# chronology and dates of Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas



## science

Does anyone know of a convenient source where I can get whatever is known about the dates of Scarlatti's sonatas? I'm having a hard time finding this information online! Maybe I'm just not looking in the right places.


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## Mandryka

In W. Dean Sutcliffe's_ The Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti and Eighteenth-Century Musical Style_ (Cambridge 2009) the suggestion is that there's a dearth of information and nothing reliable can be said. Kirkpatrick thought he had a chronology and so did Kenneth Gilbert, but Sutcliffe thinks that they are both very shaky indeed.

Colin Tilney released two Scarlatti CDs which, allegedly, contain late sonatas. I'm not a real Scarlattian, and I haven't really hear any stylistic difference between these sonatas and L1-K30, though I could be missing it. Maybe Tilney was just relying on Gilbert or Kirkpatrick.

















Generally very little is known about Scarlatti.


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## Mandryka

Here's an essay by Hantai on the subject



> Some remarks on the chronology of Scarlatti's works
> In the 1950s, when the harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick produced his catalogue of Scarlatti's
> keyboard works, he decided to assign numbers 1 to 30 to the pieces printed in 1738 (the famous
> Essercizi) and thereafter to follow the order found in the Venice manuscript, one of the two key
> sources still extant today. Kirkpatrick did not claim that his classification corresponded to the
> order in which the sonatas had been composed, yet there are good grounds for thinking that this
> source does largely respect their chronology.
> Having studied the style and quality of these compositions, and above all the degree of 'maturity'
> of certain features in the writing which are Scarlatti's alone, I have little doubt of this. It does in
> fact seem logical to place the Essercizi towards the start of his output. As this is the only part
> which can be dated, the point is naturally of importance to any attempt to situate the rest. The
> Essercizi are short pieces, polished with particular care with a view to their publication. One
> encounters in them many traits peculiar to Scarlatti, yet it is precisely in the light shed by the
> other sonatas that it is possible to discern therein a world still in gestation. Some people have
> suggested that the composer, so as not to shock the ears of the dilettantes in London or Paris,
> may have deliberately limited his expressive range and written in a simple and accessible style,
> little influenced by the folklore of the Iberian Peninsula: hence these thirty sonatas might just
> as well have been written after most of the others. But numerous elements, in addition to the
> musical material itself, lead us to a different conclusion. The earliest sonatas, in my opinion,
> are those located between the thirtieth and the hundredth in the catalogue. One finds mixed
> together there a fair number of very weak pieces, entirely Italianate in style and apparently
> composed at an earlier period; a series of movements written in two parts and including a figured
> bass, probably intended for a melody instrument and accompaniment, but which can sound just
> as well on the harpsichord if one adds harmonies; and several pieces including ideas which are
> exploited in much more convincing fashion in the Essercizi, and whose earlier date is thus obvious
> (compare for example the Sonatas K39 and K24). So, at one point in his life, Scarlatti was this trivial
> composer, so disappointing to those of us who know and love his œuvre . . . But this area of the
> catalogue also includes some indisputable masterpieces (K43, 46, 52, 54, 56) which I for my part
> would place after the Essercizi. It would seem, then, that this section of the manuscript is no more
> than a compilation of scattered elements devoid of any real chronology. It is only once we are
> past a hundred sonatas or so that the grouping in pairs begins to appear. From this point on, and
> without a break right up to the very last sonatas, things seem to have become organised. Here
> is a fact which in itself allows us to assert that the numbers which come before must have been
