minormajor sonatas that have a good deal in common, four F minor
works in six consecutive numbers in V XI and P XIII. These are K. 462, 463,
466 and 467, two clear pairs, followed by two F major works, K. 468 and 469.
If thematic resemblances are important for a sense of belonging, then one would
want to rearrange some of these pairs. One of the most striking gestures in K. 466,
rst found in bar 15, returns in bar 30 of K. 469. On the other hand, compare
K. 462/21ff. with K. 467/35ff., or we might note the persistence of left-hand
arpeggio gures in K. 463 and 466. These may simply imply once more that the
63
Other works that seem to relate to each other in a similar way are K. 322 and 323 in A major and K. 497 and
498 in B minor.
64
Agmon, Division, 68.
Formal dynamic 375
same keys (or key notes) prompt similar shapes and gestures, or they may in fact sug-
gest proximity of composition. In either case, they do not do a lot for the intrinsic
claims of the pairing theory.
Only in one case of two adjacent, separately titled sonatas, can there be said to be
the strongest of internal evidence for pairing: K. 347 in G minor and K. 348 in G
major. Perhaps uniquely, K. 347 makes little sense as a free-standing sonata. It contains
no elements of growth or argument, even though its harmonic course is standard
enough; it feels more like a series of separate gestures. These die away into silent
pauses, which, unusually for Scarlatti, do not provide denition or lead to a suprise;
rather, they suggest at long last! improvisation. Even the opening attention-
getting chords are a highly anomalous gesture in the context of Scarlattis customary
opening gambits. Pestelli gets it exactly right when he says K. 347 can only be meant
as a free preludizing, and continues a certain indolence is shaken every now and
then by generic chromatic passages.
65
K. 348 certainly rights this by the greatest
possible exuberance, although it too is very straightforward formally. Signicantly,
the primary sources provide the most explicit of their fewverbal indications about the
necessity of performing the sonatas in pairs, with the direction to move immediately
onto K. 348 after playing the earlier sonata, in fact to begin the rst bar of K. 348 at
the point when we would expect to hear the nal bar of K. 347s repeated second
half. Here is something that is highly characteristic: observing this instruction will
produce an elision between two structural blocks, and more specically the largest-
scale instance of a great curve in the entire sonata production.
65
FI NALE
There can be no grand synthesis at the end of this study. Not only would this be an
unlikely outcome given our current antipathy to and suspicion of nal solutions,
but it is unimaginable in the particular circumstances; it would seem to be impos-
sible ultimately to control and comprehend all that the sonatas have to offer. They
resist closure in every possible sense. This does not just entail all the difculties of
historical understanding that we have reected upon throughout, but it is inherent
in the very nature of the sonata production. In the rst instance this arises from
sheer weight of numbers. Such high productivity suggests to us a cultural sensibil-
ity remote from our own; this is a common difculty of comprehension when we
deal with the large musical repertories of the eighteenth century. Given also the
evident linguistic variety of the sonatas, we see how easy it is for any appreciation
of them to turn into an uncritical lauding of diversity the panorama tradition. Yet
in certain external features that have perhaps been overproblematized duration,
genre (or at least title), tempo and form the output is not notably diverse. Indeed,
it is just the combination of quantity with the lack of external differentiation that
has led to such images of the sonatas as a forest or labyrinth.
1
From this logisti-
cal point of view alone, it is not surprising that comparatively few have ventured
inside.
In another respect, the resistance to closure is embodied in the shapes and habits
of the individual trees in the forest. Scarlatti frequently compromises the sense of
closure fundamental to an artistic statement of his century through such means as
syntactical manipulation and the opposition of topical worlds. However, this needs
to be understood more widely as a resistance to framing and categorical statement
altogether. In its extreme relativism, both of internal mechanics and external con-
ception, it is as if the music will not stand still to be examined. It is forever dancing
playfully out of reach. This may be understood primarily in a negative, disdainful
light, but, however strong these impressions can be, such elusiveness must also be
understood in a positive revolutionary sense, as a sort of liberation. We are invited
to follow the composer in letting go and to enjoy the moment, since there is no
knowing if it will return. This side of the aesthetic equation is allied with the phys-
ical directness and suggestibility of the music, so overwhelming that it has impeded
1
Chambure, Catalogue, 18; Keller, Meister, 8.
376
Finale 377
general recognition of the relativistic aspects. Thus the composer is often portrayed
as a sort of life force, a fount of unmediated vitality, yet, as has been stressed con-
sistently, his relation to his art is exceptionally reexive and self-conscious. He is an
unspontaneous improviser.
This reexivity is keyed around a fundamental question: what does it mean to
compose? Why, for instance, should beginnings be statements rather than simply
beginnings, and why should composition stop around cadence points? Why should
keyboard textures assume the same forms as those found in other musical genres
and why should certain affective or topical signs proceed unchallenged through a
particular piece? Why should the individual parts of a texture behave in certain
predetermined ways and why should slower music be more directly expressive than
fast? As we have seen, it is not as if such working habits and assumptions are simply
overturned, but at the least they are critically inspected. One has the feeling with
Scarlatti that everything is composed to an almost unique degree, at least before
the pluralism of the twentieth century.
At the same time such relativism is the rst considered expression of a modern
type of art music that we now, rather unfortunately, call the Classical. In engaging
so pointedly with the implications and expectations produced by certain types of
thematic material, texture and syntax, Scarlatti may undermine such norms, but,
by relying on a listeners knowledge for such effects to register, he also upholds
their force. Indeed, a casual listener may only hear the formulas themselves and miss
the richness and subtlety of their manipulation. The music of the later eighteenth
century altogether is often thought to be too obliging or accommodating for just
this reason (hence the particular urgency of many recent efforts to rough up its
image). However, such a sense cannot be altogether denied; rather, it needs to be
recongured. The listener-friendliness of such material forms part of a wider brief
in which the very act of imagining the presence of a listener, even building it into
the shape of a piece, is a novelty. This arises not just through the more or less overt
manipulation of formula but through the elements of variety and surprise. All these
encourage a sense of participation above all through the comic mode of utterance
they promote in which the music is left open for the listener. With an older
mentality the more uniform constructive methods, self-evidence of the material and
push and pull around a xed centre create the sense of a unitary object. Musical
time passes as an absolute succession.
Of course there are many Scarlatti sonatas that may be termed monothematic and
so might appear to share such features, but, as we have seen, they tend to ironize this
impermeability. Likewise, there are clear differences between Scarlattis Classicism
and that of its ofcial representatives. Thus while Haydn and Mozart justify formulas
and satisfy expectations in their very different ways, Scarlattis approach is often
less organic; he may avoid certain gestures or overdo them in the most irrational
manner. Nevertheless, his procedures are born from an outlook that is comparable
in important ways. This is even true of all those features that encourage a sense of
the contingency of musical time, of its elastic and constructed nature.
Such tendencies towards subtraction or apparently gratuitous addition can, because
of their extreme and potentially incomprehensible nature, be thought of as listener-
unfriendly. On the other hand, as we have noted, the abundant popular material
in the sonatas seems calculated to evoke or entice a wide potential audience. Such
contradictions or tensions accompany almost any contemplation of the composers
wider image and have been variously reected in the critical reception history.
There is collective uncertainty about the sort of cultural work the sonatas are held
to do. Allied to this contradiction between open and elusive elements is a gap
between the image of a music that is elegant, aristocratic, neat and one that is
popular, extreme and bizarre. Is Scarlatti a clean or a dirty artist? Is the music
Apollonian or Dionysiac? What has generally been lacking in the literature is a
real confrontation of such apparent opposites, since most writers have dwelt on one
or two determining attributes. While such variety of response richly exemplies
how interpretative strategies and priorities can vary according to time and place, the
low level of intersubjective agreement should have given more pause for thought.
The contradictions seem more pronounced and more fundamental in the case of
Scarlatti.
