| Domenico Scarlatti |
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| baroque composers | |
| italian opera composers | |
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| people from naples | |
| 1685 births | |
| 1757 deaths | |
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in 1738 .]] LIFE AND CAREER (Giuseppe) Domenico Scarlatti was born in Naples , Italy, the sixth of ten children and a younger brother to Pietro Filippo Scarlatti , also a musician. Most likely he first studied under his father, the composer and teacher Alessandro Scarlatti ; other composers who may have been his early teachers include Gaetano Greco , Francesco Gasparini , and Bernardo Pasquini , all of whom seem to have influenced his musical style. He became a composer and organist at the royal chapel in Naples in 1701 , and in 1704 , he revised Carlo Francesco Pollarolo 's opera ''Irene'' for performance at Naples. Soon after this his father sent him to Venice , but the four years there are a blank in the record. In 1709 he went to Rome in the service of the exiled Polish queen Marie Casimire ; while in Rome he met Thomas Roseingrave who would later lead the enthusiastic reception of the composer's Sonatas in London. Domenico was already a Harpsichord -player of eminence, and there is a story that at a trial of skill with George Frideric Handel at the palace of Cardinal Ottoboni in Rome he was adjudged perhaps superior to Handel on that instrument, although inferior on the Organ . Later in life, he was known to cross himself in veneration, when speaking of Handel's skill. Also while in Rome, Scarlatti composed several Opera s for Queen Casimira's private theatre. He was ''maestro di cappella'' at St Peter's from 1715 to 1719 , and in the latter year came to London to direct his opera ''Narciso'' at the King's Theatre . In 1720 or 1721 he went to Lisbon , where he taught music to the princess Maria Magdalena Barbara . He was at Naples again in 1725 and during a visit to Rome in 1728 he married Maria Caterina Gentili. In 1729 he went to Madrid as music master to the princess, who had married into the Spanish royal house. Maria Barbara became Queen of Spain and he remained in Spain for some twenty-five years and had five children there. After the death of his wife in 1742 he married a Spaniard, Anastasia Maxarti Ximenes. During his time in Madrid Scarlatti composed over five hundred Keyboard sonatas. It is for these works that he is best remembered today. Domenico Scarlatti died in Madrid , aged 71. His residence on Calle Leganitos is designated with a historical plaque, and his descendants still live in Madrid today. The lack of a clear picture of Scarlatti's life or personality may have obstructed the reception of his music, when a vivid image would seem to be appropriate in order to accept the sometimes demonic eccentricity of the music. On the other hand, perhaps this should free us up as listeners. Scarlatti is also featured as a secondary character in José Saramago 's nobel prize winning novel '' Baltasar And Blimunda ''. MUSIC Only a tiny fraction of this output was published in the composer's lifetime; Scarlatti himself seems to have overseen the publication in 1738 of the most famous collection, a book of 30 "Essercizi" which, surprisingly, dominate modern concert repertoires. These were rapturously received throughout Europe and were championed by the foremost English writer on music of the eighteenth century, Dr. Charles Burney . They may also have influenced J. S. Bach 's '' Goldberg Variations '', but there is little concrete evidence to support this idea. Scarlatti's influence on late-eighteenth style may have been considerable, but he has always tended to be written into music history as an "outsider". The reasons for this may be due to generalizations about epochs (Baroque/Classical) or perhaps due to nationalistic tensions: Spain is almost off the map of most art-music histories, while Italy is known as the land of opera. The mass of sonatas which were unpublished during the composer's lifetime have only appeared in print irregularly in the two and a half centuries since, and the repertoire is not well-understood today. Scarlatti has, however, attracted notable admirers, including Chopin , Brahms , Bartók , Heinrich Schenker and Vladimir Horowitz . The Russian school of pianism has always championed the sonatas. Scarlatti wrote over five hundred sonatas, all essentially one movement binary form, yet within them compressed a staggering range of musical expression and formal invention. The sonatas' technical difficulties have often caused them to be regarded as mere studies in virtuosity, but modern pianoforte technique owes much to their influence. They display a harmonic audacity, and adventurous use of Modulation (changing from one Key to another), a freshness and variety of invention and a vigorous intellectuality in thematic and structural terms which belies their "popular" tone and their apparently careless appearance on the page. Among the many achievements of Scarlatti's style, the following stick out: 1) Scarlatti was clearly influenced by Spanish folk music. His use of the Phrygian mode and other tonal inflections more or less alien to European art music is an obvious symptom of this, as is his use of extremely dissonant cluster chords and other techniques which seem to imitate the guitar. His full-bodied, sometimes tragic use of folk idioms also singles him out. Not until Bartok and his contemporaries would notated music give folk music as strident a voice as Scarlatti. 2) Scarlatti anticipated many of the formal developments which led to the so-called 'classical style' and so might with justification be described as the first classical composer. 3) However, ever difficult to pin down, Scarlatti's musical tempestuousness suggests Romanticism, while his intense formal and syntactic restlessness and irony seem to bring him close to the modernism of, say, Stravinsky. RECORDINGS Several Harpsichordist s and Pianist s have recorded Scarlatti sonatas. Scott Ross recorded all of them on harpsichord in a 34-CD set. Other harpsichordists to perform Scarlatti are Wanda Landowska , Gustav Leonhardt and Ralph Kirkpatrick , who was also a renowned Scarlatti scholar and published his own edition of the sonatas. Among famous pianists to record Scarlatti are Vladimir Horowitz, Mikhail Pletnev , Clara Haskil , András Schiff , Christian Zacharias, Konstantinos Papadakis and Ivo Pogorelich . Major contribution in the recording also is those of Anthony di Bonaventura who (according to Sheveloff) gives a new "unusual", "modern" and yet "compelling" and "startlingly convincing" experience. The record label Naxos has set up a project to record all the keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti on the piano. These discs are performed by various artists and have reached volume 7 (100 sonatas). The Dutch harpsichordist Pieter-Jan Belder (1966) is also working on a full recording of all the 555 keyboard sonatas in sequential order for the label Brilliant Classics. MEDIA
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