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 D Major (K.491) is flanked by two others
in the same key, the K. 490 and 492, that Scarlatti
almost certainly wrote in the same brief time span. All
were preserved, along with 27 other sonatas, in the
12th Venice volume of the composer's works, dated 1756.
While they may not have been written that year, they
likely date to not more than a year or two earlier. The
Sonata is marked Allegro and has a slightly unusual
structure for a Scarlatti sonata: the composer presents
his main thematic wares, pauses, then moves onto the
secondary material, almost as if it is a wholly new
thematic group or a development section. Of course, as
was his pattern, Scarlatti presents the expository
material a second time before moving on to the actual
development section, which is also given twice. The
Sonata opens with an ebullient theme that springs from
a three-note morsel and goes on to spawn rich
contrapuntal activity. The second half of the
exposition expands on the material from the opening and
already goes in new directions. In the development
section the themes are transformed only slightly, while
maintaining their chipper, colorful character.
Source: Wikipedia
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domenico_Scarlatti).
Although originally composed for Solo Keyboard
(Harpsichord), I created this Transcription of the
Sonata in D Major (K.491) for String Quartet (2
Violins, Viola & Cello).
SHEET MUSIC