Domenico Scarlatti, Escape Artist: Sightings of His ‘Mixed Style’ towards the End of the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

A permanent move at the age of 34, from Italy into the private services of Princess María Bárbara in Portugal, later in Spain, allowed Domenico Scarlatti to escape fame and stylistic classification. In the absence of a convincing category for Scarlatti's music – post‐Baroque? pre‐Classical? galant? transitional? – the Scarlatti scholar W. Dean Sutcliffe resorts to the apt expression ‘mixed style’. But Sutcliffe acknowledges that ‘much about the Scarlatti sonatas demands to be considered in the light of the Classical style’, and so do I. In particular, the specific type of two‐part form that the composer employs in most of his 555 extant keyboard sonatas was hardly unique on the continent during his lifetime, and that form continued to appear long after it had yielded to what we today call ‘the Classical sonata’. The composer's musical ‘escape mechanisms’ – surprising delays of expected outcomes by way of evaded cadences and ‘one‐more‐time’ repetitions – can be ‘sighted’ in much repertoire towards the end of the eighteenth century, especially in the music of Mozart. Just the same, no amount of comparison of Scarlatti's music with that of later composers can diminish his ‘Spanish’ flamboyance, his penchant for the juxtaposition of wildly different ideas within a single movement – in short, his unparalleled, signature contributions to keyboard music.