This is in the rst instance a function of the sort of relativism outlined above,
whereby the sonatas strike such an elusive balance between the various roles that
we might assign to them. An encompassing ambiguity, for instance, and one not
really identied in the literature, is that between music as individual and as collective
expression. On the other hand, such contradictions are also a function of the lack
of documentary accoutrements, to which we must return once more. The chronic
lack of documentary evidence produces a kind of blank slate upon which the play
of cultural politics may be written in a particularly clear form. Such material pro-
vides a foothold for the scholar and thus makes the composer readily available for
institutional support. After all, it only takes one circumstance or event to colour
the interpretation of a whole output. Indeed, in the current case we have seen how
the composers sole surviving personal letter to the Duke of Huescar has sometimes
been magnied into a controlling statement for his entire sonata output, most un-
convincingly in my view. With such rare exceptions, there are few monuments or
mountains in the Scarlatti landscape everything is at or dark. And recent musi-
cological methodologies need such material as much as positivist approaches do or
did, although they might claim to contextualize it in very different ways.
It is for such reasons that Scarlatti, as claimed in Chapter 1, makes an exemplary
test case for musicology. The circumstances of his sonata output, and the relatively
cursory treatment that has ensued, lead to this question: when we write about music,
what do we want, and what do we need, to know? The critical difculty when deal-
ing with most well-established composers is how to revise or reproblematize what is
too well entrenched, or even simply to revivify their music (and this is one explana-
tion for the thrust of newer musicology, dealing as it still does so preponderantly with
the canon). While Scarlatti is hardly free of such an interpretative framework the
dominant image is one of mercurial vivacity the lack of biographical, chronological
Finale 379
and source information reduces its explanatory power. The case of Scarlatti reminds
us how contingent such understandings are when the supporting operations and ma-
terial are removed, when we are left only with the raw music. To return to an earlier
example, how much of the literature on the Beethoven symphonies would collapse
or, more accurately, would never have come into being without a knowledge of
their order of writing and the circumstances surrounding their composition? Con-
versely, many of the ambiguities surrounding the keyboard sonatas of Scarlatti might
be theoretically removed or solved if we were to acquire some of this vital infor-
mation. If this suggests that the rmer image that would result would be articially
sustained by extrinsic material, that is exactly the point. The music itself cannot
exist without such outside help, which we must understand in terms of ideological
framing as well as practical circumstances (the denition of these being itself, of
course, ideologically determined). As suggested just above, though, while we may
have problematized the sources of knowledge, there is still a reliance on such basic
data as chronology, biographical details, composers utterances and those that derive
from source studies. These still determine working procedures and inform the most
sophisticated arguments.
The other side of this situation is that both older and more recent musicologies
simply nd different rationales for avoiding the troubling lack of particularity of
music (most obviously but not exclusively wordless music). In Scarlattian terms,
though, there is little to deect us from musics presence, from a contemplation of
its materiality. In response to this, I have concentrated on just this materiality, but
not only from necessity; the sonatas happily embody such concerns in the most
focused and fascinating manner. I have attempted to respond to Hayden Whites
provocative challenge for music theorists to draw their narratives from music rather
than borrowing them from literary criticism and so produce a listener-orientated
music historiography.
2
This has been done through concentrating on the concept
and concrete manifestations of style.
Style means choice. This principle seems very obvious in our contemporary com-
positional context of almost innite pluralism, but within constraints, whether social
or generic, it is certainly true also of Scarlatti and other composers of the so-called
common-practice era. In fact the relative lack of evident constraints makes style a
difcult concept in contemporary music. Such a libertarian musicological attitude
to a composers deployment of material is less in favour now than an emphasis on
situatedness inception seems less important than reception yet composers surely
control as well as being controlled by their material. What marks Scarlatti out is the
exceptionally high degree of active control he seems to exercise and the resistance
to collective identity that ensues from that, the lack of belonging. Choice may of
course also mean replication, but almost invariably we are interested in those who
do not simply replicate but offer something new or distinctive. Our suspicion of
2
So characterized by Michael Spitzer in Haydns Reversals: Style Change, Gesture and the ImplicationRealization
Model, in Haydn Studies, ed. W. Dean Sutcliffe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 183.
concepts such as originality, progress and even greatness has not yet been and, one
assumes, never will be translated into a musicology that truly shakes off its depen-
dence on particular works and composers as primary points of reference. After all,
from an ethnological point of view, these are fundamental to the practice of Western
music.
If Scarlatti has prompted a focus on such issues in particularly pure form, he may
lend similar service to a more specic concern: howwe are to understand the music of
the eighteenth century. This might seem an odd prospect. The radical individualism
of the sonatas has been afrmed from many angles through this study. So has their
remarkably contemporary avour, evident not just in the details of reception but
in the many comparisons I have volunteered with musical phenomena lying well
out of Scarlattis own time. This may arise from the lack of sufcient information to
weigh him down securely in his contemporary contexts, but it is also a function of
his specic materiality. This musical body language provokes and tempts the critic
to match its direct, exuberant, sometimes delirious character, to let go of contexts
and causes and join in the dance. Then there is the deep sense of strangeness that
infuses any sustained contemplation of the composers circumstances and output
strange both because of what we do know and what we dont know.
Yet the strange case of Domenico Scarlatti offers an invitation to (re)discover such
qualities elsewhere, to recalibrate our sense of the musical eighteenth century. For a
start, the discomfort that accrues to the gure of our composer is in fact matched
by our uneasy relationship to much of the music of his century. Our knowledge and
image of this music combine overfamiliarity with a relatively small part of it and
chronic underfamiliarity with the rest. Such uneven and partial coverage is much
less evident in the study and performance of art music of other centuries; discourse
appears to have been strangled by certain entrenched terms of reference. These can
be encapsulated in the opposition of the two quantities Classical and Baroque. My
strategy with respect to these has not been one of denial. It has involved allowing
Scarlatti to showus that we should be fascinated, not bored, by such a distinction. The
terms themselves may be objectionable, but they represent tendencies (old vs. new,
the timeless vs. the timely) that carried particular force in the eighteenth century.
Further, the struggle for denition between them enacts with particular vividness
the principle of heteroglossia. At times in my accounts the different language systems
or cultural quantities have seemed polemically opposed, centrifugally scattered. At
other times, as was evident in certain topical and syntactical manoeuvres, they seemed
to merge, to be centripetally fused, in the name of more basic precepts of artistic
communication. If this tension was productive in trying to come to terms with
Scarlatti, helping us to recover a sense of the urgency of his utterance, it may also
prompt a renewed engagement with eighteenth-century musical style.
BI BLI OGAPHY
N.B. Collections of essays on Scarlatti and his contemporaries are listed here under
[Domenico Scarlatti]. Individual essays cited here from those volumes are listed with only
the title of the book; full publication details may be found in the entry for the book itself.
Abbassian-Milani, Farhad. Zusammenh ange zwischen Satz und Spiel in den Essercizi (1738) des
Domenico Scarlatti. Berliner Musik Studien 9. Sinzig: Studio, 1998.
Agmon, Eytan. Equal Division of the Octave in a Scarlatti Sonata, In Theory Only 11/5
(1990), 18.
Allison, Brian Jerome. Carlos Seixas: The Development of the Keyboard Sonata in
Eighteenth-Century Portugal. DMA dissertation, North Texas State University, 1982.
Alvarez, Rosario. Dos obras in editas de Domenico Scarlatti, Revista de musicologa 8/1
(1985), 516.
Una nueva sonata atribuida a Domenico Scarlatti, Revista de musicologa 11/3 (1988),
88393.
Anderson, Nicholas. Notes to recording by Trevor Pinnock. CRD: 1068, 1981.
Andreani, Eveline. Autour de la musique sacr ee de Domenico Scarlatti, in Domenico Scarlatti:
13 Recherches, 96108.
Anonymous. Notes to recording by Vladimir Horowitz. RCA: RL 14260, 1982.
