The Solace of Noble Minds
The Strange
Employment of Domenico Scarlatti
Naples in 1685 was a very loud place.
Thousands of inhabitants crammed into a tight
space, dwellings piled high atop each other,
narrow alleys filled with the cries of street
vendors, children, men rushing back and forth--a
cauldron of human activity. Into this noisy
environment was born one Domenico Scarlatti.
We know
very little about his life. He may have been
home schooled. His father, Alessandro, just
happened to be one of the most celebrated
opera composers in Italy, and he appears to
have taken more than a passing interest in his
son's development. One document that survives
records an attempt when Domenico was in his
thirties to achieve independence from his
father. In a place and time where no
coming-of-age was recognized, the elder
Scarlatti was able to make his children jump
when he wanted to. He once recalled another of
his sons from profitable employment in a
distant city to join him in Rome.
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| If Scarlatti was not given
all his education at home, his schooling might
have been under the provenance of the
conservatory at Naples, a small building in
which one observer reported several
harpsichord players in one room practicing at
once, no two playing the same piece. The brass
players had to inhabit the stairwell, the
winds another room, the singers an upper
story--privacy was not a option. Scarlatti was
one of 10 children, and the first born into
the family after they moved to Naples.
Scarlatti himself relocated to Rome and to
Venice to seek employment. Possible trips to
Portugal and England have not been backed by
hard evidence. |
He spent most of his life in the
service of royalty. Being a musician--even a musical
genius--then as now did not mean an easy living. Two
of Scarlatti's great contemporaries illustrated
different solutions to the problem, and their
respective perils. George Frederic Handel, a German
in the service of the King of Hanover, left for
England to make his fortune in Italian opera. The
strategy worked until the public got tired of
Italian Opera. Handel then pinned his hopes on
Oratorio, but his financial status was frequently
precarious. Another German, Johann Sebastian Bach,
spent much of his life in service to the church. An
institution that was often slow to pay salaries and
that often paid them in foodstuffs, Bach was once
famously to complain that his pocketbook was getting
unfortunately small because few parishioners were
dying and he depended on the extra remuneration from
the funerals. Both men also spent some time in
the employ of persons of the nobility, whose
members' patronage was largely responsible for a
musician's livelihood in the days when public
concerts were a rare thing.
Scarlatti found an interesting
solution indeed. He had written operas, he had
written for the church, he was the typically Baroque
jack-of-all-trades. But he was to spend the rest of
his life immersed in the most neglected and least
profitable of musical enterprises at that time:
keyboard works. He became a music teacher with only
one pupil that we know of: the princess Maria
Barbara, soon to become the Queen of Spain.
What his duties at the court may
have included we don't know. Aside from contemporary
reports that he had a gambling problem, one
friendly letter and the dedicatory preface to the
single volume he published in life, we know nothing
of his personality, what he thought of his
situation, or what was expected of him. What we do
have are over 500 harpsichord sonatas of widely
varying character, unusual originality, impossible
technical demands, and thoroughly Spanish
flavor.
Scarlatti soon had to relocate
to Madrid, though the King and Queen spent only a
scant portion of the year there as they traveled to
other palaces with clocklike regularity. His
activity may have been largely restricted to the
palace; in any case, scholars have to confront the
problem of a complete absence of manuscripts in the
composer's own hand, as well as an astonishing lack
of contemporary copies of the sonatas in Spain or of
any references among musicians of the day, and are
left to conclude that the Queen may have required a
monopoly on his talents.
We know more about one of
Scarlatti's colleagues at the Spanish court. This
was a castrati singer named Farinelli. Reputed to be
the greatest singer of his time, the man was engaged
to sing the same four pieces nightly to help the
king's depression. Scarlatti may have accompanied
him at the harpsichord on such occasions. As a
condition of his employment, Farinelli was not
allowed to offer his services outside of the palace.
