Jane Clark ‘His own worst enemy’ Scarlatti: some unanswered questions “PMD ROLLI (6 Petrio ie) 1 Paolo Antonio Roll (1687-1765) anonymous engraving. Drefived to his translation of Parase Lost (1733) Despite much musicological activity in the 30 years since Ralph Kirkpatrick's monumental study of Domen- ico Scarlatti was published" not one major fact about him has been discovered. In the preface to his complete edition of the sonatas’ Kenneth Gilbert ‘comments: ‘Of all the major 18th-century composers Scarlatti remains surely the most enigmatic: it is doubtful if any significant new elements can be expected to alter this state of affairs in the future’. In 582 EARLY MUSIC NOVEMBER 1985, the absence of any supporting information on them anyone who has battled with Domenico's sonatas is inevitably assailed by the sinking feeling that Mr Gilbert may well be right, but occasionally hope appears in unexpected situations. My own work concentrated entirely, initially. on the Spanish ele- ments’ in Scarlatti's music, but the purpose of this article is to suggest aspects of his life and output in which research might possibly yield further know- ledge of this elusive composer. One fact we do possess is the publication of the 30 Essercizi per gravicembato, but even this is shrouded in mystery and poses many questions. In 1739 two editions appeared simultaneously; one, the official publication with Scarlatti's own Preface and Dedi- cation to John V of Portugal, and the other. a pirated version. in two volumes edited by Thomas Roseingrave (which also contained some additional sonatas). Until 1953 it was thought, on the authority of Charles Burney. that the official edition was published in Venice, however, during preparation of a book* on music publishing Charles Humphries and William Smith discovered an advertisement in the Country Jounal or The Craftsmen revealing that Scarlat's official edition also appeared in London, The advertise- ment is dated February 1739 and reads: Just publish'd. Esserci per Gravicembalo. Being 30 Sonatas for the Harpsichord, in 110 Large Folio Pages. finely Engraved in big Notes, from the Originals of Domenico Scarlatti, Musich-master to the Most Serene Prince and Princess of Asturias. To be Sold by Mr. Adamo Scola. Musick Master in Vinestreet near Swallowstiet, Piccadilly. over: ‘against the Brewhouse. Price Two Guineas. Beware of inconect printed Editions. a scandal in this great Nation. and let not its fundamental Principles of Liberty and Property be abus'd by vile Worms that gnaw the Fruit of others ingenious Labour and Expense Roseingrave's edition was published by Benjamin Cooke and appeared with the Royal License of the King of England‘crorce the Second, by the Grace of God. King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, &. To all whom these Presents shall come, Greeting: Whereas our Trusty and Well-beloved Benjamin Cooke, of the Parish of St Martin in the Fields, in our County of Middlesex, Musick Printer, hath, by his Petition, humbly Represented unto Us, That he has purchased a Collection of Original Pieces of Vocal and Instrumental Musick, Compos'd by Signior DOMENICO ScARLATH, and other Authors; and with great Labour and Expense, has Engravd, Printed, and Fitted some of the said Works. in part of the same, in such a Manner as will ender them very Useful and Entertaining (oall Perform rs on the Harpsichord, or Organ, oF any other Instruments, as the said Musick may require; and hath therefore hurnbly besought Us, to grant him Our Royal Priviledge and License, for the sole Engraving, Printing, and Publishing the said Works, for the Term of Fourteen Years: We being willing to ive all due Encouragement to this his Undertaking, are sraciously pleased to conclescend to his Request; and We do therefore by these Presents. so far as may be agreeable to the Statute in that Behalf made and provided, grant unto him the said Benjamin Cooke, his Heirs, Executors, Administrators, and Assigns, Our License for the sole Engraving, Printing, ‘and Publishing of the said Works, for the Term of Fourteen Years, 10 be computed from the Date hereof, strictly forbidding all Our Subjects. within Our Kingdoms and Dominions, to reprint or abridge the same, either in the like, ‘or in any other Size or Manner whatsoever, or to import. buy. ern, ties, oF uisitibuve any Copies Uwereof, reprinted heyond the Seas, during the aforesaid Term of Fourteen Years, without the Consent of the said Benjarnin Cooke, his Helts, Executors, Administrators, and Assigns, uncler their Hands and Seals first had and obtain’d as they will answer ‘at their Perils; whereof the Commissioners, Officers of Our Customs, the Master, Wardens, and Company of Stationers are to take Notice. that due Obedience may be ronvlered to Our Pleasure herein declared. Given al Our Court at St, James's the Thirty-First Day of January, 1738-9, in the Twelfth Year of Our Reign. and other This surely indicates that the two publications came out in direct