Notes to recording by Gustav Leonhardt. Harmonia Mundi: BAC 3068, 1970.
Apel, Willi. Masters of the Keyboard: A Brief Survey of Pianoforte Music. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1947.
Baciero, Antonio, ed. Valladolid Sonatas Nos. 13, in Nueva biblioteca espa nola de m usica de
teclado, vol. 3, 3750. Madrid: Union Musical Espa nola, 1978.
Badura-Skoda, Eva. Die Clavier-Musik in Wien zwischen 1750 und 1770, Studien zur
Musikwissenschaft 35 (1984), 6588.
Domenico Scarlatti und das Hammerklavier,

Osterreichische Musikzeitschrift 40/10 (1985),
5249.
Il signicato dei manoscritti Scarlattiani recentemente scoperti a Vienna, in Domenico
Scarlatti e il suo tempo, 4556.
Barcaba, Peter. Domenico Scarlatti oder die Geburtsstunde der klassischen Sonate,

Barham, Jeremy. Notes to recording by Joanna MacGregor. Collins: 13222, 1992.
Basso, Alberto. Notes to recording by Christophe Rousset. Decca: 458 165 2, 1998.
Beck, Georges. R everies ` a propos de Scarlatti, in Musiques Signes Images Liber amicorum
Franc ois Lesure, 1118. Ed. Jo el-Marie Fauquet. Geneva: Minkoff, 1988.
Bent, Ian. Heinrich Schenker, Chopin and Domenico Scarlatti, Music Analysis 5/23
(1986), 13149.
Benton, Rita. Form in the Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, The Music Review 13/4 (1952),
26473.
381
382 Bibliography
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78101.
Bie, Oskar. A History of the Pianoforte and Pianoforte Players. Trans. and rev. E. E. Kellett and
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Blom, Eric. Review of Il clavicembalista Domenico Scarlatti: il suo secolo la sua opera by Cesare
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Bogianckino, Massimo. The Harpsichord Music of Domenico Scarlatti. Trans. John Tickner.
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Bolzan, Claudio. Review of recordings by Vladimir Horowitz (CBS: MP 39762) and Alexis
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Notes to recording by Trevor Pinnock. Archiv: 419 632 2, 1987.
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Nova Scarlattiana, The Musical Times 126/1712 (1985), 58993.
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Review of recording by Scott Ross (Erato: ECD 75400, 1989), Early Music 17/2 (1989),
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Scarlatti and the Fortepiano in Spain, Early Music 24/1 (1996), 18990 (Correspon-
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Caldwell, John. Review of recording by Maggie Cole (Amon Ra: SAR 27), Early Music
15/3 (1987), 4279.
Cappelletto, Sandro. La voce perduta: vita di Farinelli evirato cantore. Turin: EDT, 1995.
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I NDEX
Abbassian-Milani, Farhad, 188n, 296n
Acciaccatura, see harmony/cluster chords
Adorno, Theodor, 52
Agmon, Eytan, 198, 213, 374
Albero, Sebasti an de, 31, 32, 46, 47, 55, 67, 109, 114n,
118n, 119n, 121, 133, 212, 211212, 225,
224225, 235n, 250, 283n, 313n, 334, 360, 361,
370
Alberti bass, 307308
Alberti, Domenico, 293, 369
Alkan, Charles-Valentin, 2
Allen, Warren Dwight, 1, 4
Allison, Brian, 252n
Alpiarca, 32
Alvarez, Rosario, 70
Andantes see tempo
Andreani, Eveline, 55n, 317n
Anglebert, Jean Henry d, 29n
Annunzio, Gabriele D, 58n, 316n
Antonio, Infante of Portugal, 46
Apel, Willi, 79n
Aranjuez, 34
Austerity, 121, 253
Autographs, absence of see sources
Avison, Charles, 93, 168171, 295, 302n, 316
Bach, Carl Philipp Emmanuel, 29n, 42, 63, 213, 249n,
256n
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 11, 29n, 30, 36, 38, 42, 50,
52, 58, 61, 65, 7677, 93, 97, 154n, 191, 217,
235, 300, 321, 323
Badura-Skoda, Eva, 31n, 46n, 56
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 82, 139
Barcaba, Peter, 221n, 295n
Barcelona, 247
Baroque see style
Bart ok, B ela, 284n
Beck, Georges, 105n, 106n, 236n, 251, 284, 295n
Beckett, Samuel, 39, 166
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 7, 10, 35, 56, 87n, 150, 193,
210n, 217n, 280, 298, 335, 379
Belli, Giuseppe, 37
Benson, Edward Frederic, 315
Benton, Rita, 278n
Bicchi, Vicente, 69
Bie, Oskar, 26, 3738, 279
Billroth, Theodor, 10
Black Legend, 31, 67
Black, Virginia, 121n
Blom, Eric, 57n, 58, 359
Boccherini, Luigi, 324
Bogianckino, Massimo, 43n, 51n, 99n, 139n, 182,
209, 255, 286
Bolzan, Claudio, 121
Bond, Ann, 198, 209, 211, 237n, 248, 363n
Bontempelli, Massimo, 30, 37
Bonucci, Rodolfo, 64n, 372n
B ottinger, Peter, 3940, 135, 221, 283284, 288
Bouchard, Jean-Jacques, 54
Boyd, Malcolm, 2n, 27, 4041, 4344, 51n, 65, 68,
70, 72, 76, 80, 116, 119n, 134, 135n, 167, 272n,
281n, 285n, 340n, 368n, 370n
Boyden, David D., 263n, 369
Brahms, Johannes, 10, 227, 322
Brecht, Bertolt, 179
Brendel, Alfred, 59
Brunetti, Gaetano, 32
Brussels, 74
Bryson, Norman, 216n
Buen Retiro, 34
B ulow, Hans von, 28, 39, 61, 85, 123n, 150, 158, 176,
226, 236, 245n, 265, 284, 368
Burney, Charles, 31, 48, 52, 54, 76
Burnham, Scott, 6
Cabanilles, Juan Bautista, 121n
Cadence see syntax
Cadenza, 280281, 290
C adiz, 111
Caldwell, John, 367n
Cappella Giulia, 8
Carestini, Giovanni, 99
Carreira, Xo an M., 66, 108
Carreras, Juan Jos e, 65, 66
392
Index 393
Casella, Alfredo, 63, 64, 80, 123n, 138
Casellas, Jaime, 247
Celestini, Federico, 316n
Cervantes, Miguel de, 111112
Chaconne, 360
Chambonni` eres, Jacques Champion, Sieur de, 29n
Chambure, Alain de, 18, 134, 210, 321, 344n, 372n
Charles III, King of Spain, 111
Chase, Gilbert, 30
Choi, Seunghyun, 271272
Chopin, Frederic, 4, 280, 324
Choreography see dance
Chronology, 34, 7, 27, 4345, 279, 318, 342,
378379
Chua, Daniel K. L., 51n
Clark, Jane, 21, 21n, 26, 31n, 32, 63, 68, 80, 109,
110, 111n, 119n, 121122, 139n, 253, 268n,
306, 358
Classical see style
Clementi, Muzio, 38, 50, 62, 199, 217n, 221, 235n
Closure see syntax
Cluster chords see harmony
