Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico

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T H E K E Y B OA D S O N ATA S O F D O M E N I C O S CA L AT T I
A N D E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U Y M U S I CA L S T Y L E
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 influence is difficult 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 Scarlatti’s 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 first in English on the sonatas for fifty years, is to remove the composer
from his critical ghetto (however honourable) and redefine his image. In so do-
ing it will reflect on the historiographical difficulties involved in understanding
eighteenth-century musical style.
w. dean sutc l i f f e is University Lecturer at the University of Cambridge and

a Fellow of St Catharine’s 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 first issue of which will be published in 2004.
T H E K E Y B OA D S O N ATA S O F
D O M E N I C O S CA L AT T I A N D
E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U Y
M U S I CA L S T Y L E
W . D E AN S U TCLI F F E
St Catharine’s College, Cambridge
  
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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 classification 49
Style sources 54
Influence 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 influence 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 Scarlatti’s Andantes 250
Ornamentation 256
Source matters 263
6 ‘Una genuina música 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
P E FAC E
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 influence, with the exception of a few composers of the next generation
in Spain, is difficult 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 Scarlatti’s uneasy historical position has hindered sustained musicological en-
gagement with his music, and this has a flow-on effect into other spheres of musical
life. Nevertheless, there is undoubtedly a wide gap between the general public’s
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), redefine his image, and to place him more firmly 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 fills
the gap – not just faute de mieux but also as a way of investigating how one constructs
a composer when so many issues are floating. Chapter 2 forms the focus for this,
building on aspects outlined in Chapter 1. In view of the justified 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-flung literature, in
many different languages. There is insufficient 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 figure, 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 justification for its employment in the
case of a figure like Scarlatti. It is one thing to problematize close reading when a
composer’s 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 field 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 fifty years after the last book in English to be
devoted principally to the Scarlatti sonatas, by Ralph Kirkpatrick. Coincidentally, as
I recently discovered, Kirkpatrick’s ‘systematic stylistic examination’ of the sonatas
occupied an equivalent period fifty years ago, from 1943 to 1947. I hope this is a
good omen.
The relative absence of sharpening material referred to above reflects a broader
difficulty in approaching my subject – the flat 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 specifically 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 field – a flatter 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 Avison’s concerto arrangements

in Chapter 4), coverage of some of Scarlatti’s 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 definition. 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, flamenco, even Neapolitan. The other relates to those established larger
points of stylistic reference, Baroque and Classical. In the first case there is the
difficulty 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 difficulty that have discouraged scholarly endeavour, especially
in relation to a figure 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 first 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 composer’s 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 define 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 Scarlatti’s 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 difficulty of the source situation will be evaluated through a num-
ber of case studies. Macario Santiago Kastner’s phrase ‘una genuina música 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 Scarlatti’s 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 Scarlatti’s historical position. The section entitled ‘Dialect or idiolect?’ reviews a
number of the composer’s fingerprints 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 briefly, a sonata unveils more ‘personally’
inflected melodic material. The final 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 Münster (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 (c1 = middle C) where specific 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 Scarlatti’s 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, Scarlatti’s
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), 398–417.
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 Scarlatti’s 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
S C A L AT T I T H E I N T E E S T I N G
H I S TO I C A L F I G U E 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 diffidence 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 confidence,
one especially reserved for such misfits, is that of the Interesting Historical Figure.
Thus, although the significance of the composer’s work, certainly in the realm of
the keyboard sonata, is generally agreed, just how it is significant 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 composer’s 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 influence 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
difficulty 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 fixed 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 first at the University of Auckland in March 1995 and subsequently in
shortened form at the British Musicology Conference, King’s College, London, in April 1996.
2 Joseph Kerman, Musicology (London: Fontana, 1985), 130. This represents Kerman’s summary of Allen’s findings.
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 affirming 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 fit well into any of the habits of thought
through which we could expect to arrive at some construction of his significance. 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 significant 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 reflect on
its methodologies and priorities.
The circumstances of this claim to exclusiveness are worth reviewing. In every
conceivable musicological sense, Scarlatti is a problematic figure. 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 Marı́a Bárbara as music tutor first 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 composer’s
personality. Much has been made in the literature of the composer’s alleged passion
for gambling, with Marı́a Bárbara 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 significance of the composer’s 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 figure of infinitely smaller proportions and artistic significance’
than Alessandro; The History of Music (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1928), 139. Writing in 1901,
Luigi Villanis stated: ‘We will not find in [Scarlatti] the profound musician that lived in his father’; ‘Domenico
Scarlatti’, in L’arte 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 Alessandro’s
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 Scarlatti’s 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 flow 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 composer’s 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 first 138 of the sonatas in the Kirkpatrick numbering6 were copied into V or
published by 1749, thus fixing 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 Sheveloff’s 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 definite though not completely separate layers of compositional activity’.
6 This was first contained in the ‘Catalogue of Scarlatti Sonatas; and Table of Principal Sources in Approximately
Chronological Order’ near the end of Kirkpatrick’s seminal Domenico Scarlatti (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1953), 442–56.
this. Following Kirkpatrick’s 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 reflect on Warren Dwight Allen’s ‘ideology
of progress’ that underlies much musicological discourse. The lack of any chronology
for the Domenico Scarlatti sonatas means that they cannot be fitted into the narrative
pattern whereby earlier, immature works lead to more refined 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 Mozart’s Piano Sonata in B flat,
K. 333. It was regarded as a comparatively immature and unremarkable work when
its provenance was thought to be about 1778, its significance perhaps residing in the
hints it gave of future work, but Alan Tyson’s 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 reflects 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 flattening
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 composer’s work
representing a final flowering of harpsichord style and technique. Not only are the
majority of the sonatas playable on the pianos owned by Marı́a Bárbara, 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 Queen’s copyists seem to correspond at least roughly with the
order in which the sonatas were composed.’ Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 144.
8 See ‘The Date of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in B flat, K. 333/315c: The “Linz” Sonata?’, in Musik, Edition, Interpre-
tation: Gedenkschrift Günter Henle, ed. Martin Bente (Munich: Henle, 1980), 447–54.
9 See for example David Sutherland, ‘Domenico Scarlatti and the Florentine Piano’, Early Music 23/2 (1995),
243–56, and Sheveloff, ‘Domenico Scarlatti: Tercentenary Frustrations (Part II)’, The Musical Quarterly 72/1
(1986), 90–101.
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 insufficiently 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 influence. Some have claimed that certain
sonatas amount to virtual transcriptions of flamenco or folk idioms, while others have
tried to minimize its import. Italian writers have often preferred to find 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 malagueña,
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 fire, 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 defined 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
influence, 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 firmly 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 define 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 difficult for us to hear the ethnic accents in
German music, so firmly does it constitute the mainstream of our musical experience.
Hence when trying to make something of Scarlatti’s 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 (1679–1745): 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 amplified 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 reflects 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 sufficient 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 filled and overflooded 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 now does not, and never will, deem the 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; haven’t we established new contexts for investigation, indeed
new definitions 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 ‘scientific 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
new is the consequent skirting of what Scott Burnham calls ‘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 fix 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 Scarlatti’s 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 finds 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 difficulties. Imagine, for example, what the state of play
might be in the literature on Beethoven’s symphonies or Verdi’s 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 composer’s sense
of musical argument as conducted in individual works. It takes refuge in evocation.
If we want a deeper understanding of Scarlatti’s 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 fit 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 Scarlatti’s 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 confirmed, was a reluctance on the composer’s 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 6–17
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 figure of the opening hold
the piece together. Especially notable is the overlong ascending progression of the
first half (bars 74 –173 ), 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, 155–6. 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 composer’s 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 weren’t so many of them the composer’s 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 don’t
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 find 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 Rousset’s 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 11–15 December 1985 (Nice: Société de musique ancienne de Nice, 1986), 79.
20 Cited in Eric Sams, ‘Zwei Brahms-Rätsel’, Österreichische 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 justification, but it
seems to me to be another symptom of music’s 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 first instance because it will enable
us to focus on the composer’s 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 Bach’s ‘Air on
the G string’. Only in anachronistic nineteenth-century terms can we hear the
lyricism of Bach’s 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 inflections of melodic writing –
the Lombard rhythms, grace notes, appoggiaturas, and Schleifer-type figures.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 flamenco in particular. K. 277 contains
nothing whatever on the surface that suggests this, but the sort of influence 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 figure of three notes covering the interval of a third, the first two rapidly played to act
as a decoration to the final one. The classic form of the figure is found at the beginning of bar 12, but there are
many variants to be found, for instance at bars 134 or 82–3 .
Ex. 1.2 K. 277 bars 1–40
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
inflections 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 profitably 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
first two bars express the tonic by means of neighbour-note formations, and indeed
the first strong perfect cadence does not occur until the end of the first 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 first 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 17–19)
as a minore insertion. It casts a shadow without proving too disruptive. That it does
represent a break with the fluid galant diction, however, is remarkably confirmed
at the outset of the really significant interruption. The first beat of bar 27 picks up
on precisely the pitches that began bar 17, c2 , b1 and e1 , here verticalized into a
thoroughly characteristic dissonance. It is also significant that the first 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 a1 in bar 3. Bars 25–6
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 figure 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 c2 -d2 succession in the right hand
of bar 32 suggests the same pitches as in the very first 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 283–4 , which is so remote
from any notion of galanterie – may allow the return of the opening figures, 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, from bar 34 we hear continuous melodic triplets
that are a far cry from the rather small-scale diction of the first half, but this style is
equally remote from the plain crotchets of the interruption. Materially, it takes its
cue from elements in the first 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
first 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 g2 ), 8 (f2 ), 12 (e2 ), then 18 (from d2 , with the
preceding e2 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.
rhythmic–melodic types with barely any interaction between them – galant nicety,
plain crotchets that would deny any melodic finesse,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 codified 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 finally 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 composer’s 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
291 and splits the right-hand thirds of bar 302−4 into unfolded quavers, as if uncomfortable with the nakedness
of this passage.
25 For example by Eveline Andreani, ‘Autour de la musique sacrée de Domenico Scarlatti’, in Domenico Scarlatti:
13 Recherches, 99; Francesco Degrada, ‘Tre “Lettere Amorose” di Domenico Scarlatti’, Il saggiatore musicale 4/2
(1997), 300–301; and Sebastiano Arturo Luciani, ‘Domenico Scarlatti. I: Note biografiche’, 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 15–24
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, figure, 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 first of each is an unresolved tritone. Slightly more
hidden are the parallel fifths 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 flavour of a voice in species counterpoint or a conventional filler motion
in a contrapuntal texture. Note too the staggered parallel fifths at 33–5. 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 specific 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 36–9 and 43–6.
Ex. 1.3b K. 254 bars 92–101
in his recording of the complete sonatas, Scott Ross’s version of the work is not
only soberly paced in the manner discussed before but finds a number of ways to
soften the harsh profile 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 first half.30 At bars
61–2 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 significant, 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 first-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 33–9, to create an echo effect, and adds a number of
ornaments which to me suggest a ‘civilizing influence’ (Erato: 2292 45309 2, 1989). This complete recording
was made in 1984–5, and so finished 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 minim–crotchet rhythm, then parallel fifths will result! The very fact of the new notation, however,
with the leeway in performance it allows compared to the original at bar 19, seems to signify some mollification.
staggered to begin halfway through the bar. From bar 94, though, we have one of
the composer’s 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 finally 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 flavour 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 flat 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 Scarlatti’s attitude to
counterpoint, and therefore, by implication, to the traditional musical values with
which it is associated. The composer’s tendency to abuse common practice in this
way exemplifies 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 profile of later material. As well as a simple ‘disdain’ for certain
conventions, the quality may also be defined as an unwillingness on the composer’s
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 l’oeuvre pour clavier de Domenico Scarlatti: guide de l’intégrale enregistrée 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: Große Jubiläen im Europäischen Jahr der
Musik (Kulturzentrum Beato Pietro Berno Ascona: Ausstellung 24 August–30 October 1985), second edn
(German–English) (Locarno: Pedrazzini Editions, 1985), 84.
Ex. 1.4a K. 193 bars 1–49
belong to the club. This can be seen too in the shaping of the first five-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 definitive 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 fifths. The parallel sixths of bars 10–12 and 18–20
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 flat minor
than as F Phrygian, with the left hand emphasizing the semitone of the descending
minor tetrachord B–A–G–F. The form taken by this tetrachord, with raised third
and flattened 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 hand’s
alternation between raised and lowered forms of g2 and a2 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
34–5 retreats to V–I of the tonic, E flat major. These bars almost function as an
ironic echo of the modal scale activity. Compare for instance 34–5 with 23–4:
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 –g1 , is softened to a more standard
major seventh, B–a.
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 B–E–C–F 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 37–42 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 Performer’s 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 3̂ 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 45–6 recalling the melodic
fragment of 23–4 in both pitch and rhythm.36
What is most striking about this pattern is that here the composer’s ‘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
first two phrases of the half (bars 50–65) as the composer’s version of the melismatic
formulas of cante jondo (literally ‘deep song’), specifically those that are heard before
the song proper begins. The vocal intoning of ‘Ay’ is represented in bars 50–53,
followed in 54–7 by an equivalent of the ornamental vocalizings known as salidas.37
Is the odd rhythm at bars 50–51 an attempt to capture the vocal inflections of this
style? Several concrete instances of this feature from flamenco song may suggest so.
In a toná grande sung by Pepe de la Matrona, a toná sung by Ramon Medrano and a
martinete sung by El Negro, contained in the recorded collection Magna Antologia del
cante flamenco, one finds just this treatment of the initial ‘Ay’.38 In the first 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 Scarlatti’s notation.
Whether or not these phrases in K. 193 can have such specific 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 flavour. Incredibly, the composer follows this with the exact three
bars that occurred after the original modal island: bars 72–4 are identical with 34–6.
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 371 , and is allowed
36 Note how unobtrusively the composer works in the basic cell of the opening. The neighbour-note basis of its
first beat is heard both in its original shape, in the chain of figures in 43, and in inversion at the start of bars 45
and 47. The complete rhythm of the first bar is present at bars 44, 46 and 48, now absorbed into the form of a
standard cadential closing figure.
37 Zuber, ‘Blumen’, 36, 38.
38 Magna Antologia del cante flamenco (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 significance of the common tone in this sort of situation; nineteenth-century
composers, on the other hand, tend to accentuate this detail.’ See Sheveloff, ‘Keyboard’, 366–7. The composer’s
avoidance of best voice-leading behaviour, as thus elucidated, could be read as a perfect example of ‘disdain’.
Ex. 1.4b K. 193 bars 85–101
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 first 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
G–G/E–E axis around F, as if in an attempt to mediate between the modal and
tonal. The left hand’s role is unusually clear for a vamp; it features a big unfolding
between B and D in the bass, filled 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 from the 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’
flavour; 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 flamenco song. We still have to ask what something so apparently
raw is doing in a finished 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. Specifically, 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 first 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 90–91 completely so as to shorten the endless reiteration.
These changes may be heard in the recording by Anne Queffélec, who applies a
dynamic arch shape to the vamp, fading away nearly to nothing by bar 99. This
treatment tells a familiar tale of finessing when I would argue for naked insistence.
Christian Zacharias substitutes E for E at bars 86–8 and 93–6, 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 Zuber’s (guarded) suggestion of
a seguidilla basis to the piece, with its rhythm being reminiscent of castanets,43
is not ultimately of first 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 clarification
41 Opere complete per clavicembalo di Domenico Scarlatti (Milan: Ricordi, 1906–10). K. 193 = L. 142.
42 Erato: 4509 96960 2, 1970 (Queffélec); EMI: 7 63940 2, 1979–85/1991 (Zacharias). Zacharias also alters the
Gs of bar 22 and so forth to Gs, although this might conceivably be a misreading.
43 Zuber, ‘Blumen’, 27–8. She also reports Alexandru Leahu’s belief that the similarly shaped material of K. 188
represents a malagueña.
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 , g2 and e2 , thus continuing the vamp’s 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 fluent 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 Scarlatti’s stature and significance. The following chapter reflects in
more detail on the patterns of reception of this enigmatic figure.
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
PA N O A M A
P L AC E A N D T E AT M E N T I N H I S TO Y
‘Writing about the sonatas’, says Jane Clark, is ‘a field so full of pitfalls that anyone
willing to risk an opinion, however tentative, about the form, the chronology, the
Spanish influence, 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 first com-
plete edition, by Alessandro Longo, appeared in 1906–10.3 The first 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 Kirkpatrick’s 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, 1906–10).
4 Gerstenberg, Die Klavierkompositionen Domenico Scarlattis (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1969; second reprint of first
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 Kirkpatrick’s thoughts and theories. Two subsequent,
fundamental texts, both taking issue with many of Kirkpatrick’s 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 Pestelli’s 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 Kirkpatrick’s 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 Kirkpatrick’s order was also specu-
lative. However, Kirkpatrick’s evidence was ‘hard’ while Pestelli’s was ‘soft’, a reveal-
ing distinction in terms of the development of musicology outlined in Chapter 1.
If Pestelli’s approach was flawed in principle, for example in its assumption of a linear
development of Scarlatti’s style or in its reliance on the Longo text, and certainly
debatable in its detailed realization, he nevertheless made a memorable attempt to
define 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 finally contested by Malcolm Boyd, in his 1985 book that gave relatively
equal weight to all stages and products of the composer’s career.8 By then the first
complete edition of the sonatas in the modern era had appeared, edited by Kenneth
Gilbert;9 the final 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 first 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 composer’s 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 fine 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, 1971–84), 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 Scarlatti’s

keyboard output. It is not only the lack of any firm chronology but also the elusively
standard appearance of the sonatas that makes any basic mental ordering difficult,
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 five, calling them ‘suites’ and thus aligning these
with a familiar Baroque principle of multi-movement organization. Before this, in
1864, Hans von Bülow 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 flavour 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 specific 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 first ap-
pearance in Scarlatti. He continues: ‘These arrowshafts of wit, nicely calculated to
penetrate stuffed hides, were one of the reasons why the first generation of modern
harpsichordists, well groomed, proper and enamoured of the bonbons of the res-
urrected French harpsichord repertory, were at first puzzled and uncomfortable.’14
12 Preface to Achtzehn ausgewählte Klavierstücke 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), 585–91.
14 ‘Scarlatti: 300 Years On’, The Musical Times 126/1712 (1985), 588.
Panorama 29
One wonders in fact whether Lang’s 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. Lang’s suggestion that, in the composer’s 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
‘definitive and monumental study’ of Scarlatti seems remote.17 Barring the benefi-
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.
T H E D E A T H O F H A D FAC T S
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 Scarlatti’s 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 figure. 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 specifically,
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’
identified by Pestelli as a fundamental aspect of the composer’s 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 Gerstenberg’s 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 figures as D’Anglebert, C. P. E. Bach, Chambonnières, 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.
composer’s 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 difficult for us to grasp the supreme position
of opera, in particular, in eighteenth-century musical life, when the instrumental
works of such figures 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. Scarlatti’s ‘relative obscurity is indicated by the paucity of information that
has come down to us concerning his life in Madrid’.21 Such a flat explanation would
seem to be borne out by the fact that Scarlatti’s name appears only two or three times,
always insignificantly, 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 Marı́a
Bárbara 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-
latti’s 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 Scarlatti’s
name remains unmentioned.25 This is curious yet somehow typical.
From the evidence contained in an inventory of Farinelli’s instruments and scores,
drawn up in 1783 and recently published for the first time,26 it would now appear
19 Review of Domenico Scarlatti by Ralph Kirkpatrick, Die Musikforschung 7/3 (1954), 343.
20 Verga L’Aretino Scarlatti Verdi (Milan: Bompiani, 1941), 125 and 125–6.
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”: Scarlatti’s 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 See Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 52.
26 See the Appendix to Sandro Cappelletto, La voce perduta: vita di Farinelli evirato cantore (Turin: EDT, 1995),
209–21.
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 unidentified 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 ‘flat 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 fires 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, Sebastián 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 Julián Juderı́as 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 specifically 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 (1771–3). This would reflect 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
flecks to the blank canvas, here are some additional questions and issues that have
been entertained by Scarlatti commentators.
1. The circumstances of the official 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’, 314–15. 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), 104–5.
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’, Österreichische 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 Scarlatti’s 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 flatly 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 composer’s 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 Scarlatti’s 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; Marı́a Bárbara had thus
claimed sole ownership. We should also note the later situation of the symphonist
Gaetano Brunetti (1744–98), 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 Sebastián de Albero, Antonio Soler, one Andres
Solano, or even, as Roberto Pagano fantasizes, the ghost of our composer’s 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 Alpiarça in Portugal it has mostly been assumed
that Scarlatti was constitutionally slim, but Jane Clark finds in the representation
a ‘distinctly visible tendency towards corpulence’. For her, this shows ‘the danger
of taking anything at face value with Scarlatti’.37
C E AT I V E E N V I O N M E N T
A number 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, 158–9. 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 José Carreras (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 137.
34 Scarlatti – Alessandro e Domenico: due vite in una (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1985), 459–60.
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 final sentence of Scarlatti’s dedication in the Essercizi would certainly suggest, even
allowing for hyperbole, that Marı́a Bárbara 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
communiqués reporting musical evenings in the apartments of Marı́a Bárbara before she became queen and states:
‘At these evenings Domenico Scarlatti was undoubtedly present and active.’ It is difficult 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’ Scarlatti’s originality,38 but this is no more adequate an explanation
than it is for Haydn, with whose situation Scarlatti’s 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 Haydn’s 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 How can we square the notion that Scarlatti’s 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 Scarlatti’s 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
refinement 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 Scarlatti’s 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: Fundação Calouste
Gulbenkian, 1965), xxxiii, and Degrada, ‘Lettere’, 315.
41 See W. N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley, Eighteenth-Century Spain 1700–1788: 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 1700–1808 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 67–72.
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 reflected 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 reflect 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 Scarlatti’s 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-LIFE PESONALITY
Contemplating this puzzle brings us within range of another set of speculations
concerning Domenico’s real-life personality. The consensus of opinion would offer
43 Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 120; see also 91. Kirkpatrick’s ‘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 composer’s music was ‘an antidote to Marı́a Bárbara’s 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 Ife’s term. Echoing the comments of Jane Clark, he believes that ‘human malevolence’ on the part of
Queen Isabel may explain the composer’s non-participation, pointing out that, while Farinelli’s was a crown
appointment, Scarlatti was the ‘personal servant’ of Marı́a Bárbara and Fernando. Domenico Scarlatti (Sevenoaks:
Novello, 1985), 16. Since Fernando was not Isabel Farnese’s 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 d’Egitto 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, Handel’s 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 Scarlatti’s 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 influential of these was the overinterpretation of
Scarlatti’s relationship with his father. Subsequently the patriarchal bogeyman has
stalked many accounts of Domenico’s life.52 In fact, the looming figure 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 influential. And don’t 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’,
546–7.
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, Händel e Scarlatti nella storia della musica’, in Metamorfosi
nella musica del novecento: Bach, Händel, Scarlatti (Quaderni Musica/Realtà 13), proceedings of conference in Cagliari
on 12–14 December 1985, organized by the Associazione Spaziomusica with Musica/Realtà, 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 film progresses and the ‘facts’ become fewer and fewer. In the latter
part the facts of the royal lives (of Fernando and Marı́a Bárbara) 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 difficulty –
that Scarlatti is incapable of emerging as a fully formed and independent historical
personage through non-musical data alone.
T H E PA N O A M A T A D I T I O N
If the literature has had difficulties 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 fiestas 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 flavours represents the more innocent side of the panorama tradition. After
all, isn’t 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 find 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 Domenico’s 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 five hundred verses’.58 In fact, quite specific 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
mechanism for 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 Bontempelli’s ‘metaphysical spell’ with ‘the magic realism that is
the quintessence of twentieth-century Italian art’.62 ‘Magic realism’ captures per-
fectly the alchemy of Scarlatti’s 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 fireworks. Deep bass-tones are suddenly introduced; high thirds fly off;
thirds and sixths are darted in; close arpeggios swell into monstrous bundles as they are filled 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 d’oggi 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
bourrées, pastorales, or fanfares – such is the world of Scarlatti’s 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. Bie’s 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’.
A N A LY S I S O F S O N ATA S
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 find phrase units of irregular length, such as the first five 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, 88–9.

64 For examples see Eytan Agmon, ‘Equal Division of the Octave in a Scarlatti Sonata’, In Theory Only 11/5
(1990), 1–8; Peter Barcaba, ‘Domenico Scarlatti oder die Geburtsstunde der klassischen Sonate’, Österreichische
Musikzeitschrift 45/7–8 (1990), 386–9; Downs, Classical, 52; Carl Schachter, ‘Rhythm and Linear Analysis: Aspects
of Meter’, The Music Forum 6 (1987), 45–9; 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 5/2–3 (1986), 151–85; Janet Schmalfeldt, ‘Cadential Processes: The
Evaded Cadence and the “One More Time” Technique’, Journal of Musicological Research 12/1–2 (1992), 7–10;
Panorama 39
novelty value. Carl Schachter’s discussion of K. 78, for instance, is a nice reminder of
Scarlatti’s 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 Sheveloff’s claim that Scarlatti’s style is composed of ‘an
abundance of tiny, special details’.66 Janet Schmalfeldt’s study of the use of evaded and
elided cadences in K. 492 is refreshing for another reason: the relevance of a crucial
aspect of Scarlatti’s technique is placed straightforwardly in an eighteenth-century
context, with a clear implication that the composer is ‘post-Baroque’.67
Heinrich Schenker’s analyses are born from his conviction that, ‘on the evidence
of his keyboard works alone, Domenico Scarlatti is Italy’s 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 Schenker’s 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 Czerny’s edition of two hundred sonatas, and he certainly knew the
arrangements of Tausig and Bülow, 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 Böttinger,
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 Böttinger’s view of the sonata (and Scarlatti’s style), in
Sheveloff, ‘Keyboard’, 415–29; and Sheveloff, ‘Uncertainties in Domenico Scarlatti’s Musical Language’, in
Domenico Scarlatti e il suo tempo (Chigiana 40), proceedings of conference in Siena on 2–4 September 1985,
sponsored by the Accademia Musicale Chigiana Musicologia and the Università degli Studi in conjunction with
the Società Italiana di Napoli (Florence: Olschki, 1990), 145–50.
65 Schachter, ‘Rhythm’, 48. 66 Sheveloff, ‘Keyboard’, 258.
67 Joseph Kerman’s term, used in Musicology (London: Fontana, 1985), 53.
68 Schenker, ‘Meisterwerk’, 153. For an account of Schenker’s general treatment of Scarlatti see Ian Bent, ‘Heinrich
Schenker, Chopin and Domenico Scarlatti’, Music Analysis 5/2–3 (1986), 131–49, especially 139–40.
69 Schenker, ‘Meisterwerk’, 154.
70 Schenker, ‘Meisterwerk’, 176. Compare the reaction of Sebastiano Luciani, writing a year later than Schenker:
Bülow ‘did not hold back from contaminating and weighing down . . . the airy grace of Scarlatti’s 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.
Böttinger makes the composer almost too unutterably strange for words, too
sensational, but many of his formulations are welcome – the description of Scarlatti’s
‘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 composer’s 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 difficulties around Scarlatti’s keyboard output are factual, practical and
logistical.
I M P OV I S AT I O N
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 composer’s fin-
gers, the other that they were carefully written to aid the technical development of
Marı́a Bárbara. Nevertheless, they both fall under the category defined 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 Scarlatti’s case. Their covert pur-
pose, I believe, is to explain an embarrassingly large output from a 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
œuvre possesses, considered thought is not one of them. This becomes explicit in
Boyd’s comparison of the sonatas and cantatas. First we read: ‘Much of the keyboard
music of the period, and Scarlatti’s perhaps more than most, sprang directly from
the composer’s fingers, 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 Annäherungen an eine Sonate’, in Musik-Konzepte 47 (1986), 80.

73 Böttinger, ‘Annäherungen’, 75 (‘Die Kunst des unreinen Satzes’); the concept is amplified from 75 to 92, and I
return to it especially in Chapter 5 of this study. The phrase itself, playing on Schenker’s ‘Der freie Satz’, means
unclean or impure composition.
74 Böttinger, ‘Annäherungen’, 101.
75 I translate Kathleen Dale’s 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
Pestelli’s 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 Scarlatti’s, 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 fine
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 confidence of a style in which . . . tonality was so secure’.78 Partly
because of such confidence, 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.
P E DAG O G Y
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 amateur’s 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 Scarlatti’s Cantate da camera and their Connexions with Rome’, in Händel e gli Scarlatti a Roma,
proceedings of conference in Rome on 12–14 June 1985, ed. Nino Pirotta and Agostino Ziino (Florence:
Olschki, 1987), 258–9.
77 An extreme version of this claim may be found in Chambure, Catalogue, 9–10.
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 difficulty 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
doll’s house of domestic confinement next to the ‘man’s world’ of public genres like
opera and symphony.81 Even at a higher level of technical proficiency, after all, many
eighteenth-century keyboard composers were associated with distinguished female
protagonists: Scarlatti with Marı́a Bárbara, 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 proficiency – scales, arpeggios, oc-
taves, leaps, repeated notes and so forth. In the course of this pedagogical exposition
he notes Scarlatti’s 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 Keller’s 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 Bülow, Klavierstücke, i; see also Longo, Preface to Opere complete per clavicembalo di Domenico
Scarlatti, [i]. Note too how the work of Klaus Heimes on Scarlatti’s 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 Soler’s Keyboard Sonatas’ (M. Mus. treatise, University of
South Africa, 1965), 55–100; and ‘Carlos Seixas’s Keyboard Sonatas: The Question of Domenico Scarlatti’s
Influence’, Bracara Augusta 28 (1974), 453–67.
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 satisfies 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
C H O N O L O G Y
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 confident of his chronology. All the standard parts of the mas-
ter narrative87 can thus take their place, in the ‘conspicuous stylistic development . . .
from the flashy and relatively youthful sonatas of [V 1749] and a few already copied
out in [V 1742] 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 Kirkpatrick’s 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 Kirkpatrick’s chronological claims. He believes there is a good deal of stylistic
evidence to support Kirkpatrick’s ‘ “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 Scarlatti’s 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, Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphony
and the Idea of Classical Style: Through-Composition and Cyclic Integration in his Instrumental Music (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), 335–47. 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 Sheveloff’s 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.
the other hand, he finds 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 specific, 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
reflection of the composer’s various ‘creative periods’?
Among those who believe that the groupings reflect 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 fiery red to a flourishing 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 quantifiable
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 confirm this. The majority of these
sonatas are so distinctive texturally, topically and even, it would appear, aesthetically,
compared with the rest of Scarlatti’s output, that it is difficult 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, 160–61.