competition with one another. To the English public clearly Roseingrave's was the ‘official version, having a long list of subscribers, most of whom were established and respected members of the musical profession in London.? The fact that Rosein- grave had tampered with the text and added extra works by himself and Alessandro Scarlatti would not have concerned them. Whatever the closeness of this, subsequently much-flaunted, friendship between Roseingrave and Scarlatti— possibly pure worship of the one for the other, perhaps something of an embarrassment to the sophisticated and possibly, at that stage in his career, fairly ambitious Italian—such pirating would surely have concerned the composer? ‘The story of their meeting is well-known and Scarlatti ‘was evidently showing Roseingrave who was master on his own tertitory. All composers were keen to have their music published in London and that Scarlatti's, ‘own edition of the 30 Essercizi appeared there is not mysterious. The more unfortunate aspect is that Roseingrave's protected publication was the only one of which anyone appears to have been aware. So far the sole evidence for the other, with a lavish frontis- piece by Amiconi, is the advertisement in The Crofisman A purely political journal, The Craftsman aligned itself in opposition to the King and the government, and was supported by the men who, in 1733, estab- lished the so-called ‘Opera of the Nobility’ in direct competition with Handel and, thereby, the King Farinelli, the Opera's principal singer, hero and friend. left England in 1737 for Madrid, where Scarlatti had already been for four years. The secretary of the company was Paolo Rolli illus.1); before he came to England in 1715 he had been amember of Domenico's circle in Rome. He was librettist of Scarlatti's opera Narciso (a revised version of Amor d'un ombra e gelosia dun‘aura), performed in London by the newly-formed Royal Academy of Music in May 1720, and strong evidence exists that he wrote the celebrated paper ‘against Handel in The Craftsman in April 1733.7 Rolli was still in London in 1739 when the Essercizi appeared, Jacopo Amiconi, creator of the frontispiece (see illus.4), was enjoying great success in England both as a portrait painter and as decorator of the newly-built mansions of the aristocracy and the speculators. A measure of his success can be deduced from the fact, that when he was to decorate the staircase in the Cavendish Square house of the Duke of Chandos in 1735, the Duke remarked that he could take the canvas elsewhere to work on it, “otherwise | shall have the house perpetually filled with people coming to see it.* He was also a lifelong friend of Farinelli. Clearly no expense was spored on the Lssercieé and one wonders who payed. A particularly strange aspect of this publication is that Farinelli, who must have known all, about it (Amiconi joined him and Scarlatti in Madrid in 1747) even if he was not directly responsible for it, led Burney to believe that it had been printed in Venice. 1t is tempting to assume that. like so many of the activities of ttatians in London in the 1730s the issue held political significance which, even more than 30 years later, Farinelli was still too diplomatic to reveal EARLY MUSIC NOVEMBER 1985 5432 Richard Boyle, Sid Earl of Burlington, by Godfrey Kneller (Devonshire Collection. Chatsworth) (photo: Courtauld Institute ofan) Domenico must first have met Farinelli when he returned to Italy from Portugal in 1724. Itwasthen that he also met Johann Adolf Hasse. who is responsible for first mention of a Scarlatti sonata. Niggli. in his biography of Hasse's wife Faustina Bordoni, maintains that she only consented to marry Hasse after she had heard him play ‘one of the most difficult sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti.” If this story has any foundation then it has to be dated between 1728 when Faustina arrived in Venice and 1730 when she and Hasse were married, In all the reports of Scarlatt's harpsichord playing as a young man there is no indication that he was necessarily playing his own music. His father. Alessandro. who by all accounts was not a virtuoso, presumably wrote his virtuosic keyboard music for his brilliant son. It is possible that it was these works and his improvisatory skill that accounted for Domenico's ‘early fame. Scarlatti was 35 when, in 1720, he left Rome. It is a mystery that so far no reports of his teaching activities there have come to light. Rome was full of English amateur musicians on The Grand Tour’ who must have 544. EARLY MUSIC NOVEMBER 1985, sought lessons from someone. While Pasquini was still alive (he died in 17 10) his name figures repeatedly in the letters and diaries of English ‘milords' who not only studied with him, but commissioned music from him, After his death accounts show that the milords still bought harpsichords and engaged music masters and Scarlatti seems the obvious candidate for Pasquini Clientéle, his father having returned to