Cole, Maggie, 367n
Colles, Henry, 86, 86n, 191
Comic opera, 96, 103, 134, 178, 222, 245, 281n
Commedia dellarte, 286
Concerto, 85, 123n, 132, 141, 199200, 289
Cone, Edward T., 286
Continuo practice, 236, 238, 248
Cook, Nicholas, 171n
Copland, Aaron, 84
Corelli, Arcangelo, 54, 55, 62, 80, 93, 132, 133, 171n,
253
Counterpoint, 1518, 9394, 9697, 98, 140,
230236, 293294, 302, 303, 319, 348
Opening imitation, 150, 180, 232, 241, 294, 324,
328, 334
Couperin, Francois, 5, 29n, 62, 63, 301
Crescembeni, Giovanni, 30
Cristofori, Bartolomeo, 45, 46
Crocker, Richard L., 368
Crotch, William, 249
Czerny, Carl, 39, 42, 61, 245, 248
Dahlhaus, Carl, 97
Dale, Kathleen, 40n, 45, 58n, 157, 191, 285n, 321
Dance, 1011, 8385, 177, 181, 198, 285287, 313,
335, 342, 358, 371
for Iberian forms see folk and popular music
Allemande, 92n
Courante, 93n
Gigue, 111, 123n
Minuet, 83, 84, 8586, 8788, 252n, 370, 371
Davies, Siobhan, 54, 215
Debussy, Claude, 5, 98, 108, 245, 322
Degrada, Francesco, 51n, 72, 79, 98, 183, 236, 236n,
238, 340
Deleuze, Gilles, 215
Dent, Edward, 5253, 61, 217, 268n
Derr, Elwood, 171
Derrida, Jacques, 216
Der unreine Satz, 40, 221223, 247250
Disdain, 1819, 22, 22n, 29, 86, 94, 182, 191, 219,
220, 225, 232, 275, 293, 321, 327, 376
Dissonance see harmony
Docker, John, 82, 322
Doderer, Gerhard, 69
Dodgson, Stephen, 220n
Donington, Robert, 270
Downs, Philip, 76
Dresden, 32
Dreyfus, Laurence, 9798, 325n
Duran, Josep, 247248
Durante, Francesco, 54, 181, 247
Dur on, Sebasti an, 66n
Dussek, Jan Ladislav, 50
Edwards, Donna, 95, 213n
Einstein, Albert, 49
Elas, Jos e, 121, 133
Ending see syntax/closure
Escorial, 31, 34
Etzion, Judith, 31
Fadini, Emilia, 27, 28, 45, 64, 121, 186187, 195n,
257, 258, 261, 263, 263n, 264, 268, 270, 272,
307, 307n
Falla, Manuel de, 68, 107, 108, 262n
Fantasia, 156157, 199
Farinelli (Carlo Broschi), 30, 31, 34, 48, 66, 70, 99
Farnese, Isabel, Queen of Spain (wife of Felipe V), 30,
34n
Faur e, Gabriel, 59
Felipe V, King of Spain, 33, 34, 81n
Ferguson, Howard, 42, 192, 257, 366n
Fern andez Talaya, Teresa, 73
Fernando VI, King of Spain, 30, 33, 34n, 36, 44n, 46,
69, 111
Flamenco see folk and popular music
Florence, 45
Folk and popular music, 11, 1213, 15, 33, 78, 8081,
85, 106, 107108, 109110, 112, 122n, 134136,
177, 181, 216, 223, 244, 288, 300, 301, 302303,
310, 316, 319, 326, 344, 345, 356, 357, 359, 373,
378
Flamenco, 11, 22, 24, 107, 108, 109, 110122, 135,
140, 141, 187, 216, 262, 268, 361
Iberian elements and inuence, 5, 11, 21, 6768,
80, 107n, 107122, 140144, 198, 200, 224, 253,
254, 262, 306, 308, 310, 332, 348, 356, 358, 361
394 Index
Folk and popular music (cont.)
Italian elements and inuence, 63n, 71, 110111,
111n, 134135, 136, 140n, 146n, 145166, 181,
262, 342
style and dance type s
Bien parado, 141
Bolero, 110, 363n
Bulera, 110
Cante jondo, 22, 114, 121, 142, 268, 310n, 332
Fandango, 110, 123n, 142
Malague na, 24n
Peteneras, 119n
Saeta, 110, 268, 272, 363
Salidas, 22
Seguidilla, 24, 110, 122
Siguiriya, 95
Tango, 63, 109
Form, 7, 1415, 166, 201, 207, 308, 320325,
340355, 376
Accelerated second half, 84, 342
Progressive, 15, 344346, 347355
Retention of material at original pitch, 283n,
342343, 355
Freeman, Daniel E., 97n, 294
Frescobaldi, Girolamo, 54, 233
Froberger, Johann Jakob, 29n
Fuller, David, 80, 266
Galant see style
Galuppi, Baldassare, 86, 87, 177178, 178, 182,
237
Gasparini, Francesco, 55, 236
Geminiani, Francesco, 171n
Genre, 78, 8586, 94, 212, 293, 294, 334, 376
Gerhard, Roberto, 67n
Gerstenberg, Walter, 26, 29, 85, 308, 320n
Gesualdo, Carlo, 2
Gigli, Girolamo, 72
Gilbert, Kenneth, 27, 44, 185, 186187, 192, 204,
205, 208, 256n, 258, 259, 261, 263, 264, 268,
270, 272, 305, 307, 333n, 337
Gillespie, John, 36n
Giustini, Lodovico, 46, 71, 86, 87, 237238, 250, 370
Godowsky, Leopold, 284n
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 100
Granada, 108
Granados, Enrique, 118, 120n
Gray, Cecil, 2n, 36n, 6061, 253, 359
Great curves see syntax
Greco, Gaetano, 54
Grimaldi, Nicolo, 45
Grout, Donald Jay, 81
Guitar, 42, 62, 81, 112n, 121, 238, 254, 297, 319, 345,
347, 361
Gusm ao, Alexandro de, 73
Haas, Arthur, 214n
Hammond, Frederick, 47, 107n, 198, 285n, 294n,
306, 368, 368n
Hand-crossing, 56n, 170, 182, 248, 284285,
286289, 294, 335
Handel, George Frederick, 35, 58, 61, 65, 71, 93, 93n,
134, 147148, 149, 171, 217, 321
Hanta, Pierre, 60n
Harmony, 21, 59, 114119, 129, 142144, 147, 163,
167, 199n, 206207, 214, 217220, 236247,
252, 282, 290291, 309310, 317, 340341, 343,
366
Cluster chords, 236238, 300, 313315, 339
Dissonance, 98, 100, 112, 114, 128, 213, 220, 229,
230, 236245, 307, 310
Modal opposition, 341, 352
Phrygian, 21, 116118, 142, 233, 313n, 357
Terzverwandschaft, 340341
Hatten, Robert, 139
Hauer, George, 51, 97
Hautus, Loek, 76, 179, 219, 230, 312
Haydn, Joseph, 19, 30, 33, 36, 42, 46, 50, 57, 75, 77,
81, 168, 179, 190, 199, 210n, 217, 235, 249,
256n, 308n, 313n, 316n, 324, 337, 340, 374
Headington, Christopher, 252n
Heimes, Klaus, 42n, 72n, 114
Heteroglossia, 82, 139, 380
Heuschneider, Karin, 212, 312
Horowitz, Vladimir, 176, 227, 333
Hotz, Pierre du, 74
Howat, Roy, 43n, 321
Huescar, Duke of, 15, 74n, 7375, 182, 247
Hughes, Rosemary, 308n
Hummel, Johann Nepomuk, 50
Iberian elements and inuence see folk and popular
music
Ife, Barry, 34n, 55n, 198
Imitation see counterpoint
Improvisation, 4041, 156, 198, 213, 276, 277, 290,
292, 334, 347, 375, 377
Invention, 15, 92, 105, 189, 282
Irritation, 40, 170, 221, 252, 285, 325
Isabel, Queen of Spain see Farnese, Isabel
Italian elements and inuence see folk and popular
music
Jackendoff, Ray, 10n
James, Burnett, 68
James III, the Old Pretender, 69
Jansen, Therese, 42
Jazz, 193, 194, 301, 335
Jeppesen, Knud, 317
Jo ao V, King of Portugal, 46, 53, 65, 72, 72n, 73, 75,
85
Index 395
Johnson, John, 224
Jones, J. Barrie, 118, 123, 262n
