In 1738 Domenico Scarlatti published his Essercizi in London. Four years later a manuscript continuation – the first, longest and most fascinating of the court copyist’s series – was dated 1742. The digits “742” look considerably weaker than the “1”, so it might be questioned whether they were added at the end of the job rather than at the beginning. I offer a hypothesis here that tends to come down on the side of the latter possibility.
The copying began with 15 recent sonatas, but then the book, later bound for Queen María Bárbara and now known as Venice 1742 or XIV, became a hodgepodge of the composer’s earliest works (including some chamber music)* and more recent sonatas that came to the court copyist’s hands intermittently. Among the latter are two of the composer’s profoundest utterances, K 69 and K 87. They are in two keys as far removed from each other as they can be (F minor and B minor)**. Both are traditionally associated with melancholy and grief, an Affekt found in these pieces to a degree unmatched in the corpus of Scarlatti’s sonatas.
The text of K 87 in Venice 1742 is so corrupt that Kenneth Gilbert’s edition chooses the version found in Parma II (1752), presumably corrected by the composer when he went back to the 1742 archive and selected a mere 14 out of its 60 works for inclusion in the new set.
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In 1728 Scarlatti married the 16-year-old María Catalina Gentili in Rome. She bore him five children. An important family chronicle of 1912 states that this was his second marriage. No record has been found of a first, but the famous “emancipation” of Domenico from Alessandro’s parental authority at age 32, enforced by law in 1717, is surely related to what must have been a short-lived and childless union. The same chronicle states that marriage came “á disgusto de su padre” – to Alessandro’s disgust.
Scarlatti’s “lovely wife”, as a contemporary document describes María Catalina, died in Madrid in 1739. Her mother continued to live with the composer and helped bring up the children of his third marriage to Anastasia Ximenes of Cádiz.
There can be little doubt that the loss of a wife of 11 years, still young and the mother of five children, cast deep gloom over the middle-aged widower. K 69 and K 87 are strikingly inserted among works from Scarlatti’s youth and physical prime. I wonder if there is a personal significance to the stylistic break at Venice 1742 no. 15 (a recent work) and no. 16 (the first of the early group). Did Scarlatti stop composing on the death of the Lady Scarlatti (her courtesy title as the wife of a knight), and go back to review his portfolio of productions from happier days? Besides the first 15 sonatas, K 69 and K 87, the Venice 1742 manuscript contains only two other sonatas which look close to its date.
On the one hand, K 84 has the quality of someone taking arms against a sea of troubles. On the other is a third sonata in close proximity to K 69 and K 87 in terms of style and manuscript location. K 92, in funerial D-minor,*** has the same dense, idiomatic non-fugal polyphony as the other two, but the atmosphere is completely different. Here we have, instead of intimate grief, the monumental textures and dotted rhythms of a pompe funèbre. Dare I pile speculation upon speculation and say that this was Scarlatti’s more public farewell to María Catalina? Is it too farfetched to suggest that the autograph from which the corrupt 1742 copy of K 87 was prepared was written in a state of despair?
A group of three sonatas in triple time might bear interpretation as Trinitarian symbolism, and the key relationships as a metaphor for separation. Be all this as it may, these three sonatas form a niche all their own in Mimo’s production, unsurpassed for inner rhetorical power and eschewing all the glitter of his more popular sonatas.
February 19, 2025
* The musical poverty of some of these Jugendsünde is such that their very inclusion in the queen’s archive indicates an obsessive desire on the composer’s part to preserve absolutely every toccata, minuet, capriccio or sonata he ever wrote. Anything not found in the double15-volume series or the Essercizi must therefore be regarded with the greatest suspicion. At the moment I can accept only one escapee: K 141. The autograph may have fallen into the hands of the composer (Albero?, Nebra?) of K 142-4, never to be returned. If that is not the case, one of the many imitators of Scarlatti’s style celebrated their most successful forgery in K 141.
** Bach’s Clavier Übung II takes the same keynotes, but intensifies the opposition between Italian and French styles by putting the “Italian Concerto” in the major mode, and the “French Overture” in the minor.
*** Charpentier, Règles de composition (1690) says D minor is “Grave et Devot”. There is a marked resemblance between K 92 (ca. 1740?) and K 8. The earliest datable source for the latter is Boivin I (1737), in old clefs. Its slightly later appearance in the Essercizi has new clefs. All sources mark K 8 “Allegro”, but it should be noted that Roseingrave (who so oddly doubled K 8 in his pirated edition) and Boivin mark K 30, the “Cat Fugue”, Allegro, instead of the definitive Moderato. I wouldn’t want to go on record as saying that an Allegro K 8 records Domenico’s rejoicing over the death (1725) of an extremely difficult father, like Mozart did with his Musikalischer Spaß.
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