The 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 reconsideration 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 doing 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 EighteenthCentury 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 2 Panorama

1 26

Place and treatment in history The dearth of hard facts Creative environment Real-life personality The panorama tradition Analysis of sonatas Improvisation Pedagogy Chronology Organology Style classification Style sources Influence Nationalism I Nationalism II Evidence old and new

26 29 32 34 36 38 40 41 43 45 49 54 55 57 61 68

3 Heteroglossia

78

An open invitation to the ear: topic and genre A love-hate relationship? Scarlatti and the galant Iberian influence Topical opposition

4 Syntax

78 95 107 123

145

Repetition and rationality Phrase rhythm Opening and closure Sequence

145 167 171 181

v

vi

Contents Kinetics Vamps

188 196

5 Irritations

217

Der unreine Satz Introduction Voice leading Counterpoint Cluster chords and dirty harmony Rationales Tempo and Scarlatti’s Andantes Ornamentation Source matters

217 217 223 230 236 247 250 256 263

6 ‘Una genuina música de tecla’

276

Fingermusik and ‘mere virtuosity’ Keyboard realism Texture and sonority

276 292 297

7 Formal dynamic

320

Binary-form blues Thematicism Formal properties and practices Dialect or idiolect? Lyrical breakthrough Pairs

320 325 334 355 358 367

Finale

376

Bibliography Index

381 392

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 contemporaries 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 acknowledgement is usually brief. The extreme lack of hard documentary evidence together with Scarlatti’s uneasy historical position has hindered sustained musicological engagement 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.

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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 definition 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 syntactical 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 inconsistencies 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 number 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 keyboard 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’)

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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, Virginia 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

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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 2

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. 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 Mar´ıa 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 Mar´ıa 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

4

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. 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 biographical – 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

6

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’. 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.

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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 Mar´ıa 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 8 9

‘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. See ‘The Date of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in B flat, K. 333/315c: The “Linz” Sonata?’, in Musik, Edition, Interpretation: Gedenkschrift Günter Henle, ed. Martin Bente (Munich: Henle, 1980), 447–54. 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.


5

concerns the possibility that the majority of the sonatas were conceived in samekey 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 nineteenthcentury 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 12

11 ‘Domenico Scarlatti’, The Musical Quarterly 13/3 (1927), 488. See Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 143. 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.

6


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 14 15

Cited in Kerman, Musicology, 127. ‘Theorists and “The Music Itself ” ’, Journal of Musicology 15/3 (1997), 325. 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.


7

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 musicology 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 contexts 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 commentary 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 mentioned, 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 17

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. 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.

8


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 corresponding 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


9

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.

10


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 nineteenthcentury 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

20 21

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. ¨ Cited in Eric Sams, ‘Zwei Brahms-Rätsel’, Osterreichische Musikzeitschrift 27/12 (1972), 84. 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.


11

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 normally 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’ becomes 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 markers 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 .

12

The keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti 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


13

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

14


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 suggests 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 balanced. 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 commentary 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.


15

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 optimistic 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

25

26

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. 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. The original text is contained in Luciani, ‘Note I’, 469, and Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 121, offers a translation.

16

The keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti 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 28

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. 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.


17

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

30

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. 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.

18


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

32

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’. 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.


19

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 nineteenthcentury 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

20

The keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti 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


21

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 threebar 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 threebar 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 clustered harmonies are replaced by airy arpeggios and registrally isolated diatonic scale 33

34 35

‘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. ‘Domenico Scarlatti and Spanish Folk Music: A Performer’s Re-appraisal’, Early Music 4/1 (1976), 20. See Zuber, ‘Blumen’, 28; Clark also mentions the ‘ever-present chromatic hovering’ between the two versions of 3ˆ in Clark, ‘Spanish’, 20.

22


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 neighbournote 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

37 38 39

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. Zuber, ‘Blumen’, 36, 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. 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’.


23

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.

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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 almost 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 before 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, whatever 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 42 43

Opere complete per clavicembalo di Domenico Scarlatti (Milan: Ricordi, 1906–10). K. 193 = L. 142. 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. Zuber, ‘Blumen’, 27–8. She also reports Alexandru Leahu’s belief that the similarly shaped material of K. 188 represents a malagueña.


25

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 enquiry 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 complete 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 surrounding 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 2 3 4

5

Review of Domenico Scarlatti: Master of Music by Malcolm Boyd, The Musical Times 128/1730 (1987), 209. A History of the Pianoforte and Pianoforte Players, trans. and rev. E. E. Kellett and E. W. Naylor (London: Dent, 1899), 69. Opere complete per clavicembalo di Domenico Scarlatti (Milan: Ricordi, 1906–10). 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). 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 unfortunately not in general circulation. Joel Sheveloff ’s doctoral dissertation of 1970 represents 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 speculative. However, Kirkpatrick’s evidence was ‘hard’ while Pestelli’s was ‘soft’, a revealing 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 musicological 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 8 9 10

7 Pestelli, Sonate. Sheveloff, ‘Keyboard’. Domenico Scarlatti: Master of Music (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986). Domenico Scarlatti: Sonates (Paris: Heugel, 1971–84), 11 vols. 11 Sheveloff, ‘Frustrations I and II’. Domenico Scarlatti: Sonate per clavicembalo (Milan: Ricordi, 1978–).

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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 circumstances 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 composer 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 embraced 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 appearance 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 resurrected French harpsichord repertory, were at first puzzled and uncomfortable.’14 12 13

14

Preface to Achtzehn ausgewählte Klavierstücke von Domenico Scarlatti, in Form von Suiten gruppiert (Leipzig: Peters, 1864), i. 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. ‘Scarlatti: 300 Years On’, The Musical Times 126/1712 (1985), 588.

Panorama

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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 beneficent 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

16 17 18

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. Lang, ‘300 Years’, 589. Peter Williams, Review of Domenico Scarlatti: Master of Music by Malcolm Boyd, Music and Letters 68/4 (1987), 372. Sitwell, Background, 166.

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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 Mar´ıa 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 circumstances 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 Scarlatti’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 production. 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 20 21 23 24

25 26

Review of Domenico Scarlatti by Ralph Kirkpatrick, Die Musikforschung 7/3 (1954), 343. Verga L’Aretino Scarlatti Verdi (Milan: Bompiani, 1941), 125 and 125–6. 22 See Pestelli, Sonate, 181. The Music of Spain (London: Dent, 1942), 109. 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. 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. See Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 52. See the Appendix to Sandro Cappelletto, La voce perduta: vita di Farinelli evirato cantore (Turin: EDT, 1995), 209–21.

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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, particularly musical scores, has often been sought in such disasters as the complete destruction 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 Juder´ıas 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 28 29 30

31

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. ‘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. See Clark, ‘ “His own worst enemy”. Scarlatti: Some Unanswered Questions’, Early Music 13/4 (1985), 543. ¨ Compare Eva Badura-Skoda, ‘Domenico Scarlatti und das Hammerklavier’, Osterreichische Musikzeitschrift 40/10 (1985), 525, suggesting that this must have been the case, and Clark, ‘Enemy’, 544, where the author stresses that the reports of Scarlatti’s playing never suggest he was playing his own music. 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.

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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; Mar´ıa 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 33

34 35

36

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Boyd, Master, 158–9. All but the Essercizi would seem to have been unauthorized publications. 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. Scarlatti – Alessandro e Domenico: due vite in una (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1985), 459–60. 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. See Boyd, Master, 165. The final sentence of Scarlatti’s dedication in the Essercizi would certainly suggest, even allowing for hyperbole, that Mar´ıa 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 Mar´ıa 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. Clark, Boyd Review, 209. The portrait is reproduced on the cover of Boyd, Master.

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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 behaviour of the vamp sections not owe something to such royal example? In fact, only 38 39

40 41

42

For example in Philip G. Downs, Classical Music: The Era of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (New York: Norton, 1992), 49. 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. See Kastner, Introduction to Carlos Seixas: 80 Sonatas para instrumentos de tecla (Lisbon: Fundaça˜ o Calouste Gulbenkian, 1965), xxxiii, and Degrada, ‘Lettere’, 315. 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. See Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 131.

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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 instance, 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 principle. 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 adornments 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 between 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

44 45 46

47

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 Mar´ıa Bárbara’s disappointed life’. See Hammond, ‘Scarlatti’, 161. Barry Ife and Roy Truby, Introduction to Early Spanish Keyboard Music: An Anthology, Volume III: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 4. 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 Mar´ıa 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. Scarlatti only wrote two operas for a public theatre – Ambleto of 1715 and Berenice regina d’Egitto of 1718. See Degrada, ‘Lettere’, 272.

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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 50 51 52

49 Lang, ‘300 Years’, 585. Cited in Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 33. See Hermann Keller, Domenico Scarlatti, ein Meister des Klaviers (Leipzig: Peters, 1957), 86, and Clark, ‘Enemy’, 546–7. Sheveloff, ‘Frustrations I’, 399. 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.

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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 Mar´ıa 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 54 55 56

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Pagano, Vite, 462, 409, 461. ‘Besides, the attention given to monarchs and ministers has distracted me from the events of Domenico’s life.’ Pagano, Vite, 407. Thompson, ‘Scarlatti’. 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. Review of recording by Mikhail Pletnev (Virgin: 5 45123 2, 1995), Gramophone 73 (1996), 72.

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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 beyond 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 perfectly 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 59 60 62

Pestelli, Sonate, 2. See Luciani, ‘Domenico Scarlatti creatore del sinfonismo’, Musica d’oggi 8/2 (1926), 43, and Hammond, ‘Scarlatti’, 186. 61 See Ife, Scarlatti, 21. Bontempelli, Verga, 128. ‘Domenico Scarlatti fra i due nazionalismi’, in Metamorfosi nella musica del novecento, 53.

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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 structurally 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 feverish, supercharged syntax of the sonatas themselves. Bie’s sentence, with its wealth of strongly physical metaphors of movement, has the additional virtue of responding 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 historical 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 64

Bie, Pianoforte, 88–9. 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’, Osterreichische 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;

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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

65 67 68 69 70

71

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. 66 Sheveloff, ‘Keyboard’, 258. Schachter, ‘Rhythm’, 48. Joseph Kerman’s term, used in Musicology (London: Fontana, 1985), 53. 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. Schenker, ‘Meisterwerk’, 154. 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. Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 281.

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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 exclusive categories, one suggesting the sonatas issue straight from the composer’s fingers, the other that they were carefully written to aid the technical development of Mar´ıa 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 purpose, 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 73

74 75

‘F. 244: 4 Annäherungen an eine Sonate’, in Musik-Konzepte 47 (1986), 80. 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. Böttinger, ‘Annäherungen’, 101. 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.

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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

77 78

79 80

‘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. An extreme version of this claim may be found in Chambure, Catalogue, 9–10. 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. ‘Bach and Handel’, in Keyboard Music, ed. Denis Matthews (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 74n. 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.

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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 Mar´ıa 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 keyboard playing’.82 He devotes a long section to enumerating all the technical features in which the sonatas were intended to develop proficiency – scales, arpeggios, octaves, 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 character – 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

82 84

85

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. 83 Keller, Meister, 44 and 83. Keller, Meister, 39. 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. ‘Early Keyboard Music’, in Keyboard Music, ed. Denis Matthews (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 40.

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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 master 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 thinner 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

87

88 89 90

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. 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’. 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. 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. Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 145.

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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 92 93 94

Boyd, Master, 160–61. Gilbert, ‘Périple scarlattien’, in Musiques Signes Images – Liber amicorum François Lesure, ed. Joël-Marie Fauquet (Geneva: Minkoff, 1988), 132. Pestelli, Sonate, 222. 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.

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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 graduated 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 e´tudes d’exécution transcendante – or, on a lower level, quasi-didactic lessons – transparently acts as yet another attempt to avoid any awkward contemplation 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 96 97

98 99

‘Hypothèse a` propos de l’ordre des sonates dans les manuscrits vénitiens’, in Domenico Scarlatti: 13 Recherches, 48–9. ‘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. 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. For example Alberto Basso, notes to recording by Christophe Rousset (Decca: 458 165 2, 1998), and Gilbert, ‘Périple’. 100 Sutherland, ‘Piano’, 252. Sheveloff, ‘Frustrations II’, 90.

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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 instruments, makes, ranges and special devices must be that they coexisted for most of 101 102

103

104 105

106

Sutherland, ‘Piano’, 250. 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. 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. Pagano, Vite, 173. 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 Mar´ıa Bárbara’s likely early ownership of pianos in Michael Cole, The Pianoforte in the Classical Era (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 15–17. 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.

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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 seemingly 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 qualities 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 harpsichord 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 written: ‘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 writing 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 107 108 109 110

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. With the seeming exception of the group of sonatas concentrated in the early K. 300s referred to earlier. 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. Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 184.

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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

112 113 114 116 117 118

‘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. Some possible instances are discussed in Sheveloff, ‘Keyboard’, 342–51. See Hammond, ‘Scarlatti’, 168, and Sheveloff, ‘Keyboard’, 327. 115 See Sutherland, ‘Piano’, 251. Sutherland, ‘Piano’, 251 and Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 184. 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. Van der Meer, ‘Keyboard’, 140. 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.