Joseph II, Emperor, 56
Juderas, Juli an, 31
Kafka, Franz, 35
Kastner, Macario Santiago, ix, 59n, 67, 68, 80, 177,
292, 371n
Keene, Benjamin, 112
Keller, Hans, 94, 177
Keller, Hermann, 42, 49, 76, 129n, 250n
Keyboard realism, 220, 292297
Kirby, Frank Eugene, 76
Kirkendale, Warren, 148n
Kirkpatrick, Ralph, viii, 4, 2627, 28, 32, 34, 35,
4344, 4748, 55, 60, 62, 64, 65, 72n, 78, 80, 81,
90n, 91, 99, 112, 122, 158, 159, 167, 183,
193194, 219220, 227, 246, 248, 252, 256n,
257, 268n, 279, 285, 286, 310n, 319, 325, 342,
347348, 367, 368, 369, 370, 373
Koch, Heinrich, 124, 128, 129
Kramer, Jonathan D., 197
Kramer, Lawrence, 85, 216n
Landon, H. C. Robbins, 57n
Landowska, Wanda, 28, 121, 122, 270, 270n, 355n
Lang, Paul Henry, 2829, 35, 59, 98, 284n
LAugier, Alexander Ludwig, 56
Leahu, Alexandru, 24n
Leaps, 129, 203, 284, 285, 286289, 294295, 311,
358
Learned style see style
Leo, Leonardo, 117, 116117
Levy, Janet M., 43n, 230231, 323n
Libby, Dennis, 59
Libro di tocate, Lisbon see sources
Ligeti, Gy orgy, 209
Linear intervallic pattern see sequence
Lipatti, Dinu, 316n
Lisbon, 31, 49, 56, 69, 73, 109
Liszt, Franz, 297
Literes, Antonio de, 66n
Livermore, Ann, 99, 303
London, 31, 76, 280
Longo, Alessandro, 24, 26, 27, 28, 53, 61, 6364, 85,
176, 193, 226, 229, 265, 268, 368
Lorca, Federico Garca, 108
Luciani, Sebastiano, 39n, 75, 285
Lynch, John, 74n
Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 215
Lyrical breakthrough, 92, 254, 358367
Lyrical voice, 11, 15, 99, 253, 355, 356, 357, 359, 360
MacGregor, Joanna, 316n
Madrid, 30, 31, 32, 46, 56, 66, 73, 99, 109, 111, 257
Mahler, Gustav, 10, 106
Mainwaring, John, 35, 75
Malipiero, Gian Francesco, 5, 150
Mancini, Francesco, 340
Mann, Thomas, 63
Mannerism, 8, 219, 340
Marcello, Benedetto, 54, 85, 181, 182, 253n, 276n,
286, 370
Mara B arbara de Braganca, Queen of Spain, 2, 4, 30,
32, 32n, 34n, 36, 40, 42, 46n, 48, 56, 69, 72n,
73, 112, 313, 363
Maria Casimira, Queen of Poland, 30
Marshall, Robert, 77
Martnez de la Roca, Joaqun, 247
Marx-Weber, Magda, 86
Materiality, 67, 38, 280, 285, 306, 307, 379, 380
McCredie, Andrew, 280
McLauchlan, Annabel, 72, 340
McVeigh, Simon, 249
Medici, Prince Ferdinando de, 45
Mellers, Wilfred, 10, 52, 75, 138, 139, 344, 347, 355,
357
Mendelssohn, Felix, 10, 150
Mertens, Wim, 215216
Messiaen, Olivier, 74
Metastasio, Pietro, 56
Meyer, Leonard B., 55, 107, 144, 210n
Michelangeli, Arturo Benedetti, 105, 176, 319
Minimalism, 158, 215216
Minuet see dance
Missing bars and bass notes see syntax
Mitchell, Timothy, 108, 110, 111112, 216
Modality see harmony
Modest sonatas, 4445, 104107, 183, 191, 192
Mortensen, Lars-Ulrik, 238, 248
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 4, 18, 35, 42, 5657, 75,
95, 96, 104, 126, 134135, 146, 199, 217n, 235,
280, 281, 281n, 360
Murcia, Santiago de, 81
Naples, 5467, 68, 117, 247
Narrative, 10, 139
Nationalism, 5, 33, 5768
Nettl, Bruno, 368n
Newton, Richard, 61n
Opening see syntax
Opera buffa see comic opera
Organology, 4, 4549, 73, 209n, 237
Ornamentation, 6, 127, 146n, 158, 204, 205, 208,
232, 256263, 265, 268, 307, 348355
Paganini, Niccol ` o, 280, 281
Pagano, Roberto, 32, 3536, 44n, 46, 47n, 69, 72n,
75, 112, 141, 248n, 252253, 276, 296297
396 Index
Pairs, 5, 44, 48, 144, 252, 275, 294, 367375
Palermo, 69
Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da, 317
Pannain, Guido, 366
Panorama tradition, 3638, 40, 52, 63, 7879,
123124, 140, 176, 363, 376
Paradies, Domenico, 177
Parakilas, James, 67n
Parallel intervals see voice leading
Pardo, 34
Parma collection see sources
Pascual, Beryl Kenyon de, 46n, 73
Pasquini, Bernardo, 55, 317, 318, 320
Pastorale, 63, 71, 83, 8687, 92, 134, 135n, 136138,
260, 316
Pedagogy, 32, 40, 4143, 76, 217, 220, 277, 292, 293,
335
Pedrero-Encabo,

Agueda, 5467, 68, 121n
Pennington, Neil D., 81n
Perahia, Murray, 319
Performance, 6, 10, 17, 53, 59, 81, 95, 100, 105, 106,
110, 111, 121122, 128n, 132, 136, 141, 146,
146n, 157158, 168, 174177, 206, 221, 223,
237238, 252, 255, 256, 258, 259, 260263,
264265, 266, 281, 284, 285286, 299300,
304, 307, 315316, 318319, 335, 367, 368,
369, 374
Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista, 54
Pestelli, Giorgio, 18, 27, 29, 37, 40, 40n, 51, 5657,
58n, 62, 64, 7071, 71n, 80, 83, 98, 105106,
122n, 123, 133, 134, 134n, 139n, 141, 153154,
155n, 165, 178n, 181n, 191, 198199, 219, 224n,
233, 236, 236n, 252, 266n, 277, 281n, 295n, 303,
310, 326, 329, 330n, 362, 375
Petrarch, Francesco, 37
Physicality see virtuosity
Picturesque, 249
Pilar, Mara del, 73
Pl` a, Juan Baptista, 73
Plaistow, Stephen, 36, 299
Platti, Giovanni Benedetto, 151, 151152, 177, 182
Pletnev, Mikhail, 120n, 121, 122, 158159, 162, 176,
251, 265, 299, 318, 319, 367
Ployer, Barbara, 42
Pogorelich, Ivo, 315, 316n
Pont, Graham, 71
Popular music see folk and popular music
Porpora, Nicola, 56
Portuguese see folk and popular music/Iberian
elements and inuence
Powell, Linton, 112n, 120, 133, 235n
Pressing, Jeff, 166n
Price, Uvedale, 249
Puyana, Rafael, 80, 95, 110111, 121, 123n, 136, 253,
262n, 310n, 363n
Quantz, Johann Joachim, 99
Queff elec, Anne, 24, 176
Radcliffe, Philip, 210n
Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 58, 62, 323, 363
Rasgueado, 345
Ratner, Leonard, 79
Rattolino, Piero, 209210n
Ravel, Maurice, 59, 245
Recitative, 199n
Register see texture and sonority
Regola dellottava, 213, 215
Repetition see syntax
R eti, Rudolph, 326
Rhythm, 59, 84, 119, 145147, 193194, 266
Ricercare, 211212, 294
Richards, Annette, 249n
Rodrguez, Vicente, 6768, 120, 121, 121n, 152n,
154155, 182, 334
Rome, 69, 72, 318
Roncaglia, Gino, 53, 6263, 82
Roseingrave, Thomas, 31, 281, 300
Rosen, Charles, 6n, 41, 51n, 58, 77, 100n, 105, 182n,
199, 297300, 360
Ross, Scott, 17, 18, 266
Rostand, Claude, 60
Rousset, Christophe, 10n, 258, 370
