Summary: We mark the death of the composer Domenico Scarlatti 261 years ago today, on July 23, 1757 in the Spanish capital of Madrid.<br> The year 1685 was something of an annus mirabilis – a “miraculous year” – in the history of Western music as it saw the births of three of the greatest composers ever to grace our planet. On February 23, 1685, George Frederick Handel was born in the central German city of Halle. Thirty-six days later, on March 31, Johann Sebastian Bach was born some 60 miles away, in the central German city of Eisenach. Just under seven months after that, on October 26, Domenico Scarlatti was born in the Italian city of Naples. What a year!<br> Some would take me to task for lumping Scarlatti together with Handel and Bach. (And in truth, we must be careful about lumping anyone together with Sebastian Bach, Handel included.) But having said that, we are not going to diminish one composer’s greatness by cudgeling him with that of another, because any way we spell it, Domenico Scarlatti was, bless him, a great composer.<br> We would further observe that musically, Scarlatti did something that neither Bach nor Handel did: neither Bach (who died in 1750) nor Handel (who died in 1759) transcended the musical syntax of the “High (or late) Baroque”, irksome though it might be to employ such a period designation. Whatever; Scarlatti – who died in 1757 – did indeed transcend stylistically the High Baroque, and his music is a brilliant example of a new, more populist compositional style that emerged in his hometown of Naples in the 1720s and 1730s, a style that would eventually come to be known as the “Classical style.”<br> Maestro Scarlatti came by his musical bona fides honestly. He was the sixth of ten children born to the composer and teacher Pietro Alessandro Gaspare Scarlatti (1660-1725). The elder Scarlatti is considered to be the padrino – the godfather – of Neapolitan (meaning Naples-based) opera. Paul Henry Lang, writing in his magisterial Music in Western Civilization sums up Alessandro Scarlatti’s importance this way:<br> “The great personality who virtually made Naples the Mecca of musicians was Alessandro Scarlatti. He composed more than 100 operas; the number of his oratorios is approximately 150, while the cantatas (600) and various types of church music, together with his keyboard music, complete a truly impressive oeuvre. This astounding productivity does not mean superficiality or patchwork, for his compositions show a mastery of workmanship and an abundance of original musical ideas. In his dramatic works he professed an unconditional worship of the beauty of melody [and] a complete abandonment to the sensuous charm of the singing voice. Modern Italian opera begins with [Alessandro] Scarlatti. Handel, who met him in 1708, remained a devoted admirer of the Neapolitan master throughout his life, studying and imitating his works with loving care.”<br> But Handel was not Alessandro Scarlatti’s greatest disciple. That would, of course, be Alessandro’s son Domenico. It wasn’t that Alessandro took Domenico’s music education into his own hands in the manner that Leopold Mozart did with his son Wolfgang 75 years later (while Alessandro did oversee Domenico’s instruction, it was a music education provided principally by others). No, Alessandro’s greatest gift to his son was raising him in the immersive, theatrical musical environment of a successful opera composer. Young Domenico’s music education was of the most practical sort: music was the family business and he was expected to contribute. As he got older he performed all sorts of jobs for his father: he arranged and copied music; he tuned instruments; he accompanied singers at rehearsals; he assisted his father in whatever was necessary during productions, acted as a gopher; we can imagine him making the coffee, corking the wine; if he could have, he’d likely have shaken the martinis. Writes Ralph Kirkpatrick in his biography of Domenico Scarl...