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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 automatically 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 ‘cautionary 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 provisional 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 harpsichord 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 119 120 121

Sheveloff believes that the avoidance of notes above c3 in the Essercizi may represent ‘cautionary editing’; Sheveloff, ‘Keyboard’, 327. The circumstances of this publication are explained more fully below on pp. 69–70. Keller, Meister, 37–8.

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of the most distinguished victims of a musicological malaise about mid-eighteenthcentury 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.

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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 Scarlatti 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, uncertainty 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 classification, 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 generally 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 123 124

125 126

Cited in Pestelli, Sonate, 23. 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. See Pestelli, Sonate, 259–63. 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.

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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 geographical 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 composer, 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 127 128

129

Cited in Kate Eckersley, notes to recording (‘Love’s Thrall’: Late Cantatas, vol. 3) by Musica Fiammante (Unicorn-Kanchana: DKP(CD)9124, 1992), 5. 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. Geschichte der Klaviermusik, third revised and expanded edn of C. F. Weitzmann, Geschichte des Klavierspiels and ¨ der Klavierliteratur, I: Die Altere Geschichte bis um 1750 (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1899), 426.

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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 meccanismo’ 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 antiRomantic 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 130 131 132 133 134

‘Domenico Scarlatti: 1685–1935’, The Monthly Musical Record 65/770 (1935), 177. See Pestelli, Sonate, 32–3. ‘Domenico Scarlatti nel secondo centenario della sua morte’, in Immagini esotiche della musica italiana, Accademia Musicale Chigiana (Siena: Ticci, 1957), 67 and 69. 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. Saramago, Baltasar and Blimunda, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988), 161.

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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 extemporised 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. 135 136

137

Siobhan Davies, ‘A Week in the Arts’, The Daily Telegraph, 20 May 1995, A5. 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). 138 Cited in Pestelli, Sonate, 44. Cited in Pagano, ‘Dita’, 84–5.

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Another ingredient of this sort, as found in the list above, is the seemingly surprising 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 technical 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 independently 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 prominent 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 composer’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 139 140

141 142 143

Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 42 and 115. 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. Style and Music: Theory, History and Ideology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 143 and 144. Malcolm Boyd devotes a whole chapter to this area; see Boyd, Master, 205–23. 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 Joaqu´ın Montero’, The Music Review 41/3 (1980), 197–206.

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‘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 orientation, 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 connections obtaining between the courts in Lisbon, Madrid and Vienna; Joseph II and Mar´ıa 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 influence, 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

145

146 147 148

149

150

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. 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). Noted in Badura-Skoda, ‘Die “Clavier”-Musik in Wien zwischen 1750 und 1770’, Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 35 (1984), 74. 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. 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. 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. See for example Bülow, Klavierstücke, ii; Malipiero, ‘Scarlatti’, 480; Villanis, Italia, 170.

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‘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 factor 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 opposition 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 critical 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 assimilation, 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. 2. 3. 4.

elegance and grace rationality and logic Mediterranean, Classical detachment, dryness, precision

151

Pestelli, Sonate, 187. 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’.

152

58 5. 6. 7. 8.

The keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti joy and happiness clarity, limpidity, transparency, lucidity brightness and brilliance 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

154 155 156

157

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. Alan Sinfield, ‘The Migrations of Modernism: Remaking English Studies in the Cold War’, New Formations 2 (1987), 116. Rosen, Classical, 46. 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. 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.

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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 flimsiness 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 158 159 161 162

‘Italy: Two Opera Centres’, in Man and Music: The Classical Era, ed. Neal Zaslaw (London: Macmillan, 1989), 15. 160 Schenker, ‘Meisterwerk’, 154. This is discussed in detail in Chapter 4, pp. 145–7. Brendel, Music Sounded Out: Essays, Lectures, Interviews, Afterthoughts (London: Robson, 1990), 239. 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.

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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 163 164 166

Cited in Pagano–Boyd, Grove, 406. 165 Trend, Falla, 149. Notes to recording by Anne Queffélec (Erato: 4509 96960 2, 1970), 10. Gray, History, 140. Compare Pierre Hanta¨ı’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 Hanta¨ı (Astrée Na¨ıve: E 8836, 1992/2001), 11.

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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 objectification 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 ‘universal’ 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 composers and English love of eccentrics.170 The two main players in this story, though, have still exhibited a form of Latin solidarity 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 country of origin; the Spanish has been diffident, and even defensive, about the adopted 167 168 169 170

Dent, ‘Scarlatti’, 176. See Santi, ‘Nazionalismi’ for an account of the Italian context for this – what Santi calls the ‘second nationalism’. Seiffert, Klaviermusik, 420. 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.

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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 operations 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 partisans: this particular strain of ‘initially anti-Germanic Mediterraneanism’172 was soon muted by political events. In order to make Scarlatti specifically Italian (again), writers had to differentiate within the elements of the Latinate paradigm. This meant not only distancing the composer from any Spanish elements (Portugal was hardly mentioned), 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 invasion’, 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 171 172 174 175

Santi, ‘Nazionalismi’. Pestelli, Sonate, Introduction/II, ‘Il mito di Domenico Scarlatti nella cultura italiana del ’900’, 25–56. 173 Valabrega, Clavicembalista, 97–8 and 99. Pestelli, Sonate, 39. Valabrega, Clavicembalista, 88 and 89–90. Frank Zappa, Tinsel Town Rebellion (Ryko: RCD 10532, 1981/1995), at the end of ‘Peaches III’.

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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 Scarlattiana 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 176 178

179 180 181

177 Villanis, Italia, 170. Roncaglia, ‘Centenario’, 64. 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’. Vinay, ‘Novecento’, 136. ‘La portée de l’influence andalouse chez Scarlatti’, in Domenico Scarlatti: 13 Recherches, 66–7. Vlad, ‘Storia’, 22.

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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

183 184

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. Pestelli, Sonate, 54. ‘Scarlatti Revisited in Parma and Venice’, Notes: The Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association 28/1 (1971), 7.

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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 185 186 187

‘Musicology in Spain (1980–1989)’, Acta Musicologica 62/2–3 (1990), 266 and 287. Boyd, Master, 153. 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.

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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 successful 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 Spanish 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 musicologists 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

189 190 191

192 193

´ See for example Alvaro José Torrente, ‘The Sacred Villancico in Early Eighteenth-Century Spain: The Repertory 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: unpublished, 1995), especially 1–18. 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. See Javier Herrero, Los or´ıgenes del pensamiento reaccionario español (Madrid: Editorial Cuadernos para el Diálogo, 1971), 63. 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. Craig H. Russell, ‘Spain in the Enlightenment’, in Man and Music: The Classical Era, ed. Neal Zaslaw (London: Macmillan, 1989), 359. ‘Opera and Ballet in Public Theatres of the Iberian Peninsula’, in Boyd–Carreras, Spain, 28.

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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 Rodr´ıguez (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 Agueda Pedrero-Encabo of Scarlatti’s Essercizi, published in 1739, and the thirty sonatas of Rodr´ıguez, 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

195

196 197

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. 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? Kastner, ‘Repensando’, 137. 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.

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surprisingly, the writer lays more weight on the differences of the respective composers 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 198 199 200 201

‘Los 30 Essercizi de Domenico Scarlatti y las 30 Tocatas de Vicente Rodr´ıguez: paralelismos y divergencias’, Revista de musicolog´ıa 20/1 (1997), 388. Boyd, Master, 222; Clark, Boyd Review, 209. Van der Meer, ‘Keyboard’, 157. Another diplomatic summation may be found in Ife–Truby, Spanish, 6. Manuel de Falla and the Spanish Musical Renaissance (London: Gollancz, 1979), 35.

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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 Mar´ıa 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

203 204 205

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 Investigaça˜ o Cient´ıfica, 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. Pagano, Vite, 354–62. See Edward Corp, ‘Music at the Stuart Court at Urbino, 1717–18’, Music and Letters 81/3 (2000), 351–63. Doderer, Libro, 11.

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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 209 ´ Montserrat and the Sonata published by Rosario Alvarez, 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, 206 207 208

209

210

211

Sheveloff, ‘Frustrations I’, 418–19. The sonata is found in the Fitzwilliam Museum at MU MUS 148 (formerly 32 F 13). Boyd, notes to recording by Mayako Soné (Erato: 4509 94806 2, 1994), 6; van der Meer, ‘Keyboard’, 137. 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. 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 Alvarez, ‘Una nueva sonata atribuida a Domenico Scarlatti’, Revista de musicolog´ıa 11/3 (1988), 883–93. 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 Mar´ıa A. Ester-Sala, ‘Dos sonatas de Domenico Scarlatti: un tema abierto’, Revista de musicolog´ıa 12/2 (1989), 589–95 (sonatas reproduced in facsimile on 591–4). 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.

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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 212 213

214

‘Una nuova fonte manoscritta per Alessandro e Domenico Scarlatti’, Rivista italiana di musicologia 25/1 (1990), 115 and 117. 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. See ‘Handel versus Domenico Scarlatti: Music of an Historic Encounter’, Göttinger Händel-Beiträge 4 (1991), 232–47, especially 243–4.

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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

216 217 218 219

‘These are Compositions born under your Majesty’s Auspices’: Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 102. Sutherland, for example, 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 ‘undoubtedly 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 Mar´ıa 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. 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. ‘An Examination of “Progressive Style” in Domenico Scarlatti’s La Dirindina’ (M.Phil. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1996), 12. See the commentary in Degrada, Preface to edition of La Dirindina (Milan: Ricordi, 1985), xxii. Boyd, Master, 73–4.

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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 Mar´ıa 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 220 221 222 223

See Brito, ‘Portogallo’, 78–9. See ‘Domenico Scarlatti and his Son Alexandro’s Inheritance’, Music and Letters 69/1 (1988), 23–9. ‘Memoria con los u´ ltimas voluntades de Domenico Scarlatti, músico de cámara de la reina Mar´ıa Bárbara de Braganza’, Revista de musicolog´ıa 21/1 (1998), 162. Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 102–3.

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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 224 225

See Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 120. 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.

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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 ‘representative 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

227

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. Luciani, ‘Note I’, 469.

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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 conjunction of the ‘ingenious jesting’ with the following aim of ‘mastery of the harpsichord’ shows ‘something characteristic of the new galant taste – the emphasis on entertainment 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 aesthetic 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 228 229

Zuber, ‘Blumen’, 19. 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.

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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 characteristically 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. 230 231

232

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. ‘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. Rosen, Classical, 163.

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 appears 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.

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(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

4

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’). 5 Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer, 1980), 9. Degrada, Enciclopedia, 358.

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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].

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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

8

9

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. 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. Grout, History, 456.

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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 utterances. 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 altogether (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 11

Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 171. Roncaglia, ‘Centenario’, 65.

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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 become 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 remarkably 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 13

Compare Basso, Rousset Notes, 6. 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.

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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.

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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 uninhibited 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 music. 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 frankness 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 16

Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 125. Gerstenberg, Klavierkompositionen, 85.

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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 considering 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 18 19 20 21

22

This comparison between Seixas and Scarlatti is explored in Kastner, ‘Repensando’, 151–2. Colles, ‘Sonata’, 895. Notably, Colles also remarks that the sonatas do not appeal to ‘the familiarity of established dance rhythms’. ‘Domenico Scarlattis Stabat mater’, Kirchenmusikalisches Jahrbuch 71 (1988), 19. Pointed out in Boyd, ‘Cantate’, 253. 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. The numbering is taken from Baldassare Galuppi: Sei sonate, ed. Iris Caruana (Padua: Zanibon, 1968), No. 5052.

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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.

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The keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti 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 directions. 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, ‘Rodr´ıguez’, 382.

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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 contrasting 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].

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The keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti 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

27

Quoted in Marx-Weber, ‘Domenico Scarlattis “Miserere”-Vertonungen für die Cappella Giulia in Rom’, in Alte Musik als a¨ sthetische Gegenwart: Bach, Händel, Schütz, proceedings of IMS congress, Stuttgart, 1985, ed. Dietrich Berke and Dorothee Hanemann (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1987), 136. 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.

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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, 28


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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 harmonic 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 pastorale, 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 30

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. Several writers suggest that K. 4 is an allemande: Pedrero-Encabo, ‘Rodr´ıguez’, 375; Pestelli, Sonate, 138; Seiffert, Klaviermusik, 422.

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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 without 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 hierarchically 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 31 32

Sheveloff, ‘Frustrations I’, 416. 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).

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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 rhythm in conjunction with a stepwise descent. final bars or the constant use of a 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 creative intervention so favoured elsewhere by the composer. The descending dottedrhythmic 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 independent, 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 34

‘Frames and Images: Locating Music in Cultural Histories of the Middle Ages’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 50/1 (1997), 33n. Sheveloff states that ‘each [fugue] is in some way flighty, overcomposed or grotesque’; Sheveloff, Grove, 343.

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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 voluminous 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 reborn, 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

36

37

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. 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. EMI: 7 63940 2, 1979–85/1991.

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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 postBaroque 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.

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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 Enlightenment 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 implicitly 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 postBaroque 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 40 41

42

See David A. Sheldon, ‘The Concept Galant in the [Eighteenth] Century’, Journal of Musicological Research 9/2–3 (1989), 90–91. Cited in Daniel Heartz, ‘Galant’, rev. Bruce Alan Brown, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edn, vol. 9, 430. 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. 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.

