in search of scarlatti’s harpsichord ❧ 139
few headings; I’m going to talk about small passages as illustrations, and then
draw a fairly close analysis of one sonata and its mate.
The thickening and thinning of Scarlatti’s chord writing is something I
talked about a great deal in my chapter on Scarlatti’s harmony and the chap-
ter on Scarlatti’s harpsichord in the book, but I don’t think at the time I fully
realized how consistently he has notated his part-writing in terms of pieces as a
whole. There is a tendency for the writing to get thickest at moments of great-
est tonal activity—in other words, in the middle of the piece, in the modula-
tory sections after the double bar.
[RK demonstrates on the harpsichord, with commentary.]
The foregoing thoughts suggest a number of conclusions and also some back-
ward glances at what has been said earlier in this series. I think here, with
Scarlatti, we have some support for the theory that some of the most idiomatic
keyboard music is conceived in extra-harpsichord terms. I said, you remember,
that a lot of things imitating other instruments than the keyboard, even tran-
scriptions, very often ended up being more idiomatic, perhaps because of their
very concentration, by defi nition, in translation of the idiom. And this paradox
holds, I think, for a great deal of Scarlatti. And I think it’s one of the reasons
that Scarlatti is so much more idiomatic than many of his lesser contempo-
raries who use the same formula but without the imagination of drawing from
sources outside the harpsichord and beyond the reaches of its mere keyboard.
We have, however, perhaps a démenti^10 to the assertion that was made that
the exploitation of keyboard style is usually done by a minor composer. In this
case, we have a revolution in exploitation of keyboard style by a major com-
poser. You can say that most of the features of Scarlatti keyboard style turn up
in a composer like Soler, and yet, how much more restricted these features are!
And after all, Soler learned a great many of his tricks from Scarlatti.
The question is often asked, what about Scarlatti on the piano? It’s usually
asked in a loaded form—do I think it’s wrong to play Scarlatti on the piano?
And then I have to answer that I think it’s far less wrong to play Scarlatti well on
the piano than to play it badly on the harpsichord. And, on the whole, I’m not
sure that I haven’t heard worse distortions of Scarlatti on the harpsichord than
I have on the piano, but it’s perhaps touch and go. But I don’t see why a great
many of the sonatas can’t be made very beautiful on the piano, and I know a
number of pianists who have achieved exactly this result, particularly because
there is so much in Scarlatti that suggests something outside the instrument.
Some years ago I was called in by Vladimir Horowitz to give some advice
on stylistic matters. We spent some evenings together and this was, needless to
- Denial.
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