92 Gilbert, ‘Périple scarlattien’, in Musiques Signes Images – Liber amicorum François Lesure, ed. Joël-Marie Fauquet
(Geneva: Minkoff, 1988), 132.
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 stylistic–textural group.
See Sheveloff, ‘Frustrations II’, 99–101. 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. 266–355) 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 biografie, vol. 6,
ed. Alberto Basso (Turin: UTET, 1988), 635.
Panorama 45
composer’s 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 1752–7 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 final 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 études d’exécution 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 Dale’s 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 Sheveloff’s 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 Sheveloff–fortepiano axis has been David Sutherland, who has
reinterpreted existing evidence to suggest that Scarlatti was ‘the piano’s first great
advocate’.100 He notes that Scarlatti must have tried Cristofori’s 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
Cristofori’s work. This does indeed seem so likely that our familiar modal verb
hardly seems necessary. He also observes that ‘the diffusion of Cristofori’s pianos . . .
is largely congruent with the geography of Scarlatti’s career, suggesting that Scarlatti
95 ‘Hypothèse à propos de l’ordre des sonates dans les manuscrits vénitiens’, in Domenico Scarlatti: 13 Recherches,
48–9.
96 ‘Hours with Domenico Scarlatti’, Music and Letters 22/2 (1941), 115. Note that this was written in 1941, before
Kirkpatrick’s ‘chronology’ destroyed such enviable possibilities of innocence.
97 First suggested in Sheveloff, ‘Keyboard’, 319–41 and 357, then presented more definitively in Sheveloff,
‘Frustrations II’, 90–101. He notes that only seventy-three sonatas lie beyond the range of the Queen’s
pianos.
98 For example Alberto Basso, notes to recording by Christophe Rousset (Decca: 458 165 2, 1998), and Gilbert,
‘Périple’.
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 first published keyboard works specifically designated for the fortepiano, the
twelve sonatas by Lodovico Giustini of 1732, were dedicated to the Infante Don
Antonio of Portugal, brother of King João V. We should also note the title given
to the extraordinary works of Scarlatti’s 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 specific works of the eighteenth-century keyboard
repertoire – often within the œuvre of a single composer – to specific 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 (1986–7), 10, 12. It seems most unlikely that the phrase ‘o piano forte’ was
added later, a point agreed by Powell, Antonio Baciero and Genoveva Gálvez; 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 Pérez Mirabal’s 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), 65–6; 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
g3 , 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 five-octave range (G1 to g3 ), notes: ‘If
we accept . . . that not all Domenico Scarlatti’s 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 Boyd–Carreras, Spain, 185n.
104 Pagano, Vite, 173.
105 See Bengt Johnsson, Preface to Domenico Scarlatti: Ausgewählte Klaviersonaten, vol. 1 (Munich: Henle, 1985), vi,
and Rafael Puyana, ‘Influencias ibéricas y aspectos por investigar en la obra para clave de Domenico Scarlatti’,
in España en la música de Occidente, vol. 2, proceedings of conference in Salamanca on 29 October–5 November
1985, ed. Emilio Casares Rodicio, Ismael Fernández de la Cuesta and José López-Calo (Madrid: Instituto
Nacional de las Artes Escénicas y de la Música, 1987), 56. Note also the arguments in favour of Marı́a Bárbara’s
likely early ownership of pianos in Michael Cole, The Pianoforte in the Classical Era (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1998), 15–17.
106 For recent examples see: A. Peter Brown, Joseph Haydn’s Keyboard Music: Sources and Style (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1986), especially 160–71, including a list of ‘preferred’ instruments for particular sonatas; László
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, Haydn’s Keyboard Music: Studies in Performance Practice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 1–32.
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 Albero’s 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 difficult to imagine any keyboard composer, including
Scarlatti, schizophrenically conceiving first 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 first 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
Kirkpatrick–harpsichord axis. Frederick Hammond, for example, has recently writ-
ten: ‘Scarlatti might have conceived a few monochromatic 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 first part of this sentiment rests on Kirkpatrick’s 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 Pagano–Boyd, Grove, 403.
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 Queen’s instruments drawn up in 1758 has been used as the
basis for most discussion of Scarlatti’s 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 piano’s accompanying role (reinforced by
an appeal to ‘Farinelli’s 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 Queen’s inventory and which could only have been used for
accompanying.115 The recent publication of the Farinelli inventory confirms this
claim that the accompanying instrument was a harpsichord.116
Van der Meer’s new chronology suggests that the composition of the sonatas was
spread over most of Scarlatti’s 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
flaw; van der Meer does not so much as acknowledge the very many writings that
point up the clear weaknesses in Kirkpatrick’s 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 (Sheveloff’s
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’, 342–51.
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 Sheveloff’s 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 efficient 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 e3 , presumably in the manner of an
ossia. It would seem as if d3 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 Scarlatti’s writing seemed flatly 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 don’t play him. If only both sides would play him
at all . . . !’121
S T Y L E C L A S S I F I CAT I O N
Albert Einstein’s maxim that ‘the secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your
sources’ would seem to apply particularly well to Domenico Scarlatti. Two corollaries
of this have already been stressed: the composer’s 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 c3 in the Essercizi may represent ‘cautionary editing’;
Sheveloff, ‘Keyboard’, 327.
120 The circumstances of this publication are explained more fully below on pp. 69–70.
121 Keller, Meister, 37–8.
of the most distinguished victims of a musicological malaise about mid-eighteenth-

century music, which is treated from another angle in James Webster’s study of
Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphony. Whereas Haydn has suffered from inadequate critical
apparatus with respect to the first half of his output, all Scarlatti’s 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 difficulties of style
classification 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 fit. 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 edifice of Classicism, so tightly defined and entrenched in its
stylistic and aesthetic values, has made it very difficult 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 difficulty on the other side
of the edifice, although not one that is chronologically so fixed. 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
specific 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 flatten out in the same way; it has too charged a history.
Nevertheless, the persistence of the two terms testifies 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, Haydn’s ‘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 democratic–bourgeois 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 classifica-
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 composer’s work, and more gener-
ally his indebtedness to native traditions. One of the central strands of Pestelli’s book
details Scarlatti’s war against the modern galant style, one which is finally openly
declared in the many of the alleged ‘late’ works; Scarlatti’s 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 final 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 figures, 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, confident 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 See Pestelli, Sonate, 259–63.
126 These include Lang, Rosen (for whom the sonatas provide ‘the first significant examples of [the] new dramatic
style’), Alexander Silbiger (‘Scarlatti’s spirited buffo style’) and Daniel K. L. Chua (who cites a passage of reiterated
figures from K. 521 to illustrate how cadential forces generate ‘the energy of the Classical language’). Lang,
‘300 Years’, 587–8; Rosen, Classical, 43; Silbiger, ‘Scarlatti Borrowings in Handel’s 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 reflect 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 insufficient
simply to align them with older historical ways; in a similar manner to the panoramic
prose exemplified 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 first composer to embody
the modern spirit, ‘the first who dared give way to fancy in his compositions’.
Theodor Adorno’s definition of what ‘modern’ meant for Bach’s 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 definition 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, Pérotin and the early
127 Cited in Kate Eckersley, notes to recording (‘Love’s 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 Ältere Geschichte bis um 1750 (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 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 first difficult
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 prefigured Scarlatti’s
adoption by the Italian Futurist movement, which found in him just the image of
unyielding speed, elemental rhythm and ‘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 composer’s 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 João V, the Portuguese writer Jose
Saramago includes the personage of Domenico Scarlatti. In tandem with the main
‘official’ 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 flying machine, known as the passarola, to which Scarlatti lends his enthusiastic
support. ‘If Padre Bartolemeu’s Passarola were ever to fly, 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: 1685–1935’, The Monthly Musical Record 65/770 (1935), 177.
131 See Pestelli, Sonate, 32–3.
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: ‘I’ve just started working with two pieces of music by Scarlatti . . .
and I find 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 Scarlatti’s roots in the
past, in search of influences 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 ‘refined 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 specific aspects of the Neapolitan scene.
One might recall Burney’s story of the Neapolitan violinists who amazed Corelli
with their easy, brilliant sight-reading of passages he found very difficult;137 note also
this description of seventeenth-century Neapolitan singing style from J.-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 Scarlatti’s 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’, 310–11 (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 11–14 April 1985,
ed. Domenico Antonio D’Alessandro and Agostino Ziino (Rome: Edizioni Torre d’Orfeo, 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, 85–7 (Durante); Michael Talbot, ‘Modal Shifts in
the Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti’, in Domenico Scarlatti e il suo tempo, 33–4 (Vivaldi); Pestelli, Sonate, 67–86,
and Pestelli, ‘Bach, Handel, D. Scarlatti and the Toccata of the Late Baroque’, in Tercentenary Essays, 277–91
(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’, 84–5. 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 flight. 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 influence 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 difficult to see the logical connection they all make.140 Why did
other well-schooled composers, of Scarlatti’s 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 Bouchard’s description of
Neapolitan song; if this bears on Scarlatti’s style, it will be because the composer had
an ear open for it. Leonard B. Meyer’s words on the nature of influence will prove
germane here. They are crucial to situating all aspects of Scarlatti’s style, above all
the vexed matter of Iberian influence.
The nature of influence, like that of creativity, has been misunderstood because emphasis
on the source of influence 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 transform that source into a cause, as though the composer’s
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 influenced, or they might have been affected in quite
different ways.141
INFLUENCE
Turning the telescope in the other direction, to try to determine the extent of
Scarlatti’s influence 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 influence provided by the com-
poser’s ‘modernism’, we have great difficulty in making strong connections. This
difficulty once more serves the cause of Scarlatti’s ‘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 composer’s writing). Ife, Scarlatti, 19; Andreani, ‘Sacrée’, 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, 205–23.
143 This is examined in Richard Newton, ‘The English Cult of Domenico Scarlatti’, Music and Letters 20/2 (1939),
138–56. Linton E. Powell looks to possible influence on a subsequent generation of Spanish keyboard composers
in ‘The Sonatas of Manuel Blasco de Nebra and Joaquı́n Montero’, The Music Review 41/3 (1980), 197–206.
‘isolationists’ among the critical community, who maintain that the composer did
not influence the wider course of music history.144
Uppermost in the sights of the stylistic ‘assimilationists’,145 on the other hand,
has been the edifice 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 Scarlatti’s
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
Marı́a Bárbara were cousins.146 Figures who may well have been involved in the
Viennese promulgation of Scarlatti’s keyboard music include l’Augier, Metastasio
and Porpora.147 A firmer logistical link is Giuseppe Scarlatti, our composer’s nephew.
It is generally assumed that Giuseppe visited his uncle in Spain before 1755, possibly
as a result of the performance of his opera L’Impostore 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 influ-
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 influence. The composer who succeeded Beethoven as axial point of the musical
universe, Mozart, is omnipresent in Pestelli’s 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 Scarlatti’s influence 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 composer’s 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), 224–35.
145 I borrow the concept and terminology of isolationism vs. assimilationism from Daniel M. Grimley,
‘Peripheralism, Acculturation and Image in Fin-de-Siècle 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 frühen Klaviersonaten’, Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 47 (1999), 96–7.
148 See Seunghyun Choi, ‘Newly Found Eighteenth[-]Century Manuscripts of Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonatas
and their Relationship to Other Eighteenth[-] and Early Nineteenth[-]Century Sources’ (Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Wisconsin, 1974), 108–12.
149 See Philip Radcliffe, ‘The Scarlattis: (ii): Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757)’, 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 Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, fifth edn, vol. 7, ed. Eric Blom
(London: Macmillan, 1954), 896.
150 See for example Bülow, Klavierstücke, 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
Mozart’s 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
influence.152 Quite often, though, the attribute ‘Scarlattian’ amounts to no more
than a flavour of rapidity and agility. Any links between Haydn and Scarlatti, as
already proposed in the first chapter, are more a question of creative mentality than
coincidences of material or texture.
N AT I O N A L I S M I
An element hinted at in the stylistic classifications 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 fulfil 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
152 Eric Blom claimed a ‘strong influence of Scarlatti’s spare keyboard style on that of Haydn’ and László Somfai
believes that such works as Haydn’s Sonatas Nos. 42 in G and 50 in D show a Scarlattian influence. 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
1732–1765 (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 Sinfield has called ‘the
difficulty 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 Scarlatti’s style is less varied and less flexible
than that of the ‘German masters’, a conclusion that is difficult 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 Blom’s review of Cesare
Valabrega’s book on Scarlatti:
The author is not often betrayed by a Latin hankering after fine phrases into such false
metaphors as ‘l’opulent[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 d’oeuvre accompanied
by the finest 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-confidence 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 specific references, since all attributions may be found almost anywhere with great ease. The
influence of the Italian novelist Gabriele D’Annunzio, 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 fixing the Scarlattian image once and for all as implying ‘health, joy, strength, brightness,
latinità, mediterraneità’. See Pestelli, Sonate, 31.
154 Alan Sinfield, ‘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 d’oeuvres’. ‘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, flimsy 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
music’s 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 specific 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 superficiality and flim-
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 first chapter the attempts to
downplay the fact that most of the sonatas are fast. The emphasis on the composer’s
roots in the world of Renaissance polyphony – the perceived mainstream of 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 Fauré
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 fighting 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. 145–7. 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 goût sûr, 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 ‘Cat’s 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: ‘Scarlatti’s rhythmic inventiveness is as inexhaustible as it is refined, 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
Scarlatti’s actual syntax, the elisions, the vamps, the patterns that fail to complete
themselves? It is no accident that the vamp itself (briefly defined 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. Scarlatti’s 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 Scarlatti’s sonatas that can be
difficult for us to cope with, given our immersion in German musical manners. This
is a certain relentlessness, as identified 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 identifies a strand that has nothing to do with
163 Cited in Pagano–Boyd, Grove, 406.

164 Notes to recording by Anne Queffélec (Erato: 4509 96960 2, 1970), 10. 165 Trend, Falla, 149.
166 Gray, History, 140. Compare Pierre Hantaı̈’s much more recent comment that ‘a certain jarring harshness’
accompanies the ‘gaiety that has so often been emphasized in Scarlatti’s work’. Notes to recording by Pierre
Hantaı̈ (Astrée Naı̈ve: 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. Gray’s charge of ‘excess’ also
represents a welcome delivery from Latin sweetness and light.
N AT I O N A L I S M 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
Scarlatti’s two hundred and fiftieth 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-
fication 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 Longo’s edition: ‘The duty to present to the musical world a complete
critical edition of Scarlatti’s 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 Bülow, so scoring a nationalistic point for the more ‘univer-
sal’ culture. Indeed, Dent’s statement is not without its own element of nationalist
preening; it also fits 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 diffident, 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 Scarlatti’s ‘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 sufficient cause for the ‘cult’ in
its own right.
Spaniard in its midst. This has been fuelled by the too easy assumption, following
Kirkpatrick, that Scarlatti’s 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 classification – so
it can be argued that these traditions have retained much of their force up to the
present.
The manner in which Scarlatti was finally embraced in twentieth-century Italy has
been the subject of two compelling discussions by Piero Santi and Giorgio Pestelli,
both of which concentrate specifically on the nationalist (which also means Fascist)
element.171 The composer’s reclamation also coincided, of course, with a modernist
disparagement of Romantic style, hence the particular significance 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 specifically 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 Scarlatti’s ‘energetic
musical laughter’ with the French harpsichord art of Couperin and Rameau, which
was defined 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 Scarlatti’s musical lines.173 The healthy body
of Scarlattian art was also unaffected by any Spanish clothing: ‘It doesn’t matter if
[he] spent a number of years at court in Spain and Portugal; his creative spirit, even if
breathing the fickle vapours of the Spanish guitar, remains essentially Italian and free
from any deep ethnic influence.’ 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. Scarlatti’s 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 Zappa’s album Tinsel Town
Rebellion, containing the repeated acclamation ‘Let’s 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 first half of the eighteenth century in our Italy’. His music conjured up clear
skies, sweet waters, the pure joy given by meadows in flower and ‘the interior joy
171 Santi, ‘Nazionalismi’. Pestelli, Sonate, Introduction/II, ‘Il mito di Domenico Scarlatti nella cultura italiana del
’900’, 25–56.
172 Pestelli, Sonate, 39. 173 Valabrega, Clavicembalista, 97–8 and 99.
174 Valabrega, Clavicembalista, 88 and 89–90.
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 flower; it fills 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 Mann’s 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 Casella’s 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 Vinay’s description of the fourth of the five movements (‘Pastorale’) as a
celebration of the Italian character of Scarlatti’s art, of the ‘deep ties between certain
Scarlattian melodic inflections and Italian popular song’,179 misses the point – that
the whole piece does this cultural work. It is Italianized and picturesque, its syntax
fitting 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 flavour. The
only real candidate, K. 450, which Clark has recently classified 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, 233–4. To this list, which the author
acknowledges is incomplete, I would suggest the following additions, in order of the five movements: I – the
countersubject of K. 41 (which Gianfranco Vinay misidentifies as a distortion of K. 257; ‘Le sonate di Domenico
Scarlatti nell’elaborazione 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 portée de l’influence andalouse chez Scarlatti’, in Domenico Scarlatti: 13 Recherches, 66–7.
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, Kirkpatrick’s system being
given first 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 Kirkpatrick’s fundamental book appeared until 1984.
There are, however, more fine-grained instances of appropriation. The emphasis
by Italian scholars on Scarlatti’s strong roots in the past, if not simply reflecting a more
intimate knowledge of the repertory, may (as already proposed) reflect this tendency.
After all, Casella in Scarlattiana chose to incorporate several of the plainly ‘archaic’ trio
sonatas (K. 81, 89, 90), so remote from any notions of ‘Scarlattian style’, in preference
to works that might have disturbed his stylistic picture.182 Pestelli’s assertion of the
‘general conservatism of [Scarlatti’s] work’ can be understood in this way too.183
Nevertheless, Pestelli’s 1967 book could hardly be accused of ignoring the Iberian
flavours or failing to deal with their implications, since they feature fully in the
discussion; but at a structural level his classification 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
deflecting 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 composer’s
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 significant 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.
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 José 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 difficulties 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

Scarlatti’s 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 Handel’s oratorios, or the loss of all
trace in Germany of Bach’s 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 Boyd’s 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, influence. (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 João 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 influence and were thus regarded as having
185 ‘Musicology in Spain (1980–1989)’, Acta Musicologica 62/2–3 (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 field 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 escénica, 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 Xoán 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 Scarlatti’s influence 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 specifically culturally
188 See for example Álvaro José Torrente, ‘The Sacred Villancico in Early Eighteenth-Century Spain: The Reper-
tory of Salamanca Cathedral’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1997), ix–x, and also Torrente, ‘A
Critical Approach to the Musical Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Spanish Music’ (Cambridge: unpub-
lished, 1995), especially 1–18.
189 This view is represented in Mary Neal Hamilton, Music in Eighteenth[-]Century Spain (New York: Da Capo
Press, 1971; reprint of first edn [Urbana, Illinois, 1937]), 100.
190 See Javier Herrero, Los orı́genes del pensamiento reaccionario español (Madrid: Editorial Cuadernos para el Diálogo,
1971), 63.
191 See Torrente, ‘Villancico’, 6n., and Carreras, ‘From Literes to Nebra: Spanish Dramatic Music between Tradition
and Modernity’, in Boyd–Carreras, Spain, 7–16. In the context of the villancico, Torrente also describes Durón,
Literes and Torres as ‘protagonists’ in the introduction of Italian operatic conventions; ‘Italianate Sections in the
Villancicos of the Royal Chapel, 1700–40’, 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 Boyd–Carreras, 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
Kastner’s 1989 article, ‘Repensando Scarlatti’, a sustained exercise in scepticism about
all the received wisdom on the composer. He refutes the image of technical novelty
and with it Scarlatti’s assumed leadership of a new keyboard school, pointing to the
example of K. 61, ‘which shows many figurations deriving from the toccatas of [his
father] Alessandro’.195 Scarlatti’s possible influence on the native Iberians Soler, Seixas
and Albero is regarded as insignificant. More important for our current purposes,
however, are Kastner’s intimations about the true essentials of Iberian musical feeling.
Thus he claims of Scarlatti: ‘When the southern Italian appears to be moved or fiery,
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 definitively Spanish
are also found in the works of Vicente Rodrı́guez (1690–1760), 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, grew up, 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 Águeda Pedrero-Encabo of Scarlatti’s Essercizi,
published in 1739, and the thirty sonatas of Rodrı́guez, 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 influenced 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 author’s 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
Kastner’s statement would appear not to hold?
196 Kastner, ‘Repensando’, 137.
197 Kastner, ‘Repensando’, 154. A different sort of scepticism was evident in Roberto Gerhard’s 1954 BBC radio
talks, ‘The Heritage of Spain’. Gerhard did not deny the ‘Spanishness’ of Scarlatti, but felt it was ‘a flavour, a
peculiar accent’ rather than consisting of direct incorporation of Spanish/flamenco 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
Scarlatti’s 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 Kastner’s
review and implicitly in Pedrero-Encabo’s account of influence. Eternal vigilance
is after all an indispensable quality for all Scarlattian research in particular. When
it comes to the vexed question of Iberian influence, 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 figure 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 field of Scarlatti reception, what has not happened is at least as significant 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 Meer’s 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 Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas is not just
a question of national essences, but has a historical dimension too:
Ironic at first 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
influence on Spanish music and its debilitating effects on the native product, themselves
looked to Scarlatti as mentor and exemplar.201
EVIDENCE 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 significant 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 benefitting from any
198 ‘Los 30 Essercizi de Domenico Scarlatti y las 30 Tocatas de Vicente Rodrı́guez: paralelismos y divergencias’,
Revista de musicologı́a 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 Ife–Truby, 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 flecks 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 finds 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 Pagano’s 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. (Scarlatti’s vocal abilities have been confirmed 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 find out somewhat more about several major
breaks from the composer’s 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 nuncio’s letter, Scarlatti went to Rome to
recover his health, while we know that he married his first wife in Rome in May
1728. Here is an example of more meaning less, since speculation may now begin
concerning the composer’s 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 Marı́a Bárbara was married to
Prince Fernando of Spain.
This information is contained in the preface to the facsimile edition of the Libro di
tocate, briefly 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 ramifications 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
(1719–1727)’, Preface to facsimile edn, Libro di tocate per cembalo: Domenico Scarlatti (Lisbon: Instituto Nacional
de Investigação Cientı́fica, 1991), 9–10. See also Aurora Scotti, ‘L’Accademia degli Arcadi in Roma e i suoi
rapporti con la cultura portoghese nel primo ventennio del 1700’, Bracara Augusta 27 (1973), 115–30. 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 Doderer’s 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, 354–62.
204 See Edward Corp, ‘Music at the Stuart Court at Urbino, 1717–18’, Music and Letters 81/3 (2000), 351–63.
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 confirmed. (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 finally emerged
in the recent past (such as the copies of 189 works at Zaragoza208 ), a number of
‘new’ sonatas have been found attributed to Scarlatti. Some, such as the two sonatas
held at the Real Conservatorio Superior de Música in Madrid, the four found in
Montserrat and the Sonata published by Rosario Álvarez,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 Scarlatti’s 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 find, since there are few copies of sonatas in
Italy dating from the first half of the eighteenth century. Furthermore, the sonatas,
206 Sheveloff, ‘Frustrations I’, 418–19. The sonata is found in the Fitzwilliam Museum at MU MUS 148 (formerly
32 F 13).
207 Boyd, notes to recording by Mayako Soné (Erato: 4509 94806 2, 1994), 6; van der Meer, ‘Keyboard’, 137.
208 Reported in José V. Gonzalez Vallé, ‘Fondos de música de tecla de Domenico Scarlatti conservados en el archivo
capitular de Zaragoza’, Anuario musical 45 (1990), 103–16. Note the fact that the copy of K. 206 carries the
date 1752. If this reflects 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 first sonata of P V,
dated 1752, and the first sonata of V III, dated 1753.
209 The Madrid sonatas are published as Appendix III in Boyd, Master, 240–52; Bengt Johnsson (ed.), ‘Montserrat
Sonatas’ Nos. 1–4, in Domenico Scarlatti: Ausgewählte Klaviersonaten, vol. 1, 81–90; Rosario Álvarez, ‘Una nueva
sonata atribuida a Domenico Scarlatti’, Revista de musicologı́a 11/3 (1988), 883–93.
210 Antonio Baciero (ed.), ‘Valladolid Sonatas’ Nos. 1–3, in Nueva biblioteca española de música de teclado, vol. 3
(Madrid: Union Musical Española, 1978), 37–50, and Marı́a A. Ester-Sala, ‘Dos sonatas de Domenico Scarlatti:
un tema abierto’, Revista de musicologı́a 12/2 (1989), 589–95 (sonatas reproduced in facsimile on 591–4).
211 In addition, under the category of ‘Libri Differenti’ we find 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 Scarlatti’s 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 first 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. 1–30, 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 find
something for him to have done during the now yawning gap of 1727–9. 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 Pont’s theory that K. 63 represents a written record of Scarlatti’s 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 d2 to D in even triplet quavers from the first 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 fill in the bar. A good
example may be found in the final bars of the Giustini movement given as Ex. 3.2a
in the following chapter. (Where it does exist, as in the final flourishes 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 find 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, exemplifies Scarlatti’s 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’, Göttinger Händel-Beiträge 4 (1991),
232–47, especially 243–4.
the composer’s dedication to João 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 first importance has been the publication in 1985 of an edition by
Francesco Degrada of the comic intermezzo La Dirindina. The first 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 Scarlatti’s 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 work’s construction, and thus implicates both men more seriously in
an organized satirical attack’.217 In addition, there is the unusual note found on the
final 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
profit by the scandal and sell some copies of the score.218 The work seems finally
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
flatter and support the established order’.219 Indeed it would appear surprising, but
then it is precisely such values that seem to emerge from the composer’s keyboard
music.
215 ‘These are Compositions born under your Majesty’s 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 Meer’s 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
Marı́a Bárbara, 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 Scarlatti’s 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.
Panorama 73
Among other discoveries, the most intriguing are more letters from Portugal, this
time from the secretary to João V, Alexandro de Gusmão. In one of these he indicates
that the famous Catalan oboist Juan Baptista Plà had come to Lisbon in 1747 on
Scarlatti’s recommendation. The significance of this becomes apparent in a letter of
the same year, in which Gusmão writes that new and ‘piquant’ Scarlatti sonatas had
arrived and that he had heard them played in his own house in a way that pleased Plà –
even though the latter had heard them played by the composer himself.220 This is
the nearest thing we now have to a confirmation that Scarlatti performed publicly at
court in Madrid (question nine of our earlier list of specific uncertainties), unless we
are rather perversely to conjecture that Plà 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 Marı́a 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 final years is the memorial to the composer’s will, published by Teresa
Fernández Talaya in 1998. The goods inventoried in the two additions show that
Scarlatti had enjoyed a very comfortable position; among them we find reference to
a ‘clavicordio’, valued at 3,000 reales. The other significant musical news contained
is that there were two keyboard instruments in Scarlatti’s house that belonged to the
Queen; these were returned along with various scores on the composer’s 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 Kirkpatrick’s 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 composer’s 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’, 78–9.

221 See ‘Domenico Scarlatti and his Son Alexandro’s Inheritance’, Music and Letters 69/1 (1988), 23–9.
222 ‘Memoria con los últimas voluntades de Domenico Scarlatti, músico de cámara de la reina Marı́a Bárbara de
Braganza’, Revista de musicologı́a 21/1 (1998), 162.
223 Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 102–3.
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 Scarlatti’s 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 first
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 composer’s 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 composer’s 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 difficulty 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.
Scarlatti’s 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

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 Scarlatti’s 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, superficial, 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 find in Mozart’s dedication to Haydn of the six string quartets of 1782–5). 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
João 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 difficult to execute and that the
works are not very ‘varied’ in style. Even the final 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 composer’s behalf, is: don’t worry, be happy.
It is in these terms first of all that we must grapple with the preface – as a public
‘staging’ of the figure 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 composer’s 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 Scarlatti’s 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] Scarlatti’s 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), 426–31.
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 Kirby’s 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 Burney’s claim that the composer knowingly broke
the rules, from a position of strength, as it were; he observes the modification of
‘Scherzo’, the playful element so striking in the composer’s music, by ‘ingegnoso’,
which makes it clear that ‘naive cheerfulness’ is not implied. In short, Scarlatti is
a ‘reflexive’ composer.229 This reading supports the earlier assertion of Scarlatti’s
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 reflects 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
confirms Scarlatti’s lack of ‘spiritual depth and universal significance’ when compared
to Bach. For Philip Downs, Scarlatti’s 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 Scarlatti’s 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), 165–6; Wheelock, Haydn’s Ingenious
Jesting with Art: Contexts of Musical Wit and Humor (New York: Schirmer, 1992), 18; Zuber, ‘Blumen’, 18–19;
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 Scarlatti’s ‘seriousness’, we might also consider the
claim of Robert Marshall that the Goldberg Variations were influenced 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. Scarlatti’s denial of ‘profound learning’ should surely be taken in the spirit
which Rosen finds in the ‘ingenious jesting’ of Haydn’s 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 fluency, if one will, of the
technical–musical 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 Händen (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), 348–9. 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.
3
H E T E O G L O S S I A
A N O P E N I N V I TAT I O N TO T H E E A : TO P I C A N D G E N E
If Scarlatti had a genius for leaving few traces in life, he showed the same talent
in his work. We have already reviewed the difficulties of classifying his style in
the large, issuing both from the broader historiographical problems associated with
eighteenth-century music and from the composer’s own anomalous position within
such a system. On a more intimate scale too the details of Scarlatti’s language are
difficult to fix. 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 influences – 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 classification. If Scarlatti’s 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 difficulty has been to hold these two conflicting 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 identified 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 flesh out a panorama, especially a Spanish one, stated nevertheless
that it ‘does not find expression merely in loosely knit impressionistic program music,
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 figure who so often was
1 Mellers, Orpheus, 86. 2 Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 115.
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 from the sullying associations
of the programmatic.3 The desirability of an abstract view is evident in Degrada’s
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 purified in the nervous flow 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 figure, 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 significance.
Replacing the ‘figure’ of the Baroque is the Classical ‘topic’, a term which by
definition refers to a larger musical world, one of which it forms just a constituent, a
possibility. It is axiomatic to this study that Scarlatti’s sharp variety of musical materials
encourages us to view him in a Classical light; yet such a classification seems difficult
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 unified surface, where topics, to use Leonard
Ratner’s distinction, act as ‘types’ rather than ‘styles’.5 In other words, the topics
fill 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 1–5
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 Kirkpatrick’s remark, ‘My
Portuguese friends tell me that [K. 238] resembles a folksong from the Estremadura’,
Pestelli’s 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 classification, 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
classification 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 filled 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, ‘Influencias’, 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 113 –131 or 26–301 , 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 83 to 113 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 flourishes
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 composer’s 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 4–5 also
finds 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 figure 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 specificity
of association must be understood as essential to the works, and indeed to most of
Scarlatti’s 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 Kirkpatrick’s reservations, ‘impressionism’, as defined for Scarlatti by Donald Jay
Grout, covers these qualities quite nicely: ‘Because his sonatas absorb and transfigure
so many of the sounds and sights of the world, and because he treats texture and
harmony freely with a view to sonorous effect, Scarlatti’s 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, 249–50; Vinay, ‘Novecento’, 123.
8 See Neil D. Pennington, The Spanish Baroque Guitar, with a Transcription of De Murcia’s 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
conflicting 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 Bakhtin’s ‘heteroglossia’. The following definition 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
fiction of a unitary national language is always trying to contain the stratification, diversity and
randomness produced in the daily clash of professional, class, generational, and period utter-
ances. Existence itself is heteroglossia, a force field created in the general ceaseless Manichaean
struggle between centripetal forces, which strive to keep things together, unified, 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 Scarlatti’s
‘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 definition
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
fix our impressions in specific 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 reflects the limits and difficulties of topical identification alto-
gether (and this also applies to the classification of figures). There is always the danger
of nominalism in topical approaches; labelling a topic as such does not exhaust the
significance 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 Scarlatti’s 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 fix 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 first 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 composer’s 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 find that dance per se becomes the governing topic.
Take the case of K. 496 in E major; in 3/4 time, this has been identified 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’, 98–9.
a minuet. It seems difficult to agree with this; the basic rhythmic cells, the first-beat
triplet and the repeated-note crotchet figure, 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 flat
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 definitive 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 Copland’s El salón México, 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 82–4 with 26–8 of the present work14 ), K. 284 (compare
its opening material, with drone pedals, with bars 5–7 here), K. 413 (compare bars
9–10 with 12–13 of K. 305), or K. 372 (see bars 37–9, which are very similar to bars
5–7 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 first eleven bars are written against
the bar line, from 12 we are back on the downbeat, then 19–21 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 new initial material,
we simply hear permutations of what was heard in the latter part of the first 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 definition 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 refined reflection 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 find 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 fidelity. 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 solo–tutti divisions of the concerto and the continual presence of overt string
figurations, in such works as the third movement of Marcello’s Sonata No. 7 or
Seixas’s Sonata No. 5 (1980), bring home how subdued such manifestations are in
Scarlatti.
The composer’s 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 classifications; as we have
seen, there is another type of dance altogether that Scarlatti prefers to cultivate. The
actions of Bülow 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 significant
element is a wider statistical one: there are not many of them. João V’s appreciation
of French culture and ways, for instance, seems to be reflected 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 Scarlatti’s relationship to genres. One can see the same attributes outside
the realm of the keyboard sonatas. Magda Marx-Weber finds 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 ‘flagelli’ and
‘tremebat’ is almost entirely absent.19 Equally, the ground-bass structure found in
the first aria of the early cantata Bella rosa adorata is the only known example in all
of the composer’s 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 fifths, 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 finale 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 gentrification of the figure,
the third softening the bare fifth of the underlying model,21 which was clearly too
rude to stand by itself. Almost exactly the same process is evident in the finale of
Galuppi’s Sonata No. 6,22 in the first few bars, but here the horn fifth is avoided
altogether. It is difficult 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’, 151–2.
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 figure 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, fifth 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 56–77
Ex. 3.2b Galuppi: Sonata No. 6 bars 1–8
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
crotchet–quaver 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 figure, but the composer presents it in disembodied form. It covers the full
range of the keyboard, using all available Cs; the figure is reinvented to become a
play of rhythm and sonority. This demonstrates well the composer’s 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 figures marked ‘con dedo solo’, meaning
glissando. In the first half these figures 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 filling-in of the jumping octave by notes approximately halfway between.
See ‘Der ruhende Pan’, the interlude for strings alone from Telemann’s Overture for Four Horns, Oboes, Bassoon
and String Orchestra, F11 (1725). A very similar bass pattern is found in the slow movement of Beethoven’s
‘Pastoral’ Sonata in D major, Op. 28, testimony to the remarkable durability of such topical signals.
Ex. 3.3a Zipoli: Pastorale bars 47–56
Ex. 3.3b K. 398 bars 1–9
bitonal effect can, however, only just be glimpsed given the speed and register of the
right hand’s figures. More disconcerting than this, though, is that these ‘finger 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 Münster and Vienna
readings of the sonata, ‘Minué 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 deflects 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 sonata’s repetitive syntax removes the ‘archaic’ character
from the governing style of the material.24 This subtle conflict of means and manner
is most apparent in the reiterations of bars 41–3, and especially from halfway through
24 This is also discussed in Pedrero-Encabo, ‘Rodrı́guez’, 382.