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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 significance 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 inclusively 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 44 45 47

I am thinking of such monodic openings as those to Prélude a` l’après-midi d’un faune and the preludes Bruyères and La fille aux cheveux de lin. Lang, ‘300 Years’, 587; Degrada, ‘Lettere’, 300; Pestelli, Sonate, 232 and 86. 46 See Heartz, ‘Galant’, 431, and also Sheldon, ‘Galant’, 97–100. Pestelli, Sonate, 271. This is discussed in Freeman, ‘J. C. Bach’, 239.

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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 particular the magical conduct of a circle of fifths in bars 11–15. The unprepared sevenths 48 49 50

Sheldon, ‘Galant’, 103. Compare Bogianckino’s assertion that the ‘Latin-Catholic world’ found it relatively easy to leave behind the Baroque. Bogianckino, Harpsichord, 20. Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 169; Livermore, A Short History of Spanish Music (London: Duckworth, 1972), 116–17. See Heartz, ‘Galant’, 431.

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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 equivalent, 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 52

53

Cited in Pestelli, The Age of Mozart and Beethoven, trans. Eric Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 11. 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. 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.

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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.

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The keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti 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 straightforwardly 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

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Ex. 3.5b K. 309 bars 57–77

typical bass affirmation of the new key leaps into the creative foreground. The closing 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

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The keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti 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

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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. 55 56 58

Rosen, Classical, 317. 57 Pestelli, Sonate, 195. Discussed by Diane Arbus in Diane Arbus (New York: Aperture, 1972), 13. Georges Beck calls these ‘boring implacable minims . . . without variety or vigour’. ‘Rêveries a` propos de Scarlatti’, in Musiques Signes Images – Liber amicorum François Lesure, ed. Joël-Marie Fauquet (Geneva: Minkoff, 1988), 15.

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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 59 60

61

62

Pestelli, Sonate, 239. 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. 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. EMI: 7 63940 2, 1979–85/1991.

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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.

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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 Garc´ıa 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 65 66 67

Timothy Mitchell, Flamenco Deep Song (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 112. See also Etzion, ‘Legend’. Debussy attended a bullfight in San Sebast´ıan and was able to hear flamenco singers and guitarists at the Exposition Universelle of 1889–90 in Paris. See Chase, Spain, 299. ‘Opera and Ballet in Public Theatres of the Iberian Peninsula’, in Boyd–Carreras, Spain, 17. 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.

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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 answers 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. Indeed, 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.

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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 centralism 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 buler´ıa. This has been disputed by Rafael Puyana; while accepting 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.

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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 alternates 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 identification 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 harmonic 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 composer’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.

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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 ‘upperclass 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 flamenquer´ıa – 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 Mar´ıa 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

73

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. 74 Pagano, Vite, 447. See Mitchell, Flamenco, 99.

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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

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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 composite 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 76

Heimes, ‘Soler’, 172. The author gives as an example bars 48–52 of Soler’s Sonata No. 19 in C minor. 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 Ex. 3.7a K. 107 bars 17–43

Ex. 3.7b K. 55 bars 85–96

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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 4ˆ and ˆ This can be seen in the activity of C and E around D in Ex. 3.7b. Boyd is more 6. 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: 77

Boyd, Master, 180–81.

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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 ˆ there is also a repetitive syntax that is clearly at odds with the falling on 4ˆ and 6; 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 domiˆ 5– ˆ 6(– ˆ 5) ˆ bass that in some form or other nated the piece. We are left with the 4– 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 conceives it in this sonata, IV or IV6 alternating with V in the Phrygian progression.

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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 comparable 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 refreshingly 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 79

I borrow this term from James Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5, Cambridge Music Handbooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Something remarkably similar occurs in the Fugue No. 1 in D minor by Albero, at bars 204ff .

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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 stylistic 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 81

82

‘Enrique Granados: A Few Reflections on a Seventieth Anniversary’, The Music Review 47/1 (1986), 22. 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. 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.

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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 Rodr´ıguez: [Rodr´ıguez] 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” – longwindedness 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 84

Pletnev is surely right to adopt a deliberate Andante tempo in his recording of K. 404. Virgin: 5 45123 2, 1995. 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.

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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 El´ıas, and even more the sonatas of Rodr´ıguez. 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 controlled’, 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 performance 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 exaggerates 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

86 87 88 89

´ Puyana, ‘Influencias’, 54. Agueda Pedrero-Encabo similarly evokes ‘an eminently Spanish compositional tradition of an austere, expansive and reiterative character’. For her, however, this is an essence inherited by Rodr´ıguez 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 Cient´ıfico, University of Valladolid, 1997), 248. 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. Try, for example, Virginia Black’s driving, exuberant performance of K. 187. United: 88005, 1993. Landowska on Music, collected, ed. and trans. Denise Restout, with Robert Hawkins (Secker and Warburg: London, 1965), 249. 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’.

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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 circumstances 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 eighteenthcentury 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 91

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Explained in Clark, Clark Notes, [5]. 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). 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.

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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 ‘musical 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 instance, 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 boundless 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 interpolations 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 programmatic 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 harderedged 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 95 96

94 Sitwell, Background, 131, 135. Pestelli, Sonate, 195–6. 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. 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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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 ˆ 6ˆ bass). The strict topic survives only in the tenor interjections of the might the 5– 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 dissonant 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 99 100

Cited in Ratner, Classic Music, 23. 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.

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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 between 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 perhaps 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 connection of intervallic shape which is now writ large is the principle of harmonic flexibility 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.

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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 ˆ 6ˆ progression, F–G. textural thirds) from the previous section, emphasizing the 5– 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,

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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.

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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 descendingtriadic 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 understanding 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 arguably 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

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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 o´rgano entre el Antiguo y Moderno estilo by El´ıas 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 El´ıas, 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 El´ıas 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 103 104 105

Compare the figuration that closes the first half of K. 162 with that of the closing ‘ritornello’ in K. 265, bars 193–4. Powell, ‘Albero’, 16. ´ See Agueda Pedrero-Encabo, ‘Some Unpublished Works of José El´ıas’, in Boyd–Carreras, Spain, 214–15.

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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 firsthalf 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 106 108 109 110 111

107 These works are discussed in Boyd, Master, 80–83. Boyd, ‘Tolomeo’, 18–19. 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. For other examples of interruptions, see K. 282, 414 and 511, all in D major. Max Seiffert’s remark that the structure of the whole is reminiscent of an Alessandro Scarlatti overture form seems cold comfort. Seiffert, Klaviermusik, 422. Sitwell, Baroque, 288; Chambure, Catalogue, 83; Pestelli, Sonate, 202–3; Boyd, Master, 172.

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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

113 114

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. Böttinger, ‘Annäherungen’, 80. Saramago, Baltasar and Blimunda, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988), 161.

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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 programme 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 programme, 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 picturepostcard 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 suddenly 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 presentation 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’).

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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

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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 dominant 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 attainment 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


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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 selfconscious 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 117 118 119 121

‘On Narrativity in Music: Expressive Genres and Levels of Discourse in Beethoven’, Indiana Theory Review 12 (1991), 76. For Massimo Bogianckino, this morendo connotes a ‘sorrowful fading out of the memory’. Bogianckino, Harpsichord, 110. 120 Mellers, Orpheus, 86. ‘On Narrativity in Music’, 95. 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 relationship 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.

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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 centripetally 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 juxtaposition. 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.

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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 violinismo; 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 paralleled 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.

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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 ˆ 5– ˆ 6ˆ bass at bars 5–6, which will be more fully exploited from bar 31 to Phrygian 4– 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

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they still favour the Spanish. The bass line hovers around D in modal manner, picking ˆ 5– ˆ 6ˆ shape from the opening unit, bars 5–6, while the soprano varies up on the 4– 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 righthand 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 material. 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 resolution. 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

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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 generating 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 become 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 harmonic 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 privileging 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 disappearance. 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.

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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

3

This at least is the conclusion one must draw from the evidence of the sources. The question of possible extemporized 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. See Rosen, Classical, 62–3, as one example of many warnings against this practice.

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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

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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 descending 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.

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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

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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 immediately, 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 consequence 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 6

Malipiero, ‘Scarlatti’, 480. 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).

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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

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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 Rodr´ıguez. 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.

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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

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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 seemingly 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 Rodr´ıguez. 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

8 9 10

Pestelli, Sonate, 146. 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. 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.

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Ex. 4.5a K. 27 bars 17–21

10

9–8

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9–8

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Ex. 4.5b K. 27 bars 23–6

10

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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 mindless 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.

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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

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(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 u¨ hle 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

13 14

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. Dale, ‘Contribution’, 43. See Sheveloff, Grove, 338–9. We will return to this stylistic suggestion.

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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 16

Virgin: 5 45123 2, 1995. 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.

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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.

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reference to the opening, with some simplification of the pattern but more importantly 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 5ˆ to 1ˆ (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

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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 construction 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

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10

10)

(7

10

7

10

7

10

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Ex. 4.7b K. 523 bars 50–54

Ex. 4.7c K. 523 bars 57–64

4

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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 denied 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

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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, significantly 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 considerable 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 opening 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

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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 becomes dominated by material, first heard from bar 19, that is less thematically distinctive 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

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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 minormode 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.

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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 firsthalf 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 nonsense 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 impression 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.

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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, contraction, extension and the insertion of irregular phrases, although, surprisingly, he did not acknowledge the ‘missing-bar’ phenomenon.20 Significantly, though, such remarks 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 common 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 21

Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 311. See also the section ‘Tempo and Rhythm’, 292–304. 22 Sheveloff, ‘Uncertainties’, 170. Boyd, Master, 174.

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energy is phrase elision, which ‘only Haydn cultivates as frequently and as interestingly 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 elements 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 24

Sheveloff, ‘Keyboard’, 415 and 369. 25 Cited in Boyd, Master, 225. Cited in Boyd, Master, 218.

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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 fallingthird motive and initiating a new downbeat-orientated module. Avison clearly cannot 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 developments; 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

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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 confusion, 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 unaccounted 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

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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 ‘unneccessary 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 inconclusive 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 syntactical denial, seems to react against the rhetorical relaxation that normally coincides 26

27

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. ‘Handel’s Use of Scarlatti’s “Essercizi per Gravicembalo” in his Opus 6’, Göttinger Händel-Beiträge 3 (1987; published 1989), 176.

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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 inevitable 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 embodiment 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

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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 29

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. Sheveloff, ‘Uncertainties’, 155. The great curve is also discussed in Sheveloff, ‘Keyboard’, 279–88.

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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 executive 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

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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

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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 clearingspace, 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 (Michelangeli); EMI: 7 63940 2, 1979–85/1991 (Zacharias).

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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 similar 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 considerations 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 syntactical 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 32

Keller, Meister, 78; Kastner, Introduction to Carlos Seixas: 25 Sonatas para instrumentos de tecla (Lisbon: Fundaça˜ o Calouste Gulbenkian, 1980), xvii. 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.

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The keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti 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 Scarlatti’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

34 35

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. The numbering is taken from Baldassare Galuppi: Dodici sonate, ed. Iris Caruana (Padua: Zanibon, 1974), No. 5299. As noted in Peter Williams, ‘The Harpsichord Acciaccatura: Theory and Practice in Harmony, 1650–1750’, The Musical Quarterly 54/4 (1968), 520.

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Ex. 4.14 K. 224 bars 63–8

thought to require detailed listening. Through this harmonic and the previously examined 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 implications 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 composer 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.

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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

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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 considered, 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 defamiliarizes 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

38 39 40

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. 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. Only Ralph Kirkpatrick appears to have isolated this device as such; see Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 249. 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.

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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 Rodr´ıguez, 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 counterpoint is intractable and rugged. There is a hidden creative virtuosity in creating 41 42

Bogianckino, Harpsichord, 66. 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.

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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 rising 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


44

See Degrada, ‘Lettere’, 299 and 302.

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(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, efficient 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 intensification 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 manipulation, 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 example 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 pattern 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.

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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 ascending linear intervallic pattern, the 5–6 at bars 82–5. A good example of a typical

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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 estrangement remains. This is strengthened very considerably when the full source situation is considered. Gilbert and Fadini both do some tidying in different ways.

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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 respectability 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 relaxation 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.

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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.

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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 directed 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 effective, 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 49

See Chambure, Catalogue, 99, and Pestelli, Sonate, 169. 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.

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At the beginning of the second half, in bars 38–9, the composer unusually combines 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 underappreciated 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

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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 51 52

Pestelli, Sonate, 198; Dale, Pestelli Review, 186–7. 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. Colles, ‘Sonata’, 895.

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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 54

55

Scarlatti: Twelve Sonatas (Easier Piano Pieces No. 57, London: The Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, 1986), 28. 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. Cited in William Rothstein, Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music (New York: Schirmer, 1989), 3.

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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 analysed. 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.

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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 Chapter 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.

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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 texture. 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.

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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 intimate understanding of the effects of syntactical patterning, whether wrought by

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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 distort 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 seemingly 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 explored 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 compositional service? They would often appear to be underdetermined by the particular context. Such questions must be understood to involve rhetorical as well as structural coherence. 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 obtrusively. 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 disembodied 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.

