Classical Music » Did Scarlatti Take part in the Piano?
January 27th, 2012 by adminFrom the Middle Ages, Italy’utes Medici family was a magnet regarding artists and artisans, which created extraordinary works within the family’s generous patronage. In 1688, Florence’ersus Grand Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici hired Bartolomeo Cristofori, and then 33 years old, to look after their collection of harpsichords. This was an important place: Cristofori was paid as much as virtually any court musician.
The harpsichord associated with Cristofori’s time was a beautifully shaped instrument, responsive and flexible. But this lacked one feature: variable characteristics. The harpsichord’s mechanism picked the strings of the instrument. There was no practical means (then) to make it pluck all of them more gently. The only way to vary volume was to change prevents or combine manuals. The options for dynamic variety were fairly limited.
Some time inside 1690s, Cristofori had a brainstorm. He realized that when he replaced the harpsichord’utes plucking mechanism with one which struck the string instead, the force of the strike — and thus the volume of the audio — could be under complete power over the player.
The idea of a computer keyboard instrument that struck the particular strings rather than plucking them wasn’t really new. The clavichord got existed since at least your 15th century. A clavichord had tangents fastened to the keys. Instead of managing jacks and quills which plucked the strings, the tangents themselves minted the strings inside the instrument’ersus case.
The problem with the clavichord has been that while it was capable of extremely sensitive dynamic expression, its volume range was from almost inaudible to barely audible. Let’s face it, the drive that a keyboard player may transmit through his or her palms is limited. The clavichord’s tangents couldn’t strike its strings hard enough to make a sound that could be seen, say, in a church refuge. This meant that the clavichord wasn’t ideal for anything other than the most intimate music-making. (It made a magnificent device for late-night keyboard practice, however.)
Cristofori solved this problem by adding an analog action. It multiplied the player’ersus string-striking force by four (eight, in his later instruments) along with used that force to operate a vehicle a hammer against the line. He also added an escapement system. The escapement allowed the hammer for you to fall back after striking the string, so the string would certainly keep vibrating. (Think of the approach a fine crystal goblet bands when you tap it having a spoon — as long as you don’t maintain your spoon touching the goblet after you tap it.)
Cristofori named his invention “arpicimbalo che fa illinois piano e il forte” — harpsichord with soft and loud. Right now, we shorten that name a bit. We call it the piano.
Maybe you’re expecting myself to say here that Cristofori’utes piano “took Europe by storm” (or even some similar cliche’!) and right away eclipsed the harpsichord.
That didn’capital t happen. Truth to tell, keyboard avid gamers didn’t like the touch. The Florentine cello was harder to play, along with the keys just didn’t feel right when pressed. They didn’t like the tone, sometimes; it was too soft, as well muffled. Besides, who really needed very much variety in volume anyhow?
It would remain for afterwards piano makers to solve these complaints. But Cristofori had begun the process of revealing the harpsichord’s lock on open public keyboard performance. It’s not difficult to imagine that without the fiscal and moral support from the Medici family, Cristofori probably couldn’t have pushed keyboard technology forward — but that’s another tale for another day.
Now time for 1700, and over to Naples. That’utes when and where Domenico Scarlatti, one more musical member of a hugely talented audio family, was named organist and composer of the Royal Religious organization. He was even granted a special additional salary for his work as chamber harpsichordist.
Domenico Scarlatti was only 15 years aged.
By 1708, Domenico became members of his father in The italian capital. There he attended the each week concerts originated by Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni. In 1709, Prince Ferdinando sent the Cardinal a lavish gift via Florence: one of Cristofori’s pianos. Did Scarlatti enjoy or hear that musical instrument? Again, history doesn’t inform us.
In 1719, Scarlatti left Rome, ostensibly for England. In actuality, this individual was on his approach to Lisbon, Portugal, where he had a job offer — he was to always be master of the Royal Religious organization there. In Lisbon he encountered an extremely talented royal youngster — the particular infanta Maria Barbara, who, as a contemporary report said, “Surprise[ed] the impressed intelligence of the most excellent Teachers with her Mastery of Vocal range, Playing and Composition.”
Inside January of 1729, Maria Barbara married Ferdinando, the Spanish infante. It was a somewhat uncomfortable union whose goal was entirely political. Maria Barbara soon found herself in the dangerous company of the jealous California king Isabella of Spain. Isabella perhaps refused to allow Maria Barbara to carry her personal servants — all but 1, that is: her music instructor, Domenico Scarlatti. During the remaining 28 years of his or her life, Scarlatti composed and catalogued around 550 keyboard exercises for Nancy Barbara — from 1746, queen of The world.