Rubenstein, Artur, 47
Rushton, Julian, 97n
Rutini, Giovanni Marco, 369
Sachs, Barbara, 263n
Sachs, Curt, 6, 11
Sachs, Harvey, 32n
Salter, Lionel, 369
Salzer, Felix, 41n
Sammartini, Giovanni Battista, 100n, 178n
Santi, Piero, 37, 62, 218n, 316n
Saramago, Jose, 53, 135
Sarri, Domenico, 286n
Satie, Erik, 120
Saudade, 95
Scarlatti, Alessandro, 2, 30, 32, 3536, 45, 51, 54, 67,
71, 134n, 177, 237, 247, 320
Scarlatti, Alexandro, 73
Scarlatti, Domenico
Letter to Duke of Huescar, 15, 7375, 247,
378
Preface to Essercizi, 7377, 258, 281
Real-life personality, 2, 3436, 75
works
Cantatas, 28, 31, 69, 98, 238; Bella rosa adorata, 86;
Piangete, occhi dolenti, 183, 340
Operas and intermezzos, 34, 280; Ambleto, 34n;
Berenice regina dEgitto, 34n; La Dirindina, 72, 340;
Index 397
Narciso (Amor dun ombra), 280; Tolomeo et
Alessandro, 30, 134
Sacred works; Madrid Mass, 31, 317n, 318;
Miserere in E minor, 89; Salve regina, 31, 318;
Stabat mater, 86; Serenades, 31, 69; Sinfonias, 134
Sonatas; K. 1-30 (Essercizi), x, 31, 39, 43n, 48, 64,
67, 7172, 7377, 85, 88, 92, 93, 168, 171, 188,
188n, 224n, 279, 284, 295, 296n, 304n, 316,
335336, 339, 362, 370; K. 1, 335; K. 2, 171,
335; K. 3, 71n; K. 4, 92, 316; K. 6, 68; K. 7, 68,
284; K. 8, 80, 93; K. 9, 39, 7172, 171, 315316;
K. 11, 295; K. 13, 39, 305; K. 14, 188; K. 15,
288; K. 17, 227; K. 18, 8889; K. 19, 295,
301302, 302, 303, 362, 362363; K. 20, 295;
K. 22, 182; K. 24, 9n, 121, 250n, 297, 298, 336;
K. 25, 336; K. 26, 168, 169; K. 27, 152155,
152156, 250n, 318, 336, 339; K. 28, 304, 304;
K. 29, 140, 284, 288, 335336; K. 30, 60, 71n,
182183, 235, 335, 336, 339; K. 39, 89, 9, 168,
187; K. 41, 63n; K. 45, 195196, 196; K. 46,
295, 295; K. 48, 140; K. 50, 63n, 140, 140n;
K. 52, 93; K. 53, 184187, 186, 266; K. 55, 114,
115, 116; K. 56, 248249, 249, 318, 319; K. 57,
187, 239, 239240; K. 60, 93; K. 61, 67, 67n,
110111, 146; K. 63, 71; K. 64, 63n, 238; K. 65,
276277, 277278, 282, 282284, 285, 287, 289,
308, 317, 343; K. 67, 93; K. 69, 93, 93n, 94, 99,
224n; K. 70, 48n, 85; K. 71, 71, 369; K. 73,
371372; K. 76, 71, 369; K. 78, 39; K. 80, 71n;
K. 81, 64; K. 83, 371, 372; K. 86, 93, 99, 251;
K. 87, 60, 9395, 137; K. 88, 48n; K. 89, 64;
K. 90, 64; K. 92, 80, 93; K. 96, 63n, 123, 176,
176177, 195, 224, 254, 319; K. 98, 272; K. 99,
64, 121, 141144, 339, 372; K. 100, 144; K. 101,
341; K. 102, 358; K. 105, 119, 193194; K. 106,
104, 336, 374; K. 107, 114116, 115, 119, 121;
K. 111, 192193, 336; K. 112, 287288,
287288, 301; K. 113, 284n; K. 114, 64, 122;
K. 115, 71, 238, 310313, 315, 316, 339; K. 116,
187; K. 118, 263; K. 119, 39, 236237, 313315,
314; K. 120, 64, 173, 174175, 180, 182, 284;
K. 123, 230231, 335; K. 124, 213214, 262;
K. 125, 173n, 246; K. 126, 288289;
K. 127, 84, 373; K. 128, 231, 231, 373; K. 130,
340, 373; K. 131, 302, 303, 373; K. 132, 144,
227, 330, 339; K. 135, 341; K. 136, 71, 319;
K. 139, 144, 356; K. 140, 167; K. 145, 69;
K. 146, 70; K. 147, 93, 224n; K. 148, 257, 358;
K. 149, 173; K. 150, 232, 239, 239, 251; K. 151,
251; K. 154, 230n; K. 158, 253; K. 162, 63n,
133, 305; K. 166, 356; K. 168, 326328, 327;
K. 170, 104, 133, 348; K. 175, 237; K. 176, 133;
K. 177, 319; K. 178, 225226, 226; K. 179, 239;
K. 180, 178, 213, 273, 289, 289290, 295, 308;
K. 181, 187; K. 182, 118, 118; K. 183, 246, 299,
300; K. 184, 121, 178, 227, 239; K. 185, 253,
360361; K. 187, 121n, 363; K. 188, 24, 24n,
118, 118, 246, 246247, 300, 316; K. 193,
1825, 1920, 23, 38, 91, 111, 144, 197, 200,
213, 336, 341; K. 194, 181; K. 195, 181,
187188; K. 197, 253; K. 198, 92, 239, 239;
K. 199, 173; K. 202, 134136, 138, 139, 339;
K. 204b, 24; K. 206, 70n, 347355, 349353,
356357, 358, 360, 373; K. 207, 343, 373;
K. 208, 171, 172, 224, 360; K. 209, 307; K. 210,
305306, 306; K. 212, 181, 227, 261, 261, 319;
K. 213, 251; K. 214, 240, 342; K. 215, 181,
237n, 254, 306n, 306, 337339, 338, 343;
K. 216, 210213, 211; K. 218, 117, 117118;
K. 221, 181, 335; K. 222, 225, 228231, 229,
307, 339; K. 223, 245, 303, 303, 309; K. 224,
178179, 179, 224, 232233, 233, 326;
K. 225, 121, 213; K. 228, 296; K. 232, 114n,
184; K. 234, 253, 361, 361; K. 235, 135, 316;
K. 236, 134; K. 238, 80, 8081, 262, 357;
K. 240, 16n, 131n, 136; K. 242, 178, 187, 224,
273; K. 243, 242; K. 244, 200, 342; K. 246, 316,
339, 373374; K. 247, 224, 224, 317, 373374;
K. 248, 181; K. 249, 341; K. 252, 184n; K. 253,
174, 200, 214215; K. 254, 1518, 16-17, 61,
100, 168, 227; K. 255, 83; K. 256, 140, 266268,
267, 343; K. 257, 63n, 188n, 188191, 359, 362;
K. 258, 344; K. 259, 63n, 251252; K. 260,
156157, 165n, 197, 209, 212; K. 261, 181, 290,
344346, 348; K. 262, 85; K. 263, 8990, 8992,
126, 224, 317, 347; K. 264, 181, 305; K. 265,
133, 133n; K. 268, 180181, 305; K. 270, 138,
275, 340, 374; K. 271, 272275, 273274, 374;
K. 274, 105, 337n, 356; K. 275, 336337, 337,
337n, 374; K. 276, 337n; K. 277, 1113, 1115,
18, 24, 90, 99, 104, 119, 144, 216, 253, 254, 347,
360; K. 278, 326, 363; K. 279, 318, 359, 360;
K. 282, 134n; K. 284, 84; K. 286, 105; K. 291,
105; K. 293, 183, 183184, 316; K. 295, 342;
K. 296, 3940, 120, 253254, 284, 368369n;
K. 297, 368369n; K. 300, 326; K. 301, 225,
225, 343; K. 302, 343, 343; K. 305, 8485, 91,
192n, 342; K. 306, 316; K. 308, 99100; K. 309,
99, 100104, 101104; K. 311, 84; K. 313, 116,
116; K. 314, 184, 185, 236; K. 317, 39, 171, 172;
K. 318, 373, 374; K. 319, 198, 200, 213, 373,
374; K. 320, 316; K. 322, 105107, 309310,
374n; K. 323, 192, 193, 194, 374n; K. 324, 141,
335; K. 325, 184; K. 327, 285286, 319, 342;
K. 331, 326; K. 332, 358; K. 334, 105; K. 336,
326; K. 337, 141, 316; K. 339, 181; K. 340, 357;
K. 342, 105; K. 343, 251, 262, 262; K. 345, 236;
K. 347, 375; K. 348, 375; K. 351, 133; K. 356,
200; K. 357, 200; K. 358, 335; K. 359, 184n, 357;
K. 362, 232; K. 364, 230n; K. 365, 92, 316, 326
398 Index
Scarlatti, Domenico (cont.)