Heteroglossia 89
Ex. 3.4 K. 263 bars 1–34
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 Scarlatti’s 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 first 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 stylistic–aesthetic 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 composer’s 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 first half. All the octave scales, rising except for the elaborated extended form at
26 Quoted in Marx-Weber, ‘Domenico Scarlattis “Miserere”-Vertonungen für die Cappella Giulia in Rom’, in Alte
Musik als ästhetische Gegenwart: Bach, Händel, Schütz, proceedings of IMS congress, Stuttgart, 1985, ed. Dietrich
Berke and Dorothee Hanemann (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 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 24–5 and 31–2, are reflections of the opening, with its rising octave followed by a
gap-filling stepwise descent. With the first such derivative, in bar 12, the initial rising
octave g1 –g2 is filled 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 133 to 161 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 e1 in the tenor at 204 that
initiates the falling linear intervallic pattern; the way the right hand curls back up
to e2 at 251 before its conclusive descent; the very prominent e1 reached in the left
hand by the jump of a third at 261 ; the corresponding right-hand shape, imitating
the left across the phrase structure, at 27–8. 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 203 ; and, very noticeably, the parallel
fourths at 262 and 332 . 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 flavour of those heard in the second bar of K. 193 (Ex. 1.4a).
In addition, from bar 20 to the end of the first 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 first
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 first half (which continues to be the case later in spite of the more
active harmonies) fits with the decorum of the opening style; after the chromatic
passage that follows the first structural cadence in III there are no chromatic notes
whatever and no attempt to inflect or shift from G major. The most current-sounding
material forms the coda from bar 343 , more open in sonority and expression than
anything previously, but even this takes its cue from the opening – the right-hand
shape at 53 –61 that formed a cadence to the opening phrase is here expanded to
articulate cadentially the whole first half.
The open fifth that starts the second half is a familiar sonority at this point of
Scarlatti’s 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 first half in a new light. The
second half-bar unit of bar 41 is now a repetition rather than being a third higher,

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
first bar, the whole of the second half is in the minor mode. The first-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 first half. The figure 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 intensifications follow. The linear intervallic pattern from bar 53 is much
higher than before. The chromatic figure from 58 is greatly intensified through its
presentation in a stretto form. From bar 64 the cadential phrases that were separated
by six bars in the first half (253 –263 and 323 –333 ) 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 flavour here, which has been tasted briefly 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 final 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 1–3. In both respects this final 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 fidelity 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 finishes 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 Williams’s comment that it looks as if it is ‘meant to be played dolce’ affirms 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, ‘Rodrı́guez’, 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 final 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 fidelity 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 find 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 fits 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 first aspect to consider is the very undramatic harmonic movement; this sonata
barely leaves its tonic. The end of the first half is more on than in the dominant,
featuring an imperfect cadence, I–V of B minor, at 313 –32. The e1 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 first
half of a minor-key work. Compare the end of the first 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 clarified 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 Bach’s Partita No. 4
in D major, we find that, for all its freedom, the texture there is much more hierar-
chically conceived; and Handel’s free contrapuntal textures are neater and less dense
than what we find in the present work.32 We must acknowledge, however, that this

32 A number of Handel’s 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 problem than Scarlatti’s. 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 flexible 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 Scarlatti’s free polyphony. In its
unsystematic texture it is, I would suggest, reminiscent of the composer’s 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
final bars or the constant use of a rhythm in conjunction with a stepwise descent.
Both seem intense 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 refinement of our
central point of enquiry. By definition 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 Scarlatti’s 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 b1 , 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 fifths 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 first 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 flighty, overcomposed or grotesque’; Sheveloff, Grove, 343.
Heteroglossia 95
plausibly sustained in an age when diatonic functionality must take first 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 reflected 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 27–9 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
nostalgia37 – but are these a product of history or are they encouraged by a similar
creative stance on the part of Scarlatti?
A L OV E - H AT E E L AT I O N S H I P ? S CA L AT T I
AND THE GALANT
The historiographical malaise that affects mid-eighteenth-century music means that
the galant style is both difficult to define and difficult to defend. Collectively we are
not quite sure what it is, but we know we don’t like it. The common image of galant
style involves mannered melodic manoeuvres, thin textures, an artificial 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, 52–3; 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), 29–30;
Puyana, ‘Influencias’, 52.
37 EMI: 7 63940 2, 1979–85/1991.
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 defined 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 refined
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 difficult 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 Mozart’s 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
Mozart’s 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 artifice and complexity in general, and the abandonment of counterpoint in
particular. Significantly, one reads frequently about the ‘thin’ textures of the galant,
while it is unknown to find disparagement of the thick textures of the older style.
Equally, while the galant is ‘short-winded’ and features too many cadences, one
does not find the older style described as long-winded. Further, the galant is defined
by its mostly melodic ‘clichés’, 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 ‘Chopin’s 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
reflection’, in contrast to ‘the socially exclusive absolutism of 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 first 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 first importance; what it speaks of is
quite different. This is why there is no necessary credibility gap between Hauer’s
‘democratic–bourgeois’ orientation and an often gracious style of delivery.
A useful recent reminder of the foundations to the galant’s bad press has been
provided by Laurence Dreyfus in his study of Bach. The author states: ‘The Enlight-
enment in the first half of the eighteenth century resulted in a kind of catastrophe
for serious musical artifice’, through ‘its naive worship of nature, facile hedonism,
uncritically affirmative 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 artifice’ we are obviously to understand above all the
decline of counterpoint. ‘Artifice’ 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 affirmative’ brings home another current difficulty with
the galant aesthetic, what Voltaire defined as its ‘seeking to please’.40 Dreyfus’s 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 one’s 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 definition 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 defined to a
great extent by its recovery of ‘serious’ technical means, above all counterpoint.42
Dreyfus’s 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 9/2–3
(1989), 90–91.
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), 243–4.
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 Debussy’s 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 clichés’. 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 Pestelli’s study of the sonatas is devoted
to disentangling Scarlatti from the style, of which we find ‘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-
nificance of Scarlatti’s connection to the galant very finely when he characterizes
it as a ‘love-hate relationship’ (attrazione–repulsione).45 The anti-pedantic orientation
of the style finds 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 Scarlatti’s
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 approach47 – tempo markings slower
than Andante barely exist in the Scarlatti sonatas. It is in any case inconceivable that
Scarlatti’s music could exist entirely outside the galant, especially when defined 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 Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and the preludes Bruyères
and La fille aux cheveux de lin.
44 Lang, ‘300 Years’, 587; Degrada, ‘Lettere’, 300; Pestelli, Sonate, 232 and 86.
45 Pestelli, Sonate, 271. 46 See Heartz, ‘Galant’, 431, and also Sheldon, ‘Galant’, 97–100.
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 ‘Latin–Catholic’ 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
firm 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 first third of the century, when the greatest castratos, such as Farinelli
and Carestini, were in their prime.50 If the example of Farinelli was influential in
Scarlatti’s 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 figures 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 304 ; and the frequent grace
notes seem to signal a sort of amorous flirtation. 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 symptom of 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 flexible and attentive to changing circumstances,
that seemed to engage directly with the listener.
This texture promotes an atmosphere where the slightest inflection registers, in
which the sighing appoggiaturas can achieve their full sensual effect. Note in partic-
ular the magical conduct of a circle of fifths in bars 11–15. The unprepared sevenths
48 Sheldon, ‘Galant’, 103. Compare Bogianckino’s 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), 116–17.
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 defined 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 intensified by a perception that
galant sensibility was confined 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 definition of the
galant, which is a style of personal inflection. It is all too easy for the contemporary
performer not to hear beyond Lang’s ‘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’ first 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 figure at 14–15. 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 galant’s 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 first 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 definition’ 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 Rosen’s citation of a passage from Sammartini’s Symphony No. 6, which
has a rather similar sprawling transitional top line, described by Rosen as ‘unbelievably ugly’. Sonata Forms (New
York: Norton, 1980), 140–41.
Heteroglossia 101
Ex. 3.5a K. 309 bars 1–51
the hiccups of its bass accompaniment and its five-bar duration. There is then some
attempt to repair the damage by gap-filling, 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 d3 to c3 to b2 . 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 filling of the previous c2 –b2 gap by the stepwise descent from a2 to d2 ,
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 figures 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 34–7, 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 57–77
typical bass affirmation of the new key leaps into the creative foreground. The clos-
ing idea also seems pointedly simple; bars 43–6 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 first and second tries, from bars 61 and 67, are less awful
than the first-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 34–7, but, with its very plainly
exposed tritone caused by the leap up to b2 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 first half, the passage seems undecided about whether it should last
for four or five 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 83–92
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 86–9 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 finales of the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony and the G
major Quartet, K. 387). We should also note that the bass at bars 86–9 seems to find
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 can’t 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. 296–355), 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 fit oddly in the wider context of the whole
œuvre. Their demeanour is introverted, the composer’s 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 inflection that should be at the core of the galant is straitjacketed. The music wears
a fixed 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 fascination56 is
being put to the test; the fascination comes from the sense that the composer may
be treading a fine 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 first heard at bars 82 –10 can easily
fascinate; it has an odd flavour, with its staggered parallel intervals of fifths 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 find 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 cliché of a refined 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 difficult to hear this merely as popular
simplicity.

56 Discussed by Diane Arbus in Diane Arbus (New York: Aperture, 1972), 13. 57 Pestelli, Sonate, 195.
58 Georges Beck calls these ‘boring implacable minims . . . without variety or vigour’. ‘Rêveries à propos de
Scarlatti’, in Musiques Signes Images – Liber amicorum François Lesure, ed. Joël-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 boredom–fascination symbiosis. There is something akin to what we find 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, defining 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 composer’s concerns with space and register that will be
explored in Chapter 6 – this is all keenly felt as narrow and confined. The diminished
seventh of bar 63 is the one expansive gesture, but it is immediately gap-filled.60 The
sonata presents a completely stratified 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 field’ 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 Scarlatti’s 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
60 This may owe something to the diminished-seventh chord outlined in the treble at 484 –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 filling-in: ‘Shouldn’t one breathe into [the bass minims] the life they are lacking by
adding some notes? One could drive a coach with five horses through the gap between treble and bass.’ Beck,
‘Rêveries’, 15.
62 EMI: 7 63940 2, 1979–85/1991.
Heteroglossia 107
momentous happening. Apart from this bar, the bass plays absolutely nothing apart
from minims.
IBEIAN INFLUENCE
It should be clear in the light of a number of earlier discussions that I believe the issue
of Iberian influence 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 influence on later Spanish art music,
whether in defining an approach to the incorporation of popular elements or whether
in suggesting a certain compositional ethos. If we accept that this influence was
practical as well as spiritual, then the ‘authentically Spanish’ becomes unknowable.
If we suppose for a moment that nothing about Scarlatti’s 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 Scarlatti’s ‘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 first instance a question of tradition, of
cultural determination, rather than one of essence. Furthermore, our impressions of
Spanishness derive in the first instance from its embodiment in art music, even for
those who have direct experience of, say, flamenco guitar and vocal performances.
This is because a natural filtering 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 ‘composer’s 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 filtered 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 Hammond’s remark that ‘until we know more about eighteenth-century Iberian folk music, detailed
documentation of its influence 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 influence.
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 Europe’s
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 Ibéria, 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, Xoán 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 define what is “artificial/foreign” is
a constant feature of standard reference works by Spanish and Portuguese musical
scholars’.66
The attempt to recover an uncontaminated form of flamenco, 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 Garcı́a 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 flee 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 definition,
it does different cultural work in this context.
Against the relativism which has been offered above, one might argue that, without
some attempt to isolate the truly Spanish elements in Scarlatti’s style, however fraught
that operation might be, we cannot properly judge his style. We will be in danger
of attributing to the composer’s 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 filtering
involved. How can we possibly grasp the nature of the composer’s creativity unless
we can identify such sources with reasonable confidence, assess the relative fidelity
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 bullfight in San Sebastı́an and was able to hear flamenco singers and guitarists at the Exposition
Universelle of 1889–90 in Paris. See Chase, Spain, 299.
66 ‘Opera and Ballet in Public Theatres of the Iberian Peninsula’, in Boyd–Carreras, 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), 45–7.
Heteroglossia 109
given their apparently vivid manifestation in Scarlatti, is already a form of originality.

As has been stressed before, ‘influence’ 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 identification. 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 reflected 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 difficult 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 composer’s 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 identified 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 flamenco dance. The Spanish
element fills 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 flamenco 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 conflicting material, the effect of the work is, in fact,
relatively unremarkable. K. 532 in A minor 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 flamenco 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 Taruskin’s 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 classification can be conceptualized as a series of

binary pairs held within ever-widening circles: Andalusian folk music vs. flamenco,
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 flamenco.
The musical and cultural problems inherent in the definition of flamenco 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, flamenco 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 flamenco cannot be
equated with anonymity, since its music is largely generated by specific 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 difficult to extricate flamenco 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 flamenco
and Andalusian folk music, but there is also a tendency to conflate 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 classification, the same overlappings occur. For instance, Jane Clark
has suggested that the sonatas K. 490–92 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 bulerı́a. 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’, 63–5; Puyana, ‘Influencias’, 53 and 52.
Heteroglossia 111
suggested that, rather than being a problem of classification, 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 [Scarlatti’s] 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 identification on the
basis of supposed dance rhythms – always, of course, to the extent that such identifi-
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 identification. There is, in other words, less difficulty
in disentangling say, flamenco, 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 flamenco should stand
somewhat apart when we ponder Scarlatti’s incorporation of elements from below.
Such a distinction matters because of the socio-political implications of the com-
poser’s use of flamenco elements. We must first acknowledge, though, that what the
composer incorporated could not have been defined as such at the time. Flamenco
music only assumed any sort of official 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 Scarlatti’s 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 Cádiz, as a sort of ‘final solution’ to the gitano
problem. Nevertheless, it is clear that flamenco 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 Spain’s 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, ‘Influencias’, 53. See also Clark, ‘Andalouse’, 63; for Clark, though, it is more a question of an Italian
sensibility which modifies or controls the Spanish elements rather than Italian features being included as such.
establishment of the so-called cafés cantantes from the 1840s, flamenco 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 flamenquerı́a – 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 difficult to assess the applicability of
this largely later behaviour to the composer’s environment. So often in the sonatas
one wonders what Marı́a Bárbara 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 Queen’s 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 flamenco-type material and more general popular
inflections. Such political and environmental speculation should not in any case
overshadow the broader cultural moment of Scarlatti’s flamenco manner, radical
beyond any doubt.
So what features may be proposed as indicators of a flamenco 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 30–33.
72 See Zuber, ‘Blumen’, 8–14. Note too the comments of Linton Powell when assessing Scarlatti’s 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 19–43
For all the apparent refinement 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,
specifically the flourish heard every two bars from bar 221 .
The cluster is briefly 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 flamenco, which involves
more than just pain and harshness; the ‘sadness’ of cante jondo is a ritual aspect of its
expression, not unlike what one finds 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 Scarlatti’s disciple, Soler, suggests
that the ‘conventional notation’ of such passages often ‘represents but a courtly
“purification” of a vocal gliding through vacillating intervals’.75 Such ‘purification’,
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 30–33 do not seem
to be very filtered 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 finished artistic product.
The Sonata in F major, K. 107, is also notable for an apparent attempt to portray
flamenco vocal effects (see Ex. 3.7a). The right-hand figuration found at bars 17–23,
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, Scarlatti’s approximation to vocal portamento?
The repetitiveness of the cadential units and their extravagant flourishes at bars 25–30
do suggest flamenco 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 39–43, 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 112–13 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 inflections of flamenco song.76 The
climax of the exoticism in K. 55 comes at bars 88–95 (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 flamenco 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 flamenco style,
75 Heimes, ‘Soler’, 172. The author gives as an example bars 48–52 of Soler’s Sonata No. 19 in C minor.
76 For another example of the isolated display of such scales, see K. 232, especially bars 27–8 and 67–8, although
the effect here is much more quizzical. For an example by Albero, see Sonata No. 19 in B minor, bars 18–21.
Heteroglossia 115
Ex. 3.7a K. 107 bars 17–43
Ex. 3.7b K. 55 bars 85–96

Ex. 3.8 K. 313 bars 65–76
minor goes with the ethnic and major with the normal musical world. Exoticisms
flourish 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 flavours. In Ex. 3.8, for instance, from K. 313, a turn to
the minor prompts a marked Spanish coloration in bars 71–2, where we find one of
the closest approximations to that now ingrained marker of Spanishness, the rapid
turn figure. Here one could even say that the rubato is notated. However, this figure
is as much thematic as ‘realistic’; it reflects the second subject of the sonata, heard
from bar 42.
Ex. 3.8 also illustrates the harmonic feature traditionally taken as axiomatic to
Scarlatti’s 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
g1 in bar 71. Just as common is the hovering around the dominant by both 4̂ and
6̂. 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 Scarlatti’s earlier vocal music.77 This cautionary note overlooks the
confirming 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 one’s certitude
when encountering examples such as Ex. 3.9 below, from an aria in Leonardo Leo’s
opera Amor vuol sofferenza:

Heteroglossia 117
Ex. 3.9 Leo: Amor vuol sofferenza ‘Tu si no forfantiello’ bars 7–9
Ex. 3.10 K. 218 bars 77–84
This is a minor enclave that postpones the final cadence of the opening ritornello.
The bass line hovers around the dominant, with dynamic and accentual weight
falling on 4̂ and 6̂; 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 Scarlatti’s 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 79–82
(see Ex. 3.10) the composer strips away the melodic formulae that have domi-
nated the piece. We are left with the 4̂–5̂–6̂(–5̂) 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 IV6 alternating with V in the Phrygian progression.
Ex. 3.11a K. 182 bars 74–85
Ex. 3.11b K. 188 bars 124–30
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 75–8).79
Another harmonic feature found frequently in the sonatas seems to evoke the
world of flamenco: 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
definition in the composer’s 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 flavours 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
Scarlatti’s 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 Scarlatti’s music.’80 Although one might jib
at the cautious line on the extent of modal activity, it is nice to find a direct attack
on Scarlatti’s ‘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 flamenco style, we
may set to one side the identification 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 flamenco 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 24–30 of Ex. 3.7a). In the Sonata in G major, K. 105, we find in bars 64–9
three consecutive versions of the two-bar unit previously heard just once at bars
52–3 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 39–44 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 magnified 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 flamenco 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
flamenco rhythms.82
Another rhythmic–syntactical factor is more abstract still. It was suggested in the
early account of K. 277 that the influence of flamenco, and to an extent all folk music,
80 ‘Enrique Granados: A Few Reflections 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, 66–7. 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 final product. On great curves, see Chapter 4, pp. 173–5.
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 figures found in Albero’s Sonata
No. 8 in F major, at bars 40 and 45–6. These similarities are so pronounced that they suggest less that the two
younger composers might have been inspired by Scarlatti’s 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 composer’s 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 flamenco. 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 listener’s attention in a
normal manner. Instead, we may find 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
1054 –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, first of all a sort of idiomatic
musette, then a Spanish turn of phrase, both chiselled out by rests, and then, at bars
114–15, 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 specifically flamenco in character. Indeed,
in some respects it seems opposed both to flamenco intensity and to the nervous
character of most of Scarlatti’s 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 efficiently or
functionally. Linton Powell has commented on this sense in the works of Rodrı́guez:
[Rodrı́guez] tends to carry on figurations 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 find 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
efficient 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 mañana,
one simply has to have played through some of the fugues of Albero and Soler, the
tientos of José Elı́as, and even more the sonatas of Rodrı́guez. To this Westerner
at least, the gigantic sequences one finds 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 Puyana’s definition 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 classification reflected 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 flamenco, 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 flavour to emerge.87 In many cases, though, particularly in the rendering
of cante jondo elements, there is more room to manoeuvre. In Wanda Landowska’s
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 253 ff. and 454 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
flavour’ – a sort of mannered, histrionic tenderness. In particular he leans on the
alto ninth found at 301 and 503 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 (flamenco) 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, ‘Influencias’, 54. Águeda 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 Rodrı́guez
from Cabanilles, and definitely not encountered in his contemporaries Scarlatti and Seixas. La sonata para teclado:
su configuración en España (Valladolid: Secretariado de Publicaciones e Intercambio Cientı́fico, University of
Valladolid, 1997), 248.
86 Review of 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 Black’s 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), 18–19. 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 defined 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 find in Landowska and
Pletnev is arguably very much in style. Wouldn’t a straight and sober performance
represent a lesser degree of ‘taste’? The same issue arises with Andreas Staier’s version
of the Sonata in A major, K. 114. He gives an exceptionally fiery 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 flamenco 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, defines the composer’s 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 defines
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 reflecting 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 composer’s 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
T O P I CA L O P P O S I T I O N
The topical plurality and ambiguity that characterize Scarlatti’s mixed style have
been read by Giorgio Pestelli as indicators of the composer’s ‘theatrical vocation’.
The sonatas ‘overflow with the animated life of the stage’, they offer us a ‘musi-
cal spectacle’. In fleshing 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 figures’.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 world’s 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 conflicting characters placed on one stage as
characters that inhabit different stages altogether. The outcome of such conflict can
93 Pestelli, Sonate, 195–6. 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’, 31–4.
96 Several musicians have heard K. 96 within just one topical frame. Bülow calls it ‘Gigue’ in his Achtzehn ausgewählte
Klavierstücke (Leipzig: Peters, 1864), where it forms No. 6 of Suite No. 3, and Alfredo Casella arranged it for
small orchestra as the final movement of his ‘Toccata, Bourrée et Gigue’ (Paris: Maurice Senart, 1933). Puyana
counts this as one of the many Portuguese fandangos amidst the sonatas; Puyana, ‘Influencias’, 52.
Ex. 3.12 K. 402 bars 1–102
be difficult 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 first 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 72 –91 mirrors that found in the right hand at bars 12 –31 ; less exactly, the left
hand at 52 –71 follows the right hand’s 32 –51 . This is a perfectly formed and highly
unified 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
A–C–E heard at bars 11–13–15. For all the marked difference in stylistic premises,
the right hand uses two of the earlier basic shapes – scalic descent in plain crotchets at
92 –101 , then the neighbour-note motion towards a cadence (compare bars 10–111
with 4–51 ). 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 signifier 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 142 and 162 in the left hand we find 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 b2 , the first note of the piece and the first 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 19–20 and in bar 21). Note also the presence
of parallel thirds at 17 and 193 –202 and the plain outlining of a tritone at 19–21.
From bar 22 the music has clearly returned to the melodic stasis found from bar 9.
Significantly, the density of trills increases (hinting at an oriental melodic style, as
might the 5̂–6̂ bass). The strict topic survives only in the tenor interjections of the
original 7–6 suspension cell, now heard very much as a remnant. This first section
has an ABAB expressive-material structure that will also hold for the entire first half.
A rest with a pause follows, the first of many in K. 402.
If the strict topic was undermined within the first section, then bars 26ff. blow
it away. We move to the most up-to-date style, the galant. For Koch in 1802, the
defining 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 fifth
F–C, 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
c2 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 C–B–B–C succession of
bars 24–5!
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 30–31; 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 d1 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 28–9 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, András 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 first section he
adds ornaments at bars 63 and 201 ; the inappropriateness of such additions will already be plain from the earlier
discussion of the strict style. This reflects not, of course, a ‘wrong’ performance but the difficulties 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
2
c 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 figure 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 ‘artificial’ formulas, without the
realization that such looseness was delivered in the name of freedom. The protracted
formulaic cadence at bars 36–7 then widens the stylistic gap still further. The wittiest
of all the oppositions, however, is half buried in this formula: the melodic figure
from bar 352 , 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 firmly 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 11–15; but more important than the connec-
tion of intervallic shape which is now writ large is the principle of harmonic flexi-
bility that underpins this diatonic behaviour. It now contradicts the opening style on
the largest possible scale. We also find 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 first section. The answering unit more
explicitly revives earlier material – compare the right-hand line at 404 –421 with bars
34 –51 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 first four bars up a step recalls the procedure heard in bars 26–9 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 question–answer
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 figure 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 figure
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 464 –472 , however, is found at the very end of the first section, in the B–B–C
succession across the bar at 24–5. 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 first 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 first 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 find 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 from the 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 62–4 contain multiple
echoes of the multiple material we have been confronted with so far:
1. The melodic peak on a syncopated two-beat b2 in bar 62, followed by a descending

scale, recalls the first section, bars 1–2 and 17–19;
2. The syncopated rhythm with neighbour note in bar 62 alone may be compared
with bars 4, 41 and especially 7–81 ;
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 62–4 as a melodic whole resembles bars 35–7, especially with the
initial second-beat syncopation on B and the following elaborate ornamentation;
5. The immediate cancellation of the leading note in the A–B–A line of bar 62
replicates at the dominant the D–E–D of bars 8–9.
From bar 69 there is another descent from b2 , 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 5̂–6̂ progression, F–G.
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 finally granted at bar 75, which brings a more
conclusive assemblage of elements, seemingly in the name of finding a middle style.
We hear another descent from b2 down an octave; the triplets are now integrated 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
82–3 the opening gambit from bars 1–2 is harmonized I–IV–V 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 832 –841 . In
a stunning display of topical transformation, the opening unit is brought back five
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 82–3, bars 84–5 present a more
contrapuntal version. An exact transposition of bars 1–2 occurs in the left hand,
which also of course answers the right hand of the previous two bars. The upper voice
of 84–5 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 891
of the fourth working, the expected dissonance wrought by a suspension is replaced
by a triple chordal dissonance. The fifth 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 first-half vamp rhythm in the left hand. The
insistent syncopated rhythms clearly derive from the same area. Thus the first dozen
bars of the second half compress all the stylistic and textural possibilities presented so
disconcertingly in the first 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 finally 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. Significantly, 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 fifth from its first-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 I–V, C major–G major relationship is what we
might have expected to hear in the first half. There is a fairly extensive rewriting of
bars 101–4, 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 103–4). Bars 100–1 and 102–3 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, g2 , 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 131–3 comes straight from
bars 22–4, not from 55–7, as it ought. Thus the suspension figure 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 131–3, Scarlatti
is in effect taking us directly from the equivalent of bar 25 to 584 , so cutting out our
big first-half interpolation. The most significant 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 first 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 first 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 first, but with many important adjustments at a micro
level reflecting the changed significance 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 first 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, fictional 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 specifically 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 finding some common ground. The
contrasts turn out not to be as abandoned as they first appear.
A number of sonatas raise such contrasts onto a more explicit structural plane.
In his chronological classification 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 figuration that prompt firmer 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 find a similar plan, for example,
in Albero’s Sonata No. 22 in F minor. Here, an evocation of antico style in the
Adagio sections is followed by an exhilarating romp of modern figuration in the
Vivo sections. The unusual formal plan, particularly in the way the first B section
of the ABA B 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 influences 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 órgano entre el Antiguo y Moderno estilo by Elı́as
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 José Elı́as, 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 Elı́as 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 figuration that closes the first half of K. 162 with that of the closing ‘ritornello’ in K. 265, bars
193–4.
104 Powell, ‘Albero’, 16.
105 See Águeda Pedrero-Encabo, ‘Some Unpublished Works of José Elı́as’, in Boyd–Carreras, Spain, 214–15.
nondescript. Of greatest interest is the possibility of operatic influence on such forms,

given the composer’s own habits in his early operas. Changes of tempo, dynamics and
affect are strikingly frequent, for example in Ptolemy’s aria ‘Tiranni miei pensieri’,
from the newly recovered Tolomeo et Alessandro. Boyd has made a telling comparison
with Handel’s setting of an adaptation of the same libretto in 1728; in a number of
arias the ‘unified 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 Scarlatti’s orchestral–operatic overtures – as in the sharp fluctuations of Sinfonias
Nos. 9 and 14.107 Thus the theatrical metaphor for Scarlatti’s 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 first fifteen 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 sonata’s 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 20–30. 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 57–9 the raw popular dance material is given in melodic sequence, a
stylistically unlikely treatment for which the first half provides no precedent.109
More disconcerting still is the Sonata in B flat major, K. 202. The return to first-
half material from bar 110 in the second half, after an ‘interruption’, is very fleeting;
and what we hear subsequently is really a coda using new material in a markedly
broader, more popular style than the music of the first 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 first 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 first 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’, 18–19. 107 These works are discussed in Boyd, Master, 80–83.
108 Pestelli describes it as a sudden flaring-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 Seiffert’s 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, 202–3; Boyd, Master, 172.
Heteroglossia 135
sections. Indeed, as we have seen, it seems to blast away the material of the first 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 flamenco 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 artificial, 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 Böttinger 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 first 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 Scarlatti’s sonatas are situated in a world that may not be
listening is brilliantly grasped by José 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 composer’s aesthetics,
112 To give this some statistical support, Andreas Staier, in his recording of the work (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi:
05472 77274 2, 1992), takes 1’05” over two playings of the first half and 2’20” over a single playing of the
second half. Of this, the pastorale section takes 2’00” 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 Böttinger, ‘Annäherungen’, 80.
114 Saramago, Baltasar and Blimunda, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988), 161.
but of his philosophy. Art music, or at least Scarlatti’s 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, artificial 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 Thompson’s BBC television pro-
gramme of 1985. The challenge for this medium lies in finding 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 show the 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 flavours – 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 find 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 finished 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 (Scarlatti’s) 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 ABC shape that was implicit in K. 202. This work has been seized upon gratefully
by all writers on the sonatas, since for once, in the first 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 fifes). The
final, 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 Scarlatti’s versions
of the topic (K. 446, for example, is marked ‘Allegrissimo’).
Heteroglossia 137
Ex. 3.13 K. 513 bars 1–16
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 first two and a half bars. These
are followed by an exact repetition of the material down a tone in B flat major,
which immediately undercuts the simplicity. The leaping octave figure 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 fifths in the top two parts of 82 may
be a characteristic reference to rustic technique.) The reworked sequential repetition
of this three-bar unit, beginning on the final quaver of bar 8, is more anguished,
with the succession of perfect and diminished fifths 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 f2 at 104 , which might represent being out of tune. Our opening
idyll is now a distant memory.
More artifice is apparent in bar 15, where we find a wonderful overlap in the phrase
structure; 153 ought, like 143 , to represent the final beat of a one-bar unit, but it also
functions as the downbeat of its own one-bar unit. This is confirmed by the parallel
one-bar unit beginning at 163 . 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 34–5, is certainly more arty than folksy. (It is
realized precisely in this sense in the fourth movement of Casella’s Scarlattiana.) The
same three right-hand notes that effect the fade-out are reactivated on the return to
a repeated A section (with f2 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 36–381 and 173 –183 . 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 final part of K. 202. Does this represent the modern or the
composer’s ‘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: ‘What’s to come is still (very) unsure.’116
116 Mellers, Orpheus, 86.

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 Bakhtin’s 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.
Mellers’s 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
form in the sonatas – outright topical opposition within a single ‘integrated’ structure.
It is often difficult 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 Mellers, Orpheus, 86.
121 Both Clark and Pestelli believe K. 513 to have been written early in the composer’s career. See Clark, ‘Enemy’,
545, and Pestelli, Sonate, 203–4. 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 first 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 from one element to
another. In K. 256, for example, the dotted style that is prominent in the first 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 inflections 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 hand’s
falling thirds and the right hand’s d2 –f 2 –e2 succession fit with earlier shapes. Does
this suggest that the exuberance of toccata and of flamenco 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 definition so,
but flamenco 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 Scarlatti’s 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 fifths from bar 96. If this,
like the sequential organization, seems a standard linguistic feature of the time, the
manner of presentation suggests an Iberian influence, which might be confirmed
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 flamboyant flamenco material (almost exactly par-
alleled at the start of the second half of K. 324) takes one’s breath away. Here is an
example of a passage that surely does call for some slowing and flexibility of tempo –
it is difficult 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 25–7 reflect bars 5–9 and 12–16. 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 Pestelli’s argument that much
keyboard toccata figuration 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 41–3 strongly resembles bars
19 and 21 of the flamenco material. When it occurs at the end of the half, it is also a
typical Baroque bit of figuration, another example of our Essercizi-type cadence. The
composer seems to be delighting in finding 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 first in E minor, the mode seemingly at odds
with its populist character. Significantly, towards the end of the passage it mutates into
something that derives clearly from the world of high art; after the simple popular
I–V alternations, a 7–10 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 reaffirmed 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 final 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 4̂–5̂–6̂ bass at bars 5–6, which will be more fully exploited from bar 31 to
bar 37. The A–A false relations sound very exotically modal, and the final 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 firmly
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 271 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 final appoggiatura, resembles that at bars 5–61 . The rising third A–B-C
at 272 –281 then suggests the shape of 43 and 63 , so that the sense of a variant on the
earlier phrase unit is even more complete. The repetition of the phrase at 272 –291
then represents a syntactical parallel to the earlier passage. However, the flexibility
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 first 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 from 30 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 D in modal manner, picking
up on the 4̂–5̂–6̂ shape from the opening unit, bars 5–6, 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 stratified – its more
formal conception also suggests the Baroque manner of before. Then, unusually,
bars 33 ff. return from 363 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 first half: the right-
hand material is essentially the same but with more flourishes, while the left hand
rather makes the point of the original by being anchored in G throughout. This
truer revelation of the opening’s harmonic nature is now of course possible in the
new harmonic context, following the cadence in G at the end of the first half. From
bar 48 the most overtly Spanish material of the first 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 first
half. The texture is again more aerated and stratified – 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 first 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 first structural use of the major mode in the piece), the
stepwise movements of the original are replaced by V–I 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 31–7.
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 48–51. The more
neutral passage returns from bar 68 with its function as a melting pot clarified, 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 composer’s 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 sanctified 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 first 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 find more satisfactory ones than might otherwise have been chosen.125
These three elements have all been amply demonstrated in our consideration of
Scarlatti’s 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
composer’s syntactical style.
125 Meyer, Style and Music, 139.

