in search of scarlatti’s harpsichord ❧ 131
thought I would like to learn. And like all beginnings of Scarlatti, I picked out
the technical problems, the fast and brilliant and instrumentally challenging
pieces. A few weeks later, a friend in Florence presented me with the eigh-
teenth-century edition of the Roseingrave^3 sonatas. This was, for many years,
the only unadulterated text that I had to deal with. There again, I picked out
the fast pieces and I played them as fast as I could and used them as displays of
a technical brilliance that I was still in hopes of achieving. And most of the rep-
resentation of Scarlatti on early programs took this form. Longo dominated,
although one couldn’t do everything that he asked on the harpsichord. The
repertoire gradually expanded with a little bit more variety. I still had no idea,
except from having seen a few specimens in museums, of what the Italian harp-
sichord was like.
In 1938, I recorded Scarlatti sonatas for the fi rst time, fast and brilliant
again, with a certain amount of playing around with possibilities of registra-
tion, but I think not very much because those sonatas didn’t permit it. It was
in 1939 that I fi rst got a glimpse of both the Venice and the Parma manu-
scripts and made annotations for a dozen or two of the sonatas in my copy
of Longo and conscientiously played from these texts henceforth. It was at
the same time that I got from Gerstenberg’s^4 book a notion of the sequence,
pairwise arrangement, and chronology of the sonatas. But none of this sunk
in very deep even after, in 1940, I agreed to write a book on Scarlatti. In the
years from 1941 to 1946, I did get to know the corpus of Scarlatti sonatas quite
well. I went through them in chronological order—taking notes, correcting
misunderstandings, but still I would say with hindsight, with a fairly superfi cial
approach. Certainly this approach in performance was directed at the curious
and the bizarre and striking more than at the profound.
The turning point occurred in both research and in performance in 1947
when, for the fi rst time after the war, I went to Europe and worked extensively
in Italy and especially in Spain. The overwhelming Spanish content of the
music became apparent to me as never before, and I really date any serious
preoccupation as a Scarlatti interpreter from then. It is also then that I was able
to uncover information about instruments that, unfortunately, has not really
been superseded to this day. In addition to the well-known passages in Burney^5
and other material that I have quoted in the Scarlatti book, I found in the
library of the Royal Palace in Madrid the inventory of what appeared to be all
- Domenico Scarlatti, Forty-Two Suits of Lessons for the Harpsichord, ed. Thomas
Roseingrave (London: Johnson, 1739).
- Walter Gerstenberg, Die Klavierkompositionen Domenico Scarlattis (Regensburg:
Bosse, 1933).
- Charles Burney, A General History of Music, from the Earliest Ages to the Present
Period (London, 1789), ed. Frank Mercer (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935).
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