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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 recognized 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 dominant 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 under 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 63

Agmon, ‘Division’, 4. Bond, Harpsichord, 183.

62

Hammond, ‘Scarlatti’, 178. 65 Pestelli, Sonate, 19 and 52. Ife, Scarlatti, 21.

64

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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

67

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. 68 See the account in Rosen, Sonata, 89–94. Rosen, Classical, 215.

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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.

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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 hypermetrical manipulation and a concomitant struggle between regularity and irregularity 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 material at bars 9–11 makes the break between third and fourth bars of the unit even plainer. 69

Private correspondence, 1994.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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 informed 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 simplification (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

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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

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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 introduced 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 version 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.

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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 72 73

Alastair Williams, New Music and the Claims of Modernity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 85. Sheveloff, Grove, 338. Bogianckino, Harpsichord, 101–2. The author also links such a feature with the emergence of a fortepiano style.

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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. Comparable 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

75

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. Chambure, Catalogue, 89. As is frequently the case in this publication, the French original says something rather different and perhaps less acute.

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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

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The keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti 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.

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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 78

See Agmon, ‘Division’, 4. 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.

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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 syntactically. 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 illustration of Sheveloff ’s proposed Vivaldian descent. The violin-like figuration suggests 79

80

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. 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.

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we are listening to a solo episode from a concerto. There is also a very clear embodiment 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 sections, 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.

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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 outlined 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 unprecedentedly 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 differentiation 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, flamenco 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 83

84

Wim Mertens, American Minimal Music, trans. J. Hautekiet (London: Kahn and Averill, 1983), 119, 121 and 122–3. 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. 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 underappreciated, 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

2

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. Dent, ‘Scarlatti’, 177.

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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 ability 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 concerned 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

4

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. Compare Piero Santi’s characterization of ‘sregolatezza’ in Santi, ‘Nazionalismi’, 51.

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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 6

Hautus, ‘Insistenz’, 137. Rosen, Classical, 163. This phrase, once again, refers to Haydn.

7

Pestelli, ‘Music’, 88.

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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.

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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 occur 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 10

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. ‘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.

222


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.

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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.

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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 14

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. See Choi, ‘Manuscripts’, 78 and also 180–81.

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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.

226


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 wrongdoing 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.

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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, halfheard 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. Comparable 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 19

18 See Mast, ‘Brahms’, 54–5, 116–21 and 186. Bülow, Klavierstücke, ii. Deutsche Grammophon: 439 438 2, 1971/1994 (Kirkpatrick); Sony: 53460, 1964/1993 (Horowitz).

228


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

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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.

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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 22

See Hautus, ‘Insistenz’, especially 138–9. 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.

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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 immediately, 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.

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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 moment 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 onebar 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 contrapuntal. 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 intensively 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

25

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. 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.

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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 26

Pestelli, Sonate, 256.

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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 constructive 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 neglected 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 happens 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

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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 28 29

30

See Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 203, and Livermore, Spanish, 115. 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’. 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. Seiffert, Klaviermusik, 420; Valabrega, Clavicembalista, 309–12.

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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 overwhelming 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 themselves 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 harmonies, 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 accentuate 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

32

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. 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.

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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 acciaccatura 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 contribution to this debate from several points of view. They feature acciaccatura chords notated exactly as in Scarlatti. Aside from the organological implications of this coincidence – 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 notation 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

34

35

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. 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. See Sheveloff, ‘Frustrations II’, 96.

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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 delimited 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 allowable 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 37

‘ “Unerringly Tasteful”?: Harpsichord Continuo in Corelli’s Op. 5 Sonatas’, Early Music 24/4 (1996), 677. 38 Degrada, ‘Lettere’, 303. See for instance Boyd, Master, 183, and Bond, Harpsichord, 182 and 199.

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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 dissonance. 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.

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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 example, 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.

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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

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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 halfcadence 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 40

See footnote 22 on p. 11 for an explanation of this term. See Chambure, Catalogue, 139, and Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 202.

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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

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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 equivalent, 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 original 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 dissonant 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

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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 treatment, 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 demands 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

42

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. 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.

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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 44

Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 164–5. 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.

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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 Joaqu´ın Mart´ınez 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 knowledge, 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 46

´ See Hamilton, Spain, 218–23, Alvaro Torrente, ‘A Critical Approach to the Musical Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Spanish Music’ (Cambridge: unpublished, 1995), 12–13, and Zuber, ‘Blumen’, 16. 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.

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discussed in Chapter 3.) On a larger scale, any notion again of Scarlatti working 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 workmanship’ 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 eloquently 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 leading 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 49

50

48 Bond, Harpsichord, 182. Libby, ‘Italy’, 15. For a fuller quotation see Chapter 2, p. 59. 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 musicologists with a less refined . . . and complete critical armoury’. Pagano, Dizionario, 634. Villanis, ‘Italia’, 169.

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Ex. 5.14 K. 56 bars 37–9

innocent departure from the rules is compromised. The difficulty with all these suggestions 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 52

Simon McVeigh, Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 160. 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).

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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 54 56

Trapido, Temples of Delight (London: Penguin, 1990), 51–3. 55 See Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 293, and Pestelli, Sonate, 218. Temples of Delight, 99. 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).

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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 figuration, 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 maintain 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 58

See for example Peter leHuray, Authenticity in Performance: Eighteenth-Century Case Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 36–8. Beck, ‘Rêveries’, 16.

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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 onemovement 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 movement’, however, ‘did not prevent [him] writing beautiful specimens in which rhythmic 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 60 62 63

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 Tomˇsiˇc (Cavalier: CAVCD 007, 1987), [ii]. 61 See Rousset, ‘Statistique’, 79, or Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 322–3. Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 223. Pestelli, Sonate, 218; Pagano, Dizionario, 637. 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.

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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 65

Clark, Boyd Review, 209. 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).

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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 buildup 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.

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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.

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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

69

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. 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.

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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 71

72 73

Fadini, ‘Grafia’, 195. Sheveloff is just about the only writer to square up to the issue of missing ornaments: ‘Scarlatti’s potential for perversity 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. Keyboard Interpretation from the Fourteenth to the Nineteenth Century: An Introduction (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 136. Review of Fadini edition, The Musical Times 129/1748 (1988), 539.

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‘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 75 76 77

Rousset, ‘Statistique’, 78, and compare Rousset’s practice in his recent recording (Decca: 458 165 2, 1998). Gilbert, ‘Preface’, ix. See Hammond, review of Fadini edition, Music and Letters 69/4 (1988), 565, and Pestelli, Fadini Review, 463. To offer one simple example, see the different readings of bars 10–11 of K. 450 offered in Choi, ‘Manuscripts’, 139–40.

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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).

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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,

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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

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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 topical 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.

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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 evidence 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 connection 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

81

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. 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, Ornamentation 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.

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The keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti S O U C E M AT T E S

The source situation of the Scarlatti sonatas undoubtedly represents the master category 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 uncertainties 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 principle 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 moment, in that it is driven as much by the perception that a particular line of enquiry has been exhausted as by a genuine intellectual dissatisfaction with its premises. Thus it performs an operation of Verfremdung on the canonical art music with which it continues largely to occupy itself. 82 83

Sheveloff, ‘Frustrations I’, 406. Review of Fadini edition, Nuova rivista musicale italiana 14/4 (1980), 660.

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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 according 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 composer 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 something 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 uncomprehending performance? My quarrel, it should be clear, is not with the affective side of Taruskin’s interpretative 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 particularly 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.

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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

87 88

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). Peter Williams notes the galant character of the passage in Williams, Fourth, 106–7. Fuller, ‘Dotted’, 104.

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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.

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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, although 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 processional 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.

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K. 490: version in Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Mu Ms. 147 (formerly 32 F 12), 57–9 Plate 1a

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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

92

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. 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.

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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.

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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 95

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. 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.

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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-mobilestyle 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 97

As noted in Sheveloff, ‘Frustrations II’, 103. This point is made with respect to K. 115 in Hautus, ‘Insistenz’, 141.

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The keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti 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

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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 editorial 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 ´ SICA DE TECLA’ ‘UNA GENUINA MU

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 2 3

Much of this first section was presented in a paper given at King’s College, London in March 2001. Pagano, ‘Dita’, 87. 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.

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‘Una genuina música de tecla’

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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

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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.


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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 7

6 Bie, Pianoforte, 70–71. Cited in Luciani, ‘Sinfonismo’, 43. 8 Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 165, 168 and 169. Gray, History, 139; Rostand, Queffélec Notes, 10.

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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.


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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 acknowledge that, above all in keyboard composition, there was no clear-cut distinction 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 11 12 13

For some contexts for this see Pagano, ‘Dita’, 81–7. 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. Sutherland, ‘Fortepiano’, 255n. See also Ife, Scarlatti, 8. 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.

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The keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti 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


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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 unreflective 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 instrument, 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 considered communication with the outside world. Peter Böttinger offers some instructive 14 15

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. 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.

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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 considers 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 unselfconsciousness 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’ interpretation. 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 apparent nonchalance,20 and elegantly realized (compared with the more abrupt use of 16 18

19 20

17 Beck, ‘Rˆ Böttinger, ‘Annäherungen’, 107. everies’, 13. 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. See for instance Ife, Scarlatti, 21. 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.


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virtuoso devices found, say, in the sonatas of Seixas), when hand-crossing is introduced 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 handcrossings: 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 physically 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 22

Luciani, ‘Sinfonismo’, 44. 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.

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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 instrumental 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 mechanics, 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 historical 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 ‘tasteful’ 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 24

25

The Composer’s Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 137–8 and 139. 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. This is noted, for example, in Dent, ‘Edition’, 195.


287

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 twobar 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,

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The keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti 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 alternating hands from bar 32 functions as a release after all the previous close stepwise 26

This is Frederick Hammond’s term; Hammond, ‘Scarlatti’, 169.


289

Ex. 6.4 K. 180 bars 13–46

movement. Exceptionally, they suggest a quite clear generic parallel, with a double 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.

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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.


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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.

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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 missingbar 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.


293

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.

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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 potential. 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 nonkeyboard 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 keyboard identity, so are the often associated freedoms of register and voice leading. 30

31

Frederick Hammond, who gives a list of such outward references, believes that ‘the orchestra and other instrumental 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. Freeman, ‘J. C. Bach’, 233.


295

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 simple 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 modern 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 prominent 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.

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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 especially 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 35 36

34 Pagano, ‘Dita’, 88 and 90. This is noted in van der Meer, ‘Keyboard’, 139. 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. 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.


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significance beyond the story of the development of keyboard technique. Yet virtuosity, 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 38 40

This is pointed out in Denby Richards, notes to recording by Virginia Black (United: 88005, 1993), 6. 39 Valabrega, Clavicembalista, 152 and 154. Rosen, Romantic, 508. 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’.

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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,


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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 42

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. EMI: 7 63940 2, 1979–85/1991.

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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.


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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 dottedminim 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.

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The keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti 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?


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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.

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The keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti 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.


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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 association 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 colleagues 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 48

Sheveloff, ‘Uncertainties’, 159, 161 and 165. 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

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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 section 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 desolate 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

49

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. Hammond, Fadini Review, 565.


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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).

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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 confinement 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

52

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. Gerstenberg, Klavierkompositionen, 136.


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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

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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 55

54 Pestelli, Sonate, 173–4. Rafael Puyana notes the cante jondo influence; Puyana, ‘Influencias’, 54. 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.


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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 variationlike 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.

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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.


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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 keyboard, 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 Mar´ıa 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, headbanging 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 60

These closing bars are very similar to those of Albero’s Fugue in C minor. 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).

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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


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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 approach (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 encapsulates 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 62

‘Tradition and Authority’, Early Music 20/2 (1992), 311; Deutsche Grammophon: 435 855 2, 1993 (Pogorelich). E. F. Benson, Lucia Rising (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 4.

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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

64

65

Pogorelich, for instance, takes it very slowly, more Adagio even than Andante, while Dubravka Tomˇsiˇc 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 (Tomˇsiˇc); EMI: 7 69800 2, 1947/1988 (Lipatti); Collins: 1322 2, 1992 (MacGregor). 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. 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.


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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 dissonance’ 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 discussion 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.

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ˆ 7− ˆ 6ˆ progression in V, is a specialized expression of this. See the beginning an 8− 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 idiosyncratic than the solitary B in bar 68, which sounds in our mind’s ear long after it 67

68

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. 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).


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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 performance 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 anachronistic; 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 70

Virgin: 5 45123 2, 1995 (Pletnev); Grammofono 2000: 78675, 1943/1996 (Michelangeli); Sony: 62785, 1997 (Perahia). Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 227.

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-eighteenthcentury 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

2

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. Hammond, ‘Scarlatti’, 186; Valabrega, Clavicembalista, 96; Bond, Harpsichord, 180; Kastner, ‘Repensando’, 151.

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Formal dynamic

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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 4 6

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. 5 Dale, ‘Contribution’, 41; Chambure, Catalogue, 5–6. Silbiger, ‘Handel’, 95. Howat, Ross Notes, [3].

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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 qualifiers (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 topical, 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 8

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. John Docker, Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 184.