Scarlatti and the Florentine piano are related (if only circumstantially) at several other times and also places, but what’s unquestionable is that Maria Barbara herself was a point of intersection.
Maria Barbara owned pianos. We know this simply because she died just over 12 months after Scarlatti did, and at the woman’s death, her instruments had been inventoried. Of her dozen (!) keyboard instruments, three were pianos, and two much more were harpsichords which had been modified from pianos (perhaps because their measures failed, or because they had been judged unsatisfactory as pianos). It therefore becomes rather difficult to reject that Scarlatti was acquainted with the piano.
But did they play them? Did he want for Maria Barbara to play his or her sonatas on them?
Ralph Kirkpatrick didn’t consider so. Kirkpatrick was an American harpsichordist (1911 – 1984). He had a distinguised career as a singer, but his magnum opus was his or her biography of Domenico Scarlatti. It occupied your ex for 16 years, from 1937 to 1953. When it came to Scarlatti’s sonatas, Kirkpatrick’s views because 1953 publication were enormously powerful, guiding the performance exercise of a generation of historically-oriented keyboard set musicians.
Kirkpatrick pointed out that 73 associated with Scarlatti’s 550-some sonatas required more keys than the queen’s pianos had. This is quite hard to argue with! It seems very unlikely that either Maria Barbara or Scarlatti played those 73 sonatas on any of the pianos to which that they had known access. That’s the carefully qualified statement, yet it’s about as specified as we can really get in this specific discussion.
Kirkpatrick thought that was sufficient evidence to declare that Scarlatti possibly had the harpsichord in mind pertaining to playing all of his sonatas. There is a bit more to his argument, but it’s mostly conjectural, related to exactly what he saw as the music suitability of the piano of that time period to the sonatas. What else can one perform without definitive surviving documentation?
But from 1970, other historically-oriented musicologists and performers began to problem Kirkpatrick’s assessment. Their re-evaluation of the evidence, sketchy as it was and is also, l
ed to harpsichord maker David Sutherland’ersus 1995 article in Early Tunes magazine, “Domenico Scarlatti and the Florentine Piano.”
Sutherland contended that, in making his professional recommendation, Kirkpatrick should have given more weight to the circumstantial evidence connecting Scarlatti and the earlier Florentine piano. Sutherland also questioned Kirkpatrick’utes judgement of the Florentine piano as unsuited to Scarlatti’s sonatas, however in all honesty it’s difficult to see Sutherland’s view of this specific matter as any less summary than Kirkpatrick’s. Finally, he or she took issue with Kirkpatrick’s debate that the piano was mainly used at court with regard to accompanying singers. Sutherland’s data here seems about while persuasive as Kirkpatrick’s. Stalemate.
Who’s right? I don’t recognize.
Keyboard isn’t my instrument, so maybe I’m able to look at this whole discussion with a bit of detachment. We’ve invested over 80 years in poring over precisely what little documentation exists (reckoning when Kirkpatrick began his research for Domenico Scarlatti). We have more informed opinions than ever (and thank goodness for that), but informed as they are, they’re nonetheless opinions. We don’t have a definitive answer as to whether Scarlatti meant his sonatas for the harpsichord or the cello. Perhaps he intended some of them for starters and some for the other, but we have no way of realizing that. If he did, the 73 I mentioned before are the just ones which we currently cash hope of assigning. Really, we don’t know regardless of whether Scarlatti even cared which instrument they were played on. We may never know. There just isn’t enough data to say.
Meanwhile, players of the modern piano, from Dame Myra Hess to be able to Vladimir Horowitz — and countless others since — have never stopped playing Scarlatti. Why should they? For them, I suspect the question of what musical instrument Scarlatti had played was just about academic. His music worked on their behalf on their chosen instrument. They provided Scarlatti a voice, and also discovered their own expressive nuances within the sonatas. Audiences loved it. I imagine that has been enough for them.
What I do know for sure is that I’ve heard effective and musically enlightening performances involving Scarlatti sonatas on harpsichords, Florentine pianos, and modern pianos. Yet don’t take my term for it; compare for yourself. Here tend to be three short clips from Scarlatti’s Sonata in f modest, K519 — played on modern piano, a reproduction of Cristofori’azines Florentine piano, and harpsichord.
Scarlatti’s K519 sonata in modern piano (Beatrice Long)
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Scarlatti’s K519 sonata on Florentine piano (Brian Schrader)
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Scarlatti’s K519 sonata on harpsichord (Colin Tilney)
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I’ve also heard several pretty good Scarlatti on other tools, including harp and guitar. His songs seems to suit many different instruments, and I for one am pleased that one more avenue involving timbre and style has opened up for interpreting Scarlatti sonatas.