K. 371, 187; K. 372, 84; K. 375, 181, 326;
K. 379, 8788, 182; K. 380, 363367, 364;
K. 381, 307; K. 382, 326; K. 384, 104, 306n,
306307; K. 386, 140, 194195, 262263, 342;
K. 389, 343; K. 394, 220, 223, 290291,
291292, 318; K. 395, 339; K. 396, 370; K. 397,
370; K. 398, 8687, 88, 137, 348; K. 402, 39, 89,
124127, 124133, 218, 247, 295; K. 404,
120121, 253; K. 405, 316; K. 406, 301; K. 407,
240245, 260, 273, 307, 340; K. 408, 254;
K. 409, 200, 201209, 202203, 210, 213, 214,
258; K. 410, 340, 370; K. 411, 370; K. 413, 84,
308, 316; K. 414, 134n, 335; K. 415, 224; K. 416,
144, 339; K. 417, 166n; K. 418, 326, 340; K. 419,
196; K. 422, 166n, 232, 293, 318; K. 424, 326;
K. 425, 358; K. 426, 253, 254, 317, 357358,
359; K. 427, 184, 342; K. 428, 85; K. 429, 111,
187, 341; K. 430, 319; K. 431, 255; K. 434, 140,
181, 361; K. 435, 81; K. 437, 233235, 234235;
K. 438, 210, 369; K. 439, 63n, 262, 262, 358,
359, 360; K. 441, 318; K. 442, 306n; K. 443,
318; K. 444, 301, 301, 341; K. 446, 63n, 92,
136n, 138, 260261, 369; K. 447, 181, 317, 318,
342; K. 449, 181, 303, 304, 316; K. 450, 63, 63n,
109, 171, 172, 258n; K. 454, 297, 298; K. 457,
159, 180, 181, 319, 341; K. 461, 259260, 260,
307308; K. 462, 336n, 374375; K. 463, 16n,
374375; K. 464, 316; K. 465, 298299, 299,
300; K. 466, 228, 228, 357, 374375; K. 467,
374375; K. 468, 182, 374375; K. 469, 210,
318, 374375; K. 472, 343, 359, 362; K. 474, 49,
305, 328331, 328334, 336, 370; K. 475,
221223, 222223, 370; K. 476, 140141, 181;
K. 480, 301, 301; K. 481, 253; K. 482, 178;
K. 484, 181n; K. 485, 200201, 207, 214;
K. 487, 49, 300301; K. 489, 345; K. 490,
x, 91, 102, 110, 237n, 238, 268272, 269, 270,
271, 317, 361, 363364, 372; K. 491,
110; K. 492, 39, 110, 318; K. 493, 232, 233,
258, 329; K. 494, 358; K. 495, 178, 374;
K. 496, 8384, 374; K. 497, 374n; K. 498, 335,
357, 357, 374n; K. 500, 346, 346347; K. 501,
319; K. 502, 119; K. 503, 180, 293, 293294;
K. 511, 134n, 210; K. 513, 90, 136139, 137,
215, 348; K. 515, 259, 259; K. 516, 368n;
K. 517, 187n, 368n; K. 518, 181; K. 519, 181;
K. 520, 184n, 318, 342; K. 521, 51n; K. 522,
318; K. 523, 158163, 160162, 180, 187, 191,
206, 265, 305, 319, 336; K. 524, 104, 336, 374;
K. 525, 111, 150152, 164, 227228, 228, 276;
K. 527, 359; K. 531, 213, 335; K. 532, 109,
163164, 197; K. 534, 254255; K. 535, 174,
308309, 309; K. 536, 370; K. 537, 318, 370;
K. 539, 318; K. 540, 342; K. 541, 164, 164165,
193; K. 544, 120, 255256; K. 545, 140, 340,
341; K. 546, 253; K. 548, 112114, 113; K. 551,
227, 227; K. 554, 147150, 148, 151, 181, 318,
325; Minuet in D minor (Turin), 71; Minuet in
G major (Turin), 71; Sonata in A major (Lisbon),
6970
Scarlatti, Giuseppe, 56
Schachter, Carl, 39
Schenker, Heinrich, 39, 40n, 41, 59, 220, 316n
Schenkman, Walter, 318n
Scherzo, 150
Schiff, Andr as, 128n, 255256, 333
Schmalfeldt, Janet, 39
Schoenberg, Arnold, 74
Schott, Howard, 257
Schroeter, Rebecca, 42
Schubert, Franz, 36, 50, 60, 210, 211, 296, 324, 340,
366, 368
Schumann, Robert, 168, 182n
Seiffert, Max, 52, 61, 134n, 235
Seixas, Carlos, x, 31, 42n, 55, 67, 85, 109, 121n, 182,
250, 252, 253n, 285, 299n, 334, 358, 370, 371
Sequence see syntax
Sessions, Roger, 192
Seville, 46n, 110, 363
Sheldon, David, 98
Sheveloff, Joel, 3n, 7, 22n, 23, 27, 31n, 39, 43n, 44n,
45, 4849n, 60, 65, 70, 77n, 93, 94n, 107n,
167168, 173, 173n, 184, 201, 209210n, 214,
228229, 237, 245n, 246n, 257n, 263, 268, 305,
336, 339, 369, 372
Shostakovich, Dmitry, 106
Siciliana, 134, 260
Siena, 63
Silbiger, Alexander, 51n, 264
Sineld, Alan, 58
Sitwell, Sacheverell, 26, 29, 123, 134, 193, 344n
Soler, Antonio, 2831, 32, 42n, 55, 67, 114, 114n,
118, 119n, 121
Somfai, L aszl o, 57n
Sonority see texture and sonority
Sources, 7, 65, 146n, 172173, 256257, 263275,
305306n, 368
Autographs, absence of, 34, 31, 41, 256
Barcelona, 70
Cambridge, 70, 260, 262263, 268, 270272, 369
Lisbon, 44n, 49, 6970, 140n, 187, 258, 262, 263,
272, 305306n, 333, 369370
London, 224
Madrid, 70, 119n, 369
Montserrat, 70
M unster, 88, 187, 268, 271, 306, 337n
Parma, 3, 32, 4445, 70, 70n, 119n, 144, 187, 251,
257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 263, 268, 271272, 306,
307, 333n, 342, 369370, 373, 374, 375
Index 399
Turin, 7072, 369
Valladolid, 70
Venice, 3, 32, 4445, 47, 70, 70n, 144, 187, 251,
257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 263, 268, 271272,
279, 306, 307, 333n, 342, 368, 369370, 373,
374, 375
Vienna, 44n, 56, 88, 187, 224, 270, 271272, 306,
313n, 337n, 369
Zaragoza, 70
Spacing see texture and sonority
Spanish see folk and popular music/Iberian elements
and inuence
Speed see tempo
Spielfreude, 283284, 287, 290
Staier, Andreas, 15n, 122, 135n, 176, 307, 335
Star turn see thematicism
Strauss, Richard, 95
Stravinsky, Igor, 151, 192, 236237, 265
Style, 8, 25, 38, 4955, 62, 120, 122, 198, 219, 264,
265, 356, 357, 359, 379380
Baroque, 9, 14, 18, 28, 39, 5051, 58, 79, 81, 92,
96, 139, 140, 142144, 167, 168, 179, 180, 190,
192, 193, 198199, 214, 224, 245, 254, 276,
282283, 306, 318n, 320, 322, 334, 341, 344,
347, 360, 373, 377, 380
Classical, 5051, 5657, 79, 97, 105, 167, 179, 245,