4
S Y N TA X
E P E T I T I O N A N D AT I O N A L I T Y 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 seem to 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 fulfils certain
roles or fits 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 deflecting this, the use of echo effects in performance, must be viewed with
suspicion, since it goes against the grain of Scarlatti’s 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 one’s musical manners.
These two characteristics or principles can hold good on a larger scale as well.
Repetitions are there when we don’t 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 first 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. Scarlatti’s 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’, 103–6. 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, 62–3, 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 fine 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, Scarlatti’s 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 from the 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 artifice 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
affirmed. 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 influence 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 final movement of his Concerto, Op. 6 No. 2 (see
Ex. 4.2). This also falls a notional two octaves from C to C, with a similar acceleration
towards the end. It constitutes a fugal subject whose many, inevitable, structural
Ex. 4.1a K. 554 bars 1–5
Ex. 4.1b K. 554 bars 46–57
returns form the exact syntactical opposite to Scarlatti’s 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,
Scarlatti’s 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 Scarlatti’s unaccompanied
first 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 1–13
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 find 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 first 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 seem to 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 Beethoven’s 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 Bülow’s renaming of it as such in his arrangement6 ) reminds us that many of the
Scarlatti sonatas may be profitably, 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 fit with our maverick syntactical
profile. 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 final, sixth piece in Suite No. 2 of Achtzehn ausgewählte Klavierstücke, in Form von Suiten
gruppiert (Leipzig: Peters, 1864).
Syntax 151
Ex. 4.3 Platti: Sonata No. 3/iii bars 9–19
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 fleet 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 finale
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 D7 chords is somewhat assuaged
when they are immediately followed by G7 chords, constituting exactly the sort of
‘progression’ that is lacking in the Scarlatti. The best touch, however, is found in the
final bar of the half, after several bars that restore the customary two-part texture. The
final 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 fifths, from D to G
to C, in the name of establishing the dominant. Not only that, but this final 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 1–32
points, when it was common practice to fill 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 justifies 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 Rodrı́guez. 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 first half). Its stretch of apparently irrational repetition,
heard in the first 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 find no source or reference: an insignificant
arpeggiated figuration, 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 one’s 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 first three bars is not entirely blameless, with some clear denials
of voice-leading propriety – a b1 is missing from bars 21 and 31 . 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 first three
bars that the parallels really do register as such. The following polyphonic texture at
bars 7–9 is more solid with its four parts, but again there are missing continuations
in individual voices. In the first instance this is to avoid the consecutives that would
arise from their presence.9 The toccata style responds by showing more flexibility of
melodic movement; the g1 –f1 –e1 traced by the upper line at 112 –121 chimes with
the linear movement of the learned material, more specifically 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 D–C–B, G–F–E
and F–E–D.
On the next syntactical level up, though, there is no flexibility 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 10–8, with
suspensions added to make a 10–9–8 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 Rodrı́guez. The similarity of
conception is very striking. From bar 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

9 Thus the implied tenor b at 81 would yield parallel fifths with the alto. One bar later, the alto note is omitted
for the same reason – to avoid a simultaneous D–E in the tenor and A–B in the alto.
10 Peter Williams compares the passage with the opening of Bach’s Gigue from Partita No. 1 in B flat 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. Bach’s Clavierübung Prints’, Early Keyboard Journal 5 (1986–7), 32–3.
Syntax 155
Ex. 4.5a K. 27 bars 17–21
10 9–8 10 9–8 10 9–8 10 8
Ex. 4.5b K. 27 bars 23–6
10 7 10 7 10 7 10 7 10 10
only that, but after a two-bar breather the same repetition is repeated up a fourth,
although this time it finally 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 find 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 10–7, that lies more in the province of the
learned style. Reductions of this pattern (Ex. 4.5b) and that of bars 17–21 are given
above.
In its rhythmic fluidity, 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
26–7 the rapid unfolded thirds of the semiquaver figuration 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 Pestelli’s 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. 96–8.
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 fill 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 composer’s contemporaries would have recognized as proper music) do
not ultimately so much affirm 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 25–41, 61–71, 107–36 and 155–78, 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
follow the vamp sections are similar in material and seem untouched 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 firmly 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 composer’s 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 find their way
into any finished artistic context. Only Scarlatti seems to have had the nerve to allow
such moments into his final 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 composer’s
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
first-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 figurations14 ), they in fact contain
strong melodic impulses that never shape themselves into anything definitive. 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 first 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 official G major as in its timeless
moments. If Scarlatti wasn’t a relatively peripheral figure, we could describe this as
a truly prophetic piece of the ‘Ich f ühle Luft von anderem Planeten’ variety. It is
so exceptionally audacious that we don’t have the historical or stylistic means to do
justice to it. Characteristically, Scarlatti doesn’t 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 Scarlatti’s 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, 338–9. 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 problem given the
traditional role played by eighteenth-century music in our culture as the embodiment
of civilized values; it offers an opportunity to advertise one’s taste, one’s ‘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 figuration 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 Scarlatti’s
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. Scarlatti’s habit of lopping
off a bar – giving us one bar at the end of the first 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 first half of
K. 523 in G major (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 aficionado, but they form a useful index to the most
idiosyncratic aspects of the composer’s 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 find 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 fifth on the downbeat
of bar 21 – Pletnev must consider this too raw a sound and so replaces the left hand’s
A with a C.16
15 Virgin: 5 45123 2, 1995.
16 Exactly the same alteration is found in Bülow’s arrangement of K. 523, found as No. 6 of Suite No. 1 in
Achtzehn ausgewählte Klavierstücke. This reminds us of Scarlatti’s relishing of such open sonorities, as detailed in
the discussion of horn calls in Chapter 3, pp. 86–7.
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. Kirkpatrick’s 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 1–4: 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 find 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 5–17 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 5–13
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
first 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 159–65.
Ex. 4.6 K. 523 bars 1–73
reference to the opening, with some simplification of the pattern but more impor-
tantly a new continuation – the four bars 21–4 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 5̂ to 1̂ (see the stepwise fall from a2 to d2
at 37–9), reworks the contour of the start (the stepwise fall from d3 to a displaced
Syntax 161
Ex. 4.6 (cont.)
g1 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 (44–7). 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 confident 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 (7–6; 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 7–15
10 (7 10) 7 10 7 10 7 10
Ex. 4.7b K. 523 bars 50–54
Ex. 4.7c K. 523 bars 57–64
4 6 4 6 4 6 4 6
Ex. 4.7d K. 523 bars 44–8
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 44–481 of the right hand with the
left hand from 502 to 541 ). Both these elements of learning, the linear pattern and the
imitation, impose a firmer 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 fulfil. This second phrase too receives
a continuation, at bars 54–5, 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 d3 to a2 heard at the beginnings of both
Syntax 163
halves, while the alto becomes still more independent, forming its own 4–6 pattern
with the bass (see Ex. 4.7c). This contains all four original stepwise pairs, as found
too at bars 44–481 : this is illustrated by Ex. 4.7d, which aligns the shared notes.
This then hooks into a repetition of bars 48–9 at 64–5, but note how the total
phrase has expanded. The phrase including 64–5 is at least two bars longer than that
containing 48–9; 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-
nificantly 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 figure? 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 fiery
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 c2 –b1 . This
is then expanded immensely from the start of the second half, starting with the
same notes as at the beginning (compare bars 633 –66 with bars 43 –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 fixed 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 C–B becomes E–D from bar
67 and then G–A from bar 71. Unlike the first-half model, though, the bass ostinato
Ex. 4.8a K. 541 bars 16–30
figure 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 633 –751 with 833 –951 ). This leads, not
to more variance, but to a direct repetition of the start of the second larger phrase
(compare 833 ff. with 953 ff.), with the bass an octave lower. From here Scarlatti
reverts to the earlier principle of melodic insistence and harmonic change found in
the first half. When from bar 1073 we return for the third time to the identical phrase
(as at bars 833 and 953 , 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 fits 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, first heard from bar 19, that is less thematically distinc-
tive than anything else in the piece – a routine left-hand figuration 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 57–72
to nothing that becomes the centre of attention. Ironically, the ‘phrase’ from bars
192 to 271 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 satisfied 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 figure 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 filling 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 first unit, at bars 66–7, 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, 205–6. The same fragment can be found in K. 260, in fact – compare bars 88–91 of its first half.
finds life after this too and presents a new figure 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 hand’s dramatic shape has called the left’s bluff. Bar 68 represents the first
point of rest in both parts.
The re-emergence of the left-hand figuration from silence confirms the sense that
the figure 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 first-
half form, so dispensing with the chordal parallel fifths, and from bar 86 the left
hand’s 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 88–9,
which picks up on the tune of the first half – compare bars 352 –361 , for example.
Melodic and temporal coherence has been resumed. Now there occurs another bar’s
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 88–9 now seems just as provisional as the non-
sense material. One barely notices that this is now a recapitulation of the first-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 infiltrates 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 Scarlatti’s sonatas to the subject, mentioning K. 422 and K. 417.
‘Relations between Musical and Scientific 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 Scarlatti’s 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 Scarlatti’s
proclivities in this direction. Ralph Kirkpatrick described the composer as ‘a past
master of phrase structure’, noting Scarlatti’s employment of juxtaposition, contrac-
tion, extension and the insertion of irregular phrases, although, surprisingly, he did
not acknowledge the ‘missing-bar’ phenomenon.20 Significantly, though, such re-
marks were subsumed under ‘performance’ in the final chapter of his book, while
consideration of Scarlatti’s 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 reflects the composer’s 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 fiction. 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 identification 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 Scarlatti’s 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’, 292–304.
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 Boyd’s ‘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 Scarlatti’s 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
reflected in two works already examined in Chapter 1, K. 39 and K. 254.) That
this is rarely, if ever, acknowledged reflects 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 composer’s 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 difficult 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 Scarlatti’s
manipulation of syntactical norms.
Avison’s 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 15–21 (see Ex. 4.9) he omits
a bar so as to yield a neater 3 × 2 construction. It is difficult, though, to say just
which bar is omitted – it seems at first 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 Scarlatti’s
hovering on the dominant and consequently more fluid, 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 15–40
the sonata is all dominant preparations of various sorts until bar 43 (even the opening
tonic is not given proper cadential definition).
Bar 201 features an elision, with the upper-voice c2 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 221 . 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 first 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 26–7). The simpler patterning may act as a corrective to the
first 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 19–20 of the model). However, the inner part has already
abandoned its cross-string figuration; bars 28–9 match 20–21 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 figure 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 f2 at bar 301 , 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. Confirming 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 20–21), the lower parts slightly rework the material that began the
two previous phrases. Compare these lower parts at bars 302 –321 with bars 152 –171 ;
beginning on the second quaver of the bar, both feature a falling-third figure, 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 301 in the lower parts, thus far unac-
counted for. The parallelism with the two previous phrases encourages us to hear 321
as the last quaver of a six-quaver unit, but the fact that it matches the downbeat back
at 301 may encourage us to hear it rather as the first 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 find themselves in a state of nervous irritation. Yet this is exactly the
flavour that tends to emerge from the 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 justification for many of Avison’s alterations.26
At the end of the half bars 65–6 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, Scarlatti’s 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 Handel’s treatment of the material he borrowed
from the Essercizi for his Twelve Concertos, Op. 6, of 1739. He consistently augments
Scarlatti’s material. Of course, Handel’s borrowing cannot be directly compared with
Avison’s ‘transcription’, but it is noteworthy that both composers find means of
making the original material more comfortable; one cuts while the other expands.
The final 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 Scarlatti’s epigrammatic statements to still more
compressed terms’.27
OPENING 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 composer’s ‘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.
Scarlatti’s 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 Geminiani’s 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 ‘Handel’s Use of Scarlatti’s “Essercizi per Gravicembalo” in his Opus 6’, Göttinger Händel-Beiträge 3 (1987;
published 1989), 176.
Ex. 4.10a K. 208 bars 12–14
Ex. 4.10b K. 317 bars 113–18
Ex. 4.10c K. 450 bars 40–42
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 final 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 specific embod-
iment of the taste for an ‘open’ musical experience, as defined in the discussion of
the topically mixed sonatas in Chapter 3. Where else in the tonal repertoire of the
eighteenth century does one find 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 reflects
scribal laxity; or perhaps it reflects 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 specifically, a number of sonatas are notationally explicit on this
Syntax 173
matter. In K. 149, for example, the first-time bar at the end of the first half makes
explicit that the performer should not wait for a whole bar to fill itself out before
continuing. The time signature is 4/4, and bar 16 follows a crotchet first beat with
just a crotchet rest, marked with a pause. Gilbert inserts a 2/4 time signature in the
first-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
filling 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 final first-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 first
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 quaver’s 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 confirms 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 first half of a sonata. These slurs indicate that the
material contained within them is to be played first 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 Scarlatti’s ‘radical
treatment of the midpoint of the binary form’:
Most music in Scarlatti’s lifetime used a first ending to provide a retransitional link from
the end of the first half back to the opening material on the tonic; the second ending then
does away with this linking material, allowing the first half to finish with the fullest, most
convincing stop in the piece, save for the parallel ending of the second half, and thus, of the
sonata. In Scarlatti’s usage of two endings, an opposite effect tends to prevail. In about 125
sonatas, he will allow the first half to come to its fullest stop the first time, and then use the
second ending to overlap the border between halves, so the musical fabric can flow seamlessly
[between] them, almost magically evaporating the usual brick wall between halves.29
28 Sheveloff’s phrase in a discussion of this feature in K. 125; he notes that it ‘appears too often in Domenico’s
keyboard works to be an accident’. Sheveloff, ‘Keyboard’, 423.
29 Sheveloff, ‘Uncertainties’, 155. The great curve is also discussed in Sheveloff, ‘Keyboard’, 279–88.
Ex. 4.11 K. 120 bars 1–27
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 flat major
arpeggio that ends the first-time playing of the first 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 1–30
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 Queffélec adds almost five to make six, Pletnev just over five
(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 Longo’s intervention most performers would quite ‘naturally’ add one. In
his edition Bülow 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 first 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 first half, bars 26ff. This represents
30 Deutsche Harmonia Mundi: 05472 77274 2, 1992 (Staier); Sony: 53460, 1964/1993 (Horowitz); Erato: 4509
96960 2, 1970 (Queffélec); Virgin: 5 45123 2, 1995 (Pletnev); Grammofono 2000: 78675, 1943/1996 (Michelan-
geli); EMI: 7 63940 2, 1979–85/1991 (Zacharias).
Syntax 177
a clear correction of what was so unsettling before and proves the need for doing
exactly what was notated in the first 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 wouldn’t 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 fixed, beyond all questions
of ‘intentionality’. This would simply confirm 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 Scarlatti’s 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 difficult 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 Scarlatti’s 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 find
the clearest precedents and echoes. In sonatas by composers such as Galuppi, Platti
and Paradies one finds 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: Fundação
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), 94–6.
Ex. 4.13 Galuppi: Sonata No. 1/ii bars 51–60
the same tendency towards sharp, jocular invention, suggesting a common Italian
comic-operatic heritage.33 In particular one finds 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 Galuppi’s Sonata
No. 1 in C major.34
Such formulations remain a trademark of Italian operatic style well beyond Scar-
latti’s and Galuppi’s time, of course, as does the relatively plain delivery of the perfect
cadence.35 Yet in spite of these shared cultural characteristics, Scarlatti’s 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
final 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 fifths 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 artificiality of harmonic habits? The cadence and the approaching
manoeuvres represent an area of definition usually taken for granted, of course, not
33 Note too Pestelli’s 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, 1650–1750’, The
Musical Quarterly 54/4 (1968), 520.
Syntax 179
Ex. 4.14 K. 224 bars 63–8
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 first 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 composer’s 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 fingerprints 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 specific 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 artificiality 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 definition of the term, it should be clear that
Verfremdung does not in any way specifically define Scarlatti’s 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 first half the final cadential repetitions actually begin at bar 173 . The second
version from 183 is interrupted at bars 19–21, then we hear five more, every bar
ending the same way in all parts. The first of these further five 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 184 . The bass repetitions are essentially identical every time – to get the real
flavour 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 first half) and the Baroque manner of
the preceding material (note the sequence at bars 63 –102 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 confirming effect, of the possibility that
closure might not eventuate. Thus we are again reminded of the artificial nature of
musical time and its commonly agreed syntactical rules. Here we have an energy that
won’t 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 quaver’s 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 defined earlier in conjunction with K. 523 and K. 457, this occurs at
or near the beginning of the first half of a sonata. Broadly speaking there are two
types of beginning to a Scarlatti sonata – the diffident and the hyperactive. The first
may be routine, conventional, low-key, often involving the use of imitation between
the hands that is then abandoned. This diffidence 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 them in
the first 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 difficult 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 diffidence at the start, in that the
first 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 first 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 flurry 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 flurries 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 figure. 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 define, 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 17–44 of K. 519, for
instance, it comes across as a natural but rather un-arty device for intensification. 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
S E QU E N C E
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 (first 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 Marcello’s Sonata No. 1 in D minor, bars 7–11, or Durante’s Le quattro stagioni
dell’anno – Sonata per cembalo, ed. Alberto Iesuè (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 fifths.41 This neglect shows the
difficulties 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
significance 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 Rodrı́guez, 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 63 –102 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 difficulty 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 52–5 and 58–61 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 84–7 of K. 468, where right-hand glissandi are matched most
incongruously with a descending 8–10 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 ‘Cat’s
Fugue’, K. 30. This piece, sometimes regarded as an embodiment of the composer’s
respect for the old contrapuntal ways, as supposedly expressed in the letter to the
Duke of Huescar, is surely one of Scarlatti’s 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 Schumann’s use of the ‘diatonic circle of fifths’ 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 84–95
what Kirkpatrick calls a ‘magnificent tangle’,43 in so consistently avoiding the fluency

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 first is certainly too long, and both feel creatively slack. Rarely is it so
obvious that sequence is being held at arm’s length. We can also find 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 first 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 flavour 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 first half
43 Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 154. 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 first 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 artificiality of syntactical structures,
but not of course in the sense of wishing them dead. Indeed, it must be made clear that
not all Scarlattian sequences are as loaded as those mentioned so far – at bars 60–63
of K. 325, for instance, we hear a ‘neutral’ use of the device, as a straightforward, effi-
cient way of returning to the tonic.45 The passage at bars 57–64 of K. 232 is another
case of sequence apparently being used straightforwardly, here as a natural intensifi-
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 flavour 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 significant moment occurs from bar
90 (see Ex. 4.16a). What precedes this is the Vivaldi-concerto-type figural 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 263 –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 flourishes 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 fulfil this syntactical expectation: at bars 31–2 a 9–8 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 80–83 of K. 252, bars 94–9 of K. 359
and bars 58–65 of K. 520.
Syntax 185
Ex. 4.16a K. 314 bars 87–102
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 satisfied. The 9–8 is specifically realized at bars 74, 76, 78 and 80 (following
for now the Gilbert edition) and is meshed inside a larger controlling 10–8 pattern,
indicated on the score in Ex. 4.17. Further, we are then treated to an ascend-
ing linear intervallic pattern, the 5–6 at bars 82–5. A good example of a typical
Ex. 4.17 K. 53 bars 72–95
non-congruence of patterning is found at 85–6: in bar 85 the a1 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 5–6 continues, even though the bass line indicates that we have moved
on to a new phrase. Only at 88–9 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 piece’s basic
units. In addition, the exact repetitions of bars 88–93 are thrilling in context, coming
as they do after so much sequential and manual ‘fiddling’.
For all the sequential fulfilment 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 fifth quaver of the bar,
V and P both give g1 . So does the new Lisbon source and all other sources. Gilbert
changes this to an f1 so as to form part of the 9–8 succession previously discussed;
Fadini respects the V and P reading here but then changes the fifth quaver of bar 802
to an e1 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 difficult 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 flamenco 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 73–7.
It responds to the ‘primitive’ sequences of parallel fifths heard earlier in the second
half by retaining the basic material and organizing it into a civilized 10–5 linear
intervallic pattern. Other uses of this device in extremis include K. 181, bars 65–691 ,
K. 429, bars 36–401 , K. 371, bars 78–84, and K. 57, bars 146–8.
The Sonata in F major, K. 195, presents early in its first half an extreme form of
opening insistence, a huge expansion of what was originally, in bar 7, a filler tag.
This figure is heard in twenty-one consecutive bars, during which the composer
plays around with the fine 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
first 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 first half, at bars 82–7 and 98–103, turns an unremarkable three-bar pattern of descending
tenths into five 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.
KINETICS
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 define an essential aspect of Scarlatti’s art seems unconvincing on the surface; is
not music in general and by definition 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 first 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 find 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 first 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 fit 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’ defined by Farhad Abbassian-Milani in his study of the Essercizi,
Zusammenhänge 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 definition 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 flavour 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 first appears at bars 4–61 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 fulfilled. The same occurs at 12–13, but with the right
hand rearranged to emphasize the parallel sixths/tenths with which the second basic
shape will henceforth be associated. Bars 13–14 simply rewrite the preceding pair
of bars; the broken parallel fifths in the right hand are not really to be thought of as
improper, since this is a fairly common type of keyboard figuration in the eighteenth
century.49 Bars 15–17 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 first 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 sonata’s 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
13–14 in the minor, but these now occur twice as if to prolong the pattern-making.
Bars 23–4 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 15–18
are repeated directly at 25–8. In another context, bars 29–31 would make an effec-
tive, unbuttoned closing unit, but they are heard here as another recycling. They
vary the material of 25–7, 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 13–16, 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 c2 to c3 followed by a fall of a
ninth to b1 outlined at bars 33–4. 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 Schenker’s Commentary Translated’, The Music
Forum 5 (1980), 54–5 and 116–21, 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 38–9, 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 first with
a transposition of bars 25–6. Note too how he begins the second half, wittily, with
a rising octave shape, thus explicitly conjoining the opening figure 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 flavour of the work. Then we hear six
bars of the ‘holding’ figure, a logical progression from the previous two (13–14) then
four (19–22). The fact that two bars of major are followed by four bars of minor here
replicates the order found in 13–14 then 19–22, in another conjoining of previously
separate events. The D minor version of the main melodic sequence of the first
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 a2 and
c2 , so increasing the sense that we are endlessly revisiting familiar ground.
From bar 52 the original transition passage of bars 23–4 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 581 is controlled by
another three-part descending sequence; there would seem to be no escape.
Bars 66–8 retain the right-hand pitches of bars 15–17 and 25–7 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 70–73 now generate their own matching unit. Bars 74ff. have no equivalent
in the first half; they decorate the previous phrase, so that in the second half we
now have five 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 first
half. After the endless hearings of this falling-third figure, this final 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 Scarlatti’s 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 difficulties 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 significance and ends up running dry.
In other words, to quote Dale’s 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 exemplified by the talismanic figure of Bach, are to be realized by
harmonic and contrapuntal means; Scarlatti’s 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 Pestelli’s; it is all too easy to see only empty
figuration 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 deflect us from the intensity of musical thought, which
in Scarlatti’s 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 Scarlatti’s 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, 186–7.

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 first 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 find a continuous texture from
start to finish. Certainly Gilbert’s suggested half-bar rest before the return to the first
half, disappointingly confirmed 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 first 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 sequential–motivic 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 final
four-bar units. ‘Phrases’ is definitely 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 definition 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 first half and
its effect on the performance, both in moving back to the beginning of the first
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
confirm 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 fifty-five 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’,
288–91.
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 clarified 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 definitely a ‘unified’ 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 difficult 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-fifths
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 composer’s syntactical awareness can take many forms, there is one
particular flavour 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 traffic. 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 flavour, 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 superficial note picture that gives the impression of a predominantly homophonic style
(unfortunately borne out by Longo’s 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 136–7. 57 Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 187.
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 ‘superficial 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 flavour of ‘agile and nervous mobility’ produced by Scarlatti’s
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 first
cadence of the sonata, bars 8–9 function not just as a new idea but as a variant on
bars 6–7. 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 c2 –b1 line as bar 6. Such a blurring of boundaries between sections already
aids the moto perpetuo feeling that is being developed. Bars 10–11 make as if to
repeat 8–9, but halfway through turn into a transposition up a third, leading us to
the mediant. Bars 12–13 then seem to present a complete mediant replica of 8–9,
although the first 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 10–11 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 7–8, 9–10, 11–12
and 13–14, 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
5–6 in the right hand. Bars 16–17 then present the first precisely aligned reiteration
of material, with their transposition up a step of 14–15. 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 8–9 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 gratification that would come from a firm 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 first 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 79–81, 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 47–8 and 58–60, 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 flexibility of pacing is a key element in Scarlatti’s kinetic art. A comparable
moment occurs in K. 96. After all the detailed inflections of material earlier in the
second half and the panoramic changes of imagery throughout, bars 165–80 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
78–93 in the first 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. It’s 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 fluent 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 fifth
quaver of bar 13. The passage is quite rewritten in the second half (see Ex. 4.18b); the
descending right-hand line from the first 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 first 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 12–15
Ex. 4.18b K. 45 bars 30–33
instead of the total four from the first half. Nothing could be less appropriate to the
character of the interruption than a literal repetition of the first-half form. (K. 419
in F major has a similar feature, but one that is less disruptive.) So the composer’s
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 first half (in bar 15).
Thus the surprise surprises anew in the second half.
VA M P S
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 Scarlatti’s style?
More than ever when attempting an overview of aspects of a composer’s style, the
very ordering of the following sonata sections under the category of ‘vamp’ can dis-
tort their significance. 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 conflicts with the particular freedom of realization that is the
development’s raison d’être. 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 specific 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 one’s whole sense of musical time. As has been suggested
already, such sections seem to live for the present, to know nothing of the reflection,
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 difficulty 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 significance; 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), 375–6.
free solo sections found in Vivaldi concertos; and, more radically, that their generally
athematic figuration 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 vamp’s 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 reflect ‘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 influence of these seductive
maneuvers’.63 Although the type of influence 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 Scarlatti’s 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 definition 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?
Pestelli’s account of the phenomenon combines Ife’s 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 ‘flowered under the composer’s
improvisatory fingers’. 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 Mozart’s 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 difficulties 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 figuration, 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 first movements of Clementi’s Sonata Op. 25 No. 6 and Haydn’s
String Quartet Op. 33 No. 4), perhaps the most ready association for many listeners
would be with the first movements of Mozart’s 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 figuration, 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 Sheveloff’s analogy with the solo sections in
Vivaldi’s concertos.
When we pursue the concerto connection, however, the analogy between the
vamp and this type of development starts to weaken. The figuration 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 Scarlatti’s practice, Michael Talbot suggests that Baroque recitative might have been ‘the cradle of radical
techniques of modulation that did not find 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 Rosen, Classical, 215. 68 See the account in Rosen, Sonata, 89–94.
one returns to the contemplation of Iberian flavours, 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 figuration, 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 vamp’s 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 figure that is
specific 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
first 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 15–18 and 65–8 suggest
that both passages proceed from the same basis. Indeed, the vamp really usurps the
role of bars 15–34 of the first 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 fifth-progression in the upper voice and a sixth-progression
in the bass (f2 –b1 and b1 –d1 respectively). It has become functional. There is a
clear irony in the fact that the vamp enforces a new, less disruptive character on the
first-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 F1 to g3 . 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 ‘filler’ 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 fine 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 1–53 , every phrase unit is repeated exactly until the
final ‘flourish’. 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 figure from bar 13 that was perhaps the first 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 figuration is quite explicitly
thematic. This repeated figure, 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 461 . 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 figures here
recontextualize the descending triadic figures heard so often in the first 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 first 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 composer’s 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 first 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 five 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 first 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 1–3, 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 4–5 constitute a single, indivisible impulse. There is therefore an
overlap of function at bar 41 , but those elements suggesting a fresh start at this
point make the stronger impression. The varied form of the right hand’s mate-
rial at bars 9–11 makes the break between third and fourth bars of the unit even
plainer.
69 Private correspondence, 1994.

Ex. 4.19 K. 409 bars 1–86
Bars 4–7 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 hand’s 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 first time around.70
As a counter to the somewhat schizophrenic theme, bars 17–24 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 17–18 encapsulates the two
parts, bringing them side by side; thus 17 corresponds to 1 (more broadly the first
three bars) and 18 to 4, in both hands. The left-hand pattern is then repeated while
the right hand of bars 19–20 rhymes with 6 (or 7) then 8. The left hand at bar 7
is particularly significant for the hasty attempt it makes at balance within the first
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 17–24. The attempt to dispel the tensions that arise through
ambiguity of phrase structure by means of grim reiteration is significant given the
nature and role of the vamp to come.
Above this the right hand in 17–20 acts as a sort of compression of bars 1–8, as we
have seen, and this is followed by a pseudo-sequence at 21–4. 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 conflict 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 ‘difficult’ A at bar 22, A is reaffirmed
in the following bar, by means of another awkward interval (the diminished fourth
D–A) 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 25–6 are almost a transposition of
17–18 but for the initial g2 ; this has to move upwards and, with another first-beat a2 ,
suggests rather a parallel with 21–2. 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 31–2 then transposes the
equivalent bars 23–4, 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 confirmatory D major phrase from bar 33, beginning with a repeated a2 , 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 V–I alternations of the intervening
Syntax 205
passages. Octave displacement aside, the opening bass line consists purely of stepwise
movement until the V–I of 7–8. 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 hand’s
voice-leading components resolve, e2 to d2 and a1 to the appropriate f1 , 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 five 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 4–5; in fact the second
of these is at the same pitches as its model save for the substitution of a2 by a2 .
Equally, the cadential bars 43–4 bear an obvious resemblance to 7–8, demonstrating
the composer’s extreme sensitivity to the nuances of cadential formulae. If we ignore
Gilbert’s ornamental suggestions at bars 24 and 32, then the effect of the appoggiatura
in bar 44 has considerable structural significance, 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 421 . While this arises first of all for reasons of registral management, it highlights
the triumph of A over A and also stresses the 2 + 2 construction of bars 40–43;
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 a2 , reinforced by the largest left-hand leaps so far,
up to a1 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 17–32 – is now taken up
by both hands. Although such reiterative directness is a common rhetorical gambit
at this point of a Scarlattian structure, confirming 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 I–V
alternations demand a following I, and the pattern has been so firmly established that
the thematic form it takes seems inevitable. Bars 64–5 are in fact difficult to align
within the larger structure. If bar 64 begins as a fifth 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 661 sounds climactic, and a much
stronger hypermetrical downbeat than that found two bars earlier at 64. From this
point of view bars 64–5 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 conflict, a fine
state of affairs after the unanimity of the previous eight-bar unit. In the midst of
this, the right-hand ascent in octaves A–B–C–D provides a textural and pitch
reminder of the very opening, now reversed. This time the final 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 difficult leaping figures – some breathing space seems essential.
Thus in the first 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-
plification (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 simplification, 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 fits this bill too. On the other hand the section does build
on the one aspect of harmonic complication present in the first half, the conflict
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
figure hovers very much around the region of A/A/B; note especially the dramatic
movement of A to the enharmonic B at 118–19. (The semitonal equivocation
around these notes is reflected by other layers of the texture, for instance by the
D–D–E and E–E–F 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 five-bar
phrase that effects a thematic retransition. With the vamp essentially finishing at bar
142, it is almost the same length as the first 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 first two bars.
This five-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 71–86, 87–102 and 103–18), 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 figure at 130 (significantly using a2 and its
lower octave and anticipating the figure at bars 143–5) and the clear sense of return
from 131 to the material from bars 91ff. The fact that complications arise with the
fourth of the vamp’s very large units suggests an extraordinary affinity 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 fills
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 justified 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 finally realize itself in the fullest possible form, but the final 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 filled up by
a quaver figure. It would not do, however, to imagine that Scarlatti has now solved
his syntactical difficulties. 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 figures.
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
a1 –b1 appoggiatura, a resolution not heard thus far. We then hear an equivalent
of bars 17–24, which in this context does not sound so abrupt in its introduction;
it is almost as if the insertion at bars 164–7 is compensating for all the previous
isolated single-bar phrase endings, as a sort of extended afterbeat. Where the ver-
sion of bars 17–24 differs significantly from its model is in the right hand at 172–3.
The displacement of the a2 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 164–5 of the prior four-bar unit. The displacement also
means that the two four-bar units at 168–71 and 172–5 are more symmetrical than
the first-half equivalent: bars 169 and 173 now match, and in addition 171 and 175
feature rhyming ornamental figures. Indeed, this symmetrical ornamentation has a
structural meaning (which is why the Gilbert extrapolation of the feature to the first
half is misleading): we are more strongly encouraged now to hear 168–75 as two
separate four-bar units rather than as a return to possible eight-bar organization.
This trend is continued in the final eight bars, which twice outline the same bass
progression as 164–7, with the left hand finally achieving some balance between
the leaping octave figure and its cadential responsibilities. Melodically, 164–7 also
form the substance of 176–9 to enforce the new four-bar tendency. In the final four
bars attention is focused on nailing the sub-plot. The a2 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 g2 then rises to a2 in a
reversal of the augmented second of bar 4. This then leads to b2 , and the final a2
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 final
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 composer’s sense of an ending. The end to K. 409 is rhetorically weak, in
spite of the relatively strong gestures presented in the final 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 figure of the vamp, repeated seventy times over with
just the two intervening bars of adjustment. It would plainly be misguided to hear
this figure as a direct relation of anything in the first half, such as bars 18 and 26, or
even as an outline form of bars 4–5. Even if it were clearly and significantly 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 figuration 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 Bond’s ‘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 finally 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 mind’s ear? It was suggested in the discussion of K. 260, with its multiple vamps,
that the normal music fades into insignificance. 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 vamp’s 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 Sheveloff’s definition 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 Sheveloff’s 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, 101–2. 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
difficulties 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 first half ). Since the sonata is effectively monothematic,
the insistent repetition of the same figure 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 figuration.
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 figure heard at bars 2–5 (see
Ex. 4.20a and b). Of the three notes heard on the last three quavers of each bar
here, only the final one is retained in the second half, leading to the same downbeat
appoggiatura motive. The fact that the whole figure 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 68–9 by a dominant version of bars 1–2. Both
the fragmentation and insistent repetition of a thematic module fit the mould of a
conventionally understood development section.74
On the other hand, the sense of purpose in Scarlatti’s ‘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 difficult 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 figure is characterized above all by its appoggiatura, an
intense melodic device. In addition, after the first two renderings at bars 69–70 and
70–71, 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 Scarlatti’s ‘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. Meyer’s 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’ definition is of course often difficult 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 1–9
Ex. 4.20b K. 216 bars 68–81
describe a falling third, yielding a more vocal sense of line. It therefore becomes
difficult to hear the passage just as ‘figuration’; each repetition has its own specific
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 figuration is very similar
to that found in the recercata movements of Albero’s 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 figure 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 figures 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 Albero’s 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 Scarlatti’s 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. Scarlatti’s 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 defined 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 79–82 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 Heuschneider’s 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
dell’ottava. (An explicit aligning of Scarlatti’s 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 one’s improvisations
around a bass line of rising and falling scales. What unifies 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 c1 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 632 . Often the manoeuvres are more complicated,
as in K. 531, where the first descent is diverted back to the starting point of B
before a more straightforward descending octave progression unfolds (bars 67–85).
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 flourish 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 reaffirmed by another
arpeggiated flourish at bars 102–3. 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 83–103. Exceptionally, it is built on several successive melodic
impulses rather than on a single repeated figure. In addition, its exquisitely painful
dissonances differ greatly from the highly diatonic language elsewhere; the first 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 intensification of the rest as a contrasting
world.
K. 253 in E flat 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 profile than the
surrounding material that, in retrospect, it is clearly the first half that represents the
waiting for the arrival of an important event. Similarly, the resumption of the official
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
first half. This first 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 finally declares itself properly from bar 143 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 definition. The non-vamp material is consistently
written against the bar line; compare the very explicit filling of 12/8 bars by the
vamp, with each downbeat heavily stressed. Once the invention has settled after
the characteristic nerviness of bars 22–8, the repeated figurations and large-scale
sequential construction feel more comfortable than what was offered for much of
the first half.80
In stylistic terms this is the least elusive of vamp sections. It has a strong Baroque
flavour, especially once it settles from bar 29, and is easily the most direct illustra-
tion of Sheveloff ’s proposed Vivaldian descent. The violin-like figuration 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 ‘justifies 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 57–8.
80 The corrective sense of the vamp is emphasized by the fact that the composer recapitulates the start – not the
opening bar, but bars 2–3 – 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 fluent material of the first 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 dell’ottava in the bass’s 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 finish with an appeal to their more ineffable qualities.
Siobhan Davies, the choreographer of a number of Scarlatti sonatas, to whom we 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 specifically 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-François 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 briefly 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 float clear of them in an autistic
self-sufficiency, a repetition without rationality or purpose.
This self-sufficient 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 flamenco in particular,
suggesting the sort of abstract influence postulated in the discussion of K. 277 in
Chapter 1. Timothy Mitchell has written that for real aficionados of the form, fla-
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
122–3.
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 TAT I O N S
D E U N E I N E S AT Z
Introduction
What Scarlatti does for syntax he also does for the elements of musical grammar. If
Scarlatti’s 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 defined largely by the resourceful avoidance of such infelicities. Yet
even here, the extent of Scarlatti’s estrangement from common 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
composer’s 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 figure much in the
teaching of musical rudiments, in the acquisition of harmonic and contrapuntal
skills in tonal music. Teachers will have enough difficulty explaining to their charges
the aberrations found in Bach, Handel and Haydn without opening the Pandora’s
box that Scarlatti’s sonatas represent. Edward Dent imagined the likely response:
‘ “If Domenico Scarlatti writes consecutive fifths, why shouldn’t I do so too?”.’2
Although consecutive fifths are far from the most frequent or disturbing of the
composer’s 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 first
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 confidence 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.
Scarlatti’s ‘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? Scarlatti’s 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 firm 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 Scarlatti’s
infringements and procedures. On many occasions, for instance, the learning goes
underground, as seen in K. 402; the fine 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 composer’s dissolute behaviour.4 Scarlatti does not after all
3 Note in this regard William Weber’s idea that the codification 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 Santi’s 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 Scarlatti’s 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 affirms 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 confidence 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 sufficient
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 define 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 Scarlatti’s 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 influential chapter on Scarlatti’s 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 Hautus, ‘Insistenz’, 137.