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This is particularly a danger given the governing disruptive paradigm of contemporary 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 progressive 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 category 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 embodiment 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

10

11

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. 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 Instrumental Music, Music Analysis 13/1 (1994), 127. Talbot, ‘Shifts’, 34–5.

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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 operation, 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.

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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 pronounced 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 craftsmanship, 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

14

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). Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 253.

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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.

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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 accompaniment 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

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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 perspective, 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 imitation in bar 1 is as concise and small-scale as could be imagined (using the same tag

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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.

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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.

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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’.

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(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 ascending 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 inflections, 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.

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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 minormode 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 recapitulation 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 occurrence, 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 directly – 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.

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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 assimilationist readings of this habit, variously drawing on the gestural traditions of keyboard forms like the toccata, fantasia and prelude or emphasizing the improvisatory 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 contemporaries such as Seixas or Rodr´ıguez 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 Rodr´ıguez, see Pedrero-Encabo, ‘Rodr´ıguez’, 386; on Albero, see Pestelli, Sonate, 230.

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As has been stated before, such openings may have tremendous e´ lan 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 warmup, 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-overright 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 22

Teldec: 0630 12601 2, 1996 (Staier); Universal: 80471, [1950s]/1998 (Valenti). 23 Hammond, ‘Scarlatti’, 181. This is Wilfred Mellers’ term; see Mellers, Orpheus, 86.

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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 otherwise 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 descending 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 implications 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.

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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.

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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

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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 harmonic 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 emphasis. 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

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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 wonder 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 possible 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 indicators, 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 28 29

She notes too that an ending of such brevity is ‘unmatched in all other intermezzi examined’. McLauchlan, ‘Dirindina’, 23–4. Degrada, ‘Lettere’, 296. 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

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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.

30

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. 31 Trend, Falla, 149. Talbot, ‘Shifts’, 42.

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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 32


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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 firsthalf 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.

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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 reworking, 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 34 35

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). Sacheverell Sitwell notices this too: K. 258 ‘is solemn and curious, with [the] sudden interpolation of a Schuhplattler, almost a clog dance, surely not of Italian or Andalucian inspiration’. Sitwell, Baroque, 284. Mellers, Orpheus, 85. Alain de Chambure suggests, also quite plausibly, that it ‘rings out like a bugle call’; Chambure, Catalogue, 123.

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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

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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

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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


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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 4ˆ (connoting V) then of 1ˆ (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 37


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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 recontextualization 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 distorted, made clumsy and ‘personal’, and choked by the texture. A bout of modal

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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 fallingoctave 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

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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

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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 contrarymotion scales which, as explained, derive from and then expand upon the disturbance

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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

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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.

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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 modifications) – 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 impassioned 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 conventions 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.

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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 subsequent 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 contrarymotion 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.

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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 between 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.

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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 repetitions 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].

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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 definition. 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, subtractions 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.

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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 Cos`ı 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 somewhat 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 parenthetical 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.

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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 appoggiaturas 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 1ˆ 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.

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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.

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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 journey to Seville after the royal marriage of Mar´ıa 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 described earlier. The work might indeed seem to partake of a sort of pictorialism a` la Rameau, but Scarlatti changes our perspective and our relationship to the material over the course of the piece. The point of view alters in the second half, as if the observer becomes a participant, as collective activity is overtaken by a lone voice. After the plain enunciation of topic in the 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 45

See for example Lionel Salter, notes to recording by Wanda Landowska (EMI: 7 64934 2, 1949 [notes 1993]), 7, and Mellers, Orpheus, 86. 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.

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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

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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

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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 background (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

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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

47

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. 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.

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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 commentary 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 49 50

51 52

See Hammond, ‘Scarlatti’, 179–80; Pagano, Vite, 419; Schott, review of Fadini edition, The Musical Times 136/1834 (1995), 671; van der Meer, ‘Keyboard’. Crocker, Style, 349. 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. Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 143; Hammond, ‘Scarlatti’, 180. 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

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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 coherence 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 common 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 documentary 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

53 54

55

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. Salter, ‘In Search of Scarlatti’, The Consort 41 (1985), 48; Boyden, Kirkpatrick Review, 262; Sheveloff, Grove, 347. 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. 56 See Boyd, ‘Sonatas’, 64. See Pestelli, ‘Fonte’, 118.

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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 presentation 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 structures entitled Recercata, Fuga y Sonata. Not only that, but such multi-movement structures often show clear thematic interconnections. Sometimes these may involve 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 58 59

These are discussed in Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 142. 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. See Allison, ‘Seixas’, 16.

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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 righthand 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.

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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 62

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. 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.

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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

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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 composers, 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 64

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. Agmon, ‘Division’, 6–8.

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same keys (or key notes) prompt similar shapes and gestures, or they may in fact suggest 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 attentiongetting 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 largestscale 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 impossible 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 sensibility 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 logistical 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 conception, 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 physical directness and suggestibility of the music, so overwhelming that it has impeded 1

Chambure, Catalogue, 18; Keller, Meister, 8.

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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 consistently, 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.

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Such tendencies towards subtraction or apparently gratuitous addition can, because of their extreme and potentially incomprehensible nature, be thought of as listenerunfriendly. 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 provides 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 unconvincingly in my view. With such rare exceptions, there are few monuments or mountains in the Scarlatti landscape – everything is flat or dark. And recent musicological 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 dealing 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 explanation 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

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and source information reduces its explanatory power. The case of Scarlatti reminds us how contingent such understandings are when the supporting operations and material 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? Conversely, 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 information. 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 compositional 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.

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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 dependence 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.

BIBLIOGAPHY

N.B. Collections of essays on Scarlatti and his contemporaries are listed here under [Domenico Scarlatti]. Individual essays cited here from those volumes are listed with only the title of the book; full publication details may be found in the entry for the book itself. Abbassian-Milani, Farhad. Zusammenhänge zwischen Satz und Spiel in den Essercizi (1738) des Domenico Scarlatti. Berliner Musik Studien 9. Sinzig: Studio, 1998. Agmon, Eytan. ‘Equal Division of the Octave in a Scarlatti Sonata’, In Theory Only 11/5 (1990), 1–8. Allison, Brian Jerome. ‘Carlos Seixas: The Development of the Keyboard Sonata in Eighteenth-Century Portugal’. DMA dissertation, North Texas State University, 1982. ´ Alvarez, Rosario. ‘Dos obras inéditas de Domenico Scarlatti’, Revista de musicolog´ıa 8/1 (1985), 51–6. ‘Una nueva sonata atribuida a Domenico Scarlatti’, Revista de musicolog´ıa 11/3 (1988), 883–93. Anderson, Nicholas. Notes to recording by Trevor Pinnock. CRD: 1068, 1981. Andreani, Eveline. ‘Autour de la musique sacrée de Domenico Scarlatti’, in Domenico Scarlatti: 13 Recherches, 96–108. Anonymous. Notes to recording by Vladimir Horowitz. RCA: RL 14260, 1982. Notes to recording by Gustav Leonhardt. Harmonia Mundi: BAC 3068, 1970. Apel, Willi. Masters of the Keyboard: A Brief Survey of Pianoforte Music. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947. Baciero, Antonio, ed. ‘Valladolid Sonatas’ Nos. 1–3, in Nueva biblioteca española de música de teclado, vol. 3, 37–50. Madrid: Union Musical Española, 1978. Badura-Skoda, Eva. ‘Die “Clavier”-Musik in Wien zwischen 1750 und 1770’, Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 35 (1984), 65–88. ¨ ‘Domenico Scarlatti und das Hammerklavier’, Osterreichische Musikzeitschrift 40/10 (1985), 524–9. ‘Il significato dei manoscritti Scarlattiani recentemente scoperti a Vienna’, in Domenico Scarlatti e il suo tempo, 45–56. Barcaba, Peter. ‘Domenico Scarlatti oder die Geburtsstunde der klassischen Sonate’, ¨ Osterreichische Musikzeitschrift 45/7–8 (1990), 382–90. Barham, Jeremy. Notes to recording by Joanna MacGregor. Collins: 13222, 1992. Basso, Alberto. Notes to recording by Christophe Rousset. Decca: 458 165 2, 1998. Beck, Georges. ‘Rêveries a` propos de Scarlatti’, in Musiques Signes Images – Liber amicorum François Lesure, 11–18. Ed. Joël-Marie Fauquet. Geneva: Minkoff, 1988. Bent, Ian. ‘Heinrich Schenker, Chopin and Domenico Scarlatti’, Music Analysis 5/2–3 (1986), 131–49. Benton, Rita. ‘Form in the Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti’, The Music Review 13/4 (1952), 264–73.

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INDEX

Abbassian-Milani, Farhad, 188n, 296n Acciaccatura, see harmony/cluster chords Adorno, Theodor, 52 Agmon, Eytan, 198, 213, 374 Albero, Sebastián de, 31, 32, 46, 47, 55, 67, 109, 114n, 118n, 119n, 121, 133, 212, 211–212, 225, 224–225, 235n, 250, 283n, 313n, 334, 360, 361, 370 Alberti bass, 307–308 Alberti, Domenico, 293, 369 Alkan, Charles-Valentin, 2 Allen, Warren Dwight, 1, 4 Allison, Brian, 252n Alpiarça, 32 ´ Alvarez, Rosario, 70 Andantes see tempo Andreani, Eveline, 55n, 317n Anglebert, Jean Henry d’, 29n Annunzio, Gabriele D’, 58n, 316n Antonio, Infante of Portugal, 46 Apel, Willi, 79n Aranjuez, 34 Austerity, 121, 253 Autographs, absence of see sources Avison, Charles, 93, 168–171, 295, 302n, 316 Bach, Carl Philipp Emmanuel, 29n, 42, 63, 213, 249n, 256n Bach, Johann Sebastian, 11, 29n, 30, 36, 38, 42, 50, 52, 58, 61, 65, 76–77, 93, 97, 154n, 191, 217, 235, 300, 321, 323 Badura-Skoda, Eva, 31n, 46n, 56 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 82, 139 Barcaba, Peter, 221n, 295n Barcelona, 247 Baroque see style Bartók, Béla, 284n Beck, Georges, 105n, 106n, 236n, 251, 284, 295n Beckett, Samuel, 39, 166 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 7, 10, 35, 56, 87n, 150, 193, 210n, 217n, 280, 298, 335, 379 Belli, Giuseppe, 37

Benson, Edward Frederic, 315 Benton, Rita, 278n Bicchi, Vicente, 69 Bie, Oskar, 26, 37–38, 279 Billroth, Theodor, 10 ‘Black Legend’, 31, 67 Black, Virginia, 121n Blom, Eric, 57n, 58, 359 Boccherini, Luigi, 324 Bogianckino, Massimo, 43n, 51n, 99n, 139n, 182, 209, 255, 286 Bolzan, Claudio, 121 Bond, Ann, 198, 209, 211, 237n, 248, 363n Bontempelli, Massimo, 30, 37 Bonucci, Rodolfo, 64n, 372n Böttinger, Peter, 39–40, 135, 221, 283–284, 288 Bouchard, Jean-Jacques, 54 Boyd, Malcolm, 2n, 27, 40–41, 43–44, 51n, 65, 68, 70, 72, 76, 80, 116, 119n, 134, 135n, 167, 272n, 281n, 285n, 340n, 368n, 370n Boyden, David D., 263n, 369 Brahms, Johannes, 10, 227, 322 Brecht, Bertolt, 179 Brendel, Alfred, 59 Brunetti, Gaetano, 32 Brussels, 74 Bryson, Norman, 216n Buen Retiro, 34 Bülow, Hans von, 28, 39, 61, 85, 123n, 150, 158, 176, 226, 236, 245n, 265, 284, 368 Burney, Charles, 31, 48, 52, 54, 76 Burnham, Scott, 6 Cabanilles, Juan Bautista, 121n Cadence see syntax Cadenza, 280–281, 290 Cádiz, 111 Caldwell, John, 367n Cappella Giulia, 8 Carestini, Giovanni, 99 Carreira, Xoán M., 66, 108 Carreras, Juan José, 65, 66

392

Index Casella, Alfredo, 63, 64, 80, 123n, 138 Casellas, Jaime, 247 Celestini, Federico, 316n Cervantes, Miguel de, 111–112 Chaconne, 360 Chambonnières, Jacques Champion, Sieur de, 29n Chambure, Alain de, 18, 134, 210, 321, 344n, 372n Charles III, King of Spain, 111 Chase, Gilbert, 30 Choi, Seunghyun, 271–272 Chopin, Frederic, 4, 280, 324 Choreography see dance Chronology, 3–4, 7, 27, 43–45, 279, 318, 342, 378–379 Chua, Daniel K. L., 51n Clark, Jane, 21, 21n, 26, 31n, 32, 63, 68, 80, 109, 110, 111n, 119n, 121–122, 139n, 253, 268n, 306, 358 Classical see style Clementi, Muzio, 38, 50, 62, 199, 217n, 221, 235n Closure see syntax Cluster chords see harmony Cole, Maggie, 367n Colles, Henry, 86, 86n, 191 Comic opera, 96, 103, 134, 178, 222, 245, 281n Commedia dell’arte, 286 Concerto, 85, 123n, 132, 141, 199–200, 289 Cone, Edward T., 286 Continuo practice, 236, 238, 248 Cook, Nicholas, 171n Copland, Aaron, 84 Corelli, Arcangelo, 54, 55, 62, 80, 93, 132, 133, 171n, 253 Counterpoint, 15–18, 93–94, 96–97, 98, 140, 230–236, 293–294, 302, 303, 319, 348 Opening imitation, 150, 180, 232, 241, 294, 324, 328, 334 Couperin, François, 5, 29n, 62, 63, 301 Crescembeni, Giovanni, 30 Cristofori, Bartolomeo, 45, 46 Crocker, Richard L., 368 Crotch, William, 249 Czerny, Carl, 39, 42, 61, 245, 248 Dahlhaus, Carl, 97 Dale, Kathleen, 40n, 45, 58n, 157, 191, 285n, 321 Dance, 10–11, 83–85, 177, 181, 198, 285–287, 313, 335, 342, 358, 371 for Iberian forms see folk and popular music Allemande, 92n Courante, 93n Gigue, 111, 123n Minuet, 83, 84, 85–86, 87–88, 252n, 370, 371 Davies, Siobhan, 54, 215 Debussy, Claude, 5, 98, 108, 245, 322