Naples in 1708. It has always been said that Roseingrave was responsible for putting on Narciso at the King's Theatre, London in May 1720, This seems unlikely, even though he directed it and wrote 3 few extra numbers The people responsible for the choice were. surely. Lord Burlington and the other founder- members of the Royal Academy of Music, many of whom must have met Domenico in Rome. It was clearly planned that the conposer himself would direct the performances since an entry in the Vatican archives® states that he had left. in September 1719, for England. About this time Lord Burlington (who seems, unfortunately. to be almost as shadowy a figure as Scarlatti) returned to London from Rome after his second visit. one of the purposes of which was to recruit Italian musicians for the Royal Academy. Did Scarlatti come, and leave before the performances. delegating them to Rosein: rave? That he did not want to face competition with Handet's Radamisto, also done that season. is possible. Hasse had similar reservations; when invited to direct the Opera of the Nobility, he is supposed to have refused on the grounds that Handel was not yet dead With an important post at the Portuguese court awaiting Scarlatti, it would perhaps have been unwise tohave taken a hack seat in London, Whether he came or not. a route from Rome to Lisbon via London was not inconceivable in the 18th century. Owing to the Methuen Treaty of 1703 trade between England and Portugal was intense and both Lisbon and Oporto had large English populations. tt seems likely therefore that Portugal had its share of the early 18th-century, wide compass (GG-2""), English harpsi- Uwwrs a itis pethaps these instuments that were responsible for the similar compass of some Iberian harpsichords. Was it even Scarlatti himself who. on his arrival in Seville in 1733, persuaded makers there to build these large instruments? Seville was still an important Spanish port and centre of instrument building at the time and so itis reasonable to conjecture that imported English instruments. held in high esteem," inspired Iberian designs, It seems reasonable to suppose. in the face of no spiiiets amention of a keyboard piece by Domenico before 1728, that he did not write any until after his arival in Portugal. This notion is somewhat shaken by a Sonata such as K503 which has no element in the Pastorale sections to distinguish it from those of Pasquini or Aldovrandini, and nothing in the final section that could not have been written by his father. It is a typically Italian piece of the early 18th century. Itis, of course. possible that he wrote such a piece later at the request of a pupil but this example perhaps shows that arriving at a chronology for the sonatas is, at the prezent time, an impoctible problem. technical feature that no one seems thoroughly to have investigated ishand-crossing. This seems to have been essentially a French characteristic. first of all in the pieces croisées and later in the more acrobatic form invented, he claimed." by Rameau in Les Cyclopes of 44 Frontispiece of Scarlat’s Esserciz (1739) by Jacopo Amicon 3 Connoisseurs in Rome (1750), possibly by James Russel (1720-1763) [Yale Center for British Art. Paul Mellon Collection) EARLY MUSIC NOVEMBER 1985 5451724. If his claim is correct—and certainly Bach's ‘minor Fantasy and B- Partita and Couperin's Les Tours de Passe-passe postdate Les Cyclopes—did Scarlatti know the Rameau Piéces de Clavecin? There is what appears to be a quotation from Les Cyclopes in 547 (see ex.1) and comparison between Rameau and Scarlatti xa Rameau, Les cyclopes (ieces de Clavecin, 1728) Exth Scarlatti, Sonata in G,x587 (= a reveals too many similarities—in addition to hand: crossing—to be coincidental (see ex.2). This also applies with regard to Rameau's Piéces de Clavecin en Concert, and it ought to be remembered that the Spanish court was Bourbon and its library contained, for instance, cantatas by Clerambaull."” | have indicated" that purely Andalucian elements in the sonatas, coupled with the feeling of excitement and novelty those that employ them generate, could imply that they were written in 1729-33. the years Domenico spent in Seville. All indications are that he ‘Ex2a Rameau, Les cyelopes (Pieces de Clavecin, 1724), \ cee bean Seat Sonata in B m9. A517 Bre j Deer. SS composed less and less as he grew older and perhaps the fact that he seems to have been supplanted by Farinelli and other Italians was in some measure his 546 EARLY MUSIC NOVEMBER 1985, ‘own fault. The fact that he wrote no operas afterhe left Italy has so far thought to have been strange, but if we are to judge from the songs in Narciso" he appears to have been incapable of writing a good tune. All the interest, and it is considerable, is found in the instrumental parts, which in turn contain many ele- ments present in the sonatas. This talent would, however, not have appealed to audiences who liked to bathe in the beautiful. though totally undemanding, tunes