> composed at an earlier date.
> 
> There is one aspect of the output of any composer which makes it possible to date his music
> fairly precisely: the pitch of the highest and lowest notes required in the score. Over the
> centuries keyboards have constantly been extended, offering more notes to composers who,
> still unsatisfied, have each time wanted to go one short step further. For example, it is clear that
> Scarlatti at first had no note higher than c''' at his disposal, like Bach at a certain period. In the
> Essercizi nothing is written higher than c''', and d''' only appears regularly from K100 onwards, but
> is subsequently in constant use. One senses that Scarlatti once more feels constricted, which leads
> him to modify certain melodic imitations within the limits allowed by the instrument. Finally,
> e''' crops up, then f''', and in the end he reaches g''', a note that existed on only a few keyboard
> instruments at the time (Beethoven was the first composer of the Classical era who was able to
> use it, and only towards the middle of his lifetime). In this respect, it is important to note that a
> composer only decides to make use of a new note when it is present on the instruments available
> to him and when he assumes that a sufficient number of musicians will be in a position to play his
> works that require it. Who knows if Scarlatti was not the first to urge Spanish instrument makers
> to reach these unaccustomed heights?
> The last element that can give us a relatively clear idea of the order of composition is the
> increasing precision with which Scarlatti indicates the tempo of his sonatas from one end of
> the manuscript to the other. Thus - and this must have been a surprise to many people - the
> Essercizi present only two possibilities: allegro or presto (!). Is there really not a single moment
> in all these pieces requiring even a semblance of moderation? Is everything either fast or very
> fast? I think that what comes afterwards sheds considerable light on this question. One gradually
> meets more precise indications such as larghetto, allegro assai, andante moderato, allegrissimo,
> until there comes a point when Scarlatti seems to be content with half-a-dozen tempo markings
> signifying either 'fast' (allegro, allegrissimo, presto) or 'slow' (adagio, andante). The term vivo makes
> its first appearance at no.125 and will be abundantly utilised thereafter, sometimes combined
> with allegro. The word cantabile, which is not properly speaking an indication of tempo, is also
> encountered from no.132. One observes Scarlatti seeking greater precision in his wording
> (allegro ma non molto [K166], vivo non molto [K203], allegro vivo [K180], andante moderato e
> cantabile [K170]), without always grasping exactly he is getting at. It is in the names he gives the
> slow movements (andantino for the first time in K211, then cantabile andantino [K277], andante
> commodo [K328], moderato [K347]), or on the contrary at the rapid end of the spectrum (presto,
> prestissimo [K348]), that he is most precise. It is in the sonatas towards the end of the catalogue
> that Scarlatti is at his most inspired in stating what he wants (più tosto presto che allegro [K419],
> presto quanto si possibile [K427], non presto ma a tempo di ballo [K430], andante allegro [K452],andante spiritoso [K454]). But it would appear that it was when trying to say 'fast but not too fast'
> that he had the greatest difficulty in explaining his wishes - and this is exactly what is lacking in
> the Essercizi. The Sonata K501 sees the emergence of the term allegretto - at last! This was to be
> the new norm, all over Europe and for a long time to come, for designating without too much
> circumlocution a tempo that was to be brisk yet restrained. Five hundred sonatas were necessary
> to get to this stage, after which the term is used twelve times more up to the very last sonata,
> no.555.
> Of course, it is of no great significance whether Scarlatti composed these final pieces on the eve
> of his death, or somewhat earlier. But how can one be other than astonished, in the light of the
> foregoing reflections, to realise just how late inspiration came to this composer, and to think that
> it was an old man who felt bursting forth from his imagination music so playful, so full of frenetic
> jousts, of vivacity and ardour?