393

Degrada, Francesco, 51n, 72, 79, 98, 183, 236, 236n, 238, 340 Deleuze, Gilles, 215 Dent, Edward, 52–53, 61, 217, 268n Derr, Elwood, 171 Derrida, Jacques, 216 ‘Der unreine Satz’, 40, 221–223, 247–250 ‘Disdain’, 18–19, 22, 22n, 29, 86, 94, 182, 191, 219, 220, 225, 232, 275, 293, 321, 327, 376 Dissonance see harmony Docker, John, 82, 322 Doderer, Gerhard, 69 Dodgson, Stephen, 220n Donington, Robert, 270 Downs, Philip, 76 Dresden, 32 Dreyfus, Laurence, 97–98, 325n Duran, Josep, 247–248 Durante, Francesco, 54, 181, 247 Durón, Sebastián, 66n Dussek, Jan Ladislav, 50 Edwards, Donna, 95, 213n Einstein, Albert, 49 El´ıas, José, 121, 133 Ending see syntax/closure Escorial, 31, 34 Etzion, Judith, 31 Fadini, Emilia, 27, 28, 45, 64, 121, 186–187, 195n, 257, 258, 261, 263, 263n, 264, 268, 270, 272, 307, 307n Falla, Manuel de, 68, 107, 108, 262n Fantasia, 156–157, 199 Farinelli (Carlo Broschi), 30, 31, 34, 48, 66, 70, 99 Farnese, Isabel, Queen of Spain (wife of Felipe V), 30, 34n Fauré, Gabriel, 59 Felipe V, King of Spain, 33, 34, 81n Ferguson, Howard, 42, 192, 257, 366n Fernández Talaya, Teresa, 73 Fernando VI, King of Spain, 30, 33, 34n, 36, 44n, 46, 69, 111 Flamenco see folk and popular music Florence, 45 Folk and popular music, 11, 12–13, 15, 33, 78, 80–81, 85, 106, 107–108, 109–110, 112, 122n, 134–136, 177, 181, 216, 223, 244, 288, 300, 301, 302–303, 310, 316, 319, 326, 344, 345, 356, 357, 359, 373, 378 Flamenco, 11, 22, 24, 107, 108, 109, 110–122, 135, 140, 141, 187, 216, 262, 268, 361 Iberian elements and influence, 5, 11, 21, 67–68, 80, 107n, 107–122, 140–144, 198, 200, 224, 253, 254, 262, 306, 308, 310, 332, 348, 356, 358, 361

394

Index

Folk and popular music (cont.) Italian elements and influence, 63n, 71, 110–111, 111n, 134–135, 136, 140n, 146n, 145–166, 181, 262, 342 sty le and danc e ty pe s Bien parado, 141 Bolero, 110, 363n Buler´ıa, 110 Cante jondo, 22, 114, 121, 142, 268, 310n, 332 Fandango, 110, 123n, 142 Malagueña, 24n Peteneras, 119n Saeta, 110, 268, 272, 363 Salidas, 22 Seguidilla, 24, 110, 122 Siguiriya, 95 Tango, 63, 109 Form, 7, 14–15, 166, 201, 207, 308, 320–325, 340–355, 376 Accelerated second half, 84, 342 Progressive, 15, 344–346, 347–355 Retention of material at original pitch, 283n, 342–343, 355 Freeman, Daniel E., 97n, 294 Frescobaldi, Girolamo, 54, 233 Froberger, Johann Jakob, 29n Fuller, David, 80, 266 Galant see style Galuppi, Baldassare, 86, 87, 177–178, 178, 182, 237 Gasparini, Francesco, 55, 236 Geminiani, Francesco, 171n Genre, 78, 85–86, 94, 212, 293, 294, 334, 376 Gerhard, Roberto, 67n Gerstenberg, Walter, 26, 29, 85, 308, 320n Gesualdo, Carlo, 2 Gigli, Girolamo, 72 Gilbert, Kenneth, 27, 44, 185, 186–187, 192, 204, 205, 208, 256n, 258, 259, 261, 263, 264, 268, 270, 272, 305, 307, 333n, 337 Gillespie, John, 36n Giustini, Lodovico, 46, 71, 86, 87, 237–238, 250, 370 Godowsky, Leopold, 284n Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 100 Granada, 108 Granados, Enrique, 118, 120n Gray, Cecil, 2n, 36n, 60–61, 253, 359 ‘Great curves’ see syntax Greco, Gaetano, 54 Grimaldi, Nicolo, 45 Grout, Donald Jay, 81 Guitar, 42, 62, 81, 112n, 121, 238, 254, 297, 319, 345, 347, 361 Gusmão, Alexandro de, 73

Haas, Arthur, 214n Hammond, Frederick, 47, 107n, 198, 285n, 294n, 306, 368, 368n Hand-crossing, 56n, 170, 182, 248, 284–285, 286–289, 294, 335 Handel, George Frederick, 35, 58, 61, 65, 71, 93, 93n, 134, 147–148, 149, 171, 217, 321 Hanta¨ı, Pierre, 60n Harmony, 21, 59, 114–119, 129, 142–144, 147, 163, 167, 199n, 206–207, 214, 217–220, 236–247, 252, 282, 290–291, 309–310, 317, 340–341, 343, 366 Cluster chords, 236–238, 300, 313–315, 339 Dissonance, 98, 100, 112, 114, 128, 213, 220, 229, 230, 236–245, 307, 310 Modal opposition, 341, 352 Phrygian, 21, 116–118, 142, 233, 313n, 357 Terzverwandschaft, 340–341 Hatten, Robert, 139 Hauer, George, 51, 97 Hautus, Loek, 76, 179, 219, 230, 312 Haydn, Joseph, 19, 30, 33, 36, 42, 46, 50, 57, 75, 77, 81, 168, 179, 190, 199, 210n, 217, 235, 249, 256n, 308n, 313n, 316n, 324, 337, 340, 374 Headington, Christopher, 252n Heimes, Klaus, 42n, 72n, 114 Heteroglossia, 82, 139, 380 Heuschneider, Karin, 212, 312 Horowitz, Vladimir, 176, 227, 333 Hotz, Pierre du, 74 Howat, Roy, 43n, 321 Huescar, Duke of, 15, 74n, 73–75, 182, 247 Hughes, Rosemary, 308n Hummel, Johann Nepomuk, 50 Iberian elements and influence see folk and popular music Ife, Barry, 34n, 55n, 198 Imitation see counterpoint Improvisation, 40–41, 156, 198, 213, 276, 277, 290, 292, 334, 347, 375, 377 Invention, 15, 92, 105, 189, 282 Irritation, 40, 170, 221, 252, 285, 325 Isabel, Queen of Spain see Farnese, Isabel Italian elements and influence see folk and popular music Jackendoff, Ray, 10n James, Burnett, 68 James III, the Old Pretender, 69 Jansen, Therese, 42 Jazz, 193, 194, 301, 335 Jeppesen, Knud, 317 João V, King of Portugal, 46, 53, 65, 72, 72n, 73, 75, 85

Index Johnson, John, 224 Jones, J. Barrie, 118, 123, 262n Joseph II, Emperor, 56 Juder´ıas, Julián, 31 Kafka, Franz, 35 Kastner, Macario Santiago, ix, 59n, 67, 68, 80, 177, 292, 371n Keene, Benjamin, 112 Keller, Hans, 94, 177 Keller, Hermann, 42, 49, 76, 129n, 250n Keyboard realism, 220, 292–297 Kirby, Frank Eugene, 76 Kirkendale, Warren, 148n Kirkpatrick, Ralph, viii, 4, 26–27, 28, 32, 34, 35, 43–44, 47–48, 55, 60, 62, 64, 65, 72n, 78, 80, 81, 90n, 91, 99, 112, 122, 158, 159, 167, 183, 193–194, 219–220, 227, 246, 248, 252, 256n, 257, 268n, 279, 285, 286, 310n, 319, 325, 342, 347–348, 367, 368, 369, 370, 373 Koch, Heinrich, 124, 128, 129 Kramer, Jonathan D., 197 Kramer, Lawrence, 85, 216n Landon, H. C. Robbins, 57n Landowska, Wanda, 28, 121, 122, 270, 270n, 355n Lang, Paul Henry, 28–29, 35, 59, 98, 284n L’Augier, Alexander Ludwig, 56 Leahu, Alexandru, 24n Leaps, 129, 203, 284, 285, 286–289, 294–295, 311, 358 Learned style see style Leo, Leonardo, 117, 116–117 Levy, Janet M., 43n, 230–231, 323n Libby, Dennis, 59 Libro di tocate, Lisbon see sources Ligeti, György, 209 Linear intervallic pattern see sequence Lipatti, Dinu, 316n Lisbon, 31, 49, 56, 69, 73, 109 Liszt, Franz, 297 Literes, Antonio de, 66n Livermore, Ann, 99, 303 London, 31, 76, 280 Longo, Alessandro, 24, 26, 27, 28, 53, 61, 63–64, 85, 176, 193, 226, 229, 265, 268, 368 Lorca, Federico Garc´ıa, 108 Luciani, Sebastiano, 39n, 75, 285 Lynch, John, 74n Lyotard, Jean-François, 215 Lyrical breakthrough, 92, 254, 358–367 Lyrical voice, 11, 15, 99, 253, 355, 356, 357, 359, 360 MacGregor, Joanna, 316n Madrid, 30, 31, 32, 46, 56, 66, 73, 99, 109, 111, 257

395

Mahler, Gustav, 10, 106 Mainwaring, John, 35, 75 Malipiero, Gian Francesco, 5, 150 Mancini, Francesco, 340 Mann, Thomas, 63 Mannerism, 8, 219, 340 Marcello, Benedetto, 54, 85, 181, 182, 253n, 276n, 286, 370 Mar´ıa Bárbara de Bragança, Queen of Spain, 2, 4, 30, 32, 32n, 34n, 36, 40, 42, 46n, 48, 56, 69, 72n, 73, 112, 313, 363 Maria Casimira, Queen of Poland, 30 Marshall, Robert, 77 Mart´ınez de la Roca, Joaqu´ın, 247 Marx-Weber, Magda, 86 ‘Materiality’, 6–7, 38, 280, 285, 306, 307, 379, 380 McCredie, Andrew, 280 McLauchlan, Annabel, 72, 340 McVeigh, Simon, 249 Medici, Prince Ferdinando de’, 45 Mellers, Wilfred, 10, 52, 75, 138, 139, 344, 347, 355, 357 Mendelssohn, Felix, 10, 150 Mertens, Wim, 215–216 Messiaen, Olivier, 74 Metastasio, Pietro, 56 Meyer, Leonard B., 55, 107, 144, 210n Michelangeli, Arturo Benedetti, 105, 176, 319 Minimalism, 158, 215–216 Minuet see dance Missing bars and bass notes see syntax Mitchell, Timothy, 108, 110, 111–112, 216 Modality see harmony ‘Modest’ sonatas, 44–45, 104–107, 183, 191, 192 Mortensen, Lars-Ulrik, 238, 248 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 4, 18, 35, 42, 56–57, 75, 95, 96, 104, 126, 134–135, 146, 199, 217n, 235, 280, 281, 281n, 360 Murcia, Santiago de, 81 Naples, 54–67, 68, 117, 247 Narrative, 10, 139 Nationalism, 5, 33, 57–68 Nettl, Bruno, 368n Newton, Richard, 61n Opening see syntax Opera buffa see comic opera Organology, 4, 45–49, 73, 209n, 237 Ornamentation, 6, 127, 146n, 158, 204, 205, 208, 232, 256–263, 265, 268, 307, 348–355 Paganini, Niccolò, 280, 281 Pagano, Roberto, 32, 35–36, 44n, 46, 47n, 69, 72n, 75, 112, 141, 248n, 252–253, 276, 296–297

