Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757)
- Messa (Re maggiore) à quattro Voci detta 'Misa de Arantzazu' (1754)
Performers: Capilla Pеnаflorida; Lаchrimae Consort; Philippe Le Cοrf (conductor)
Further info: Scarlatti - Musica sacra
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Italian composer and harpsichordist, sixth child of Alessandro Scarlatti
(1660-1725) and Antonia Anzaloni (1658-1725). Details about his youth
and education from contemporary biographers are obscure. In 1700,
Alessandro arranged for Domenico to be specially appointed as
'clavicembalista di camera', in addition to the more regular post of
organist and composer of the Cappella Reale in Naples, indicating
perhaps that Domenico’s flair for the harpsichord was already evident.
In 1705, Alessandro had Domenico join him in Rome and then sent him to
Venice, but nothing is documented about the son’s activities in either
place. From Rome comes the famous, if unsupported, story about the
keyboard competition between Domenico and George Frideric Handel set up
by Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, in which it is said that Domenico
recognized Handel’s primacy on the organ but that the harpsichord
competition ended in a tie. The two admired each other throughout their
careers. Perhaps as early as 1708, he served the exiled Queen Maria
Casimira of Poland in Rome as maestro di cappella, and then he succeeded
to the same post at the prestigious Cappella Giulia at St. Peter’s
after the death of Tommaso Baj on 22 December 1714. He composed his most
significant sacred work, including a 10-voice Stabat Mater, at this
time. His operas were occasionally staged at the Teatro Capranica, along
with those of his father. Sometime before 1719, through connections
with the Portuguese ambassador in Rome, he was appointed 'mestre de
capela' to King João V of Portugal, and he arrived in Lisbon on 29
November 1719, charged with tutoring the king’s brother Don Antonio. A
more important pupil, however, was the talented Princess Maria Barbara.
Scarlatti composed sonatas (essercizi) for her and for Don Antonio; it
is possible that these represent the first batch of about 550 that he
would compose for harpsichord solo.
On 19 January 1729, Maria Barbara married Fernando (1713-1759), heir to
the throne in Spain, and soon Scarlatti followed his royal student, by
her father’s command, to the Spanish court. He was certainly in Rome in
January 1727, when he was ill and granted leave by the Portuguese king
for his recovery. His music was performed for the princess’s betrothal
ceremony on 11 January 1728 in Lisbon, but Scarlatti’s presence at the
occasion is not confirmed. On 15 May that year, he married Maria
Catalina Gentili in Rome. They had six children before she died on 6 May
1739. Scarlatti then married Anastasia Ximenes of Cádiz, who bore him
four children. At the Spanish court, free from the obligations of a
maestro di cappella, he could enjoy a fairly quiet and leisurely life of
teaching and performing for and with the royal family, free to compose
his harpsichord sonatas. When Fernando acceded to the Spanish throne in
1746, their resident singer Farinelli convinced them to establish a
court opera, but Scarlatti was not asked to compose for it and left
instead during the 1750s to copy systematically his collected sonatas.
The manuscripts indicate that he composed them to the very last days of
his life. As a composer, he composed 13 operas of his own from 1703 to
1718, 23 other dramatic works extending to 1728, about 70 chamber
cantatas, 3 masses, 14 Latin motets, and 17 sinfonie, but his modern
reputation rests on the roughly 550 harpsichord sonatas, mostly composed
later in life in the service of the royal courts of Portugal and Spain.
Domenico’s first widely circulated publication, the 30 Essercizi of
1737, impressed keyboard players all over the continent with its
exploitation of virtuoso keyboard effects such as crossed hands and
rapidly repeated tones. His brother Pietro Filippo Scarlatti (1679-1750)
was also a composer mainly active in Naples.
.jpg "François-Hubert Drouais - The Comte and Chevalier de Choiseul as Savoyards (c.1758)")