It is odd that this restrictive gig did not bother
the genial singer, but his services to Scarlatti's
legacy are massive: on the death of the king, his
heir terminated Farinelli's employment, and
Farinelli took with him the only two copies in
existence of the (perhaps) complete sonatas of
Scarlatti, which have since come to light in two
cities in Italy. Until the later 20th century,
these were our only authentic sources for
Scarlatti's pieces.
| Scarlatti's
works are in some respects almost a diary:
courtly pomp figures in, as do dances of all
kinds, noble and popular. Cries of street
vendors and children's games are represented.
None of this is part of any kind of overt
storyline. Instead, Scarlatti made the
single-movement Sonata in two-part form the
vehicle for his thoughts and moods. It was a
scheme he was to employ without variation some
555 times. But within that broadly conceived
form are hundreds of very different sonatas.
Scarlatti modulates into the same keys over and
over and over again. How he gets there
is another matter.
Biographers have
speculated that Scarlatti was a fiery
personality, perhaps even manic. He may have
written his pieces under a sudden burst of
inspiration and then abandoned the
harpsichord for days. We cannot be sure. His
works are full of the noise and activity he
must have known from his Venetian youth but
thoroughly transplanted to Spain. It is the
strange fate of Spain that much of its most
characteristic music was written by
foreigners!
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The Queen was apparently
impressed with her music teacher. Before becoming
Queen she actually hired him on two separate
occasions. And Scarlatti served at the Spanish court
for over twenty years, until his death in 1757. His
Sonatas must have given her quite a challenge if she
played them. His notorious hand-crossings and
reckless leaps make for a real technical challenge
even in our own day. This is music of a virtuoso
risk-taker. But his Sonatas also explore all manner
of strange harmonic possibilities with sudden
dissonance and unpredictable changes of texture. It
was probably for this reason that an observer
referred to his pieces as "happy freaks" and their
strange modernisms may be what has kept them tucked
away in a neglected corner of the repertory for so
long.
Scarlatti himself could
certainly play them. One witness told how when
Scarlatti began to play it sounded "as if ten
thousand devils" were animating the
instrument. At Scarlatti's disposal in the
palace were several instruments, some of which had
ranges wider than that of Mozart's and Beethoven's
pianos. There was an early piano there as well;
evidently Scarlatti was so impressed with it he had
it converted to a harpsichord!
He must have had a limited
audience. The queen may have had a musical ear, but
the king did not care for music, at least until
Farinelli arrived to awaken him, as the story goes,
from one of his frequent bouts of melancholy. The
king represented the second generation of not very
mentally stable kings in Spain; both of their queens
really ruled the realm. How intrigued he might have
been by Scarlatti's "happy freaks" and strange
inventions we'll never know, but, given his
predilection for listening to the same four arias
night after night, it is more than likely that
Scarlatti's greatest inventions were only
appreciated by half his potential audience.
Scarlatti was genial when it
mattered: knowing the difficulties of a musician's
life and the plumb arrangement he had with his royal
patron, who allowed him time and circumstance to
develop his flights of genius, he took the occasion
on publishing some of his sonatas (here called
"exercises") to flatter the king in the manner of
the times. Some of it must have been genuine:
| To the
Sacred Royal Majesty of John V.... The
magnanimity of Your Majesty in works of
virtue, your generosity in others, your
knowledge of the sciences and the arts and
your munificence in rewarding them are
well-known attributes of your great
nature.... By universal acclamation you are
known as the Just: a title which embraces
all other glorious ones, since good works
serve no useful purpose unless they are acts
of justice to oneself and others....Music,
the solace of noble minds, granted me this
enviable good fortune, and made me happy in
pleasing with it the most refined taste of
Your Majesty.... |
For whatever reasons no further
publications were forthcoming despite Scarlatti's
introductory promise to make the contents of the
next volume simpler for the amateur. With
typically Baroque false modesty the composer claimed
to explore no profound depths in these pieces, only
an "ingenious jesting with art." For the rest of his
life he would follow the royal procession in its
rounds, making the palace walls ring with the sound
of his harpsichord. Oh to be a fly on the wall!
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