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## Mandryka

And here's Sutcliffe on Chronology



> Two other fundamental areas of investigation have been held up as the salvation for Scarlatti studies - chronology and organology. The reliance on a well-established chronology for almost any form of scholarly musical study has already been explored. The particular terms of reference for any discussion of this matter have been set by Kirkpatrick; one of the main reasons he was able to tell such a good story in his 1953 book was that he was so conﬁdent of his chronology. All the standard parts of the master narrative87 can thus take their place, in the 'conspicuous stylistic development . . . from the ﬂashy and relatively youthful sonatas of [V 1749] and a few already copied out in [V 1742] through the poetic richness of the middle period of 1752 and 1753 . . . to the most complete and digested maturity imaginable in the late sonatas from 1754 to 1757';88 subsequently we read that in the late sonatas 'everything is at once thinner and richer'.89 What rendered Kirkpatrick's wholly traditional narrative rather incredible, if not absurd, was that he believed the dates of copying almost coincided with those of composition. Thus, as he conceded himself, the 'development of a lifetime'90 was compressed into a remarkably short period.
> 
> Malcolm Boyd has made a useful distinction between the two separate strands of Kirkpatrick's chronological claims. He believes there is a good deal of stylistic evidence to support Kirkpatrick's ' "general theory" of a direct relationship between the order of composition and the order of copying into the two main sources'; on the other hand, he ﬁnds it hard to credit the ' "special theory" . . . that the sonatas were copied into the Venice and Parma sets more or less at the time that Scarlatti completed them'.91 This incredulity seems to have been shared by most other writers. The 'general theory' has been widely accepted; or, it might be more accurate to say, it is often tacitly applied as a working tool without any direct acknowledgement of its shaky basis. If one rejects the intrinsic musical status of the pairs, for instance - seeing them as acts of compilation rather than composition - then chronology is immediately destroyed in any speciﬁc, if not altogether in a broader, sense. That some broader sense remains is apparent in the existence of like-minded groups of works through the Venice and Parma collections. Roughly speaking, this is most apparent in the sonatas now numbered in the K. 100s, 300s and 500s and much less so elsewhere. If one accepts the existence, if intermittent, of fairly homogeneous groupings, then are they the product of retrospective planning or a reﬂection of the composer's various 'creative periods'? Among those who believe that the groupings reﬂect a real chronological succession are Kenneth Gilbert, who tells us that the three successive colours used for his edition correspond to the three creative periods proposed by Kirkpatrick, youth, middle age and maturity.92 The standard developmental narrative is thus coloured in in the most literal way, as the colours on the covers change from a ﬁery red to a ﬂourishing green to a rich gold. On the other hand, it has been suggested that that the compilers of the volumes were creating a sort of anthology, bringing together compositions with 'common linguistic characteristics'.
> 
> Such decision-making, though, would have brought on a headache; how similar did sonatas have to be, for example, in order to qualify for such adjacency? While sonatas undoubtedly were brought together to make pairs on the basis of key, the notion that they were also brought together on the much wider and less quantiﬁable basis of style and language, in bulk, seems highly unlikely. The case of the sonatas in Parma VIII and IX (roughly equivalent to Venice VI and VII), as mostly found in Volume 7 of the Gilbert edition, seems to conﬁrm this. The majority of these sonatas are so distinctive texturally, topically and even, it would appear, aesthetically, compared with the rest of Scarlatti's output, that it is difﬁcult to believe that they were not written in a delimited period, prompted by external considerations on which we can only speculate.94 The idea that they were written on and off throughout the composer's career, closing off most of the avenues freely chosen by Scarlatti in the surrounding works, then brought together later, seems counterintuitive.
> 
> Uniting the concerns of chronology and pedagogy is Emilia Fadini, who offers the hypothesis that the Venice volumes of 1752-7 were ordered so as to provide a graduated keyboard course: the 'didactic aspect of the production cannot be minimized'.95 She essentially offers a new telling of an old story with a series of technical crescendi, traced several times over until the ﬁnal synthesis of the last volumes. Her grand plan certainly has a feel-good factor in the way it emphasizes the coherence of the Venice collections and skirts any nasty thoughts about chronology. The argument that most of the sonatas are e´tudes d'ex´ecution transcendante - or, on a lower level, quasi-didactic lessons - transparently acts as yet another attempt to avoid any awkward contemplation of the aesthetic character of the sonatas, never mind the source situation. Much to be preferred is Kathleen Dale's optimism in the matter: because no chronology is known and hence we cannot follow 'his development as a composer', playing all the Scarlatti sonatas is 'like journeying in a land where it is always spring'


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## RICK RIEKERT

W. Dean Sutcliffe begins his review of Matthew Flannery's 2004 monograph, _A chronological order for the keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757)_ with this sentence: "If the boldness of Domenico Scarlatti seems sometimes to be touched by madness, it could be argued that similar attributes are needed in anyone who wants to engage seriously with the vexed issue of the chronology of his vast corpus of keyboard sonatas."


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## science

Thank you guys!


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## mark6144

I had a similar question a few months ago, and came across this analysis of Scarlatti's works by Chris Hail, including chronology. I'm not sure how authoritative it is, but there's a lot of fascinating detail, and I'd be interested to know what others make of it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20141216234055/http://chrishail.net/


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## RICK RIEKERT

Barry Ife reviewed the late Chris Hail's massive tome last year in an issue of _Sounding Board_, the journal of The British Harpsichord Society. I've attached a copy for your reading pleasure.

http://www.harpsichord.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/SoundingBoard12.pdf


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