Some of the best-known (and most-doubted)* of the few surviving anecdotes of the life of Domenico Scarlatti appear in Burney’s “The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Provinces” (1773). Their source was the Vienna court physician, Alexandre-Louis Laugier (“M. L’Augier” in Burney), whom Burney encountered there in 1772. The doctor, who himself “had been a good harpsichord player”, had been “intimately acquainted” with Scarlatti in Madrid, “who, at seventy-three, composed for him a great number of harpsichord lessons which he now possesses, and of which he favored me with copies.” (Somebody is in error here, since Scarlatti died on July 23, 1757, 96 days before his 72nd birthday. The Madrid heat was probably too much for a corpulent old man.)
Laugier’s claim that the 42 sonatas in question were composed expressly for him may be taken with a tablespoon of salt, especially since he seems to have been a garrulous and rather boastful type, but there is no reason to doubt their provenance from the composer. I am not aware that Burney’s copies have been located, but I am so far behind in current Scarlatti scholarship that they may well turn out to be one of the surprising number of sources that have come to light in recent decades. Burney says he had only seen “three or four” of Laugier’s sonatas; those he may have found in a manuscript owned by the bibliophile and collector Richard, Viscount Fitzwilliam, now kept in Cambridge (Fitzwilliam Museum, ms 32 F 13). It contains a separate group of nine late sonatas, numbered between K517 and K553 and including three pairs. Among the others in the final range of Kirkpatrick’s catalog there are indeed some of Mimo’s loveliest slow movements.
Looking for more information on Dr. Laugier, I came across an article in Music and Letters (1996, Vol. 77 no. 1) by John Jenkins. The author says that little is known of Laugier’s early years, except that he was from Nancy, and had studied at Leiden. Much of his article is devoted to letters of the Mozart family, where Laugier appears a number of times. He midwifed Wolfgang’s first opera buffa, La finta semplice, and probably helped him survive smallpox in 1767; if so, humanity owes Dr. Laugier a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid.
Laugier organized a concert for Burney and some society folk (including Dom Pedro, Duke of Braganza, a younger brother of Scarlatti’s patron Queen María Bárbara, and Count Brühl, son of the Saxon Prime Minister whose personal harpsichordist was J. G. Goldberg), the purpose being to display the talents of an unnamed female keyboard prodigy “of eight or nine years old”.
Of her performance, Burney says, “[She] played two difficult lessons of Scarlatti, with three or four of M. Becke**, upon a small, and not good Piano forte. The neatness of this child’s execution did not so much surprise me, though uncommon, as her expression. All the pianos and fortes were so judiciously attended to; and there was such shading off some passages, and force given to others, as nothing but the best teaching, or greatest natural feeling and sensibility could produce. I enquired of Signor Giorgio, an Italian, who attended her, upon what instrument she usually practiced at home, and was answered, ‘on the clavichord’. This accounts for her expression, and convinces me, that children should learn upon that, or a Piano Forte, very early, and be obliged to give an expression to lady Coventry’s Minuet, or whatever is their first tune; otherwise, after long practice on a monotonous harpsichord, however useful for strengthening the hand, the case is hopeless.”
Putting aside the slur on le majestueux clavecin (sic Balbastre), one has to concede that Burney was right in preferring the clavichord for beginners. The passage also invites reflection on María Bárbara’s own fortepianos and double-manual harpsichords. A Scarlatti source in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris marks repeats pour le petit clavier.
I will mention one other passage which impacts directly on performance of Scarlatti:
“M. L’Augier sung to me several fragments of Bohemian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Turkish music, in which the peculiar expression depended on the contre tems, or breach of strict time; beat the measure, and keep it as exactly as is necessary, in more refined and modern music, and it wholly loses its effect.”
First of all, let me point out that this is one of countless sources from all epochs that, contrary to present deplorable practice, insist on adherence to strict tempo (except in very special cases). What Laugier is referring to is the subtle Agogik needed in so much folk music. Go to the originals, and you will see just how subtle it is; a far cry from the wild distortions presently heard in the field, even with great pianists and conductors who have been infected with HUP (Historically Uninformed Performance). Even to such a modest degree, these contre tems, prominent features of Scarlatti’s sonatas à l’espagnole, would not be found in the works of Gluck*** or Hasse, two of the composers of “more refined and modern music” with whom Burney had interviews in Vienna.
When “M. L’Augier” had to leave for Laxenburg to give medical attention to the emperor, Burney “was sorry to lose him, as his house was an excellent retreat, when I could spare time to enjoy it; and his conversation concerning music and musicians was in a particular manner entertaining and profitable.”****
February 7, 2025
* Here is the one most severely debunked: “[The sonatas] were composed in 1756, when Scarlatti was too fat to cross his hands as he used to do, so that these are not so difficult, as his more juvenile works…” Reference is always made to the portrait of the composer, painted around 1740 after he had been knighted by his former patron, the king of Portugal. It is thought to give proof that, in the words of Ralph Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti was “congenitally thin”. His face is indeed narrow, but if one looks farther down, a substantial belly is already visible. By 1752, according to his only surviving letter, he was unable to leave his house –– due to corpulence and concomitant gout? –– and had begun the great work of arranging, revising and archiving 13 volumes of earlier (and some new) sonatas. Why some scholars are so very quick to discard the testimony of their subjects’ contemporaries has always mystified me. Hand crossings do in fact dry up at the end of the Parma/Venice line, except for K528-9. The fast 5-octave leaps there look to me like a savagely nostalgic joke.
** Captain F. I. von Beecke, who according to Schubart far surpassed Mozart in a 1775 Munich piano competition.
*** Burney, sitting beside Gluck at a dinner while in Vienna, noted the following tale: “A few years since, a comic opera of Gluck’s was performed at the Elector Palatine’s theatre, at Schwetzingen; his Electoral highness was much struck by the music, and enquired who had composed it; and, upon being informed that it was the production of an honest German who loved old hock; ‘I think, says the Elector, he deserves to be made drink for his trouble;’ and ordered him a tun, not indeed quite so big as that at Heidelberg, but a very large one, and full of excellent wine.” The 1752 Schlosstheater in Schwetzingen is still in use. The famous barrel at Heidelberg vies with the Schwedenfass in Würzburg for the title of world’s largest.
**** K 547 contains what looks remarkably like a direct quote of the main theme from Rameau’s “Les Cyclopes” (32-8, 94-9), and other passages which look like attempts to reconstruct Rameau’s pounding of the anvils. Scarlatti visited Paris at least twice, in 1724 and 1725, in service of his patron King João V. Scarlatti’s hand crossings, absent from his earliest works, might have been modeled on Rameau, who in his 1724 Pièces de Clavecin claimed to have been the first to employ the device.
Parma MS XV, the last of the series, contains 12 sonatas not found, for whatever reason, in the last of the Venice mss. If I am correct in thinking that the last volumes of the double archive contained many recently-composed sonatas, it might also be the case that at least some of them were composed for Dr. Laugier. Scarlatti‘s health had been poor for some time. We do not know why the good doctor travelled to Spain, Portugal and Istanbul, but I think the imperial court of Vienna might have been lending their personal physician to their Habsburg cousins – and even to the Sublime Porte, a source of constant diplomatic tension where such a gift might have served as a douceur. And K 547 might have been a souvenir de Paris, inspired by a conversation between the old master and his French visitor.
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