Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti (1685 – 1757) was an
Italian composer who spent much of his life in the
service of the Portuguese and Spanish royal families.
Today he is known mainly for his 555 keyboard sonatas.
He is classified primarily as a Baroque composer
chronologically, although his music was influential in
the development of the Classical style and he was one
of the few Baroque composers to transition into the
classical period. He was born in 1685, the same year
as Johann Sebastian Bach ...(+)
Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti (1685 – 1757) was an
Italian composer who spent much of his life in the
service of the Portuguese and Spanish royal families.
Today he is known mainly for his 555 keyboard sonatas.
He is classified primarily as a Baroque composer
chronologically, although his music was influential in
the development of the Classical style and he was one
of the few Baroque composers to transition into the
classical period. He was born in 1685, the same year
as Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric
Handel.
Probably one of the most outrageously individual
compositional outputs of the Baroque era is to be found
in the keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti. His
sonatas are perhaps the most successful works to
migrate from the harpsichord to the modern grand piano.
Their transparent texture of simple two- and three-part
keyboard writing has one foot in the imitative
counterpoint of the Baroque while anticipating the
Classical era of Haydn and Mozart in their clarity of
phrase structure and harmonic simplicity. Especially
appealing to modern performers is their pungently
flavourful evocations of the popular folk music of
Spain, not to mention the flurries of repeated notes,
octaves and register-spanning arpeggios that make them
such effective vehicles for pianistic display.
The Scarlatti sonatas are typically in binary form,
with a first half that ends in the dominant and a
second half that works its way back from the dominant
to the home tonality. They are now referenced by means
of the Kirkpatrick (K) numbers assigned to them by
Ralph Kirkpatrick in 1953, replacing the less
chronologically precise Longo (L) numbers of Alessandro
Longo’s first complete edition of 1906.
Scarlatti’s early career was based in Naples, and his
introverted Sonata in B minor K 197 displays the
recurring streaks of pathos that Neapolitan music
revels in. The melodic line whimpers with plaintive
little appoggiaturas as harmonic tension accumulates
from the use of stubbornly immovable pedal points in
the bass.
The Sonata in G major K 455, by contrast, is
unabashedly dancelike and popular in tone, filled with
the rhythmic click and snap of the castanets. Guitar
idioms are heard in the repeated notes that dominate
the last section of each half, making this piece an
impressive showpiece of digital dexterity for the
performer. In his Scarlatti liner notes, Yevgeny Sudbin
lays stress on the spontaneous, improvisatory quality
of these sonatas. “It is very plausible that for each
of the notated sonatas,” he writes, “there were 50
or so other versions.” His performance this afternoon
may well pay tribute to these “plausible other
versions.” As to where this might occur, the smart
money is on the repeats.
Source: Wikipedia
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domenico_Scarlatti).
Although originally composed for Solo Keyboard
(Harpsichord), I created this Transcription of the
Sonata in G Major (K.455) for Piano.
SHEET MUSIC