of Ariosti, Bononcini, Hasse and even Farinelli brother, Broschi, Perhaps the great appeal for Scarlatti fof Andalucian music was its shythy i! figurative rather than melodic interest. Such tunes as, there are tend to be fragmentary like his own Surprisingly. the obvious influence of Spanish music on Scarlatti may possibly be the most straight forward aspect of this mysterious composer. How that influence throws light on the chronology of the sonatas is inevitably conjectural, but surely helpful To what extent and in what manner a performer responds to it is, as we all hear. capable of endless variety. A serious study of Andalucian music suggests ‘a manner of performance that reveals. in its use of ‘omamentation, rhythmic alteration and (above all) emotional intensity, an influence of a far more pro found character than is commonly thought. The pervading mood of solitary anguish, present in so much of this folk music, clearly struck a sympathetic chord in Domenico and may perhaps provide a clue to his character. After reading Frank Walker’ article ‘Some Notes on the Scarlattis™ one is left with the suspicion that Scarlatti was restless. He draws attention to the many uncharted periods of the composers life between 1719 and 1728, and to the possible significance of a notice in the Hallische Zeitungen (1728) quoted by Walther in his Levikon (1732). No attempt has been made to explain why a notice concerning payment of Scarlatti's travelling expenses by the King of Portugal was in a newspaper in Halle. It is possible that the persuasive fenitiustasm of Kirkpatrick's magnificent book has fulled us all into a false sense of security and that itis time, once more. to examine the life of Domenico Scarlatti If, as seems likely. he was something of an 18th century misfit, caused perhaps by his father's early domination. this state of affairs would have been aggravated by his early lack of public success as an opera composer and by the unfortunate misfiring of his own edition of the Essercizi Its also possible that = hanwonieDomenico was of a nervous and accident-prone disposition and that his father had been forced to take especial care over him. Domenico was probably un- willing to present the rest of his great collection of sonatas and it may have been with some difficulty that Farinelli and Queen Maria Barbara persuaded him to have them copied out at the end of his life, particularly since so many of them owed their greatness to his ‘unique understanding and interpretation of the much: despised folk music of southern Spain. ‘Another strange fact that seems to have gone unnoticed ia the clause in the Order of Eantingo: conferred on Scarlatti in 1738—which constrained him to ‘conjugal chastity’. His wife had to give her permission for him to receive the Order, which also required that he eat, drink and sleep as a different man.” Pethaps this was a desperate move by Maria Barbara to keep her harpsichord master on the rails. That she did not succeed may be born out by the fact that, not only did she have to pay his gambling debts, but after his wife's death in 1739 he married again, some time between 1740 and 1742. Perhaps the most revealing remark of all about Scarlatti appears in Mendel's Levikon:"* ‘fortune was on his side, only he himself was his own worst enemy My thanks are due to Ann Turner of BBC TV. and George Clarke Jane Clark is a harpsichordist who is also known for her research on Scarlatti and Couperin, She is participating in the Scarlatt festivals in Amsterdam and Nice this autumn | Kikpattick, Domenico Scarant (Princeton. 1953, rev 3/1968) 'D.Seaviaes: Sonaes ed. K. Gilbert. Le pupitre (Pais, 1971-) 2. Clark, ‘Domenico Searlat and Spanish Folk Music, EM. (1976) pp.19ff “C. Humphries and W. C. Smith, Muste Publishing inthe Brish isles (London, 1954, rev.2/1970) "A copy of Roseingrave’s edition, with a complete ist of sub serers. s housed in the Rowe Libary. Kings College, Cambrige ‘See Kirkpatrick. ope p30 'G-E. Doms, Pane Rll andthe Halton Cirle in London The Hague, 1967) 'C.H. Collins and M1 Baker, James Brydges, Fst Duke of Chondos (oxford. 1945), p285 7A. Nigal, Foust Rordont Hasse (Leipzig, 1880) "iekpasick op at 333 “nb: Ke Pascual. Harpsichords, lavichords and similar ins ‘ments in Madrid in the second half of the 18th century. RM A Reseurch Chromite, wit (1982), pp 660 "'J-P. Rameau, ices de clavecin avec une méthodesurlaméchanique des dogs (Pais. 1724), p19 "a. Livermore. Sho Mistry of Spanish Music (London, 1972, poo “lak. op cit ", Scarlatti, SONGS! in the New /OPERA/CaIEa NARCISSUS), printed for l Walsh and [Hare (London, 1720} British Library. Condon, #.515 “MF. Walker, “Some notes on the Scarlatti, Music Review. xii (1951), pp ast kirkpatick. op ot, pp.99F "Mendel and Riessmann, eds. Musicahieches Conversation Lesko, {i @Gevlin, 1885), p73, EARLY MUSIC February 1986 COUPERIN GEMINIANI Peter Holman Peter Walls STRINGS for All Historical Bow and Plucked-String Instruments EARLY MUSIC NOVEMBER 1985 547