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 fulfilling
all the orthodox requirements for common tones or suspensions is realized by Scarlatti at
the harpsichord in terms of consecutive fifths 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
find pedagogical use as an embodiment of ‘simplicity and orthodoxy’.
Nevertheless, Kirkpatrick’s explanation does raise one of the qualifications that
must attend any study of Scarlatti’s ‘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 first 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 Böttinger’s 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 composer’s 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 flat 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 101 (see Ex. 5.1a) he removes the first 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 161 he removes a minor infraction of voice-leading
‘rules’, changing the b 2 to a g2 so as to match the equivalent points of bars 10 and
13. Thus the preceding f2 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 one’s bearings. Here it is as if the units will not stand still for inspection –
after the model provided by bars 9–11, 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 significantly 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
42–5 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;
Böttinger, ‘Annäherungen’, 75–6 and 81. See footnote 73 on p. 40 for further comment on this phrase.
Ex. 5.1a K. 475 bars 9–16
Ex. 5.1b K. 475 bars 40–50
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 46–9 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 Mozart’s Piano Concertos’) and Janet M. Levy (‘Contexts and Experience:
Problems and Issues’) in Mozart’s Piano Concertos: Text, Context, Interpretation, ed. Neal Zaslaw (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1996), 75–105 and 139–48.
Irritations 223
Ex. 5.1c K. 475 bars 85–98
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 95–7
once more present three consecutive playings. He therefore has it both ways now,
working with the listener’s symmetrical syntactical expectations by means of the
rhyme of bars 92–5 with 88–91 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 flavour behind these particular discrepancies.
Voice leading
Alongside such features we also find more specific offences, of which those against
the tenets of voice leading are often among the more conspicuous. This is certainly
the case with the parallel fifths of K. 394, particularly disturbing since it is difficult
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 final repetition in bar 97 also has the more positive function of restoring the ‘obligatory register’ of the
upper voice, allowing a more decisive finish.
Ex. 5.2 K. 247 bars 85–95
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 fifths occurs in
K. 247 in C sharp minor. This begins as a finely 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 first 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 89–92 (given in Ex. 5.2) destroy this art of gentle transition. This
transposition of the second subject introduces very marked, even lurid, parallel fifths
in the left hand, first 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 unified in tone and gesture. Bars 89–92 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 d1 in 89 and 90 is changed to b, then both d1 s in 91 and 92 are
replaced, by b and f1 respectively.14
Scarlatti’s younger colleague Albero seems to use consecutive fifths in the same
way, as a calculated artistic effect. The fifths 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 3–4 with works like K. 69 or K. 147.
14 See Choi, ‘Manuscripts’, 78 and also 180–81.
Irritations 225
Ex. 5.3a Albero: Sonata No. 12 bars 20–24
Ex. 5.3b K. 301 bars 39–44
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 Scarlatti’s
K. 301 in A major (Ex. 5.3b). These parallel fifths seem to come out of the blue, in
a work of neat gestures that convey a refined popular–galant flavour. However, the
preceding two bars have offered a passing hint at something more exotic, so that our
fifths 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, first 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 fifths 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 28–40
Ex. 5.4b K. 178 bars 73–8
the first 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 definition 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 final version of the feature, though, seems to confirm any suspicions.
In bar 77 (see Ex. 5.4b) the offending parts are brought a literal fifth 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 confirmation 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 final closure is
arriving.
In his edition, Longo does his best to mollify the problem. He leaves the first-half
examples untouched, but takes advantage of the altered melodic configuration that
precedes those in the second half. He ties the d2 over the bar line at 74–5 and then,
confirming the more explicit wrongness of the final version, replaces the d2 at bar
763 with a d1 which is then tied over the bar. He thus avoids both the sudden landing
on an open fifth on the first beat of 77 and the explicit sounding of the parallel fifths
on the second beat.
We may smile at such editorial contortions, just as we may smile at Hans von
Bülow’s 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 fifths is a common
rhetorical device in Scarlatti’s cadential closes, used to bring about a stronger sense of finality through a shift in
registral colour.
Irritations 227
Ex. 5.5 K. 551 bars 34–43
fifths 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
definite 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 fifths 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 flat 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 391 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 first heard in bars
20–21), K. 184 (bar 20), K. 212 (bars 30–33) 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 a2 suspension, prepared properly at the end of
22, does not resolve. In addition, there are parallel octaves between the third and
fourth quavers (E–F). A g2 on the third quaver of the bar (paired with an e2 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 first half. The performers’ changes are perhaps motivated
17 Bülow, Klavierstücke, ii. 18 See Mast, ‘Brahms’, 54–5, 116–21 and 186.
19 Deutsche Grammophon: 439 438 2, 1971/1994 (Kirkpatrick); Sony: 53460, 1964/1993 (Horowitz).
Ex. 5.6a K. 525 bars 21–4
Ex. 5.6b K. 466 bars 14–21
as much by a desire to tidy up the discrepancies between the first- 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 fifth-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 g1 at the start of bar 20. In
fact, subsequent events show that the effect of the missing note has been precisely
calculated. The g1 found in bar 211 provides a delayed voice-leading gratification that
also helps to maintain tension between the two separate units of the larger phrase.
The means by which this delayed g1 is prepared and quit are also significant. It is
reached by means of an appoggiatura a1 that forms a strong minor-ninth dissonance
with the bass and followed by a variant involving a1 , 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 Scarlatti’s licenses
Irritations 229
Ex. 5.7 K. 222 bars 29–40
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 32–3 (see Ex. 5.7) – which include four consecutive sevenths in the
latter bar – to the extent of approving of Longo’s ‘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 final 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 I6 at 322 ) to IV at 331 then V at 332 . The
upper voice has got out of phase with this; the a2 at the end of 32 belongs with the
following IV and the b2 in 33 belongs with the following V. The a2 is a passing note
in a chromatic rising-third line, interrupted by the consonant skip down to c2 . In
fact, we have heard almost exactly the same right-hand line already, in bars 7–8; the
only difference is that the fourth and seventh notes swap around. Now b1 leads to c2 ,
the reverse of the earlier ‘alto’ progression. Its reappearance at 32–3 is connected
with a game played precisely from bars 7–8 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 21–2 is also a means of affirming V as
well as cancelling out the oversharpening.
The left-hand part at 32–3 has also been heard almost exactly before – at bars 23–4
and, immediately preceding the unit under discussion, at bars 30–31, thus providing
a big thematic overlap between the two separate parts of the structure. Loek Hautus’s
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 30–31 (and 23–4) is that
the intervallic conduct is so blameless – the hands move in parallel thirds almost all the
way. Thus both in specific thematic terms and given the play of harmonic indicators –
note the A–A in 33 – the muddle at 32–3 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 112 –131 ! The unit that follows from bar 36 reflects the events of the previous
one. The b1 that fills in the fourth b1 –e2 (compare the filled-in g2 –b2 of 32–3) 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 significantly,
the soprano resembles the alto part heard from bars 186 onwards – this was the motive
associated with the dominant’s attempt to articulate itself free from interference.
K. 123 in E flat major offers even more screeching dissonances, involving parallel
major sevenths (at bars 31–8).22 If it is any consolation, they sound worse than they
actually are. The c3 and a2 in bar 31 act as neighbour notes to the controlling b2 ,
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 d2 –b1 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 138–9.

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 rhythmic–motivic configuration, there involving parallel fifths.
Irritations 231
Ex. 5.8 K. 128 bars 12–18
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 first heard in bar 14
of K. 128 in B flat 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 final 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 defined 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 diffidence 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 flourishing 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 first 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 flourish; 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 173 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 72–3, with rude parallel fifths 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 963 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 figure mean that one may
also hear the resolution as occurring on the third quaver.
Irritations 233
Ex. 5.9 K. 224 bars 81–98
third sequential exotic version seen from bar 813 of Ex. 5.9 clearly retains all these
attributes (and the rhythmic configuration is similar). At bars 91–4 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 942 we find B–B–A, A–A–G and B–B–A. Not
only that, but the clash with the chordal member a second above is also replicated;
thus the C clashes with the B at 921 just as the F clashes with the E at 981 .
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 first 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

Ex. 5.10a K. 437 bars 1–5
Ex. 5.10b K. 437 bars 16–24
something akin to a popular song. Yet K. 437 is full of witty recontextualizations

of the opening point. This is especially true of its first 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 final
bar of the first half – the cadential resting point on c2 also represents the first 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 49–50 the alto’s changing-note figures 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 56–7, but with the added incorporation of the rising three-quaver figure
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 49–57
case with the passage first heard at bars 20–21, which has the separate character of
an objet sonore, and is even more striking at 56–7, 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 Scarlatti’s triumph so completely to disguise a
polyphonic entry, turning counterpoint into colour.
For all this celebration of Scarlatti’s 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 finales of Mozart’s String Quartet in G major,
K. 387, and ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, or the fugues in Haydn’s Op. 20 string quartets.28
There is a definite 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 ‘Cat’s 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 finishes in an oddly
downbeat way by conceding that Scarlatti does not write Germanic fugues, that they
do not have the complexity of Bach’s.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 Powell’s discussion of Albero’s 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 Tovey’s scorn for Clementi’s 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, ‘Tovey’s Marginalia’, The Musical Times 131/1769 (1990),
352–3.
30 Seiffert, Klaviermusik, 420; Valabrega, Clavicembalista, 309–12.
of Degrada and Pestelli, understandably keen to re-establish the composer’s ‘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
first 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 Bülow’s
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 Scarlatti’s clusters demands such extreme measures to do
31 For example Degrada’s assertion of the ‘typically contrapuntal nature of [Scarlatti’s] 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 sufficiently emphasize the ideological dimensions to Scarlatti’s and our own response to the whole issue.
32 Vlad, ‘Storia’, 25. Bülow’s 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
Vlad’s restorative wish. Beck, ‘Rêveries’, 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 find 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 flourish, but not the
acciaccaturas, which fulfilled 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’ sonatas35 – 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. Significantly, this is marked ‘Adagio, e
arpeggiato nell’ acciaccature’. At bars 14 and 21 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 80–82 of K. 490
‘should be released quickly’ (without offering any firm musical rationale for this advice), while those found after
the double bar of K. 215 may be held on. Bond, Harpsichord, 199–200.
35 See Sheveloff, ‘Frustrations II’, 96.
Scarlatti’s use of them, where they are most commonly found in the middle of a unit
and less frequently at a beginning. Many of Scarlatti’s 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 Scarlatti’s 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’être 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 reflect guitar technique and, by extension, suggest an exotic–popular stylistic
world.37 On the whole, however, some conceptual gap remains. As with vamps, a
fairly firm historical context does not seem to be equal to what the sonatas present;
it is difficult ultimately to hear the clusters simply as an intensification of existing
features.
It was stressed earlier in connection with cluster chords that the sensation of
dissonance often results as much from accumulation 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 Degrada’s from
his study of the late cantatas, of a ‘deliberately “dirty” harmonization’.38 In other
36 ‘ “Unerringly Tasteful”?: Harpsichord Continuo in Corelli’s Op. 5 Sonatas’, Early Music 24/4 (1996), 677.
37 See for instance Boyd, Master, 183, and Bond, Harpsichord, 182 and 199. 38 Degrada, ‘Lettere’, 303.
Irritations 239
Ex. 5.11a K. 150 bars 57–62
Ex. 5.11b K. 198 bars 54–6
Ex. 5.11c K. 57 bars 96–111
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 c2 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
543 and 553 of K. 198 (Ex. 5.11b) the right hand’s 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 find 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 1–98
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 flat 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 10–12 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 first 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 misfires,
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 22 being required for voice-leading reasons, what is
offered suggests a play of modulatory indicators. In any C major work F is the first
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 23 in the right hand makes as if to continue the
same textural process, but at bars 4–5 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 67–8 and
82–4 of K. 243, for instance). The whole phrase lasts nine and a bit bars – from
this point all phrase lengths are defiantly irregular except for those that finish each
half.
Almost by way of compensation, the motivic construction of the sonata is very
clearly defined. If reduced to its lowest common denominator, motive (a) can be
defined 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 0–12 , 52 –62 , 11, 12, 31–2, 44, 503 –51, 62–3 and 68–71. Motive (b) consists of a
scalic third; see for instance bars 12 –2, 4, 13–14, 16ff., 23, 43, 51, 73. An extension
of this third into a scale may be found at 20–22, 29–31, 43–4, 54–6, and 68ff.
(in both hands).
The Schleifer 39 figure that initiates the obvious wrongdoing at 16 is a version of (b).
According to the understood usage of this figure, the outer notes should receive
harmonic support and the middle one act as a passing note between them. Thus the
a2 and f2 should be consonant, but in fact the g2 is, since it fits with the left-hand
harmony. However, it cannot be heard in this way; the rules of usage demand that g2
be heard not just as subordinate, but as an embellishment of the embellishment (it is
a passing note from the consonant skip a2 on the way to the primary pitch, the f2 ).
In other words not only is the f2 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. 407’s 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 13–15, 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 f2 dissonance does not even resolve properly, to the g2 for which it so painfully
substitutes; it moves in bar 20 to f2 (the wrong harmonic direction!), becoming
part of V7 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 finish 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 fifth, so that we start with V of V and
its dominant.
A further complication should be pointed out, in that although the left hand at bars
25–6 seems to move between I and IV of D (and at 16–17 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 flatwards, so that both are a step away on the
circle of fifths 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 hand’s next bar while the left continues down to form
a scale. In fact, much about this material specifically recalls bars 4–5. 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 specific textural
and indirect registral significance. The fact that the hands finally 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 25–8 (tied Cs heard two bars apart). This seems rather cruel after its effortful
eventual removal from the first half. In addition, the vertical C/G clash of bar 21
is revived by the g-c2 of bar 511 , 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:
V7 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 finishes at 57 a fifth 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 –d2 constitute
a D minor I after the previous V, and the pair of d2 s at 58 and 60 answer the pair of
c2 s at 51 and 53. Not only that, but the Schleifer gap-fills the tritone, with both the
c2 and g2 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 F–A dyads look
back to the previous phrase, forming a D minor 6/3 with the upper voice, while
the alternating E–G 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 fifths; 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 c3 –f 2 –e2 traced at 622 –631 . 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 A–C fits with the previous A minor harmony,
while the initial G–B 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 flat-side keys (C major counts as
flat in this notional context of prolonging V). Another five-bar unit follows from bar
68, leading to a V of C version of 14–15 at bars 703 –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 first-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 V7 of C. This harmonic clarification is aided by a topical relaxation
into a clearly popular mode, as can be heard in the insistent drone fifths 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 77–8, though, we find a real twist – having sorted out the first part of the origi-
nal offending phrase, the composer now complicates the second part. Thus Scarlatti
follows the cleansed equivalent of 16–20 (more accurately 25–8) with a more dis-
sonant version of 29–30, prompted by the need to have more flat-side emphasis to
counter the C–F complex. The offending note is the left-hand b1 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 73–6 and 79–80,
Scarlatti could have done the same with bars 77–8! 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 flavour 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 first, is rather like that of the metaphysical poets – they couldn’t help it,
it was simply a natural way of thinking and writing. It is based once more on
Subotnik’s ‘supreme confidence 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 sufficient 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
Scarlatti’s ‘confident’ 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 Bülow endorsed Czerny’s assessment in the preface to his edition;
Bülow, Klavierstücke, 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 Scarlatti’s modulations as ‘militantly individual’; Sheveloff, Grove, 341. Haas, ‘Modulation’
and Talbot, ‘Shifts’ also contain thoughtful discussions of the composer’s modulatory practice.
Ex. 5.13 K. 188 bars 104–23
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 flavour. It may be found, for instance, in the
three-card trick heard from bar 20 of K. 183, in which several diatonically ambiguous
notes lend an unusual flavour 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 fleetingly unsatisfactory c2 heard in bar 18 of K. 125, surrounded
by Cs which denote a smooth transition toward the dominant.44 Here any modal
flavour 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 first half and the return to C promised by
bars 109–10. 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 Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 164–5.
44 Sheveloff perfectly describes this C as ‘a very special note, a vague partial negation of the motion towards the
dominant that, while insufficient 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 one’s 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 inflected 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 Joaquı́n Martı́nez de la Roca of Valencia Cathedral began a
pamphlet war that lasted for five 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 justification 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 Scarlatti’s 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, 218–23, Álvaro Torrente, ‘A Critical Approach to the Musical Historiography of
Eighteenth-Century Spanish Music’ (Cambridge: unpublished, 1995), 12–13, 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 Scarlatti’s liberties is implied by Duran’s 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 Scarlatti’s 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 composer’s ‘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’ reflect 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
Czerny’s 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 37–9 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 flurry 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.
Kirkpatrick’s intuition of basso continuo practice as the ‘stylistic matrix’ of Scarlatti’s 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 refined . . . and complete critical armoury’. Pagano, Dizionario, 634.
50 Villanis, ‘Italia’, 169.
Irritations 249
Ex. 5.14 K. 56 bars 37–9
innocent departure from the rules is compromised. The difficulty 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 difficulty 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 Haydn’s 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 Scarlatti’s 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 composer’s misdemeanours. Nevertheless, Price’s concept reminds
one that Scarlatti and Haydn can be profitably 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 Trapido’s novel Temples of Delight. The mother of Flora
Fergusson, a friend to the book’s central figure, 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 Flora’s 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 floorboards, would have
considered Scarlatti sufficient grounds to petition for the Fergussons’ eviction . . . She had
assumed, for the rest of her days, a kind of greyish camouflage 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, Flora’s mother was a dancer
and she marries a man with an accountant’s 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: ‘ “You’ll 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.
T E M P O A N D S CA L AT T I ’ S A N DA N T E S
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 difficulty: 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, Albero’s
Sonata No. 18 in B minor is marked Andante but seems to demand a quick and
aggressive approach, while the first movement of Seixas’s 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), 51–3.

54 Temples of Delight, 99. 55 See Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 293, and Pestelli, Sonate, 218.
56 Note Hermann Keller’s remark that, for Scarlatti, ‘Allegro’ seemed to be ‘an almost neutral, flexible concept’;
Keller, Meister, 64. See also Howard Schott, Playing the Harpsichord (London: Faber, 1971), 115 (the sonata
K. 24 is misidentified as K. 27).
Irritations 251
in the music of the first 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 find 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 finds 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 flowing 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. Scarlatti’s 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 find 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 14–18 of K. 213 in D minor show
one example of this, in a work that definitely ranks among the composer’s slower
specimens of Andante tempo. This passage could easily be felt as one-in-a-bar figu-
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 justified or made effective in performance; one could main-
tain that its very bareness creates a type of tension that fits well in a work that
contains many harsh angularities and strong dissonances. Bars 21–2 of K. 259 in
G major also seem to lack sufficient 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 Pletnev’s tempo
57 See for example Peter leHuray, Authenticity in Performance: Eighteenth-Century Case Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), 36–8.
58 Beck, ‘Rêveries’, 16.
is frankly Allegro59 – 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 difficulty 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 slow tempo, 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 Scarlatti’s 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 difficulty 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-sufficiency, 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 Scarlatti’s 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
Pagano’s 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 Scarlatti’s 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 Tomšič (Cavalier: CAVCD 007, 1987), [ii].
60 Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 223. 61 See Rousset, ‘Statistique’, 79, or Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 322–3.
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 Pestelli’s ‘rhythmic restlessness’ help us to approach and

define 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 definition of expressive character as a hint at a
flavour conveyed by so many of the Andante sonatas. They are certainly not lacking
in lyricism – many give the sense of a well-defined 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 finish cleanly. Examples may be found in
K. 158, 197, 234 and 481. On a different plane we have already defined 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 profitably explore. A certain 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 defined 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 flavour 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 Puyana’s 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 Marcello’s Sonata
No. 8 in B flat major or Seixas’s 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 define 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 51–2. 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 define may not obtain through an entire structure. Andante for
Scarlatti seems to be cognate with a certain expressive groundlessness, diffidence
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 define 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 find 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 flourishes that hint at the French overture, as
with the imitative points at bars 1–2, 5–6 and 10–11. Interspersed with the Baroque
posings are many Spanish touches; the chains of acciaccatura figures 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 IV6 (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
difficult 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 flourish 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 flourish in the bass. The right hand’s imitation, the first 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 figure 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 B flat major is marked Cantabile. For Massimo Bogianckino
this sonata seems ‘caught up in the threads of an indefinable 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 first 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 flurry
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 finally 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 first 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 first half, bars 14–22, 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 flourishes 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. András Schiff fills in the
pause bars after the ‘Arbitri’ indications on the second playing of each half with
cadenzas based on written-out trill figures.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 find such loaded non-sound?
O N A M E N TAT I O N
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
Scarlatti’s ornaments are to be realized, on which subject there have been a number
of studies.68 As with other of the composer’s 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 reflect 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 definition
in the gift of the performer.69
In Scarlatti’s 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 grafia dei manoscritti scarlattiani: problemi e osservazioni’, in Domenico Scarlatti e il suo tempo, 183–206,
offers a good overview; the virtual chapter ‘Ornamentation in Scarlatti’, found as Appendix IV in Kirkpatrick,
Scarlatti, 365–98, 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: Haydn’s 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), 33–64. He states that Haydn’s ‘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 didn’t 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
copyist’s 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 configuration will generally sound incomplete, flat
or featureless without it. This is what Howard Schott implies when he writes of
Scarlatti’s ‘fine notational variations’ that are ‘often internally inconsistent within a
composition and frequently at odds with the player’s musical feeling’.73 Although
such issues can and ought to be debated as a matter of general musical principle –
one person’s ‘inconsistency’ is another’s ‘variety’ – in the particular case of Scarlatti
it seems to be just the ‘player’s 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 defined 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 composer’s variety and
70 Fadini, ‘Grafia’, 195.
71 Sheveloff is just about the only writer to square up to the issue of missing ornaments: ‘Scarlatti’s 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 composer’s [ornamental]
suggestions would fit 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 Scarlatti’s practice difficult 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 significantly 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 Scarlatti’s 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 fidelity 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’ fit 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 Scarlatti’s 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 specific rationale. An
74 Rousset, ‘Statistique’, 78, and compare Rousset’s 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 10–11 of K. 450 offered in Choi, ‘Manuscripts’,
139–40.
Irritations 259
Ex. 5.15 K. 515 bars 47–56
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 first 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
confirm 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 Scarlatti’s 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 difficult 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 fine instance of the structural implications of
non-parallel ornamentation (see Ex. 5.16). It is difficult 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 specific 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 1–7
left-hand echo individualizes the lower registral space, suggesting a more ‘active’ and
vivid field of sound. The ‘answering’ echo in fact poses a question rather than simply
completing the pattern. In addition, this fits with a principle specific 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 confirmed
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 7–8.
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 subject’s left-hand figure from
bar 134 , in which a typical siciliana rhythm in the tenor register alternates with
single low bass notes. In the first phrase the thrice-repeated dotted figure is always
ornamented; in the second from 154 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 figure a mind of its own, so to speak. This is particularly
significant 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 confirmed by what happens in the equivalent passage
in the second half. This time the pattern is the same until the sixth hearing of the
figure, where, in a double bluff, the ornament is not revived. A performer may
well find the evidence of the sources too irritatingly sporadic to be taken seriously:
isn’t this a typical example of scribal shorthand, the addition of the ornamental
complement to the dotted figure 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 first half. Without this, there would be every justification
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 61–77
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 inflect the dozen appearances of
the figure identically each time. With the observance of repeat marks, the ‘potential
for perversity’ in an imaginative performance is then exponentially increased.
For a final 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 first three parallel phrases of the second half (shown
as Ex. 5.17). Gilbert changes the appoggiatura g2 given by both P and V in bar 68 to a
b2 so as to match the V reading of bar 72. On the other hand, Fadini retains this g2 in
68, but then for 72 she chooses the e2 given by P rather than the g2 given by V. Thus
while Gilbert make the two bars match by upper rather than lower appoggiaturas,
Fadini does the opposite! If Fadini’s 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 Scarlatti’s ornamental signs to Spanish
Ex. 5.18a K. 343 bars 51–3
Ex. 5.18b K. 439 bars 39–44
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 flamenco 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 inflections which might also be ornamented appropriately. These inflections
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 flavour, bearing
in mind the debate in Chapter 3 about the claims of realism versus 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 composer’s ornamentation in explicitly Spanish terms.
Puyana, ‘Influencias’, 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 354 and 783–4 , 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 354 – 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 783–4 the right hand has alternating E and F quavers,
with a trill over the final F, a more elaborately melismatic version of what one finds
in the primary sources.
Finally, one should signal the arrival of a potentially significant 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 first 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
significant 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 first 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 Fadini’s comment that the ‘poverty of ornamental signs’ in Scarlatti ‘enforces a plurality of
possible solutions’, suggesting that their frequent lack of secure definition virtually forces some freedom out of
the performer. For many, of course, this may afford a less agreeable prospect than the table des agréments typically
provided by composers of the French school. Fadini, ‘Grafia’, 206.
81 David D. Boyden, for instance, feels that it ‘does not seem reasonable 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, ‘Scarlatti’s Tremulo’, Early Music 19/1 (1991), 92. For a few of the many other
contributions to this debate, see Fadini, ‘Grafia’, 203–6; Gilbert, ‘Périple’, 130; Frederick Neumann, Orna-
mentation in Baroque and Post-Baroque Music, with Special Emphasis on J. S. Bach (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1978), 352–5; Sheveloff, ‘Keyboard’, 385–96; and Carl Sloane, ‘Domenico Scarlatti’s “Tremulo” ’, Early
Music 30/1 (2002) (‘Correspondence’, with reply by Howard Schott), 158.
S O U C E M AT T E S
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
“definitive” 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 difficult not to have some
sympathy for this position – that one’s whole sense of style and hence a feeling for
the plausibility of various details can collapse when faced with the difficult 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 final solution to the irritation. Not only is
this plainly impossible in Scarlatti’s 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 definition 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 specifically 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 Scarlatti’s
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.
83 Review of Fadini edition, Nuova rivista musicale italiana 14/4 (1980), 660.
Irritations 265
Richard Taruskin’s 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 definition’. While
there can be little doubt about his claim that the demand for clean texts and clean
performance made by ‘authentistic’ culture is firmly rooted in twentieth-century
taste84 – and hence ‘authentic’ in its own right – at what point does Taruskin’s
‘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 Scarlatti’s
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 Scarlatti’s 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 Taruskin’s 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 stifles the creativity of musicians,85 but the consistent correction of so much
fine print in the Scarlatti ‘tradition’ stifles the creativity of the composer! This is par-
ticularly difficult to grasp because so many of the composer’s 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, Bülow or
Tausig versions outright than to claim a sham ‘real Scarlatti’ that then proceeds to
offer such a selective fidelity.
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, affirm 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 composer’s 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
first 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 first 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 first half (particularly since V
has already been securely established) emphasizes the severity of the learned topic
that is more firmly enunciated here. The initial part of the second half then seems to
undermine the stylistic certainty of the first half ’s close. At bar 51 the dotted rhythm
dramatically relents, and, although it soon returns, the cadential bar 60 suddenly
introduces a configuration 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 61–2 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 63–4; 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 711 , helping to create that admixture of rhythmic elements that
is so characteristic of the galant, lead to yet another version of the same cadential
flourish, 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 figures
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 Zipoli’s Pastorale for organ,
where the dotted material clearly depicts rustic flutes or fifes (which are asked for in the registration too).
87 Peter Williams notes the galant character of the passage in Williams, Fourth, 106–7.
88 Fuller, ‘Dotted’, 104.
Irritations 267
Ex. 5.19 K. 256 bars 60–78
at 69–70 and 72–3, obviously perplexed by the wholesale change of affect that has
come over the music.89
After the symmetrical repetition of bars 69–71 in turn, bar 75 alludes to the
contrary-motion figure heard at 61–2; the right-hand broken octaves at 76 seem
an almost frivolous-sounding decoration of this. In bar 77 we find a compacting
of the chromatic rise of 633 –641 with the following, by now familiar, cadential
figure. 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 first half. But are we faced
with a case of scribal error? Fadini corrects this by placing the first three notes of the
right hand’s 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 fidelity, the mechanical reproduction of an
original error. Fadini’s correction would seem to attribute the first 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 first three notes of the figure 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 Fadini’s correction – the
previous two bars see to that. The cadential pattern at bar 772–3 has already been heard
five times from bar 60, thus making the circularity and over-articulacy of syntax in
the total stylistic context very plain. The Gilbert/V/P/M version 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 Sheveloff’s 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 significant 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
flourishes 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 flamenco proces-
sional genre of a saeta.90 The very number of different readings rather confirms how
strange this language must have been to copyists, with the composer giving many
approximations to cante jondo style.
90 Before Jane Clark’s 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), 57–9
Plate 1a
Plate 1b
Plate 1c
The Cambridge copy of K. 490, not taken account of by Fadini, contains some
interesting variants, some reflecting 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 9–12 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 Donington’s remarks are quoted and discussed in Sheveloff, ‘Keyboard’, 375–7; EMI: 7 64934 2, 1949/1993
(Landowska). By way of local colour, Landowska’s 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 5–11
Ex. 5.20b K. 490 bars 78–82
Ex. 5.20c K. 490 bars 33–7
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 c3 given in bar 814 of Q 15115 (also found in M and W G, another
Vienna copy) is to be preferred to the d3 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 814 differs from the first-half equivalent (bar 364 , 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 35–7, the top part (presumably
for reasons of registral management, no f3 being available) has the c3 fall to the
c3 in the next bar. The d3 at bar 814 gives a kink in the melodic line as if to offset
the disappointment of the unfulfilled expected rise of a fourth. Doesn’t this give a
stronger contour? Choi’s preferred W II version – rhyming more closely with the
first half – is rather clumsy in effect and in its blank yielding to the presumed registral
93 Choi, ‘Manuscripts’, 142–3. This is backed up in Eva Badura-Skoda, ‘Il significato dei manoscritti Scarlattiani
recentemente scoperti a Vienna’, in Domenico Scarlatti e il suo tempo, 50–51.
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 d3 at the start of bar 82
which perhaps further refines the join. There is another small note, e2 , 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
specific contribution to the difficult 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 first 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 final 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 ficta 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 ficta accidental at 38! Gilbert’s 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 d1 , which
is certainly possible, but there is also no alto d2 ; then the decorated repetition offers no left-hand g1 , or anything
else, on the first 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 33–50
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 mollifies unusual contours in the second half of a sonata.97 On
a smaller scale, a flurry of unexpected chromatic activity at this point is a stylistic
fingerprint of the composer’s (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 first half, and the harmonic activity in the second half before the tonic is
resumed holds no surprises. This might fit 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 final cadential flourish 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 51–72
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 35–6), so that G will be brighter on its
reaffirmation, while at the same time introducing sharps on its first and fifth scale
degrees G and D, so that it will sound more firmly 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 f2 , g2 and a2 in a firm G major context that
it is hardly surprising that bar 35 breaks away. The upper component of the sixths
figuration at bars 47–9 then constitutes a correcting and affirmative response.
Scarlatti aficionados will note the unusually long retention of the dominant after
the double bar and the still more unusual strong cadence in V at bars 56–7 (see
Ex. 5.21b). This passage can be understood as a direct response to the ‘problem’
that arose in the first half. G major was undermined, and the final few cadential
Irritations 275
bars do not carry enough weight to make good the undermining, hence the firm
articulation of the dominant at this stage. More than that, the point at which the
opening line of the second half deviates from its first-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 significant 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 first 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 67–8, where the offending shape – back almost
exactly in the form heard at bars 35–6 – 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 14–21. 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 89–90 of K. 270 and 69–70 of K. 271). Furthermore, K. 270 has exactly the
same attribute of missing Fs before the double bar. One could also find 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 confirm 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 inflections,
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 Scarlatti’s ‘disdain’.
6
‘ U N A G E N U I N A M Ú S I C A D E T E C L A ’
F I N G E M U S I K A N D ‘ M E E V I T U O S I T Y ’ 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 fingers, and his
inspiration came through the symbiosis of hands and keyboard (hence Roberto
Pagano’s term ‘Fingermusik’2 ). What we have here is, if not a ‘finger 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
composer’s music, which is after all one of its most novel and revolutionary attributes,
but the idea that Scarlatti was a slave to his fingers 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 fight 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 flippant
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-sufficient, generically legitimated
free figuration of the true toccata style.3 The interaction of the two elements brings
1 Much of this first section was presented in a paper given at King’s College, London in March 2001.
2 Pagano, ‘Dita’, 87.
3 The figuration is very similar to that found in the fourth movement of Marcello’s 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
Scarlatti’s is an isolated object.
276
‘Una genuina música de tecla’ 277
Ex. 6.1 K. 65 bars 1–74
to mind rather Giorgio Pestelli’s ‘theatricality’ – one could envisage a piece of stage
business involving a notary and a clown.
The critical reception of Scarlatti’s keyboard writing has in fact been distinctly
schizophrenic. On the one hand we find the sense that the composer lets his fingers
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 Scarlatti’s exploitation and development of keyboard technique, often examined
by means of ‘fictitious surveys’ of technical features.4 This led to the sort of verdict
found in an old edition of Grove’s Dictionary: ‘He was not a great master in the art of
4 Pestelli’s 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 Scarlatti’s 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-sufficient 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 first 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 composer’s keyboard writing.
His absolute confidence 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. 266–355) we find 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, 70–71.