396

Index

Pairs, 5, 44, 48, 144, 252, 275, 294, 367–375 Palermo, 69 Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da, 317 Pannain, Guido, 366 Panorama tradition, 36–38, 40, 52, 63, 78–79, 123–124, 140, 176, 363, 376 Paradies, Domenico, 177 Parakilas, James, 67n Parallel intervals see voice leading Pardo, 34 Parma collection see sources Pascual, Beryl Kenyon de, 46n, 73 Pasquini, Bernardo, 55, 317, 318, 320 Pastorale, 63, 71, 83, 86–87, 92, 134, 135n, 136–138, 260, 316 Pedagogy, 32, 40, 41–43, 76, 217, 220, 277, 292, 293, 335 ´ Pedrero-Encabo, Agueda, 54–67, 68, 121n Pennington, Neil D., 81n Perahia, Murray, 319 Performance, 6, 10, 17, 53, 59, 81, 95, 100, 105, 106, 110, 111, 121–122, 128n, 132, 136, 141, 146, 146n, 157–158, 168, 174–177, 206, 221, 223, 237–238, 252, 255, 256, 258, 259, 260–263, 264–265, 266, 281, 284, 285–286, 299–300, 304, 307, 315–316, 318–319, 335, 367, 368, 369, 374 Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista, 54 Pestelli, Giorgio, 18, 27, 29, 37, 40, 40n, 51, 56–57, 58n, 62, 64, 70–71, 71n, 80, 83, 98, 105–106, 122n, 123, 133, 134, 134n, 139n, 141, 153–154, 155n, 165, 178n, 181n, 191, 198–199, 219, 224n, 233, 236, 236n, 252, 266n, 277, 281n, 295n, 303, 310, 326, 329, 330n, 362, 375 Petrarch, Francesco, 37 Physicality see virtuosity Picturesque, 249 Pilar, Mar´ıa del, 73 Plà, Juan Baptista, 73 Plaistow, Stephen, 36, 299 Platti, Giovanni Benedetto, 151, 151–152, 177, 182 Pletnev, Mikhail, 120n, 121, 122, 158–159, 162, 176, 251, 265, 299, 318, 319, 367 Ployer, Barbara, 42 Pogorelich, Ivo, 315, 316n Pont, Graham, 71 Popular music see folk and popular music Porpora, Nicola, 56 Portuguese see folk and popular music/Iberian elements and influence Powell, Linton, 112n, 120, 133, 235n Pressing, Jeff, 166n Price, Uvedale, 249 Puyana, Rafael, 80, 95, 110–111, 121, 123n, 136, 253, 262n, 310n, 363n

Quantz, Johann Joachim, 99 Queffélec, Anne, 24, 176 Radcliffe, Philip, 210n Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 58, 62, 323, 363 Rasgueado, 345 Ratner, Leonard, 79 Rattolino, Piero, 209–210n Ravel, Maurice, 59, 245 Recitative, 199n Register see texture and sonority Regola dell’ottava, 213, 215 Repetition see syntax Réti, Rudolph, 326 Rhythm, 59, 84, 119, 145–147, 193–194, 266 Ricercare, 211–212, 294 Richards, Annette, 249n Rodr´ıguez, Vicente, 67–68, 120, 121, 121n, 152n, 154–155, 182, 334 Rome, 69, 72, 318 Roncaglia, Gino, 53, 62–63, 82 Roseingrave, Thomas, 31, 281, 300 Rosen, Charles, 6n, 41, 51n, 58, 77, 100n, 105, 182n, 199, 297–300, 360 Ross, Scott, 17, 18, 266 Rostand, Claude, 60 Rousset, Christophe, 10n, 258, 370 Rubenstein, Artur, 47 Rushton, Julian, 97n Rutini, Giovanni Marco, 369 Sachs, Barbara, 263n Sachs, Curt, 6, 11 Sachs, Harvey, 32n Salter, Lionel, 369 Salzer, Felix, 41n Sammartini, Giovanni Battista, 100n, 178n Santi, Piero, 37, 62, 218n, 316n Saramago, Jose, 53, 135 Sarri, Domenico, 286n Satie, Erik, 120 Saudade, 95 Scarlatti, Alessandro, 2, 30, 32, 35–36, 45, 51, 54, 67, 71, 134n, 177, 237, 247, 320 Scarlatti, Alexandro, 73 Scarlatti, Domenico Letter to Duke of Huescar, 15, 73–75, 247, 378 Preface to Essercizi, 73–77, 258, 281 Real-life personality, 2, 34–36, 75 wor k s Cantatas, 28, 31, 69, 98, 238; Bella rosa adorata, 86; Piangete, occhi dolenti, 183, 340 Operas and intermezzos, 34, 280; Ambleto, 34n; Berenice regina d’Egitto, 34n; La Dirindina, 72, 340;

Index Narciso (Amor d’un ombra), 280; Tolomeo et Alessandro, 30, 134 Sacred works; ‘Madrid Mass’, 31, 317n, 318; Miserere in E minor, 89; Salve regina, 31, 318; Stabat mater, 86; Serenades, 31, 69; Sinfonias, 134 Sonatas; K. 1-30 (Essercizi), x, 31, 39, 43n, 48, 64, 67, 71–72, 73–77, 85, 88, 92, 93, 168, 171, 188, 188n, 224n, 279, 284, 295, 296n, 304n, 316, 335–336, 339, 362, 370; K. 1, 335; K. 2, 171, 335; K. 3, 71n; K. 4, 92, 316; K. 6, 68; K. 7, 68, 284; K. 8, 80, 93; K. 9, 39, 71–72, 171, 315–316; K. 11, 295; K. 13, 39, 305; K. 14, 188; K. 15, 288; K. 17, 227; K. 18, 88–89; K. 19, 295, 301–302, 302, 303, 362, 362–363; K. 20, 295; K. 22, 182; K. 24, 9n, 121, 250n, 297, 298, 336; K. 25, 336; K. 26, 168, 169; K. 27, 152–155, 152–156, 250n, 318, 336, 339; K. 28, 304, 304; K. 29, 140, 284, 288, 335–336; K. 30, 60, 71n, 182–183, 235, 335, 336, 339; K. 39, 8–9, 9, 168, 187; K. 41, 63n; K. 45, 195–196, 196; K. 46, 295, 295; K. 48, 140; K. 50, 63n, 140, 140n; K. 52, 93; K. 53, 184–187, 186, 266; K. 55, 114, 115, 116; K. 56, 248–249, 249, 318, 319; K. 57, 187, 239, 239–240; K. 60, 93; K. 61, 67, 67n, 110–111, 146; K. 63, 71; K. 64, 63n, 238; K. 65, 276–277, 277–278, 282, 282–284, 285, 287, 289, 308, 317, 343; K. 67, 93; K. 69, 93, 93n, 94, 99, 224n; K. 70, 48n, 85; K. 71, 71, 369; K. 73, 371–372; K. 76, 71, 369; K. 78, 39; K. 80, 71n; K. 81, 64; K. 83, 371, 372; K. 86, 93, 99, 251; K. 87, 60, 93–95, 137; K. 88, 48n; K. 89, 64; K. 90, 64; K. 92, 80, 93; K. 96, 63n, 123, 176, 176–177, 195, 224, 254, 319; K. 98, 272; K. 99, 64, 121, 141–144, 339, 372; K. 100, 144; K. 101, 341; K. 102, 358; K. 105, 119, 193–194; K. 106, 104, 336, 374; K. 107, 114–116, 115, 119, 121; K. 111, 192–193, 336; K. 112, 287–288, 287–288, 301; K. 113, 284n; K. 114, 64, 122; K. 115, 71, 238, 310–313, 315, 316, 339; K. 116, 187; K. 118, 263; K. 119, 39, 236–237, 313–315, 314; K. 120, 64, 173, 174–175, 180, 182, 284; K. 123, 230–231, 335; K. 124, 213–214, 262; K. 125, 173n, 246; K. 126, 288–289; K. 127, 84, 373; K. 128, 231, 231, 373; K. 130, 340, 373; K. 131, 302, 303, 373; K. 132, 144, 227, 330, 339; K. 135, 341; K. 136, 71, 319; K. 139, 144, 356; K. 140, 167; K. 145, 69; K. 146, 70; K. 147, 93, 224n; K. 148, 257, 358; K. 149, 173; K. 150, 232, 239, 239, 251; K. 151, 251; K. 154, 230n; K. 158, 253; K. 162, 63n, 133, 305; K. 166, 356; K. 168, 326–328, 327; K. 170, 104, 133, 348; K. 175, 237; K. 176, 133; K. 177, 319; K. 178, 225–226, 226; K. 179, 239; K. 180, 178, 213, 273, 289, 289–290, 295, 308; K. 181, 187; K. 182, 118, 118; K. 183, 246, 299,

397 300; K. 184, 121, 178, 227, 239; K. 185, 253, 360–361; K. 187, 121n, 363; K. 188, 24, 24n, 118, 118, 246, 246–247, 300, 316; K. 193, 18–25, 19–20, 23, 38, 91, 111, 144, 197, 200, 213, 336, 341; K. 194, 181; K. 195, 181, 187–188; K. 197, 253; K. 198, 92, 239, 239; K. 199, 173; K. 202, 134–136, 138, 139, 339; K. 204b, 24; K. 206, 70n, 347–355, 349–353, 356–357, 358, 360, 373; K. 207, 343, 373; K. 208, 171, 172, 224, 360; K. 209, 307; K. 210, 305–306, 306; K. 212, 181, 227, 261, 261, 319; K. 213, 251; K. 214, 240, 342; K. 215, 181, 237n, 254, 306n, 306, 337–339, 338, 343; K. 216, 210–213, 211; K. 218, 117, 117–118; K. 221, 181, 335; K. 222, 225, 228–231, 229, 307, 339; K. 223, 245, 303, 303, 309; K. 224, 178–179, 179, 224, 232–233, 233, 326; K. 225, 121, 213; K. 228, 296; K. 232, 114n, 184; K. 234, 253, 361, 361; K. 235, 135, 316; K. 236, 134; K. 238, 80, 80–81, 262, 357; K. 240, 16n, 131n, 136; K. 242, 178, 187, 224, 273; K. 243, 242; K. 244, 200, 342; K. 246, 316, 339, 373–374; K. 247, 224, 224, 317, 373–374; K. 248, 181; K. 249, 341; K. 252, 184n; K. 253, 174, 200, 214–215; K. 254, 15–18, 16-17, 61, 100, 168, 227; K. 255, 83; K. 256, 140, 266–268, 267, 343; K. 257, 63n, 188n, 188–191, 359, 362; K. 258, 344; K. 259, 63n, 251–252; K. 260, 156–157, 165n, 197, 209, 212; K. 261, 181, 290, 344–346, 348; K. 262, 85; K. 263, 89–90, 89–92, 126, 224, 317, 347; K. 264, 181, 305; K. 265, 133, 133n; K. 268, 180–181, 305; K. 270, 138, 275, 340, 374; K. 271, 272–275, 273–274, 374; K. 274, 105, 337n, 356; K. 275, 336–337, 337, 337n, 374; K. 276, 337n; K. 277, 11–13, 11–15, 18, 24, 90, 99, 104, 119, 144, 216, 253, 254, 347, 360; K. 278, 326, 363; K. 279, 318, 359, 360; K. 282, 134n; K. 284, 84; K. 286, 105; K. 291, 105; K. 293, 183, 183–184, 316; K. 295, 342; K. 296, 39–40, 120, 253–254, 284, 368–369n; K. 297, 368–369n; K. 300, 326; K. 301, 225, 225, 343; K. 302, 343, 343; K. 305, 84–85, 91, 192n, 342; K. 306, 316; K. 308, 99–100; K. 309, 99, 100–104, 101–104; K. 311, 84; K. 313, 116, 116; K. 314, 184, 185, 236; K. 317, 39, 171, 172; K. 318, 373, 374; K. 319, 198, 200, 213, 373, 374; K. 320, 316; K. 322, 105–107, 309–310, 374n; K. 323, 192, 193, 194, 374n; K. 324, 141, 335; K. 325, 184; K. 327, 285–286, 319, 342; K. 331, 326; K. 332, 358; K. 334, 105; K. 336, 326; K. 337, 141, 316; K. 339, 181; K. 340, 357; K. 342, 105; K. 343, 251, 262, 262; K. 345, 236; K. 347, 375; K. 348, 375; K. 351, 133; K. 356, 200; K. 357, 200; K. 358, 335; K. 359, 184n, 357; K. 362, 232; K. 364, 230n; K. 365, 92, 316, 326