295n, 320, 323, 377, 380
Galant, 1115, 17, 21, 51, 76, 95107, 117,
128129, 163, 198, 200, 220, 227, 266268, 308,
330, 337, 348, 355, 360
Learned/Strict, 15, 17, 76, 96, 124128, 153156,
161162, 163, 179, 220, 227, 254, 266, 297, 319
Mid-century, 8, 50, 51, 100, 192, 320
Mixed, 109, 134, 136, 139140, 167, 168, 182,
322323
Renaissance polyphony, 51, 54, 55, 59, 317
Stile antico, 8990, 93, 9495, 218n
Subotnik, Rose Rosengard, 41, 245
Suite, 28, 85, 320, 321, 368, 370
Sutherland, David, 4546, 47n, 48, 72n, 281
Syntax, 38, 59, 60, 98, 142, 188, 191, 265, 336337,
376
Cadence, 177179, 180, 222, 229, 236, 262, 266,
292, 305, 306, 307, 318n, 318319, 377
Closure, 71, 144, 171172, 208, 308, 334, 339340,
372, 376
Elision, 84, 146, 168, 169170, 205, 325, 375
Fortspinnung, 88, 183, 184, 189, 326
Great curves, 119n, 173175, 325, 375
Hypermetrical manipulation, 193195, 201208
Missing bars, 146, 158, 159, 167, 171177, 192n,
202, 206, 265, 292
Missing bass notes, 146, 159, 305307
Opening, 180181, 324, 328, 334339, 377
Periodicity, 163, 168, 182, 206
Repetition, 23, 71, 119121, 145166, 171, 181,
193, 194, 213, 226, 253, 254, 282, 301, 325, 357
Sequence, 9, 120121, 141, 181188, 189190,
206, 275, 336
Stampede, 159, 165, 180181, 200, 324, 341, 363
Three-card trick, 141, 181, 246, 300, 345
Time and temporality, 1113, 120121, 147, 150,
155, 164166, 180, 184, 197, 322, 345, 377
Vamp, 2324, 33, 60, 105, 106, 111n, 119, 120,
129, 135, 146n, 156158, 163164, 177, 184,
197216, 219, 231, 238, 254, 289, 309, 326, 339,
342, 345, 357, 359
Tagliavini, Luigi, 83n
Talbot, Michael, 5n, 199n, 323324, 341, 341n
Taruskin, Richard, 109n, 264265, 315
Tausig, Carl, 39, 265, 316n
Telemann, Georg Phillip, 87n
Tempo, 910, 98, 104, 177, 194, 195, 250256, 316,
359, 376, 377
Andantes, 251256, 359360
Texture and sonority, 297, 377
Essercizi cadence, 93, 141, 282, 316
Missing bass notes see syntax
Octaves, 301304, 319
Open fth, 91, 300, 317
Open sonorities, 86, 158, 300304, 313
Opposition between hands, 242, 260, 307
Spacing and register, 14, 106, 226n, 243, 253, 260,
274, 281, 282, 285, 286, 289, 294296, 308315,
358
Tenor suspension, 317318
Two-part texture, 15, 98, 265, 295, 315
Unison close, 71, 171172, 304, 315, 318319
Thematicism, 1920, 201, 311, 312, 324, 325334
Dialect and idiolect, 355358, 364
Star turn, 105, 313n, 326328, 371
Thompson, David, 34n, 43n, 136
Time see syntax
Toccata, 8, 51, 64, 85, 114, 134, 136, 140, 141,
153156, 157n, 184, 187, 195, 198, 273, 276,
282, 290, 294, 311, 316, 334, 362
Toledo, 247
Tommasini, Vincenzo, 332n
Tomsic, Dubravka, 316n
Tonadilla, 66
Topic, 7, 34, 7895, 109, 123144, 147, 215, 262,
296, 299, 307, 323, 325, 339, 341, 356, 358,
363367, 376, 377
Dotted style, 140, 266268
Fanfare/horn call, 86, 123, 181, 214, 266, 308, 311,
332, 335, 357, 363367
Learned/strict see style
Pastoral see pastorale
Torrente,

Alvaro Jos e, 66n
400 Index
Torres, Joseph de, 66n
Tovey, Donald Francis, 217n, 235n
Trapido, Barbara, 249250
Treitler, Leo, 322
Trend, John, 60, 120n, 341
Troy, Charles, 177, 286n
Tyson, Alan, 4
Valabrega, Cesare, 26, 58, 62, 79n, 193, 235, 297
Valencia, 247
Valenti, Fernando, 335
Valls, Francisco, 111, 133
Vamp see syntax
Van der Meer, John Henry, 48n, 4749, 68, 70, 72n
Van Sant, Ann Jessie, 100n
Variations, 146, 311312, 321
Velasco, Domingo Antonio de, 32
Venice, 31, 63, 136, 281
Venice collection see sources
Verdi, Giuseppe, 7, 60
Verfremdung, 140, 179180, 182, 184, 188, 221, 264,
303, 326
Vienna, 56
Villanella, 266n
Villanis, Luigi, 2n, 63, 248
Vinay, Gianfranco, 63, 63n, 80, 329, 332n
Violinismo, 141, 184, 214, 286, 289
Virtuosity, 10, 41, 54, 248249, 276291, 292, 297,
335336, 376
Vittoria, Tomas Luis de, 95
Vivaldi, Antonio, 54, 132, 133, 157, 184, 198, 199,
214, 289, 323, 341n
Vlad, Roman, 63, 77n, 236
Voice leading, 100, 114, 129, 165, 193, 195, 217220,
223230, 248, 291, 294295, 377
Missing notes,, 154, 227228, 248, 291
Parallel intervals, 14, 16, 18, 20, 86, 91, 105, 138,
154, 166, 178, 187, 189, 193, 219, 223227, 229,
230, 230n, 232, 301303, 348, 354, 373
Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouet de, 97
Weber, William, 191n, 218n
Webern, Anton von, 368
Webster, James, 50, 256n
Weissenberg, Alexis, 121
Weller, Philip, 94
Wheelock, Gretchen, 76
White, Hayden, 379
Williams, Peter, 92n, 154n, 296n, 344n
Wolters, Klaus, 76
Yearsley, David, 56n
Zacharias, Christian, 24, 95, 106107, 176, 299, 333
Zappa, Frank, 62
Zelenka, Jan Dismas, 5n, 32
Zipoli, Domenico, 87, 88, 266n
Zuber, Barbara, 21, 22, 24, 76, 111112

The Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico

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THE KEYBOAD SONATAS OF DOMENI CO SCALATTI

6; there is also a repetitive syntax that is clearly at odds with the

5) bass that in some form or other

6 progression in V, is a specialized expression of this. See the beginning

1 (connoting V of V). The turn heard

, D and D, especially as found after the respective double bars. For

Osterreichische Musikzeitschrift 45/78 (1990), 38290.

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