7 Gray, History, 139; Rostand, Queffélec 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 diversified 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 influence 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 music’s 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
culture’s ambivalent attitude toward it offers the most conspicuous evidence of the
larger difficulty. 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 definition a locus classicus for virtuosity,
its historical basis being the display of individual technical prowess. Yet already
in Beethoven’s cadenzas we find 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 first movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in
C minor, K. 491, in which the performer began with a fugue on the movement’s
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 deflected.
Such concerns do not, however, bear solely on the later reception history of
Scarlatti’s sonatas; they are not anachronistic when applied to Scarlatti’s 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 flavour informs Thomas Roseingrave’s
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 Scarlatti’s 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’, 81–7.
11 This account to Charles Burney is cited in Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 30–31. Malcolm Boyd notes the difficulty 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 difficult vocal display. This helps the early identification of wickedness . . . with melodic virtuosity,
inhuman because of its mechanical nature, later taken as an example by Mozart in Die Zauberflöte with the Queen
of Night.’ Pestelli, Mozart, 48–9.
Ex. 6.2 K. 65 bars 3–6, 24–5 and 28–9
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 first 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, indefinitely extendible for
as long as the fingers fancy (note its clearly excessive repetitions and duration from
bar 3), while the Baroque matter is driven onwards. The first 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 first hocket unit (compare
bars 3, 5 and so forth), while the right hand moves up to the a2 also heard in the first
hocket unit and then one step beyond. At bars 23–5 and then 27–30 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 5/3–6/4 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 flourish, a familiar gesture
in Baroque binary forms, and the left hand in bar 38, whose equivalent in the first
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
briefly 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 first bit of counterpoint at bars
39–40 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 first 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 61–5 with 11ff. in the first 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: G–B and
A–C pairs alternate, surrounded by boundary notes of e2 and E.
Thus Scarlatti has cut from the equivalent of bar 17 to 27 of the first 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
first-half material into A major; instead, bars 27–9 return verbatim at bars 65–7,
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 inflexible
in its form.14
However, at bars 68–9 we hear a slightly altered form of 53–4, 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 33–4, 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 final 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 child’s 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-
flective 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 child’s self-sufficient 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 Böttinger offers some instructive
14 The ‘unthinking’ retention of first-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. 342–3.
15 It seems, though, to be reflected in bars 5–7 and 9–11 of the Sonata of Albero’s Recercata, Fugue and Sonata
No. 1 in D minor–major.
thoughts on the poetics of Spielfreude in the sonatas of Scarlatti. In the final 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 reflective adult world
arranges such sensations of sound, would then represent a ‘mistrust of this naivety’,
and Scarlatti’s attitude a ‘mistrust of mistrust; the salvation of the naive by making
it subversive’.16 In other words, we find a calculated innocence (a double meaning
Böttinger renders with the term Doppelbödigkeit), 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 Bülow 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 fit the streamlined smoothness of today’s
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 composer’s ‘keyboard effects’ are carried off in a spirit of appar-
ent nonchalance,20 and elegantly realized (compared with the more abrupt use of
16 Böttinger, ‘Annäherungen’, 107. 17 Beck, ‘Rêveries’, 13.
18 Achtzehn ausgewählte Klavierstücke, in Form von Suiten gruppiert (Leipzig: Peters, 1864). Also instructive in this
regard, as Piero Rattolino points out, is Leopold Godowsky’s arrangement of K. 113, which was ‘enormously
difficult to play, but eliminated the particular terrifying difficulty of the original, the left hand’s crossing leaps’.
Rattolino, ‘Pianoforte’, 115.
19 See for instance Ife, Scarlatti, 21.
20 Paul Henry Lang notes that ‘Bartók 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 defined 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 composer’s
‘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 Scarlatti’s 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
definitively, 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 affirmed elsewhere in
the literature,22 has the strength of moving (Scarlatti’s) 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 music’s corporeality altogether.
K. 327 in C major offers a fine 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 fingers, 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, 185–6; 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 difficult 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 Scarlatti’s
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 Scarlatti’s hand-crossings as an example of this. If this
suggests a refreshingly direct glance at the composer’s foregrounding of musical me-
chanics, a later thought in the author’s 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 Scarlatti’s
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 Scarlatti’s crossing of hands and acrobatic feats,
as well as a sense of gesture and dance, are reminiscent of the commedia dell’arte’.24
This offers a nice complement to the Spanish flavour that animates Kirkpatrick’s
dance imagery, since a sense of clowning may inform such passages as much as the
passionate energy of Kirkpatrick’s 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 Marcello’s Sonata No. 9 in A major, for instance, evinces some
hair-raising examples of violinistic leaps, but a comparison with Scarlatti’s leaps is
instructive. In Scarlatti the leaps are less plainly violinistic – they only rarely sound
like a sort of translation from another instrument’s 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 Composer’s Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 137–8 and 139.
24 Bogianckino, Harpsichord, 85n. One might also consider the possible specific influence of comic intermezzo
features; Charles Troy cites a burlesque comparison aria by Domenico Sarri from L’impresario 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 11–21
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 flat 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 first 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 first half. We then hear sixteen consecutive versions of the primary two-
bar module, broken only once at bars 77–9; 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 102–13
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 105–8 present the transposed equivalent of the first half ’s closing material
(see Ex. 6.3b). With bars 109–10 we might expect a third playing of the closing
figure to match 49–50 in the first 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 figure 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 official business of closing the form,
the figure 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 first two appearances of the virtuoso figure at
bars 13 and 15 (compare Ex. 6.3a). This mixture of intrinsic and extrinsic functions
offers a wonderful example of Böttinger’s Doppelbödigkeit.
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 Hammond’s term; Hammond, ‘Scarlatti’, 169.

Ex. 6.4 K. 180 bars 13–46
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
Vivaldi’s ‘Summer’ from Le quattro stagioni. For all the plainness of pitch contour,
these figures 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 39–41 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 difficult 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 first two
bars of the piece – bars 37–8 replicate 1–2 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 gratification’ than the opening
of K. 65.
This passage forms a very efficient 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 first 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 firmly 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 reflected 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 64–86
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
first 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 first place.
Ex. 6.5 (cont.)
K E Y B OA D E A L I S M
An overarching category which can illuminate many of the incidents discussed so
far is the intrinsic nature of Scarlatti’s 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 música 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 composer’s creative achievement in the sonatas. On
the other hand, many of Scarlatti’s 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 identified, 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 1–8
to create ‘una genuina música de tecla’. A concise example of this may be found
early in the Sonata in B flat major, K. 503 (Ex. 6.6). At bars 5–7 we would expect
something more ‘worked’ than the complete silence of the right hand while the left
hand answers the right’s bars 3–4; this creates a yawning gap in the texture. At all
subsequent points it provides a rough equivalent of the left hand’s prior material in
a sort of invertible counterpoint; compare bars 13–14, for instance, or 48–9, which
is the second-half equivalent of bars 5–6. 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 fulfil 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’, 89–90.

keyboard’s genius, its ‘own true identity’ – no other instruments can so easily evoke
so wide a range of reference. Nevertheless, alongside such traditional extroversive
meanings30 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 5–7. These bars represent in other words an assertion of the keyboard’s
rights, the intrusion of what I call keyboard realism. There is after all no reason for
the hands always to cooperate in creating the fiction of another form or medium.
Scarlatti is the first to assert so radically the keyboard’s rights to and possibilities of
intrinsic material. Hence, for instance, the leaps and hand-crossings, in this sense
undertaken as a demonstration of the keyboard’s musical independence through the
medium of technique. This is not the same as the normal commentary on Scarlatti’s
‘exploitation of the keyboard’ and all its technical devices. The composer is not just
inventing under the spell of his fertile fingers; he is trying to make more authentic
music with his medium. The trademark descending arpeggio in the left hand at bars
7–81 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 composer’s distance from specific generic associations, as explored in Chapter
3, is also relevant to this ‘instrumental reform’. The very persistence of the title sonata
is significant in this regard, with Scarlatti’s 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 influence 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-defined 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 Scarlatti’s extension of keyboard sound beyond its normal limits of
reference’, but this does not really distinguish Scarlatti’s 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 67–71
The Avison arrangements for string orchestra, discussed in Chapter 4, often point
up the free disposition of such elements in Scarlatti’s intrinsic keyboard style. A sim-
ple example may be found in bars 15–16 of K. 180 (see Ex. 6.4 earlier). Here the left
hand imitates the right hand’s line at a distance of two crotchets, but its c1 does not
resolve up by step as did the right hand’s c2 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 30–31 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 composer’s 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 filled in, and Pestelli sees it as part of the composer’s
‘subtraction’, as ‘refinement’ rather than ‘simplification’. Barcaba, ‘Geburtsstunde’, 385; Beck, ‘Rêveries’, 15;
Pestelli, ‘Music’, 87.
Indeed, Scarlatti’s 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 find 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 composer’s
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 five fingers. 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 Scarlatti’s ‘new objective’ of ‘rational playing devoted to employing
all the fingers of the hand’. This follows from his belief that the composer ‘tends to use
the hand as often as possible in its natural position’.34 Such ‘rationalism’ opposes the
older fingering practices with their distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ fingers. The
author takes the example of K. 228 in B flat major, in which the ‘real protagonists
of the sonata’ are ‘the ten fingers’. Thus we find for example a quarrel between
quintuple units, as determined by the number of fingers on each hand, and the 3/8
triple metre at bars 45ff.; the hands then ‘take revenge’ in their following quintuple
shapes, first of all beginning on the upbeat, then on the downbeat from bar 57. This
amounts to what Pagano defines as ‘a sort of deliberate serialization of the use of the
fingers’, in which the five-finger row can determine structure and syntax – what the
author calls ‘the possibility of finding a rationale for phrases in the . . . use of hand and
fingers’.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 gratification. The danger of Pagano’s
thesis lies not so much in any intrinsic weakness but simply in that from the wider
ideological perspective it reaffirms that Scarlatti’s concerns were ‘narrow’, lacking
33 This is noted in van der Meer, ‘Keyboard’, 139. 34 Pagano, ‘Dita’, 88 and 90.
35 Pagano, ‘Dita’, 101–7. 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-Milani’s 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 figuration, generally relatively difficult and not ‘thematic’.
Abbassian-Milani, Essercizi.
significance beyond the story of the development of keyboard technique. Yet virtu-
osity, or at least technical proficiency, 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 fluency that hides the effort of acquisition.
TEXTUE AND SONOITY

The other part of our ‘genuina música 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 Liszt’s 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 Scarlatti’s 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 Scarlatti’s sonorous invention. In his discussion of scales he
writes thus of bars 19–20 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 Valabrega’s elsewhere – to categorize this simply as a piece
of figuration or even virtuoso ‘padding’. Similarly, in bars 32–4 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 technical–pedagogical framework.
Charles Rosen also notes the historically exceptional nature of Scarlatti’s attending
so closely to sound. To argue his claim that 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 confined 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 Scarlatti’s sonatas, where the keyboard
instrument mimics trumpets, drums, oboes, and guitars.’40 While there can be little
doubt about Rosen’s 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 Valabrega, Clavicembalista, 152 and 154.
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-specific’.
Ex. 6.8a K. 454 bars 15–21
Ex. 6.8b K. 24 bars 32–6
An example of this may be found in the Sonata in C major, K. 465, with its
dominant-seventh arpeggios heard first 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 first
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 figure (see bars
26, 28, 30 and 32). This furthers the sense that it is being used non-functionally,
Ex. 6.9 K. 465 bars 24–35
so to speak, simply as sound, to be savoured asyntactically.41 Rosen’s ‘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 Scarlatti’s
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 defined 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 definition in the gift of the performer. Christian Zacharias’s 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 31–4 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 fluid and suggestive in
conception rather than being defined according to pre-established affective or topical
schemes. When Stephen Plaistow commends Mikhail Pletnev’s readings for the way
41 Something very similar indeed is heard in Seixas’s 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, 1979–85/1991.
Ex. 6.10 K. 183 bars 28–37
they ‘make . . . sound immediately command character’, he overlooks the fact that it
is the very nature of Scarlatti’s conception of sonority that has encouraged this in
the first place.43
Rosen’s conflation of this ‘pure play of sound’ with the imitation of particular
instruments is understandable given that one of its most striking manifestations is
Scarlatti’s 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 composer’s most exhilarating three-card tricks. Its bracing effect derives from the
low bass, the gap between the hands, the fifths 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 fifths 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 9–16, which jumps between four-note cluster chords a fifth apart.
The left-hand leaps in octaves, first heard at bars 49–58, 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 34–8
Ex. 6.11b K. 480 bars 73–8
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 final two-octave ascending scale in bar 163 (almost
certainly to be executed glissando) is a virtuoso flourish 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-influenced piano writing of some twentieth-century composers, starting from
a high-art position but using the vernacular to revivify their art.
On many occasions Scarlatti’s 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 composer’s keyboard writing, has
barely been recognized by writers and performers. This is perhaps not surprising,
since their provenance and effect are often difficult 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 first heard in bars 173 –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 40–54
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 9–10
and 11–12 of the first 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 52–3 and
54–5.44 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 442 –451 and 462 –471 , heard the same appoggiatura figure.
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 difficult not to be disconcerted. That the constituent voices nevertheless retain
some sense of independence, making the effect still stranger, is shown by the flicker
of rhythmic difference between the left hand’s repeated notes on the second and
third quavers of each bar and the right hand’s 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 514 –55, although the melodic line of bar 52 is taken as the
basis of a link to the equivalent of 56ff. This is the first 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 45–50
Ex. 6.11e K. 223 bars 21–5
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
23–4 (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 law or 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 hand’s imitative reply. Because the
ear hears octave equivalence the sense of independent part-writing is compromised.
Bars 8–9 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 13–17, 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 Pestelli’s theorem that the composer’s genius consists in taking away rather
45 Livermore, Spanish, 116.

Ex. 6.11f K. 449 bars 1–19
Ex. 6.11g K. 28 bars 41–6
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 final example of this fascinating textural fingerprint, 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
Scarlatti’s sonata output.
One remarkable instance of the composer’s 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 deficient 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 final cadential bars. Bars 78 and 80 rhyme with the corresponding point
at the end of the first 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 figure has become tainted
by its three prior appearances. Since it has become associated with a misfiring 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 flourish 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 first half of the
Ex. 6.12 K. 210 bars 62–82
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 composer’s 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 261 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 first half to the first-time
playing of the second would simply evaporate; Frederick Hammond in fact describes
its absence as ‘impossible’.49 However, its omission can be justified in terms of the
plot of the piece. The first half is Arcadian; it features delicate fanfares at the start,
idyllic hovering material at bars 7–111 (a mode also found in the corresponding sec-
tion of K. 215, for example), then a decorative galant demisemiquaver figure. The
second half starts with a melancholy sigh – it seems to mix Baroque and Spanish
features, the accumulation of repeated appoggiaturas at 29–31 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 first half – it sounds as des-
olate and world-weary as any example of Jane Clark’s ‘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 confidence. 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 flourish 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 261 simply highlights and enforces the separation of the two topical
worlds.
We might again finish 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 e2 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 confidence 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 deflect
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 Scarlatti’s ‘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 antagonism can 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 reflected 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 fits exactly with the new taste represented
by the Alberti figuration, 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 Scarlatti’s 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 find 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 composer’s 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 confinement, 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 30–33 are relieved by the diatonic
sixths in the right hand and octaves in the left hand. This classic antithesis of confine-
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 hand’s
‘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 confined in their coverage of a compound fifth. Nevertheless,
one may still speak of an opposition between width and narrowness of intervallic
51 One could also note that the figure is used to energize rather than as a device for textural and rhythmic cohesion;
this recalls Rosemary Hughes’s remarks about Haydn’s 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), 143–4.
52 Gerstenberg, Klavierkompositionen, 136.
Ex. 6.13 K. 535 bars 36–47
gesture. This is sharpened by the fact that in their most common form the scales
are distinctly exotic (see bars 44–7), 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
figure in the first half, the harmonic sense of those found in bars 36–41 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 confinement 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 confinement. 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
field’ and hence feels somewhat unnatural, there does exist a strange kind of tension,
as explained before.
There is also a broader difficulty 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 confinement (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 flourishes mix arpeggios and steps, the contrast between the two animating
an intensive study of space and confinement. Steps are associated with melodic
intensification, and dissonances – or vertical steps – are also important in this respect;
note immediately the strange multiple clashes of bars 23 and 63 . 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 music54 ) 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 9–10 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 g1 .
In the subsequent passage the appearances of the arpeggio are chained to a pattern
of stepwise descent from g2 to c2 (marked out on the melodic downbeats of bars 10,
12, 13, 14 and 15). Note the explicit filling in of the C minor arpeggio of 151 in the
following two beats; even more clearly than at 9–10, the two spatial–intervallic types
are being juxtaposed. Bars 16–18 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 3–41 and 9–10).
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 influence; Puyana, ‘Influencias’, 54. 54 Pestelli, Sonate, 173–4.
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 first section. Bars 23–5 seem to rework the prominent
stepwise pairs of 1–2: firstly 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 24–5. 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 fights 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 confinement. In the place of the initial
arpeggio we hear a figure whose diminutional structure is far from clear: is the d2
or the c2 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 fifth quavers; slightly less
obviously, the basic melodic pattern at bar 212–3 yields dotted crotchet b2 leading to
quaver a2 . The repeated one-bar unit is then followed at 23 by sequential patterning,
thus matching bar 3. In other words, bars 21–3 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
9–10). 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 filed under ‘leaps, difficult’; 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 38–9 might be thought of as a transition between the almost purely stepwise
and claustrophobic 32–7 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 34–5 are clear in this respect, so we might extrapolate back to 32–3, except that the d2 at 32 fits with the
implied G chord and at 33 it receives harmonic support for its case.
Bars 44–5 then have the same harmonic underlay and descending contour as 38–9,
but with the stepwise movement fighting 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 figure (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 1–2, the falling c3 –b2
being superimposed on the rising f 2 –g2 .
The next cue is provided by the rising chromatic scales of bars 65–7; 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 733 –741 , 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 16–18 at 76–8. 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 composer’s 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 final 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 figure.
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 first two notes of
the arpeggios of 1 and 2 respectively, then presents the two-note pairs (e2 –d2 and
b1 –c2 ) 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 105–6 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 Hautus, ‘Insistenz’, 141.

towards spaciousness. The final C minor arpeggio, the first since bar 8, matches the
expansive dominant version heard in bars 79–80.59 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 Marı́a Bárbara 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 sonata’s textural topics of insistence versus progression
(with pedal points set against moving parts) and space versus confinement – 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 filled
with life? Inspired irregularity has much to do with it, and this is a strong example of
Scarlatti’s creative virtuosity with common chords and figuration. 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 (a2 –f2 ) in the ascending arpeggiated pattern
and proceeds directly to the climactic d3 –a2 . 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 first-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 confirmed by the wide-ranging left-hand scale at bars 7–10. 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 31–5 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 Albero’s Fugue in C minor.
60 Might Haydn have known this piece? The first movement of his Sonata No. 62, in the relative major of this
work’s 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 1–12
Ex. 6.14b K. 119 bars 52–65
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 81–4 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 difficulty to the leaping left-hand gesture previously
associated with this material at 81–4, 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-filled. 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 figuration. 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 significance. 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 confinement, 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 finessed. 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 fleet 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 Scarlatti’s 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 finds reference to it in E. F. Benson’s 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 Avison’s 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 composer’s 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 Avison’s 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, fleet, dry, sparkling
but without passion.
As a final contribution to the assessment of Scarlatti’s keyboard style, here is a list of
some of the other textural and sonorous fingerprints that are found in the sonatas:
1. A pattern of unfolded sixths (see K. 188, 235, 320 and 449) that is generally
popular in flavour.
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 Tomšič 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
(Tomšič); 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 D’Annunzio’s 1913 story La Leda
senza cigno; Santi, ‘Nazionalismi’, 54n. Note also Tausig’s arrangement, criticized so heavily by Heinrich Schenker
in Schenker, ‘Meisterwerk’, 161–3, 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 figures, seems to have been recognized as such only
in Valabrega, Clavicembalista, 196–7, and Pestelli, Sonate, 247–8. Federico Celestini shows that this figuration,
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’, 114–15.
Ex. 6.15a K. 447 bars 5–19
Ex. 6.15b Pasquini: Variations bars 8–12
4. The tabula rasa effect of a sudden open fifth, 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 composer’s most distinctive fingerprints – the
suspension/syncopation figure in the tenor. Is it a relic of Renaissance polyphony?
It takes the same form as what Knud Jeppesen terms Palestrina’s ‘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 flattening of the dominant’s 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 figure, generally involving
66 This is cited by Eveline Andreani, who notes the use of the figure in the Kyrie of Scarlatti’s ‘Madrid Mass’ – a
somewhat different context to that at issue here; Andreani, ‘Sacrée’, 100.
an 8̂−7̂−6̂ 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 52–5, K. 443, bars
7–10, K. 441, bars 51–8. The figure is normally associated with common time,
but see the start of the second half of K. 492 for something similar.
This specific tenor figure seems to be confined to the higher-numbered sonatas
(for a less specialized form see K. 279, bars 30–31 or 34–5), 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 Scarlatti’s own
‘Madrid Mass’, where it is found most prominently in one of the inner parts at
cadence points; see, for instance, bars 76–9 of the Kyrie, 100–1 of the Gloria
or 13–14 of the Benedictus.67 If it is reasonable to align the examples found
in the sonatas with this practice, then it shows once again Scarlatti’s 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 first half of K. 447 in F sharp minor. In bars 9–12 it is heard in
the soprano with a more traditional function, in the approach to repeated tonic
cadences; from bar 13, though, the tenor’s more characteristic use of the figure
helps to bring about a harmonic and stylistic modulation from the invertible
counterpoint of the opening to the urgent folk idiom that closes the first half.
Indeed, the very repetition of the figure 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 (1637–1710),
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 figure are also evident in its employment
throughout the ‘Nobis post hoc’ section of Scarlatti’s 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 filling 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 mind’s ear long after it
67 Walter Schenkman has noted the survival of this figure in the rhythmic vocabulary of Baroque cadences, where
it normally takes a simple 8–7–8 form. ‘Rhythmic Patterns of the Baroque: Part II’, Bach: Quarterly Journal of the
Riemenschneider Bach Institute 5/4 (1974), 15–16.
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, filling 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 flourishes 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 fingerprint 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 763 to 83 of K. 327 we find
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
flavour 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 6–10, 13–15, 16–18, 19–21, 26–7, 45–7 and 53–4.
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).
7
F O M A L DY N A M I C
B I N A Y - F O M B L U E S
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 figure, 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 conflating our
problems of historical comprehension with a composer’s-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 influence 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 defined 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 Scarlatti’s 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 composer’s keyboard music ‘revolves around a single artistic problem, that of
the sonata’, and a section of Hermann Keller’s 1957 book was entitled ‘Das Problem der Form’. Gerstenberg,
Kirkpatrick Review, 343; Keller, Meister, 76–80.
2 Hammond, ‘Scarlatti’, 186; Valabrega, Clavicembalista, 96; Bond, Harpsichord, 180; Kastner, ‘Repensando’, 151.
320
Formal dynamic 321
using what we would now define 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 Scarlatti’s 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
fixed course that the composer would not commit himself to. The choice of ‘sonata’,
which as a title does not necessarily define 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 reflect the Formenlehre
tradition, implying that Scarlatti’s form is a ‘fixed 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, ‘figures . . . 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 first 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 Scarlatti’s 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 difficulties 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 Scarlatti’s ‘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, 5–6.
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 difficult 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-defined 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 Debussy’s creative thoughts do not entail a
structure or Brahms’s 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 unified 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 ‘flanked by all its quali-
fiers (rational, logical, unified, concise, symmetrical, organic, etc.)’.7 Such qualifiers
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 first sustained
musical evidence of what John Docker calls the Enlightenment’s ‘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 Treitler’s qualifiers may not necessarily be affirmed in a
consideration of the formal properties of the mixed style, and Scarlatti’s 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 Fulfilment 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 paradigm of 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 classification.
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 difficult to get to grips with a
good deal of especially eighteenth- century music, including Scarlatti’s. 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 flowering, maturity
and decline. Thus what comes later need not be better, what comes earlier need
not be inferior. However, it would be difficult 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 difficulties 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. Levy’s 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 reflect 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 Webster’s
Haydn’s ‘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’, 34–5.
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 reflected 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 first 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 first 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 firmest 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 Chopin’s sonata-form structures has involved an acceptance of a
similar formal ‘quirk’ – that the return of the second subject in the tonic, not the
first, is the defining structural moment. One could argue that this in fact is always the
case, structurally if not rhetorically: the recapitulation of a first subject is frequently
enough disguised or altered (see the first movement of Haydn’s 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
Scarlatti’s 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 composer’s influence should mean that he remains
tangential while less significant figures 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 fixed 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 composer’s pro-
nounced dislike of formal definition, 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.
T H E M AT I C I S M
It has been suggested that we may assess Scarlatti’s 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 composer’s
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 configuration 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 definition of second subjects, involves some sort of repetition that will
anchor the material in the listener’s mind. On many occasions in Scarlatti, however,
this fails to happen. This is encapsulated in Kirkpatrick’s unwittingly contradictory
statement that ‘some of [Scarlatti’s] 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 Scarlatti’s 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 figures,
the sort of technique evoked by Laurence Dreyfus in Bach and the Patterns of Invention (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1996).
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 overflowing with
invention, and the sheer amount of material they offer to the listener is a novel
factor in its own right. They exemplify Pestelli’s ‘theatricality’, in which the sonata
becomes ‘the floor of a stage’,15 yet for all their variety, they often seem constructed
according to a Rétian ‘secret art’. This tends to involve the sort of applied technique
defined 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
fulfilment 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 finds 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 significant 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 Scarlatti’s 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 figure, 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 figures, 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 flavour, of a
sort that we may also find 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 first, 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 echappée 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 figure are different. In the first half, from bar 131 (or 124 !), it
was always heard four times in succession: now it is heard three, two and five times
15 Pestelli, ‘Music’, 84.

Formal dynamic 327
Ex. 7.1a K. 168 bars 8–15
Ex. 7.1b K. 168 bars 60–67
respectively. This is as good an example as any of the composer’s disdain for notions
of fixed invention. After its first two reduced appearances in the second half it seems
clear that there is an attempt to lessen its influence. After the threefold manifestation
it is followed by a pointedly extended version of the melodic cadential material that
followed it in the first half (compare bars 15–16, for instance). After the second
version, now comprising only two units, the sonata’s opening syncopations return
in extended form, now covering seven instead of five bars. Then, as if further to
emphasize the attempt to marginalize the star turn, the closing material from the
first half returns well out of sequence, over a dominant pedal.
However, the figure is not to be denied and it counters with five 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 composer’s aversion to overt thematic control, a
more positive rationale was hinted at above with the reference to the ‘theatrical’. As
befits a star, this thematic entity is temperamental in its refusal to adopt a consistent
Ex. 7.2 K. 474 bars 1–54
profile. 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 find in
the work of other composers appears mechanical. It is not Scarlatti’s practice that
is contradictory, but the norm, which effectively mutes the premise of individuality
on which modern thematic practice should by definition be based.
For a larger-scale examination of Scarlatti’s unorthodox thematicism we turn to
the Sonata in E flat major, K. 474 (Ex. 7.2). Its first 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 first 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 2–3. 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 intensified form of what is essentially a galant language

(as one finds 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 2–3 (d2 –e2 ,
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-flattering banality . . . of many
of its concrete manifestations. This worthy origin really contained the germ of its replacement [by sensibility]:
a slight intensification 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 –g2 , a2 –b2 ) are balanced by three descending pairs on the first half of each beat,
with the grace notes acting as a further palliative – they suggest refinement and
good melodic manners after the rather raw preceding bars. The fleeting tonicization
of IV also plays a part; it acts as the well-established means of retreat or ‘making
good’. Bars 5–6 then describe the same arc as 2–4: bar 5 in particular reworks the
ascending impulse of 2–3 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 fifths 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 103 , however, the melodic shapes of 2–3 intrude. In bar 11 the three as-
cending stepwise pairs in the right hand, now chromatic, clearly refer to and intensify
the earlier pairs. The bass thirds now ascend too to provide further intensification.
The simple cadence point that follows refers at least obliquely to the opening bar in
the rhythm plus ornament of the first 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-
flections, 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 first 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 2–3. From bar 152 we have a much more
direct equivalent of 2–3, 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 b2
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 2–3,
but, more remarkably, the bar 1 figure is incorporated quite literally, first of all
reversed in the alto at 223 –231 and then descending in the soprano at 233 –241
(g2 –f 2 –e2 –d2 ). Embedded then in the totally formulaic pre-cadential continuation
is a sequential parallel to this, in the fall from e2 to b1 (at 241–2 ), the same pitches as
outlined in the opening figure! The more settled character of the reworked material
here is aided by the new firm 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 29–32 form
a big arc of the sort attempted as a means of gap-filling from bars 4–6. This clearly
forms the most expansive melodic gesture so far, and the melody not only regains the
previous peak of c3 from bar 3 but continues up to e3 . The descent of bars 303 –31
is organized around falling thirds: e3 –c3 –a2 –f 2 then e2 –c2 –a1 –f 1 . Compare this
with the g2 –e2 –c2 –a1 –f 1 –d1 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 flutes 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 inflections returned at 29–31, 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 definition. The apparently formulaic bar 32 turns out to be of
more specific 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 first 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 significant changes of detail in the recapitula-
tion of the second subject, showing that, although the second subject may dominate
the second half, the ‘first 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 flow. At 453 and 503
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 first 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 E–D succession. Further, the
last three embody a 4–3 succession over the bass; that in bar 32 describes a 6–5,
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 first to make no sense, to be an excrescence.
András Schiff clearly feels this way; he omits the trill, and so do Vladimir Horowitz
and Christian Zacharias.19 However, this figure 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 significance 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
composer’s 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 1–3 become more pronounced. Among the details clarified by
19 Decca: 421 422 2, 1989 (Schiff); Sony: 53460, 1964/1993 (Horowitz); EMI: 7 63940 2, 1979–85/1991
(Zacharias). However, Schiff commendably omits the e on the first 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 51–2 from e2 /d2 to c3
(compare bars 2–3) and the alto’s reversal of the bar 1 tag, now at the same pitch as the
original. The laconic closing arpeggio that replaces the expected repetition of the
closing unit provides a characteristically unaffirmative ending to the thematic tour
de force. However, there are plenty of ways in which the seemingly athematic final
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 first bar, gracefully filling in the fall from e2
to e1 . More significantly, though, this is a rare example of Scarlatti writing a closing
arpeggiated flourish – 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-filling and
winding conjunct movement it represents a relaxation, dissolving the tightly knit
lyrical vocabulary that has been the subject of the piece.
F O M A L P O P E T I E S A N D P AC T I C E S
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 figuration, 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 composer’s 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 find another body of music that can seem
so diffident 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 definition for any musical utterance. If we think of any
piece of music in our mind’s ear, there is a good chance that the first material to be
recalled will come from the start. And if we look at the practice of Iberian contem-
poraries such as Seixas or Rodrı́guez or even Scarlatti’s nearest companion spirit,
Albero, there is little to parallel what we find in the Scarlatti sonatas.20 Openings
may indeed be similarly configured, 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), 275–6; on Rodrı́guez, see Pedrero-Encabo, ‘Rodrı́guez’, 386; on Albero, see Pestelli, Sonate, 230.
Formal dynamic 335
As has been stated before, such openings may have tremendous élan and energy
so that the diffidence 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 seem mechanical
and indifferent. Some performers even respond to this by a manipulation of tempo.
Andreas Staier treats the first 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 flits 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 Beethoven’s
‘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 difficulty 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 unified 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, Sheveloff’s observation that each half of a Scarlatti sonata
charts a move from relative instability to stability may need to be qualified.24 We
might find 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 structural–thematic 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 first 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 first twenty-four bars consist (aside from the cadence
at 8–10) of nothing but transitional material. If one could dispute the syntactical im-
plications of the material given in the first 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 diffidence 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 first 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 18–191 matches the right
hand of the first 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 11–18 of K. 462.
Formal dynamic 337
Ex. 7.3a K. 275 bars 1–10
Ex. 7.3b K. 275 bars 16–20
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, Haydn’s 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 34–41 (in the Gilbert edition) with
82–9. However, bars 75–9 could also count as part of the structural regurgitation.
Scarlatti here recapitulates the left- and right-hand parts of 29–31 separately and at
pitch, except of course that the As become As: see Ex. 7.4b and 7.4c. Thus bars
75–7 correspond to the left hand of 30–31, extended by a bar, with the right hand
suggesting a verticalized form of the offbeat cadential figures 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 1–7
Ex. 7.4b K. 215 bars 28–34
Ex. 7.4c K. 215 bars 74–81
the first half. Then bars 78–9 correspond to the right hand of 293 –31, combined with
a rising-fifth bass also drawn from the subsequent cadential material (compare bars
37–8). More intriguingly, though, bars 75–9 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 find two successive descending scales instead
of the simultaneous presentation heard at the equivalent point of the first half. Not
only that, but the pitch structures are almost identical: the left hand at 75–781 falls
from b1 to E, which simply extends by an octave the b1 -e found at 23 –41 , while
both right-hand lines trace the same descent from b2 to e1 . 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).
Scarlatti’s conception of the opposite formal–rhetorical 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 firmer expectations we bring to this point of the form. The grand
peroration, such as we find in K. 246, is unusual indeed; although many sonatas
move towards a climax in various ways, it is rare for them to finish 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 mollifies 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 qualified 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 Scarlatti’s 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 significance for
an articulated harmonic–thematic 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 defined 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 finales, with
the seeming exception of Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphony). For instance, the close of
the first movement of Schubert’s A minor Sonata, Op. 142, contains a strong sense
of unfinished business, even though ending securely in the major. This throws the
weight of definitive 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 finale of La
Dirindina would seem to leave ‘the characters ridiculed and the audience in won-
der at so insubstantial a close’.27 Similar confirmation is provided by the comparison
drawn by Francesco Degrada between the settings by Scarlatti and Francesco Mancini
(1672–1736) of the first 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 finish.28
So what formal operations may be glimpsed in between these two poles of possi-
ble uncertainty? A number of first- 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 Scarlatti’s 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 difficulties 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 flattened again we are drawn back towards I.
In a significant 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 from A flat major to C
minor and K. 545 from B flat major to G minor. 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 Scarlatti’s
uncertain historical and stylistic position in assessing features of his writing. It is as
if his use of the device is best filed under mannerist ‘experimentation’.29
27 She notes too that an ending of such brevity is ‘unmatched in all other intermezzi examined’. McLauchlan,
‘Dirindina’, 23–4.
28 Degrada, ‘Lettere’, 296.
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, 169–70. 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 first proper major-mode coloration
for a long time, and it is that of E major, the dominant. It takes the form of 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 first 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, inflection
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 first 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 significant 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 first-half form
of major–minor–major; 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 significant
moment arrives when the mediant- or submediant-minor material of the first half
is modally translated in the second half. In K. 249, which moves from a tonic B
flat 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 fine compared to the dark drive of the first-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 110–35, especially the first 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 difficulty 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 first half of a binary form in the mediant minor. Michael Talbot
notes the use of such third-pairs in Vivaldi. Vivaldi’s particular cultivation of E–g and C–e pairs seems in fact to
find a counterpart in Scarlatti’s 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 Scarlatti’s freedoms, we need not only to examine the
contexts of individual works but to ponder his more abstract distaste for formal
definition 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 first-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 difficulties inherent in a
simple assertion of ‘freedom’. Without wishing to open once more the Pandora’s box
that the vamps represent, they suggest very clearly this duality between a freedom
pursued for more or less functional ends and a freedom pursued for its own sake. On a
less spectacular scale, we might note a common pattern whereby the second half takes
the first as a working model but offers very different inflections 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 defined 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 first.
The second half is thus not so much any sort of rhyme with the first – even though
extensive transposition is common, as it aids the impression that nothing can impede
the growing momentum – as a direct continuation and intensification 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 first half. We have seen an example