The harpsichord associated with Cristofori’s time was a beautifully shaped instrument, responsive and flexible. But this lacked one feature: variable characteristics. The harpsichord’s mechanism picked the strings of the instrument. There was no practical means (then) to make it pluck all of them more gently. The only way to vary volume was to change prevents or combine manuals. The options for dynamic variety were fairly limited.
Some time inside 1690s, Cristofori had a brainstorm. He realized that when he replaced the harpsichord’utes plucking mechanism with one which struck the string instead, the force of the strike — and thus the volume of the audio — could be under complete power over the player.
The idea of a computer keyboard instrument that struck the particular strings rather than plucking them wasn’t really new. The clavichord got existed since at least your 15th century. A clavichord had tangents fastened to the keys. Instead of managing jacks and quills which plucked the strings, the tangents themselves minted the strings inside the instrument’ersus case.
The problem with the clavichord has been that while it was capable of extremely sensitive dynamic expression, its volume range was from almost inaudible to barely audible. Let’s face it, the drive that a keyboard player may transmit through his or her palms is limited. The clavichord’s tangents couldn’t strike its strings hard enough to make a sound that could be seen, say, in a church refuge. This meant that the clavichord wasn’t ideal for anything other than the most intimate music-making. (It made a magnificent device for late-night keyboard practice, however.)
Cristofori solved this problem by adding an analog action. It multiplied the player’ersus string-striking force by four (eight, in his later instruments) along with used that force to operate a vehicle a hammer against the line. He also added an escapement system. The escapement allowed the hammer for you to fall back after striking the string, so the string would certainly keep vibrating. (Think of the approach a fine crystal goblet bands when you tap it having a spoon — as long as you don’t maintain your spoon touching the goblet after you tap it.)
Cristofori named his invention “arpicimbalo che fa illinois piano e il forte” — harpsichord with soft and loud. Right now, we shorten that name a bit. We call it the piano.
Maybe you’re expecting myself to say here that Cristofori’utes piano “took Europe by storm” (or even some similar cliche’!) and right away eclipsed the harpsichord.
That didn’capital t happen. Truth to tell, keyboard avid gamers didn’t like the touch. The Florentine cello was harder to play, along with the keys just didn’t feel right when pressed. They didn’t like the tone, sometimes; it was too soft, as well muffled. Besides, who really needed very much variety in volume anyhow?
It would remain for afterwards piano makers to solve these complaints. But Cristofori had begun the process of revealing the harpsichord’s lock on open public keyboard performance. It’s not difficult to imagine that without the fiscal and moral support from the Medici family, Cristofori probably couldn’t have pushed keyboard technology forward — but that’s another tale for another day.
Now time for 1700, and over to Naples. That’utes when and where Domenico Scarlatti, one more musical member of a hugely talented audio family, was named organist and composer of the Royal Religious organization. He was even granted a special additional salary for his work as chamber harpsichordist.
Domenico Scarlatti was only 15 years aged.
By 1708, Domenico became members of his father in The italian capital. There he attended the each week concerts originated by Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni. In 1709, Prince Ferdinando sent the Cardinal a lavish gift via Florence: one of Cristofori’s pianos. Did Scarlatti enjoy or hear that musical instrument? Again, history doesn’t inform us.
In 1719, Scarlatti left Rome, ostensibly for England. In actuality, this individual was on his approach to Lisbon, Portugal, where he had a job offer — he was to always be master of the Royal Religious organization there. In Lisbon he encountered an extremely talented royal youngster — the particular infanta Maria Barbara, who, as a contemporary report said, “Surprise[ed] the impressed intelligence of the most excellent Teachers with her Mastery of Vocal range, Playing and Composition.”
Inside January of 1729, Maria Barbara married Ferdinando, the Spanish infante. It was a somewhat uncomfortable union whose goal was entirely political. Maria Barbara soon found herself in the dangerous company of the jealous California king Isabella of Spain. Isabella perhaps refused to allow Maria Barbara to carry her personal servants — all but 1, that is: her music instructor, Domenico Scarlatti. During the remaining 28 years of his or her life, Scarlatti composed and catalogued around 550 keyboard exercises for Nancy Barbara — from 1746, queen of The world.
Scarlatti and the Florentine piano are related (if only circumstantially) at several other times and also places, but what’s unquestionable is that Maria Barbara herself was a point of intersection.