398

Index

Scarlatti, Domenico (cont.) K. 371, 187; K. 372, 84; K. 375, 181, 326; K. 379, 87–88, 182; K. 380, 363–367, 364; K. 381, 307; K. 382, 326; K. 384, 104, 306n, 306–307; K. 386, 140, 194–195, 262–263, 342; K. 389, 343; K. 394, 220, 223, 290–291, 291–292, 318; K. 395, 339; K. 396, 370; K. 397, 370; K. 398, 86–87, 88, 137, 348; K. 402, 39, 89, 124–127, 124–133, 218, 247, 295; K. 404, 120–121, 253; K. 405, 316; K. 406, 301; K. 407, 240–245, 260, 273, 307, 340; K. 408, 254; K. 409, 200, 201–209, 202–203, 210, 213, 214, 258; K. 410, 340, 370; K. 411, 370; K. 413, 84, 308, 316; K. 414, 134n, 335; K. 415, 224; K. 416, 144, 339; K. 417, 166n; K. 418, 326, 340; K. 419, 196; K. 422, 166n, 232, 293, 318; K. 424, 326; K. 425, 358; K. 426, 253, 254, 317, 357–358, 359; K. 427, 184, 342; K. 428, 85; K. 429, 111, 187, 341; K. 430, 319; K. 431, 255; K. 434, 140, 181, 361; K. 435, 81; K. 437, 233–235, 234–235; K. 438, 210, 369; K. 439, 63n, 262, 262, 358, 359, 360; K. 441, 318; K. 442, 306n; K. 443, 318; K. 444, 301, 301, 341; K. 446, 63n, 92, 136n, 138, 260–261, 369; K. 447, 181, 317, 318, 342; K. 449, 181, 303, 304, 316; K. 450, 63, 63n, 109, 171, 172, 258n; K. 454, 297, 298; K. 457, 159, 180, 181, 319, 341; K. 461, 259–260, 260, 307–308; K. 462, 336n, 374–375; K. 463, 16n, 374–375; K. 464, 316; K. 465, 298–299, 299, 300; K. 466, 228, 228, 357, 374–375; K. 467, 374–375; K. 468, 182, 374–375; K. 469, 210, 318, 374–375; K. 472, 343, 359, 362; K. 474, 49, 305, 328–331, 328–334, 336, 370; K. 475, 221–223, 222–223, 370; K. 476, 140–141, 181; K. 480, 301, 301; K. 481, 253; K. 482, 178; K. 484, 181n; K. 485, 200–201, 207, 214; K. 487, 49, 300–301; K. 489, 345; K. 490, x, 91, 102, 110, 237n, 238, 268–272, 269, 270, 271, 317, 361, 363–364, 372; K. 491, 110; K. 492, 39, 110, 318; K. 493, 232, 233, 258, 329; K. 494, 358; K. 495, 178, 374; K. 496, 83–84, 374; K. 497, 374n; K. 498, 335, 357, 357, 374n; K. 500, 346, 346–347; K. 501, 319; K. 502, 119; K. 503, 180, 293, 293–294; K. 511, 134n, 210; K. 513, 90, 136–139, 137, 215, 348; K. 515, 259, 259; K. 516, 368n; K. 517, 187n, 368n; K. 518, 181; K. 519, 181; K. 520, 184n, 318, 342; K. 521, 51n; K. 522, 318; K. 523, 158–163, 160–162, 180, 187, 191, 206, 265, 305, 319, 336; K. 524, 104, 336, 374; K. 525, 111, 150–152, 164, 227–228, 228, 276; K. 527, 359; K. 531, 213, 335; K. 532, 109, 163–164, 197; K. 534, 254–255; K. 535, 174, 308–309, 309; K. 536, 370; K. 537, 318, 370; K. 539, 318; K. 540, 342; K. 541, 164, 164–165,

193; K. 544, 120, 255–256; K. 545, 140, 340, 341; K. 546, 253; K. 548, 112–114, 113; K. 551, 227, 227; K. 554, 147–150, 148, 151, 181, 318, 325; Minuet in D minor (Turin), 71; Minuet in G major (Turin), 71; Sonata in A major (Lisbon), 69–70 Scarlatti, Giuseppe, 56 Schachter, Carl, 39 Schenker, Heinrich, 39, 40n, 41, 59, 220, 316n Schenkman, Walter, 318n Scherzo, 150 Schiff, András, 128n, 255–256, 333 Schmalfeldt, Janet, 39 Schoenberg, Arnold, 74 Schott, Howard, 257 Schroeter, Rebecca, 42 Schubert, Franz, 36, 50, 60, 210, 211, 296, 324, 340, 366, 368 Schumann, Robert, 168, 182n Seiffert, Max, 52, 61, 134n, 235 Seixas, Carlos, x, 31, 42n, 55, 67, 85, 109, 121n, 182, 250, 252, 253n, 285, 299n, 334, 358, 370, 371 Sequence see syntax Sessions, Roger, 192 Seville, 46n, 110, 363 Sheldon, David, 98 Sheveloff, Joel, 3n, 7, 22n, 23, 27, 31n, 39, 43n, 44n, 45, 48–49n, 60, 65, 70, 77n, 93, 94n, 107n, 167–168, 173, 173n, 184, 201, 209–210n, 214, 228–229, 237, 245n, 246n, 257n, 263, 268, 305, 336, 339, 369, 372 Shostakovich, Dmitry, 106 Siciliana, 134, 260 Siena, 63 Silbiger, Alexander, 51n, 264 Sinfield, Alan, 58 Sitwell, Sacheverell, 26, 29, 123, 134, 193, 344n Soler, Antonio, 28–31, 32, 42n, 55, 67, 114, 114n, 118, 119n, 121 Somfai, László, 57n Sonority see texture and sonority Sources, 7, 65, 146n, 172–173, 256–257, 263–275, 305–306n, 368 Autographs, absence of, 3–4, 31, 41, 256 Barcelona, 70 Cambridge, 70, 260, 262–263, 268, 270–272, 369 Lisbon, 44n, 49, 69–70, 140n, 187, 258, 262, 263, 272, 305–306n, 333, 369–370 London, 224 Madrid, 70, 119n, 369 Montserrat, 70 Münster, 88, 187, 268, 271, 306, 337n Parma, 3, 32, 44–45, 70, 70n, 119n, 144, 187, 251, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 263, 268, 271–272, 306, 307, 333n, 342, 369–370, 373, 374, 375

Index Turin, 70–72, 369 Valladolid, 70 Venice, 3, 32, 44–45, 47, 70, 70n, 144, 187, 251, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 263, 268, 271–272, 279, 306, 307, 333n, 342, 368, 369–370, 373, 374, 375 Vienna, 44n, 56, 88, 187, 224, 270, 271–272, 306, 313n, 337n, 369 Zaragoza, 70 Spacing see texture and sonority Spanish see folk and popular music/Iberian elements and influence Speed see tempo Spielfreude, 283–284, 287, 290 Staier, Andreas, 15n, 122, 135n, 176, 307, 335 ‘Star turn’ see thematicism Strauss, Richard, 95 Stravinsky, Igor, 151, 192, 236–237, 265 Style, 8, 25, 38, 49–55, 62, 120, 122, 198, 219, 264, 265, 356, 357, 359, 379–380 Baroque, 9, 14, 18, 28, 39, 50–51, 58, 79, 81, 92, 96, 139, 140, 142–144, 167, 168, 179, 180, 190, 192, 193, 198–199, 214, 224, 245, 254, 276, 282–283, 306, 318n, 320, 322, 334, 341, 344, 347, 360, 373, 377, 380 Classical, 50–51, 56–57, 79, 97, 105, 167, 179, 245, 295n, 320, 323, 377, 380 Galant, 11–15, 17, 21, 51, 76, 95–107, 117, 128–129, 163, 198, 200, 220, 227, 266–268, 308, 330, 337, 348, 355, 360 Learned/Strict, 15, 17, 76, 96, 124–128, 153–156, 161–162, 163, 179, 220, 227, 254, 266, 297, 319 ‘Mid-century’, 8, 50, 51, 100, 192, 320 Mixed, 109, 134, 136, 139–140, 167, 168, 182, 322–323 Renaissance polyphony, 51, 54, 55, 59, 317 Stile antico, 89–90, 93, 94–95, 218n Subotnik, Rose Rosengard, 41, 245 Suite, 28, 85, 320, 321, 368, 370 Sutherland, David, 45–46, 47n, 48, 72n, 281 Syntax, 38, 59, 60, 98, 142, 188, 191, 265, 336–337, 376 Cadence, 177–179, 180, 222, 229, 236, 262, 266, 292, 305, 306, 307, 318n, 318–319, 377 Closure, 71, 144, 171–172, 208, 308, 334, 339–340, 372, 376 Elision, 84, 146, 168, 169–170, 205, 325, 375 Fortspinnung, 88, 183, 184, 189, 326 ‘Great curves’, 119n, 173–175, 325, 375 Hypermetrical manipulation, 193–195, 201–208 Missing bars, 146, 158, 159, 167, 171–177, 192n, 202, 206, 265, 292 Missing bass notes, 146, 159, 305–307 Opening, 180–181, 324, 328, 334–339, 377 Periodicity, 163, 168, 182, 206

399 Repetition, 23, 71, 119–121, 145–166, 171, 181, 193, 194, 213, 226, 253, 254, 282, 301, 325, 357 Sequence, 9, 120–121, 141, 181–188, 189–190, 206, 275, 336 ‘Stampede’, 159, 165, 180–181, 200, 324, 341, 363 ‘Three-card trick’, 141, 181, 246, 300, 345 Time and temporality, 11–13, 120–121, 147, 150, 155, 164–166, 180, 184, 197, 322, 345, 377 Vamp, 23–24, 33, 60, 105, 106, 111n, 119, 120, 129, 135, 146n, 156–158, 163–164, 177, 184, 197–216, 219, 231, 238, 254, 289, 309, 326, 339, 342, 345, 357, 359

Tagliavini, Luigi, 83n Talbot, Michael, 5n, 199n, 323–324, 341, 341n Taruskin, Richard, 109n, 264–265, 315 Tausig, Carl, 39, 265, 316n Telemann, Georg Phillip, 87n Tempo, 9–10, 98, 104, 177, 194, 195, 250–256, 316, 359, 376, 377 Andantes, 251–256, 359–360 Texture and sonority, 297, 377 ‘Essercizi cadence’, 93, 141, 282, 316 Missing bass notes see syntax Octaves, 301–304, 319 Open fifth, 91, 300, 317 Open sonorities, 86, 158, 300–304, 313 Opposition between hands, 242, 260, 307 Spacing and register, 14, 106, 226n, 243, 253, 260, 274, 281, 282, 285, 286, 289, 294–296, 308–315, 358 Tenor suspension, 317–318 Two-part texture, 15, 98, 265, 295, 315 Unison close, 71, 171–172, 304, 315, 318–319 Thematicism, 19–20, 201, 311, 312, 324, 325–334 Dialect and idiolect, 355–358, 364 ‘Star turn’, 105, 313n, 326–328, 371 Thompson, David, 34n, 43n, 136 Time see syntax Toccata, 8, 51, 64, 85, 114, 134, 136, 140, 141, 153–156, 157n, 184, 187, 195, 198, 273, 276, 282, 290, 294, 311, 316, 334, 362 Toledo, 247 Tommasini, Vincenzo, 332n Tomsic, Dubravka, 316n Tonadilla, 66 Topic, 7, 34, 78–95, 109, 123–144, 147, 215, 262, 296, 299, 307, 323, 325, 339, 341, 356, 358, 363–367, 376, 377 Dotted style, 140, 266–268 Fanfare/horn call, 86, 123, 181, 214, 266, 308, 311, 332, 335, 357, 363–367 Learned/strict see style Pastoral see pastorale ´ Torrente, Alvaro José, 66n

400 Torres, Joseph de, 66n Tovey, Donald Francis, 217n, 235n Trapido, Barbara, 249–250 Treitler, Leo, 322 Trend, John, 60, 120n, 341 Troy, Charles, 177, 286n Tyson, Alan, 4 Valabrega, Cesare, 26, 58, 62, 79n, 193, 235, 297 Valencia, 247 Valenti, Fernando, 335 Valls, Francisco, 111, 133 Vamp see syntax Van der Meer, John Henry, 48n, 47–49, 68, 70, 72n Van Sant, Ann Jessie, 100n Variations, 146, 311–312, 321 Velasco, Domingo Antonio de, 32 Venice, 31, 63, 136, 281 Venice collection see sources Verdi, Giuseppe, 7, 60 Verfremdung, 140, 179–180, 182, 184, 188, 221, 264, 303, 326 Vienna, 56 Villanella, 266n Villanis, Luigi, 2n, 63, 248 Vinay, Gianfranco, 63, 63n, 80, 329, 332n Violinismo, 141, 184, 214, 286, 289 Virtuosity, 10, 41, 54, 248–249, 276–291, 292, 297, 335–336, 376

Index Vittoria, Tomas Luis de, 95 Vivaldi, Antonio, 54, 132, 133, 157, 184, 198, 199, 214, 289, 323, 341n Vlad, Roman, 63, 77n, 236 Voice leading, 100, 114, 129, 165, 193, 195, 217–220, 223–230, 248, 291, 294–295, 377 Missing notes,, 154, 227–228, 248, 291 Parallel intervals, 14, 16, 18, 20, 86, 91, 105, 138, 154, 166, 178, 187, 189, 193, 219, 223–227, 229, 230, 230n, 232, 301–303, 348, 354, 373 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de, 97 Weber, William, 191n, 218n Webern, Anton von, 368 Webster, James, 50, 256n Weissenberg, Alexis, 121 Weller, Philip, 94 Wheelock, Gretchen, 76 White, Hayden, 379 Williams, Peter, 92n, 154n, 296n, 344n Wolters, Klaus, 76 Yearsley, David, 56n Zacharias, Christian, 24, 95, 106–107, 176, 299, 333 Zappa, Frank, 62 Zelenka, Jan Dismas, 5n, 32 Zipoli, Domenico, 87, 88, 266n Zuber, Barbara, 21, 22, 24, 76, 111–112

The Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico

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