Formal dynamic 343
Ex. 7.5a K. 302 bars 42–5
Ex. 7.5b K. 302 bars 84–7
of this above with K. 215 (Ex. 7.4), in which a second-half passage did not so much
transpose its first-half equivalent as rework the same configuration 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 first
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 27–30 with 73–8, which extends the phrase),
K. 256 (bars 14 and 55), K. 301 (bars 13–15 and 42–4) and K. 389 (bars 15–18 and
52–5, 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 first-
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 c2 –e2 to
b1 –d2 and this induces a complete recasting of the harmonic sense: a V–I pattern in
G major is replaced by a I–V pattern in C major. It seems as if the composer’s ear is
drawn back to these pitches because they form a particularly memorable contour in
the first 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 30–32/34–6
and 70–72/74–6 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 composer’s ‘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 fulfil the formal dynamic
inherent in the new style of Scarlatti’s time; it is also an essential part of this style’s
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 material33 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 19–25. The metre very clearly changes to duple and the tone becomes much
more informal. It has the flavour of a country dance with its leaping bass octaves.34
Both of these sections are totally ignored in the second half, which first of all works
the subsequent first-half material and then provides an extensive literal transposition
of it (compare bars 32–48 with 72–86). 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 first section of the sonata. It can only be disturbing when what was presented
so firmly (this applies to both the first two ideas) can be so completely abandoned.
Only the rising sequence of bars 56–63 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
Scarlatti’s 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
disunified; it seems to embody the principle of open experience as defined by Wilfred
Mellers. After an offhand opening, the first half is pleasant but low-key until the
sudden animation provided by bar 28. This presents the first real ‘idea’ of the sonata,
so that the first half altogether provides a good instance of Scarlatti offering second
but not first 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, 1–2, 7–9 (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 16–19, 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 specific 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 first-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 first half,
in spite of the difficulty of determining the harmonic functionality of the material.
From bar 67 material from bar 9 of the first half returns, but it has, as it were,
entered a state of shock. For example, the left hand loses its equivalent of 92 , then
re-enters too quickly at 692 . 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 figuration, a long dominant pedal. A
number of fourths and twice-repeated notes suggest first-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 first-inversion chord of the parallel minor. None of this material has a strong
profile 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 finally 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 first 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 confined and small-scale after the earlier second-half
earthquake. In the first 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 final 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 53–7
Ex. 7.6b K. 500 bars 118–23
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 find 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 first-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 (110–181 ), and the two final bars (122–3) do
present a rhyme, if inexact, with the last two bars of the first half. Thus one might
feel that any other differences of shaping are simply readjustments before the final
cadence point and are not to be heard as significant departures. Half end-rhymes,
where the essentials return but are differently realized or inflected, 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 53–5 in the first 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 gratification 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, fleeting recollection. This then resolves itself on the first two beats of the
following bar, with the f2 –d2 –b1 of bar 120 moving to e2 –c2 –a1 in bar 121. But
Formal dynamic 347
there is no minim a2 at the top of the texture (compare bar 55), indicating that
the incident is not being dwelt upon, and the more anonymous-sounding quaver
figuration 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 l’oreille that says a great deal about the composer’s 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 first part ought to qualify. Most binary
constructions, whether a balanced-binary suite movement or a sonata form, are by
definition 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 final 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 beggar’s guitar,
with abrupt contrasts of texture, now thin and bell-like, then suddenly massive and dissonantly
reverberant. The music stops and starts, like life itself. The common man, even a gypsy
beggar, finds 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
Kirkpatrick’s remarks have a similar underlying basis:
Scarlatti takes the listener into his confidence . . . 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 flat minor, we can only dimly prefigure the outcome . . . Poetic feeling has even
36 Mellers, Orpheus, 86.
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 first 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 first seven bars adds to the sense of solidity. The triplet configurations
may hint at the galant, as the ornamentation of bar 6 certainly does. The falling
left-hand octave figure 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 53 –61 . These disturbances are picked up, only too appropriately,
later in the first half. The right-hand line at 52 –62 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
b1 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
39–40 and 43–4; bar 5 forms in effect a b1 minim then an a1 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 first phrase is more elegiac, but still has decorum.
However, the parallel fifths outlined by the basic voice leading of the outer pitch
extremes of 8–11 suggest a slightly looser style. Bars 8–10 in fact expand the earlier
triplet motive, rising a third then falling a fifth 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 first of 4̂ (connoting V) then of 1̂ (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 flavour, and will assume symbolic meaning as such later.
Bars 15–172 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 flat minor. The world of
the piece is turned upside down, perhaps symbolized melodically by the way bar 18
reverses the melodic first 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
flat 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
Formal dynamic 349
Ex. 7.7 K. 206 bars 1–122
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 fifths D( = C)–F–B. The sense of attempted
retrieval is then made explicit. Bars 274 –28 rework bars 173 ff. enharmonically but
also reactivate the material of bars 8–11. The sequentially falling grace-note pattern
and left-hand pitch structure of 8–11 are both compressed. The continuation into
bar 29 underlines the re-emergence of decorum, signalled by the more standard
ornamental flourish at 294 –302 . We are back on V of V, ready for restoration of
equilibrium by melodic means.
Instead we have more V of V. At 304 –314 there is a wonderful recontextualiza-
tion of the very opening; compare the F–F–C–F succession with the E–E–B–E
presented at 12 –21 . 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 334 presents a reminder
of two prior elements: b2 –a2 in upper voice (as at 17–18 and 27–8) and, in the alto,
the ornamental figure from the end of the phrase four bars earlier (294 –302 ). The
latter relation is made absolutely clear on repetition of the phrase, as the alto’s added
appoggiatura at 381 matches that heard at 301 . The left hand at 34 echoes its falling-
octave figure 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 344 –383 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 significantly, bar 351 is now a distortion of 84 and so forth.
The same technical spirit is found in the ‘second subject’ from bar 384 , its minor
mode an inevitable result of the previous coloration. The left-hand line reworks its
material of 5–6 as explained, while the right-hand crotchets on triadic degrees may
refer to the start. The fact that the first 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 first six notes (404 –411 ).
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 from and then expand upon the disturbance
Formal dynamic 353
Ex. 7.7 (cont.)
found in bars 5–6. 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 confirms bars 5–6 as the source for this outburst: the interval of a tritone
moving to a sixth in the top voices may be compared with the a1 –d2 /g1 –e2
sounded at 61–2 . 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 final unit from bar 56, which finally returns
us to B major, conflates the Spanish-sounding turn with descending arpeggios from
b2 that refer to several points in the first section. Thus the whole first 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 fields. 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 figure heard at 84 , already significantly
reworked at bars 25, 28, 35 and 50, but now it is insistent and won’t 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
flavour of the music. At 68–9 the turn figure from bar 12 offers another instance of
melodic isolation; it is now the affective focus, with the parallel fifths below startlingly
raw. The following passage from bar 71 gives full and passionate expression to the
previously more latent Spanish flavour; the turn figure now takes its place in an
integrated melodic context at 721 , as does the cell isolated at 61–3 in bar 74. Over
the bar line at 72–3 and 74–5 we hear a clear reference to the cadential figure from
293 –302 , but unlike its previous, more formulaic, cast, the figure 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 33–341 and 37–381 . But even in these terms a comparison is telling; the
ornamental figure is now no longer masked by the upper-voice cover tones. The
falling left-hand octave figure 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
now find a more congenial context. The whole passage now has a continuous chordal
accompaniment, as opposed to the consistently missing first 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 304 ff., but this is not down a fifth 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 first
half bars 29–30 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 hand’s accompanying rhythm has
now already been heard at 61 and 65.
From bar 914 there occurs a very significant intervention – an attempt to displace
the appearance of the second subject which is now due by analogy with the first half.
Formal dynamic 355
It is like a last-ditch attempt by the forces of decorum to prevail. We hear in bars 92–3
what sounds like a simplified version of the shapes found in bars 76–9, 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 943 –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 first half and by the Spanish turn shape from bar
721–3 , repeated to emphasize its strength. The second subject that may now enter
from bar 994 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-
fications) – 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 ‘finds [its] voice’. There is no real sense of melodic
patterning and an enormous melodic range from c3 to f, with an impressive im-
passioned leap at the start from c2 to c3 via e2 . 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
DIALECT O IDIOLECT?
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 definition; 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 fingerprints 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 specific 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 specific 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 influence 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 identification 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 7–8 and
48–9 recalls the subsequent 74–5 in K. 206 (as well as 29–30 in the first 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 fixed 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 composer’s own creative figures.
Formal dynamic 357
Ex. 7.8 K. 498 bars 60–63
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. 206/28–30 with K. 466/10–11, 36–7 or 38–40. 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. 206/374 –381 and K. 466/454 –461 . 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. 466/30–34 and K. 206/55–9. 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 inflected 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 composer’s 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 flavour of the harmonic inflection that
gives it its folk flavour. This feature is at once plainly derived from popular dialect
and one of the composer’s 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 13–15 of that work). This strengthens the sense of an underlying
model to these sections.
3. The first four bars of K. 425 resemble bars 15–18 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 affinity 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 specific
model having been in the composer’s mind. Jane Clark believes K. 426 reflects
Portuguese folk music.40 The bass figures 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
60–62 a plunging three-octave arpeggio figure 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 confinement, they seem to be used to alleviate
the nagging closeness and heavy intensity of the stepwise movement found through
most of the piece. Bars 60–62 seem to set the seal on this process. It is therefore
almost disturbing to find the identical material turning up a number of times in
K. 332 (first heard at 28–301 ). This case illustrates well the problems we face in
getting to grips with the details of Scarlatti’s 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?
LY I CA L B E A K T H O U G H
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 intensification 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 figurative 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 defining 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 defi-
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’ identified by Eric Blom and the relentlessness
identified 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 composer’s art. It
is thus a question as much of technical as emotional tone, with all the denials, sub-
tractions and ambiguities we have identified 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 influences and
inflections, 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 composer’s Andantes,
precisely where we might expect to find 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
defined in Chapter 5, the quality that we expect to find 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 composer’s 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 Mozart’s Cosı̀ fan
tutte Charles Rosen defines it thus: ‘there is no way of knowing in what proportions
mockery and sympathy are blended’, ‘the art . . . is to tell one’s 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
47–51), perhaps the most emotionally charged climax in all the sonatas.
The lyrical breakthrough seems to occur in two distinctive contexts. The first 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 find the more sustained examples
of this formal dynamic, where the breakthrough defines 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-defined 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 inflection of a means of lyrical expression that is in some
way communal and codified. 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 Scarlatti’s 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 first pages of K. 206 and K. 277.
In the more concise versions of this type of breakthrough Scarlatti generally works
with other well-defined 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 51–2, of a sort not expected in this style. The defining 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 hand’s accompanying chords. The following scalic descent from
c3 was heard three times in the first 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, 316–17. This concept was also discussed in relation to the ‘modest’ sonatas in Chapter 3,
pp. 105–6.
Formal dynamic 361
Ex. 7.9 K. 234 bars 21–31
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 flamenco 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 24–9 (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 1̂ 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 293 sets up the return of the passage from bar 19 that preceded the lyrical
moment.
Ex. 7.10 K. 19 bars 65–74
The second context in which the breakthrough occurs is as a sort of foil within
one of Pestelli’s ‘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 52–581
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 definitive 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 48–51 there is a feeling of anticipation, of settling
down before the main event. This main event, from bar 52, offers the listener the
first 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 doesn’t really
provide it except at this fleeting 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, fulfilling the terms
of Pestelli’s 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 confidently of K. 19 than many of the other Essercizi, since it does not quite
form a self-sufficient world. It knows another way. The foil is provided by the lyrical
breakthrough of bars 66–71 (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 c1 and d2 at 67–8, 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 40–47), also lyrical in style
but clearly much less expansive. However, this intensity is glimpsed but briefly; 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
46–9 of K. 278, where there is no marked change of tone, but a definite 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 Marı́a Bárbara 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 ‘Cortège’, 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 à 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 first eight bars, the scales heard at bars
9–11 are of uncertain import. Do they represent some sort of ceremonial flourish?
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 finds 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, ‘Influencias’, 54.
Ex. 7.11 K. 380 bars 19–58
remarkably similar in bars 13ff.! We find 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 first 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 figuration 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 34–5 then provide a thematic and harmonic answer to 19ff., with I answering
V. However, bars 36–7 do not represent a return to lyricism, for all that they resume
the continuous semiquavers and rework the contours of bars 23–5. The contours
are mechanized, as it were; they lose their spontaneity and flexibility, and are made
agents of propulsion. Compare the manner in which bars 23–4 pay no heed to strong
beats, and especially the disruptive effect of the yearning leading note at bars 232−3
and 312–3 . The repeated b2 from bar 36, heard nine times within each two-bar unit,
insistently tries to expunge this lingering a2 . Only once this is done do we move to
the equivalent b2 –g2 –f2 – compare 371 with 233 –242 . 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 fixed 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 flexibility 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 inflection of this passage is emphasized
by the ornament of bar 473 , matching that at 453 . These give a stronger, more
continuous melodic sense to the right-hand line altogether; in particular, the first
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 hand’s crotchet pulse) as the lone voice is heard. The motto rhythm
is quite transformed by being treated not as repeated notes but in fluent 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 523 and 543 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 22–3 and 31–2. There is a hugely expanded syntactical sense too,
bars 41–571 making up one big phrase. Bars 46–8 are now merely an episode, thus
reversing the priorities of the first 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 ‘L’arte 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 fluctuation 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 intensification is almost inevitable, but Pletnev
also treats 22–5 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 confirming the relevance of
the foregoing section to the lyrical topic introduced and then countered in the first
half. The final melodic note of the bar, significantly, is an a2 that is now fulfilled,
leading directly to b2 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 46–8;
after the lyric catharsis there is now no need for this complication. At bars 721 and
731 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 first half’s second part, which continues a mode of thought firmly established
at the beginning. By definition 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.
PA I S
Ralph Kirkpatrick’s 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 fleetingly on a number of occasions in this
study. Placing a discussion of it at this point reflects 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 523 ],
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 Caldwell’s comment on Maggie Cole’s 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 reflected in the Kirkpatrick numbering.
When Richard L. Crocker wrote in 1966 that ‘a sonata was too short to stand
by itself; Domenico’s solution was to put sonatas in pairs’,49 we find 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 Bülow 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 difficult to write about,
reflecting an ingrained cultural and musicological preference for larger or longer
forms,50 they are difficult to programme. A simple analogy may be made with the
German song repertory of the nineteenth century. Song cycles receive infinitely 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 find 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 finale 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 find gestures towards
opening thematic connections or an outlining of the sort of broad relationships
defined 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’, 179–80; 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), 306–7.
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 first-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 first concern. Before showing how movements may belong together in such
a sense, it must first 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 influenced 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 finds 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 Kirkpatrick’s ‘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’, 430–36. 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 46–9 in Lisbon,
for example, are equivalent to K. 410 (B flat major), 397 (D major), 396 (D minor)
and 411 (B flat major). If K. 397–396 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 reflect 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 confirmations of the pairing principle (outside several indications
found in the primary sources57 ). No. 33 of the manuscript contains K. 474 in E
flat 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 fits 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 Albero’s 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 flats but K. 475 has three, a significant
discrepancy. More important than this, one should note the markedly cramped script
of these copies compared with all the surrounding sonatas, which might reflect 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. 536–537, where in the latter he avoids the f3 in
the second half which ought to be transposed from the c3 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 Scarlatti’s orbit. Seixas, for instance, wrote no fewer than fifty
multi-movement works, sometimes with ‘segue’ indications between movements.59
We have already noted too the fact of Albero’s 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 Giustini’s Sonata No. 11 in E major, for example, the
Dolce, Allemande and Gavotte all proceed from the same point. Marcello’s 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 reflect the same keyboard compass, in Boyd, Master, 163–4.
59 See Allison, ‘Seixas’, 16.
Formal dynamic 371
the first, third and fourth all feature dominant pedal points with parallel thirds or
sixths above. In Seixas’s Sonata No. 59 in A major (1980) compare the linking bars
found at the end of the first 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 thematic–textural 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 Seixas’s two-movement
forms, it obviously strengthens the sense of a broader practice in which specific pairs
were dispensable.
It is in the ‘early’ Scarlatti multi-movement structures that are comparable to
those of Seixas that we may in fact find similar thematic connections. In K. 83, in
the second half of the main movement, the repeated cadence figure from the first
half is interrupted and deflected 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 100–103
and 117–21 (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 figure at bars 13–16.
Its metrical dissonance is played with in all sorts of ways in the second half before
being definitively corrected at bars 45–6. The following major-mode Minuetto can
then be understood as a witty confirmation 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 conflicting 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 Allegro’s 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 70–79
Ex. 7.12b K. 83 bars 117–24
This sounds like a parody. Note especially the similarity of bars 842 –85 and 932 –95
to the final cadential bars of the Allegro, from 443 ; the latter feels like a conflation
of elements of bars 443 –47. Is this reading too much into a seemingly hybrid work
that has been classified by Sheveloff as a ‘melo-bass’ sonata61 (note the figures given
in the final 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 confirmed 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-sufficient 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, specifically C sharp minor (K. 246 and 247) and F sharp major (K. 318
and 319). There are also only two sonatas in A flat major (K. 127 and K. 130) and
B flat minor (K. 128 and K. 131); these are paired in P (II 21–22 and 29–30) 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 flat 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 figure that contrasts with the opening and recurs within
the first 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 difficult 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 Scarlatti’s 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
fifths 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 difficult 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 difficult 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 Kirkpatrick’s 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 Haydn’s
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 composer’s 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 minor–major 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,
first 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 figures 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’, 6–8.
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 definition 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 Scarlatti’s 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. Significantly,
the primary sources provide the most explicit of their few verbal 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 first bar of K. 348 at
the point when we would expect to hear the final bar of K. 347’s repeated second
half. Here is something that is highly characteristic: observing this instruction will
produce an elision between two structural blocks, and more specifically the largest-
scale instance of a ‘great curve’ in the entire sonata production.
65 Pestelli, Sonate, 220–21.

FINALE
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 ‘final 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 difficulties of
historical understanding that we have reflected upon throughout, but it is inherent
in the very nature of the sonata production. In the first 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 difficulty 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 reflexive and self-conscious. He is an
unspontaneous improviser.
This reflexivity 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 first 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 listener’s 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
reconfigured. 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 fixed 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 Scarlatti’s ‘Classicism’
and that of its official representatives. Thus while Haydn and Mozart justify formulas
and satisfy expectations in their very different ways, Scarlatti’s 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 composer’s
wider image and have been variously reflected 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 exemplifies
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 first 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 identified 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 composer’s sole surviving personal letter to the Duke of Huescar has sometimes
been magnified 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 flat 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 difficulty 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 firmer image that would result would be artificially
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 definition 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, composer’s 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 find 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 deflect us from music’s 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 White’s
‘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 infinite 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
difficult concept in contemporary music. Such a libertarian musicological attitude
to a composer’s 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 ‘Haydn’s Reversals: Style Change, Gesture and the Implication–Realization
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 specific concern: how we are to understand the music of
the eighteenth century. This might seem an odd prospect. The radical individualism
of the sonatas has been affirmed from many angles through this study. So has their
‘remarkably contemporary’ flavour, evident not just in the details of reception but
in the many comparisons I have volunteered with musical phenomena lying well
out of Scarlatti’s own time. This may arise from the lack of sufficient information to
weigh him down securely in his contemporary contexts, but it is also a function of
his specific ‘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 composer’s circumstances and output –
strange both because of what we do know and what we don’t 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 figure 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 show us 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 definition 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.
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‘Una nueva sonata atribuida a Domenico Scarlatti’, Revista de musicologı́a 11/3 (1988),
883–93.
Anderson, Nicholas. Notes to recording by Trevor Pinnock. CRD: 1068, 1981.
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Anonymous. Notes to recording by Vladimir Horowitz. RCA: RL 14260, 1982.
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Apel, Willi. Masters of the Keyboard: A Brief Survey of Pianoforte Music. Cambridge, Mass.:
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Baciero, Antonio, ed. ‘Valladolid Sonatas’ Nos. 1–3, in Nueva biblioteca española de música de
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Badura-Skoda, Eva. ‘Die “Clavier”-Musik in Wien zwischen 1750 und 1770’, Studien zur
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‘Domenico Scarlatti und das Hammerklavier’, Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 40/10 (1985),
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‘Il significato dei manoscritti Scarlattiani recentemente scoperti a Vienna’, in Domenico
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Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 45/7–8 (1990), 382–90.
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INDEX
Abbassian-Milani, Farhad, 188n, 296n Benson, Edward Frederic, 315

Acciaccatura, see harmony/cluster chords Benton, Rita, 278n
Adorno, Theodor, 52 Bicchi, Vicente, 69
Agmon, Eytan, 198, 213, 374 Bie, Oskar, 26, 37–38, 279
Albero, Sebastián de, 31, 32, 46, 47, 55, 67, 109, 114n, Billroth, Theodor, 10
118n, 119n, 121, 133, 212, 211–212, 225, ‘Black Legend’, 31, 67
224–225, 235n, 250, 283n, 313n, 334, 360, 361, Black, Virginia, 121n
370 Blom, Eric, 57n, 58, 359
Alberti bass, 307–308 Boccherini, Luigi, 324
Alberti, Domenico, 293, 369 Bogianckino, Massimo, 43n, 51n, 99n, 139n, 182,
Alkan, Charles-Valentin, 2 209, 255, 286
Allen, Warren Dwight, 1, 4 Bolzan, Claudio, 121
Allison, Brian, 252n Bond, Ann, 198, 209, 211, 237n, 248, 363n
Alpiarça, 32 Bontempelli, Massimo, 30, 37
Álvarez, Rosario, 70 Bonucci, Rodolfo, 64n, 372n
Andantes see tempo Böttinger, Peter, 39–40, 135, 221, 283–284, 288
Andreani, Eveline, 55n, 317n Bouchard, Jean-Jacques, 54
Anglebert, Jean Henry d’, 29n Boyd, Malcolm, 2n, 27, 40–41, 43–44, 51n, 65, 68,
Annunzio, Gabriele D’, 58n, 316n 70, 72, 76, 80, 116, 119n, 134, 135n, 167, 272n,
Antonio, Infante of Portugal, 46 281n, 285n, 340n, 368n, 370n
Apel, Willi, 79n Boyden, David D., 263n, 369
Aranjuez, 34 Brahms, Johannes, 10, 227, 322
Austerity, 121, 253 Brecht, Bertolt, 179
Autographs, absence of see sources Brendel, Alfred, 59
Avison, Charles, 93, 168–171, 295, 302n, 316 Brunetti, Gaetano, 32
Brussels, 74
Bach, Carl Philipp Emmanuel, 29n, 42, 63, 213, 249n, Bryson, Norman, 216n
256n Buen Retiro, 34
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 11, 29n, 30, 36, 38, 42, 50, Bülow, Hans von, 28, 39, 61, 85, 123n, 150, 158, 176,
52, 58, 61, 65, 76–77, 93, 97, 154n, 191, 217, 226, 236, 245n, 265, 284, 368
235, 300, 321, 323 Burney, Charles, 31, 48, 52, 54, 76
Badura-Skoda, Eva, 31n, 46n, 56 Burnham, Scott, 6
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 82, 139
Barcaba, Peter, 221n, 295n Cabanilles, Juan Bautista, 121n
Barcelona, 247 Cadence see syntax
Baroque see style Cadenza, 280–281, 290
Bartók, Béla, 284n Cádiz, 111
Beck, Georges, 105n, 106n, 236n, 251, 284, 295n Caldwell, John, 367n
Beckett, Samuel, 39, 166 Cappella Giulia, 8
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 7, 10, 35, 56, 87n, 150, 193, Carestini, Giovanni, 99
210n, 217n, 280, 298, 335, 379 Carreira, Xoán M., 66, 108
Belli, Giuseppe, 37 Carreras, Juan José, 65, 66
392
Index 393
Casella, Alfredo, 63, 64, 80, 123n, 138 Degrada, Francesco, 51n, 72, 79, 98, 183, 236, 236n,
Casellas, Jaime, 247 238, 340
Celestini, Federico, 316n Deleuze, Gilles, 215
Cervantes, Miguel de, 111–112 Dent, Edward, 52–53, 61, 217, 268n
Chaconne, 360 Derr, Elwood, 171
Chambonnières, Jacques Champion, Sieur de, 29n Derrida, Jacques, 216
Chambure, Alain de, 18, 134, 210, 321, 344n, 372n ‘Der unreine Satz’, 40, 221–223, 247–250
Charles III, King of Spain, 111 ‘Disdain’, 18–19, 22, 22n, 29, 86, 94, 182, 191, 219,
Chase, Gilbert, 30 220, 225, 232, 275, 293, 321, 327, 376
Choi, Seunghyun, 271–272 Dissonance see harmony
Chopin, Frederic, 4, 280, 324 Docker, John, 82, 322
Choreography see dance Doderer, Gerhard, 69
Chronology, 3–4, 7, 27, 43–45, 279, 318, 342, Dodgson, Stephen, 220n
378–379 Donington, Robert, 270
Chua, Daniel K. L., 51n Downs, Philip, 76
Clark, Jane, 21, 21n, 26, 31n, 32, 63, 68, 80, 109, Dresden, 32
110, 111n, 119n, 121–122, 139n, 253, 268n, Dreyfus, Laurence, 97–98, 325n
306, 358 Duran, Josep, 247–248
Classical see style Durante, Francesco, 54, 181, 247
Clementi, Muzio, 38, 50, 62, 199, 217n, 221, 235n Durón, Sebastián, 66n
Closure see syntax Dussek, Jan Ladislav, 50
Cluster chords see harmony
Cole, Maggie, 367n Edwards, Donna, 95, 213n
Colles, Henry, 86, 86n, 191 Einstein, Albert, 49
Comic opera, 96, 103, 134, 178, 222, 245, 281n Elı́as, José, 121, 133
Commedia dell’arte, 286 Ending see syntax/closure
Concerto, 85, 123n, 132, 141, 199–200, 289 Escorial, 31, 34
Cone, Edward T., 286 Etzion, Judith, 31
Continuo practice, 236, 238, 248
Cook, Nicholas, 171n Fadini, Emilia, 27, 28, 45, 64, 121, 186–187, 195n,
Copland, Aaron, 84 257, 258, 261, 263, 263n, 264, 268, 270, 272,
Corelli, Arcangelo, 54, 55, 62, 80, 93, 132, 133, 171n, 307, 307n
253 Falla, Manuel de, 68, 107, 108, 262n
Counterpoint, 15–18, 93–94, 96–97, 98, 140, Fantasia, 156–157, 199
230–236, 293–294, 302, 303, 319, 348 Farinelli (Carlo Broschi), 30, 31, 34, 48, 66, 70, 99
Opening imitation, 150, 180, 232, 241, 294, 324, Farnese, Isabel, Queen of Spain (wife of Felipe V), 30,
328, 334 34n
Couperin, François, 5, 29n, 62, 63, 301 Fauré, Gabriel, 59
Crescembeni, Giovanni, 30 Felipe V, King of Spain, 33, 34, 81n
Cristofori, Bartolomeo, 45, 46 Ferguson, Howard, 42, 192, 257, 366n
Crocker, Richard L., 368 Fernández Talaya, Teresa, 73
Crotch, William, 249 Fernando VI, King of Spain, 30, 33, 34n, 36, 44n, 46,
Czerny, Carl, 39, 42, 61, 245, 248 69, 111
Flamenco see folk and popular music
Dahlhaus, Carl, 97 Florence, 45
Dale, Kathleen, 40n, 45, 58n, 157, 191, 285n, 321 Folk and popular music, 11, 12–13, 15, 33, 78, 80–81,
Dance, 10–11, 83–85, 177, 181, 198, 285–287, 313, 85, 106, 107–108, 109–110, 112, 122n, 134–136,
335, 342, 358, 371 177, 181, 216, 223, 244, 288, 300, 301, 302–303,
for Iberian forms see folk and popular music 310, 316, 319, 326, 344, 345, 356, 357, 359, 373,
Allemande, 92n 378
Courante, 93n Flamenco, 11, 22, 24, 107, 108, 109, 110–122, 135,
Gigue, 111, 123n 140, 141, 187, 216, 262, 268, 361
Minuet, 83, 84, 85–86, 87–88, 252n, 370, 371 Iberian elements and influence, 5, 11, 21, 67–68,
Davies, Siobhan, 54, 215 80, 107n, 107–122, 140–144, 198, 200, 224, 253,
Debussy, Claude, 5, 98, 108, 245, 322 254, 262, 306, 308, 310, 332, 348, 356, 358, 361
394 Index
Folk and popular music (cont.) Haas, Arthur, 214n

Italian elements and influence, 63n, 71, 110–111, Hammond, Frederick, 47, 107n, 198, 285n, 294n,
111n, 134–135, 136, 140n, 146n, 145–166, 181, 306, 368, 368n
262, 342 Hand-crossing, 56n, 170, 182, 248, 284–285,
sty le and danc e ty pe s 286–289, 294, 335
Bien parado, 141 Handel, George Frederick, 35, 58, 61, 65, 71, 93, 93n,
Bolero, 110, 363n 134, 147–148, 149, 171, 217, 321
Bulerı́a, 110 Hantaı̈, Pierre, 60n
Cante jondo, 22, 114, 121, 142, 268, 310n, 332 Harmony, 21, 59, 114–119, 129, 142–144, 147, 163,
Fandango, 110, 123n, 142 167, 199n, 206–207, 214, 217–220, 236–247,
Malagueña, 24n 252, 282, 290–291, 309–310, 317, 340–341, 343,
Peteneras, 119n 366
Saeta, 110, 268, 272, 363 Cluster chords, 236–238, 300, 313–315, 339
Salidas, 22 Dissonance, 98, 100, 112, 114, 128, 213, 220, 229,
Seguidilla, 24, 110, 122 230, 236–245, 307, 310
Siguiriya, 95 Modal opposition, 341, 352
Tango, 63, 109 Phrygian, 21, 116–118, 142, 233, 313n, 357
Form, 7, 14–15, 166, 201, 207, 308, 320–325, Terzverwandschaft, 340–341
340–355, 376 Hatten, Robert, 139
Accelerated second half, 84, 342 Hauer, George, 51, 97
Progressive, 15, 344–346, 347–355 Hautus, Loek, 76, 179, 219, 230, 312
Retention of material at original pitch, 283n, Haydn, Joseph, 19, 30, 33, 36, 42, 46, 50, 57, 75, 77,
342–343, 355 81, 168, 179, 190, 199, 210n, 217, 235, 249,
Freeman, Daniel E., 97n, 294 256n, 308n, 313n, 316n, 324, 337, 340, 374
Frescobaldi, Girolamo, 54, 233 Headington, Christopher, 252n
Froberger, Johann Jakob, 29n Heimes, Klaus, 42n, 72n, 114
Fuller, David, 80, 266 Heteroglossia, 82, 139, 380
Heuschneider, Karin, 212, 312
Galant see style Horowitz, Vladimir, 176, 227, 333
Galuppi, Baldassare, 86, 87, 177–178, 178, 182, Hotz, Pierre du, 74
237 Howat, Roy, 43n, 321
Gasparini, Francesco, 55, 236 Huescar, Duke of, 15, 74n, 73–75, 182, 247
Geminiani, Francesco, 171n Hughes, Rosemary, 308n
Genre, 78, 85–86, 94, 212, 293, 294, 334, 376 Hummel, Johann Nepomuk, 50
Gerhard, Roberto, 67n
Gerstenberg, Walter, 26, 29, 85, 308, 320n Iberian elements and influence see folk and popular
Gesualdo, Carlo, 2 music
Gigli, Girolamo, 72 Ife, Barry, 34n, 55n, 198
Gilbert, Kenneth, 27, 44, 185, 186–187, 192, 204, Imitation see counterpoint
205, 208, 256n, 258, 259, 261, 263, 264, 268, Improvisation, 40–41, 156, 198, 213, 276, 277, 290,
270, 272, 305, 307, 333n, 337 292, 334, 347, 375, 377
Gillespie, John, 36n Invention, 15, 92, 105, 189, 282
Giustini, Lodovico, 46, 71, 86, 87, 237–238, 250, 370 Irritation, 40, 170, 221, 252, 285, 325
Godowsky, Leopold, 284n Isabel, Queen of Spain see Farnese, Isabel
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 100 Italian elements and influence see folk and popular
Granada, 108 music
Granados, Enrique, 118, 120n
Gray, Cecil, 2n, 36n, 60–61, 253, 359 Jackendoff, Ray, 10n
‘Great curves’ see syntax James, Burnett, 68
Greco, Gaetano, 54 James III, the Old Pretender, 69
Grimaldi, Nicolo, 45 Jansen, Therese, 42
Grout, Donald Jay, 81 Jazz, 193, 194, 301, 335
Guitar, 42, 62, 81, 112n, 121, 238, 254, 297, 319, 345, Jeppesen, Knud, 317
347, 361 João V, King of Portugal, 46, 53, 65, 72, 72n, 73, 75,
Gusmão, Alexandro de, 73 85
Index 395
Johnson, John, 224 Mahler, Gustav, 10, 106