Maria Barbara owned pianos. We know this simply because she died just over 12 months after Scarlatti did, and at the woman’s death, her instruments had been inventoried. Of her dozen (!) keyboard instruments, three were pianos, and two much more were harpsichords which had been modified from pianos (perhaps because their measures failed, or because they had been judged unsatisfactory as pianos). It therefore becomes rather difficult to reject that Scarlatti was acquainted with the piano.
But did they play them? Did he want for Maria Barbara to play his or her sonatas on them?
Ralph Kirkpatrick didn’t consider so. Kirkpatrick was an American harpsichordist (1911 – 1984). He had a distinguised career as a singer, but his magnum opus was his or her biography of Domenico Scarlatti. It occupied your ex for 16 years, from 1937 to 1953. When it came to Scarlatti’s sonatas, Kirkpatrick’s views because 1953 publication were enormously powerful, guiding the performance exercise of a generation of historically-oriented keyboard set musicians.
Kirkpatrick pointed out that 73 associated with Scarlatti’s 550-some sonatas required more keys than the queen’s pianos had. This is quite hard to argue with! It seems very unlikely that either Maria Barbara or Scarlatti played those 73 sonatas on any of the pianos to which that they had known access. That’s the carefully qualified statement, yet it’s about as specified as we can really get in this specific discussion.
Kirkpatrick thought that was sufficient evidence to declare that Scarlatti possibly had the harpsichord in mind pertaining to playing all of his sonatas. There is a bit more to his argument, but it’s mostly conjectural, related to exactly what he saw as the music suitability of the piano of that time period to the sonatas. What else can one perform without definitive surviving documentation?
But from 1970, other historically-oriented musicologists and performers began to problem Kirkpatrick’s assessment. Their re-evaluation of the evidence, sketchy as it was and is also, l
ed to harpsichord maker David Sutherland’ersus 1995 article in Early Tunes magazine, “Domenico Scarlatti and the Florentine Piano.”
Sutherland contended that, in making his professional recommendation, Kirkpatrick should have given more weight to the circumstantial evidence connecting Scarlatti and the earlier Florentine piano. Sutherland also questioned Kirkpatrick’utes judgement of the Florentine piano as unsuited to Scarlatti’s sonatas, however in all honesty it’s difficult to see Sutherland’s view of this specific matter as any less summary than Kirkpatrick’s. Finally, he or she took issue with Kirkpatrick’s debate that the piano was mainly used at court with regard to accompanying singers. Sutherland’s data here seems about while persuasive as Kirkpatrick’s. Stalemate.
Who’s right? I don’t recognize.
Keyboard isn’t my instrument, so maybe I’m able to look at this whole discussion with a bit of detachment. We’ve invested over 80 years in poring over precisely what little documentation exists (reckoning when Kirkpatrick began his research for Domenico Scarlatti). We have more informed opinions than ever (and thank goodness for that), but informed as they are, they’re nonetheless opinions. We don’t have a definitive answer as to whether Scarlatti meant his sonatas for the harpsichord or the cello. Perhaps he intended some of them for starters and some for the other, but we have no way of realizing that. If he did, the 73 I mentioned before are the just ones which we currently cash hope of assigning. Really, we don’t know regardless of whether Scarlatti even cared which instrument they were played on. We may never know. There just isn’t enough data to say.
Meanwhile, players of the modern piano, from Dame Myra Hess to be able to Vladimir Horowitz — and countless others since — have never stopped playing Scarlatti. Why should they? For them, I suspect the question of what musical instrument Scarlatti had played was just about academic. His music worked on their behalf on their chosen instrument. They provided Scarlatti a voice, and also discovered their own expressive nuances within the sonatas. Audiences loved it. I imagine that has been enough for them.
What I do know for sure is that I’ve heard effective and musically enlightening performances involving Scarlatti sonatas on harpsichords, Florentine pianos, and modern pianos. Yet don’t take my term for it; compare for yourself. Here tend to be three short clips from Scarlatti’s Sonata in f modest, K519 — played on modern piano, a reproduction of Cristofori’azines Florentine piano, and harpsichord.
Scarlatti’s K519 sonata in modern piano (Beatrice Long)
Audio tracks clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to enjoy this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your internet browser.
Scarlatti’s K519 sonata on Florentine piano (Brian Schrader)
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Participant (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version right here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled with your browser.
Scarlatti’s K519 sonata on harpsichord (Colin Tilney)
Sound clip: Adobe Flash Player (model 9 or above) is required to participate in this audio clip. Acquire the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your visitor.
I’ve also heard several pretty good Scarlatti on other tools, including harp and guitar. His songs seems to suit many different instruments, and I for one am pleased that one more avenue involving timbre and style has opened up for interpreting Scarlatti sonatas.
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