Jones, J. Barrie, 118, 123, 262n Mainwaring, John, 35, 75
Joseph II, Emperor, 56 Malipiero, Gian Francesco, 5, 150
Juderı́as, Julián, 31 Mancini, Francesco, 340
Mann, Thomas, 63
Kafka, Franz, 35 Mannerism, 8, 219, 340
Kastner, Macario Santiago, ix, 59n, 67, 68, 80, 177, Marcello, Benedetto, 54, 85, 181, 182, 253n, 276n,
292, 371n 286, 370
Keene, Benjamin, 112 Marı́a Bárbara de Bragança, Queen of Spain, 2, 4, 30,
Keller, Hans, 94, 177 32, 32n, 34n, 36, 40, 42, 46n, 48, 56, 69, 72n,
Keller, Hermann, 42, 49, 76, 129n, 250n 73, 112, 313, 363
Keyboard realism, 220, 292–297 Maria Casimira, Queen of Poland, 30
Kirby, Frank Eugene, 76 Marshall, Robert, 77
Kirkendale, Warren, 148n Martı́nez de la Roca, Joaquı́n, 247
Kirkpatrick, Ralph, viii, 4, 26–27, 28, 32, 34, 35, Marx-Weber, Magda, 86
43–44, 47–48, 55, 60, 62, 64, 65, 72n, 78, 80, 81, ‘Materiality’, 6–7, 38, 280, 285, 306, 307, 379, 380
90n, 91, 99, 112, 122, 158, 159, 167, 183, McCredie, Andrew, 280
193–194, 219–220, 227, 246, 248, 252, 256n, McLauchlan, Annabel, 72, 340
257, 268n, 279, 285, 286, 310n, 319, 325, 342, McVeigh, Simon, 249
347–348, 367, 368, 369, 370, 373 Medici, Prince Ferdinando de’, 45
Koch, Heinrich, 124, 128, 129 Mellers, Wilfred, 10, 52, 75, 138, 139, 344, 347, 355,
Kramer, Jonathan D., 197 357
Kramer, Lawrence, 85, 216n Mendelssohn, Felix, 10, 150
Mertens, Wim, 215–216
Landon, H. C. Robbins, 57n Messiaen, Olivier, 74
Landowska, Wanda, 28, 121, 122, 270, 270n, 355n Metastasio, Pietro, 56
Lang, Paul Henry, 28–29, 35, 59, 98, 284n Meyer, Leonard B., 55, 107, 144, 210n
L’Augier, Alexander Ludwig, 56 Michelangeli, Arturo Benedetti, 105, 176, 319
Leahu, Alexandru, 24n Minimalism, 158, 215–216
Leaps, 129, 203, 284, 285, 286–289, 294–295, 311, Minuet see dance
358 Missing bars and bass notes see syntax
Learned style see style Mitchell, Timothy, 108, 110, 111–112, 216
Leo, Leonardo, 117, 116–117 Modality see harmony
Levy, Janet M., 43n, 230–231, 323n ‘Modest’ sonatas, 44–45, 104–107, 183, 191, 192
Libby, Dennis, 59 Mortensen, Lars-Ulrik, 238, 248
Libro di tocate, Lisbon see sources Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 4, 18, 35, 42, 56–57, 75,
Ligeti, György, 209 95, 96, 104, 126, 134–135, 146, 199, 217n, 235,
Linear intervallic pattern see sequence 280, 281, 281n, 360
Lipatti, Dinu, 316n Murcia, Santiago de, 81
Lisbon, 31, 49, 56, 69, 73, 109
Liszt, Franz, 297 Naples, 54–67, 68, 117, 247
Literes, Antonio de, 66n Narrative, 10, 139
Livermore, Ann, 99, 303 Nationalism, 5, 33, 57–68
London, 31, 76, 280 Nettl, Bruno, 368n
Longo, Alessandro, 24, 26, 27, 28, 53, 61, 63–64, 85, Newton, Richard, 61n
176, 193, 226, 229, 265, 268, 368
Lorca, Federico Garcı́a, 108 Opening see syntax
Luciani, Sebastiano, 39n, 75, 285 Opera buffa see comic opera
Lynch, John, 74n Organology, 4, 45–49, 73, 209n, 237
Lyotard, Jean-François, 215 Ornamentation, 6, 127, 146n, 158, 204, 205, 208,
Lyrical breakthrough, 92, 254, 358–367 232, 256–263, 265, 268, 307, 348–355
Lyrical voice, 11, 15, 99, 253, 355, 356, 357, 359, 360
Paganini, Niccolò, 280, 281
MacGregor, Joanna, 316n Pagano, Roberto, 32, 35–36, 44n, 46, 47n, 69, 72n,
Madrid, 30, 31, 32, 46, 56, 66, 73, 99, 109, 111, 257 75, 112, 141, 248n, 252–253, 276, 296–297
396 Index
Pairs, 5, 44, 48, 144, 252, 275, 294, 367–375 Quantz, Johann Joachim, 99
Palermo, 69 Queffélec, Anne, 24, 176
Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da, 317
Pannain, Guido, 366 Radcliffe, Philip, 210n
Panorama tradition, 36–38, 40, 52, 63, 78–79, Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 58, 62, 323, 363
123–124, 140, 176, 363, 376 Rasgueado, 345
Paradies, Domenico, 177 Ratner, Leonard, 79
Parakilas, James, 67n Rattolino, Piero, 209–210n
Parallel intervals see voice leading Ravel, Maurice, 59, 245
Pardo, 34 Recitative, 199n
Parma collection see sources Register see texture and sonority
Pascual, Beryl Kenyon de, 46n, 73 Regola dell’ottava, 213, 215
Pasquini, Bernardo, 55, 317, 318, 320 Repetition see syntax
Pastorale, 63, 71, 83, 86–87, 92, 134, 135n, 136–138, Réti, Rudolph, 326
260, 316 Rhythm, 59, 84, 119, 145–147, 193–194, 266
Pedagogy, 32, 40, 41–43, 76, 217, 220, 277, 292, 293, Ricercare, 211–212, 294
335 Richards, Annette, 249n
Pedrero-Encabo, Águeda, 54–67, 68, 121n Rodrı́guez, Vicente, 67–68, 120, 121, 121n, 152n,
Pennington, Neil D., 81n 154–155, 182, 334
Perahia, Murray, 319 Rome, 69, 72, 318
Performance, 6, 10, 17, 53, 59, 81, 95, 100, 105, 106, Roncaglia, Gino, 53, 62–63, 82
110, 111, 121–122, 128n, 132, 136, 141, 146, Roseingrave, Thomas, 31, 281, 300
146n, 157–158, 168, 174–177, 206, 221, 223, Rosen, Charles, 6n, 41, 51n, 58, 77, 100n, 105, 182n,
237–238, 252, 255, 256, 258, 259, 260–263, 199, 297–300, 360
264–265, 266, 281, 284, 285–286, 299–300, Ross, Scott, 17, 18, 266
304, 307, 315–316, 318–319, 335, 367, 368, Rostand, Claude, 60
369, 374 Rousset, Christophe, 10n, 258, 370
Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista, 54 Rubenstein, Artur, 47
Pestelli, Giorgio, 18, 27, 29, 37, 40, 40n, 51, 56–57, Rushton, Julian, 97n
58n, 62, 64, 70–71, 71n, 80, 83, 98, 105–106, Rutini, Giovanni Marco, 369
122n, 123, 133, 134, 134n, 139n, 141, 153–154,
155n, 165, 178n, 181n, 191, 198–199, 219, 224n, Sachs, Barbara, 263n
233, 236, 236n, 252, 266n, 277, 281n, 295n, 303, Sachs, Curt, 6, 11
310, 326, 329, 330n, 362, 375 Sachs, Harvey, 32n
Petrarch, Francesco, 37 Salter, Lionel, 369
Physicality see virtuosity Salzer, Felix, 41n
Picturesque, 249 Sammartini, Giovanni Battista, 100n, 178n
Pilar, Marı́a del, 73 Santi, Piero, 37, 62, 218n, 316n
Plà, Juan Baptista, 73 Saramago, Jose, 53, 135
Plaistow, Stephen, 36, 299 Sarri, Domenico, 286n
Platti, Giovanni Benedetto, 151, 151–152, 177, 182 Satie, Erik, 120
Pletnev, Mikhail, 120n, 121, 122, 158–159, 162, 176, Saudade, 95
251, 265, 299, 318, 319, 367 Scarlatti, Alessandro, 2, 30, 32, 35–36, 45, 51, 54, 67,
Ployer, Barbara, 42 71, 134n, 177, 237, 247, 320
Pogorelich, Ivo, 315, 316n Scarlatti, Alexandro, 73
Pont, Graham, 71 Scarlatti, Domenico
Popular music see folk and popular music Letter to Duke of Huescar, 15, 73–75, 247,
Porpora, Nicola, 56 378
Portuguese see folk and popular music/Iberian Preface to Essercizi, 73–77, 258, 281
elements and influence Real-life personality, 2, 34–36, 75
Powell, Linton, 112n, 120, 133, 235n wor k s
Pressing, Jeff, 166n Cantatas, 28, 31, 69, 98, 238; Bella rosa adorata, 86;
Price, Uvedale, 249 Piangete, occhi dolenti, 183, 340
Puyana, Rafael, 80, 95, 110–111, 121, 123n, 136, 253, Operas and intermezzos, 34, 280; Ambleto, 34n;
262n, 310n, 363n Berenice regina d’Egitto, 34n; La Dirindina, 72, 340;
Index 397
Narciso (Amor d’un ombra), 280; Tolomeo et 300; K. 184, 121, 178, 227, 239; K. 185, 253,
Alessandro, 30, 134 360–361; K. 187, 121n, 363; K. 188, 24, 24n,
Sacred works; ‘Madrid Mass’, 31, 317n, 318; 118, 118, 246, 246–247, 300, 316; K. 193,
Miserere in E minor, 89; Salve regina, 31, 318; 18–25, 19–20, 23, 38, 91, 111, 144, 197, 200,
Stabat mater, 86; Serenades, 31, 69; Sinfonias, 134 213, 336, 341; K. 194, 181; K. 195, 181,
Sonatas; K. 1-30 (Essercizi), x, 31, 39, 43n, 48, 64, 187–188; K. 197, 253; K. 198, 92, 239, 239;
67, 71–72, 73–77, 85, 88, 92, 93, 168, 171, 188, K. 199, 173; K. 202, 134–136, 138, 139, 339;
188n, 224n, 279, 284, 295, 296n, 304n, 316, K. 204b, 24; K. 206, 70n, 347–355, 349–353,
335–336, 339, 362, 370; K. 1, 335; K. 2, 171, 356–357, 358, 360, 373; K. 207, 343, 373;
335; K. 3, 71n; K. 4, 92, 316; K. 6, 68; K. 7, 68, K. 208, 171, 172, 224, 360; K. 209, 307; K. 210,
284; K. 8, 80, 93; K. 9, 39, 71–72, 171, 315–316; 305–306, 306; K. 212, 181, 227, 261, 261, 319;
K. 11, 295; K. 13, 39, 305; K. 14, 188; K. 15, K. 213, 251; K. 214, 240, 342; K. 215, 181,
288; K. 17, 227; K. 18, 88–89; K. 19, 295, 237n, 254, 306n, 306, 337–339, 338, 343;
301–302, 302, 303, 362, 362–363; K. 20, 295; K. 216, 210–213, 211; K. 218, 117, 117–118;
K. 22, 182; K. 24, 9n, 121, 250n, 297, 298, 336; K. 221, 181, 335; K. 222, 225, 228–231, 229,
K. 25, 336; K. 26, 168, 169; K. 27, 152–155, 307, 339; K. 223, 245, 303, 303, 309; K. 224,
152–156, 250n, 318, 336, 339; K. 28, 304, 304; 178–179, 179, 224, 232–233, 233, 326;
K. 29, 140, 284, 288, 335–336; K. 30, 60, 71n, K. 225, 121, 213; K. 228, 296; K. 232, 114n,
182–183, 235, 335, 336, 339; K. 39, 8–9, 9, 168, 184; K. 234, 253, 361, 361; K. 235, 135, 316;
187; K. 41, 63n; K. 45, 195–196, 196; K. 46, K. 236, 134; K. 238, 80, 80–81, 262, 357;
295, 295; K. 48, 140; K. 50, 63n, 140, 140n; K. 240, 16n, 131n, 136; K. 242, 178, 187, 224,
K. 52, 93; K. 53, 184–187, 186, 266; K. 55, 114, 273; K. 243, 242; K. 244, 200, 342; K. 246, 316,
115, 116; K. 56, 248–249, 249, 318, 319; K. 57, 339, 373–374; K. 247, 224, 224, 317, 373–374;
187, 239, 239–240; K. 60, 93; K. 61, 67, 67n, K. 248, 181; K. 249, 341; K. 252, 184n; K. 253,
110–111, 146; K. 63, 71; K. 64, 63n, 238; K. 65, 174, 200, 214–215; K. 254, 15–18, 16-17, 61,
276–277, 277–278, 282, 282–284, 285, 287, 289, 100, 168, 227; K. 255, 83; K. 256, 140, 266–268,
308, 317, 343; K. 67, 93; K. 69, 93, 93n, 94, 99, 267, 343; K. 257, 63n, 188n, 188–191, 359, 362;
224n; K. 70, 48n, 85; K. 71, 71, 369; K. 73, K. 258, 344; K. 259, 63n, 251–252; K. 260,
371–372; K. 76, 71, 369; K. 78, 39; K. 80, 71n; 156–157, 165n, 197, 209, 212; K. 261, 181, 290,
K. 81, 64; K. 83, 371, 372; K. 86, 93, 99, 251; 344–346, 348; K. 262, 85; K. 263, 89–90, 89–92,
K. 87, 60, 93–95, 137; K. 88, 48n; K. 89, 64; 126, 224, 317, 347; K. 264, 181, 305; K. 265,
K. 90, 64; K. 92, 80, 93; K. 96, 63n, 123, 176, 133, 133n; K. 268, 180–181, 305; K. 270, 138,
176–177, 195, 224, 254, 319; K. 98, 272; K. 99, 275, 340, 374; K. 271, 272–275, 273–274, 374;
64, 121, 141–144, 339, 372; K. 100, 144; K. 101, K. 274, 105, 337n, 356; K. 275, 336–337, 337,
341; K. 102, 358; K. 105, 119, 193–194; K. 106, 337n, 374; K. 276, 337n; K. 277, 11–13, 11–15,
104, 336, 374; K. 107, 114–116, 115, 119, 121; 18, 24, 90, 99, 104, 119, 144, 216, 253, 254, 347,
K. 111, 192–193, 336; K. 112, 287–288, 360; K. 278, 326, 363; K. 279, 318, 359, 360;
287–288, 301; K. 113, 284n; K. 114, 64, 122; K. 282, 134n; K. 284, 84; K. 286, 105; K. 291,
K. 115, 71, 238, 310–313, 315, 316, 339; K. 116, 105; K. 293, 183, 183–184, 316; K. 295, 342;
187; K. 118, 263; K. 119, 39, 236–237, 313–315, K. 296, 39–40, 120, 253–254, 284, 368–369n;
314; K. 120, 64, 173, 174–175, 180, 182, 284; K. 297, 368–369n; K. 300, 326; K. 301, 225,
K. 123, 230–231, 335; K. 124, 213–214, 262; 225, 343; K. 302, 343, 343; K. 305, 84–85, 91,
K. 125, 173n, 246; K. 126, 288–289; 192n, 342; K. 306, 316; K. 308, 99–100; K. 309,
K. 127, 84, 373; K. 128, 231, 231, 373; K. 130, 99, 100–104, 101–104; K. 311, 84; K. 313, 116,
340, 373; K. 131, 302, 303, 373; K. 132, 144, 116; K. 314, 184, 185, 236; K. 317, 39, 171, 172;
227, 330, 339; K. 135, 341; K. 136, 71, 319; K. 318, 373, 374; K. 319, 198, 200, 213, 373,
K. 139, 144, 356; K. 140, 167; K. 145, 69; 374; K. 320, 316; K. 322, 105–107, 309–310,
K. 146, 70; K. 147, 93, 224n; K. 148, 257, 358; 374n; K. 323, 192, 193, 194, 374n; K. 324, 141,
K. 149, 173; K. 150, 232, 239, 239, 251; K. 151, 335; K. 325, 184; K. 327, 285–286, 319, 342;
251; K. 154, 230n; K. 158, 253; K. 162, 63n, K. 331, 326; K. 332, 358; K. 334, 105; K. 336,
133, 305; K. 166, 356; K. 168, 326–328, 327; 326; K. 337, 141, 316; K. 339, 181; K. 340, 357;
K. 170, 104, 133, 348; K. 175, 237; K. 176, 133; K. 342, 105; K. 343, 251, 262, 262; K. 345, 236;
K. 177, 319; K. 178, 225–226, 226; K. 179, 239; K. 347, 375; K. 348, 375; K. 351, 133; K. 356,
K. 180, 178, 213, 273, 289, 289–290, 295, 308; 200; K. 357, 200; K. 358, 335; K. 359, 184n, 357;
K. 181, 187; K. 182, 118, 118; K. 183, 246, 299, K. 362, 232; K. 364, 230n; K. 365, 92, 316, 326
398 Index
Scarlatti, Domenico (cont.) 193; K. 544, 120, 255–256; K. 545, 140, 340,
K. 371, 187; K. 372, 84; K. 375, 181, 326; 341; K. 546, 253; K. 548, 112–114, 113; K. 551,
K. 379, 87–88, 182; K. 380, 363–367, 364; 227, 227; K. 554, 147–150, 148, 151, 181, 318,
K. 381, 307; K. 382, 326; K. 384, 104, 306n, 325; Minuet in D minor (Turin), 71; Minuet in
306–307; K. 386, 140, 194–195, 262–263, 342; G major (Turin), 71; Sonata in A major (Lisbon),
K. 389, 343; K. 394, 220, 223, 290–291, 69–70
291–292, 318; K. 395, 339; K. 396, 370; K. 397, Scarlatti, Giuseppe, 56
370; K. 398, 86–87, 88, 137, 348; K. 402, 39, 89, Schachter, Carl, 39
124–127, 124–133, 218, 247, 295; K. 404, Schenker, Heinrich, 39, 40n, 41, 59, 220, 316n
120–121, 253; K. 405, 316; K. 406, 301; K. 407, Schenkman, Walter, 318n
240–245, 260, 273, 307, 340; K. 408, 254; Scherzo, 150
K. 409, 200, 201–209, 202–203, 210, 213, 214, Schiff, András, 128n, 255–256, 333
258; K. 410, 340, 370; K. 411, 370; K. 413, 84, Schmalfeldt, Janet, 39
308, 316; K. 414, 134n, 335; K. 415, 224; K. 416, Schoenberg, Arnold, 74
144, 339; K. 417, 166n; K. 418, 326, 340; K. 419, Schott, Howard, 257
196; K. 422, 166n, 232, 293, 318; K. 424, 326; Schroeter, Rebecca, 42
K. 425, 358; K. 426, 253, 254, 317, 357–358, Schubert, Franz, 36, 50, 60, 210, 211, 296, 324, 340,
359; K. 427, 184, 342; K. 428, 85; K. 429, 111, 366, 368
187, 341; K. 430, 319; K. 431, 255; K. 434, 140, Schumann, Robert, 168, 182n
181, 361; K. 435, 81; K. 437, 233–235, 234–235; Seiffert, Max, 52, 61, 134n, 235
K. 438, 210, 369; K. 439, 63n, 262, 262, 358, Seixas, Carlos, x, 31, 42n, 55, 67, 85, 109, 121n, 182,
359, 360; K. 441, 318; K. 442, 306n; K. 443, 250, 252, 253n, 285, 299n, 334, 358, 370, 371
318; K. 444, 301, 301, 341; K. 446, 63n, 92, Sequence see syntax
136n, 138, 260–261, 369; K. 447, 181, 317, 318, Sessions, Roger, 192
342; K. 449, 181, 303, 304, 316; K. 450, 63, 63n, Seville, 46n, 110, 363
109, 171, 172, 258n; K. 454, 297, 298; K. 457, Sheldon, David, 98
159, 180, 181, 319, 341; K. 461, 259–260, 260, Sheveloff, Joel, 3n, 7, 22n, 23, 27, 31n, 39, 43n, 44n,
307–308; K. 462, 336n, 374–375; K. 463, 16n, 45, 48–49n, 60, 65, 70, 77n, 93, 94n, 107n,
374–375; K. 464, 316; K. 465, 298–299, 299, 167–168, 173, 173n, 184, 201, 209–210n, 214,
300; K. 466, 228, 228, 357, 374–375; K. 467, 228–229, 237, 245n, 246n, 257n, 263, 268, 305,
374–375; K. 468, 182, 374–375; K. 469, 210, 336, 339, 369, 372
318, 374–375; K. 472, 343, 359, 362; K. 474, 49, Shostakovich, Dmitry, 106
305, 328–331, 328–334, 336, 370; K. 475, Siciliana, 134, 260
221–223, 222–223, 370; K. 476, 140–141, 181; Siena, 63
K. 480, 301, 301; K. 481, 253; K. 482, 178; Silbiger, Alexander, 51n, 264
K. 484, 181n; K. 485, 200–201, 207, 214; Sinfield, Alan, 58
K. 487, 49, 300–301; K. 489, 345; K. 490, Sitwell, Sacheverell, 26, 29, 123, 134, 193, 344n
x, 91, 102, 110, 237n, 238, 268–272, 269, 270, Soler, Antonio, 28–31, 32, 42n, 55, 67, 114, 114n,
271, 317, 361, 363–364, 372; K. 491, 118, 119n, 121
110; K. 492, 39, 110, 318; K. 493, 232, 233, Somfai, László, 57n
258, 329; K. 494, 358; K. 495, 178, 374; Sonority see texture and sonority
K. 496, 83–84, 374; K. 497, 374n; K. 498, 335, Sources, 7, 65, 146n, 172–173, 256–257, 263–275,
357, 357, 374n; K. 500, 346, 346–347; K. 501, 305–306n, 368
319; K. 502, 119; K. 503, 180, 293, 293–294; Autographs, absence of, 3–4, 31, 41, 256
K. 511, 134n, 210; K. 513, 90, 136–139, 137, Barcelona, 70
215, 348; K. 515, 259, 259; K. 516, 368n; Cambridge, 70, 260, 262–263, 268, 270–272, 369
K. 517, 187n, 368n; K. 518, 181; K. 519, 181; Lisbon, 44n, 49, 69–70, 140n, 187, 258, 262, 263,
K. 520, 184n, 318, 342; K. 521, 51n; K. 522, 272, 305–306n, 333, 369–370
318; K. 523, 158–163, 160–162, 180, 187, 191, London, 224
206, 265, 305, 319, 336; K. 524, 104, 336, 374; Madrid, 70, 119n, 369
K. 525, 111, 150–152, 164, 227–228, 228, 276; Montserrat, 70
K. 527, 359; K. 531, 213, 335; K. 532, 109, Münster, 88, 187, 268, 271, 306, 337n
163–164, 197; K. 534, 254–255; K. 535, 174, Parma, 3, 32, 44–45, 70, 70n, 119n, 144, 187, 251,
308–309, 309; K. 536, 370; K. 537, 318, 370; 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 263, 268, 271–272, 306,
K. 539, 318; K. 540, 342; K. 541, 164, 164–165, 307, 333n, 342, 369–370, 373, 374, 375
Index 399
Turin, 70–72, 369 Repetition, 23, 71, 119–121, 145–166, 171, 181,
Valladolid, 70 193, 194, 213, 226, 253, 254, 282, 301, 325, 357
Venice, 3, 32, 44–45, 47, 70, 70n, 144, 187, 251, Sequence, 9, 120–121, 141, 181–188, 189–190,
257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 263, 268, 271–272, 206, 275, 336
279, 306, 307, 333n, 342, 368, 369–370, 373, ‘Stampede’, 159, 165, 180–181, 200, 324, 341, 363
374, 375 ‘Three-card trick’, 141, 181, 246, 300, 345
Vienna, 44n, 56, 88, 187, 224, 270, 271–272, 306, Time and temporality, 11–13, 120–121, 147, 150,
313n, 337n, 369 155, 164–166, 180, 184, 197, 322, 345, 377
Zaragoza, 70 Vamp, 23–24, 33, 60, 105, 106, 111n, 119, 120,
Spacing see texture and sonority 129, 135, 146n, 156–158, 163–164, 177, 184,
Spanish see folk and popular music/Iberian elements 197–216, 219, 231, 238, 254, 289, 309, 326, 339,
and influence 342, 345, 357, 359
Speed see tempo
Spielfreude, 283–284, 287, 290 Tagliavini, Luigi, 83n
Staier, Andreas, 15n, 122, 135n, 176, 307, 335 Talbot, Michael, 5n, 199n, 323–324, 341, 341n
‘Star turn’ see thematicism Taruskin, Richard, 109n, 264–265, 315
Strauss, Richard, 95 Tausig, Carl, 39, 265, 316n
Stravinsky, Igor, 151, 192, 236–237, 265 Telemann, Georg Phillip, 87n
Style, 8, 25, 38, 49–55, 62, 120, 122, 198, 219, 264, Tempo, 9–10, 98, 104, 177, 194, 195, 250–256, 316,
265, 356, 357, 359, 379–380 359, 376, 377
Baroque, 9, 14, 18, 28, 39, 50–51, 58, 79, 81, 92, Andantes, 251–256, 359–360
96, 139, 140, 142–144, 167, 168, 179, 180, 190, Texture and sonority, 297, 377
192, 193, 198–199, 214, 224, 245, 254, 276, ‘Essercizi cadence’, 93, 141, 282, 316
282–283, 306, 318n, 320, 322, 334, 341, 344, Missing bass notes see syntax
347, 360, 373, 377, 380 Octaves, 301–304, 319
Classical, 50–51, 56–57, 79, 97, 105, 167, 179, 245, Open fifth, 91, 300, 317
295n, 320, 323, 377, 380 Open sonorities, 86, 158, 300–304, 313
Galant, 11–15, 17, 21, 51, 76, 95–107, 117, Opposition between hands, 242, 260, 307
128–129, 163, 198, 200, 220, 227, 266–268, 308, Spacing and register, 14, 106, 226n, 243, 253, 260,
330, 337, 348, 355, 360 274, 281, 282, 285, 286, 289, 294–296, 308–315,
Learned/Strict, 15, 17, 76, 96, 124–128, 153–156, 358
161–162, 163, 179, 220, 227, 254, 266, 297, 319 Tenor suspension, 317–318
‘Mid-century’, 8, 50, 51, 100, 192, 320 Two-part texture, 15, 98, 265, 295, 315
Mixed, 109, 134, 136, 139–140, 167, 168, 182, Unison close, 71, 171–172, 304, 315, 318–319
322–323 Thematicism, 19–20, 201, 311, 312, 324, 325–334
Renaissance polyphony, 51, 54, 55, 59, 317 Dialect and idiolect, 355–358, 364
Stile antico, 89–90, 93, 94–95, 218n ‘Star turn’, 105, 313n, 326–328, 371
Subotnik, Rose Rosengard, 41, 245 Thompson, David, 34n, 43n, 136
Suite, 28, 85, 320, 321, 368, 370 Time see syntax
Sutherland, David, 45–46, 47n, 48, 72n, 281 Toccata, 8, 51, 64, 85, 114, 134, 136, 140, 141,
Syntax, 38, 59, 60, 98, 142, 188, 191, 265, 336–337, 153–156, 157n, 184, 187, 195, 198, 273, 276,
376 282, 290, 294, 311, 316, 334, 362
Cadence, 177–179, 180, 222, 229, 236, 262, 266, Toledo, 247
292, 305, 306, 307, 318n, 318–319, 377 Tommasini, Vincenzo, 332n
Closure, 71, 144, 171–172, 208, 308, 334, 339–340, Tomsic, Dubravka, 316n
372, 376 Tonadilla, 66
Elision, 84, 146, 168, 169–170, 205, 325, 375 Topic, 7, 34, 78–95, 109, 123–144, 147, 215, 262,
Fortspinnung, 88, 183, 184, 189, 326 296, 299, 307, 323, 325, 339, 341, 356, 358,
‘Great curves’, 119n, 173–175, 325, 375 363–367, 376, 377
Hypermetrical manipulation, 193–195, 201–208 Dotted style, 140, 266–268
Missing bars, 146, 158, 159, 167, 171–177, 192n, Fanfare/horn call, 86, 123, 181, 214, 266, 308, 311,
202, 206, 265, 292 332, 335, 357, 363–367
Missing bass notes, 146, 159, 305–307 Learned/strict see style
Opening, 180–181, 324, 328, 334–339, 377 Pastoral see pastorale
Periodicity, 163, 168, 182, 206 Torrente, Álvaro José, 66n
400 Index
Torres, Joseph de, 66n Vittoria, Tomas Luis de, 95

Tovey, Donald Francis, 217n, 235n Vivaldi, Antonio, 54, 132, 133, 157, 184, 198, 199,
Trapido, Barbara, 249–250 214, 289, 323, 341n
Treitler, Leo, 322 Vlad, Roman, 63, 77n, 236
Trend, John, 60, 120n, 341 Voice leading, 100, 114, 129, 165, 193, 195, 217–220,
Troy, Charles, 177, 286n 223–230, 248, 291, 294–295, 377
Tyson, Alan, 4 Missing notes,, 154, 227–228, 248, 291
Parallel intervals, 14, 16, 18, 20, 86, 91, 105, 138,
Valabrega, Cesare, 26, 58, 62, 79n, 193, 235, 297 154, 166, 178, 187, 189, 193, 219, 223–227, 229,
Valencia, 247 230, 230n, 232, 301–303, 348, 354, 373
Valenti, Fernando, 335 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de, 97
Valls, Francisco, 111, 133
Vamp see syntax Weber, William, 191n, 218n
Van der Meer, John Henry, 48n, 47–49, 68, 70, 72n Webern, Anton von, 368
Van Sant, Ann Jessie, 100n Webster, James, 50, 256n
Variations, 146, 311–312, 321 Weissenberg, Alexis, 121
Velasco, Domingo Antonio de, 32 Weller, Philip, 94
Venice, 31, 63, 136, 281 Wheelock, Gretchen, 76
Venice collection see sources White, Hayden, 379
Verdi, Giuseppe, 7, 60 Williams, Peter, 92n, 154n, 296n, 344n
Verfremdung, 140, 179–180, 182, 184, 188, 221, 264, Wolters, Klaus, 76
303, 326
Vienna, 56 Yearsley, David, 56n
Villanella, 266n
Villanis, Luigi, 2n, 63, 248 Zacharias, Christian, 24, 95, 106–107, 176, 299, 333
Vinay, Gianfranco, 63, 63n, 80, 329, 332n Zappa, Frank, 62
Violinismo, 141, 184, 214, 286, 289 Zelenka, Jan Dismas, 5n, 32
Virtuosity, 10, 41, 54, 248–249, 276–291, 292, 297, Zipoli, Domenico, 87, 88, 266n
335–336, 376 Zuber, Barbara, 21, 22, 24, 76, 111–112

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w. dean sutc l i f f e is University Lecturer at the University of Cambridge and

Cambridge University Press

© Cambridge University Press 2003

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of

First published in print format 2003

ISBN-13 978-0-511-06764-8 eBook (EBL)

ISBN-13 978-0-521-48140-3 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of

Preface page vii

1 Scarlatti the Interesting Historical Figure 1

arrangements (although there is some material on Avison’s concerto arrangements

creative practices were enormously stimulating. Many thanks to Penny Souster at

Cambridge, July 2002

Domenico Scarlatti does not belong. Whether we ask to whom, to where, or to

Ex. 1.1 K. 39 bars 6–17

Ex. 1.2 K. 277 bars 1–40

Ex. 1.2 (cont.)

Ex. 1.3a K. 254 bars 15–24

Ex. 1.3b K. 254 bars 92–101

Ex. 1.4a K. 193 bars 1–49

Ex. 1.4a (cont.)

progressions. Scarlatti thus seems to be working by a process of distortion, as each

Ex. 1.4b K. 193 bars 85–101

Another obstacle to discussion is the lack of outward differentiation to Scarlatti’s

composer’s life.19 This suggestion of aristocratic reserve, a common enough strain

53 Pagano, Vite, 462, 409, 461.

63 Bie, Pianoforte, 88–9.

72 ‘F. 244: 4 Annäherungen an eine Sonate’, in Musik-Konzepte 47 (1986), 80.

understandable recourse to keyboard music, especially that of the eighteenth century,

91 Boyd, Master, 160–61.

101 Sutherland, ‘Piano’, 250.

the development – essentially the progressive outward expansion – of harpsichord

deliberately restricted in this respect because of the organological imponderables of

of the most distinguished victims of a musicological malaise about mid-eighteenth-

122 Webster, Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphony, 340.

‘the gleam of future Mozartian spirituality’151 and is able to point to a number of

Instant Latinate Essentials Generator

5. joy and happiness

163 Cited in Pagano–Boyd, Grove, 406.

relentless tempi – it is just as evident in Andante as Allegro movements. We have

born of harmony of spirit with the natural surroundings’.176 Remarkably similar

176 Roncaglia, ‘Centenario’, 64. 177 Villanis, Italia, 170.

establishment of separate music departments within universities with their teaching

It is a strange fact, quite as remarkable as the complete disappearance of the autographs of

been more intrinsically Spanish.188 In this currency, Scarlatti, an Italian working in

EVIDENCE OLD AND NEW

although copied in a different hand, form part of a manuscript containing toccatas

220 See Brito, ‘Portogallo’, 78–9.

224 See Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 120.

228 Zuber, ‘Blumen’, 19.

1 Mellers, Orpheus, 86. 2 Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 115.

Ex. 3.1 K. 238 bars 1–5

evocative material, however suggestive of particularities, is a means to an end, that

premise that changes of material evince a basic dramatic or theatrical orientation.

14 Noted in Chambure, Catalogue, 113.

Of course, such irregularity as we ﬁnd in K. 305 is not to be thought of as

Ex. 3.2a Giustini: Sonata No. 3/iv bars 56–77

Ex. 3.2b Galuppi: Sonata No. 6 bars 1–8

Ex. 3.3a Zipoli: Pastorale bars 47–56

Ex. 3.3b K. 398 bars 1–9

24 This is also discussed in Pedrero-Encabo, ‘Rodrı́guez’, 382.

Ex. 3.4 K. 263 bars 1–34

Ex. 3.4 (cont.)