Old engraving after Wagniger’s design. The true musician is climbing up the Ladder of Contrapuntal Art ever higher and higher (see in the engraving the words plus ultra) to the Concert of Angels (legitime certantibus). From the “Basis and Fundamental Tone” the musical notes are being carried to the Gold-furnace (various flames in which are labelled, e.g. motet, canzonet, canon, etc.). The enemies are seen up above breaking the tritone, the false fifth, and the ninth; arrows are being shot at the Artist on the left as he writes (volenti nil difficile, “nothing is difficult to the willing mind”), but they are shattered on the Shield of Minerva, on which is represented the Austrian Eagle.
Scarlatti
Domenico Scarlatti, perhaps the greatest clavier-player that Italy ever had, prefaces a collection of thirty sonatas, which appeared at Amsterdam,[44] with the following words: “Amateur or professor, whoever thou art, seek not in these compositions for any deep feeling. They are only a frolic of art, intended to increase thy confidence on the clavier. I had no ambition to make a sensation; I was simply requested to publish the pieces. Should they be not utterly unpleasing to thee, I shall all the more willingly undertake other commissions, in order to rejoice thee in a lighter and more varied style. Take then these pieces rather as man than as critic; so only shalt thou increase thine own content. To speak of the use of the two hands—D denotes dritta, the right, and M manca, the left. Farewell!” It is noticeable how here in a few words the whole essence of Italian clavier-music is summed up—the fresh, cheerful disposition of the artist; the respect for the amateur; the pleasure in mere sound and in musical construction; the thorough working-out of intellectual motives (in the manner of the Étude); and the stress laid upon the equal participation of both hands as essential factors in the “concert,” [using this word in its older sense as expressing the association of two or more vocal or instrumental “parts”]. The word “concert” was well understood in these early days to mean the combination of two viols; and music of such a kind was, in form and in content, the true precursor of clavier-music, in which the right and left hand “parts” are strictly on an equality both in difficulty and importance.
These are the distinguishing marks of Italian clavier-art, and within these limits it works.
But Scarlatti is especially remarkable to us in the present day, in that he occupies the position of an early writer whose pieces still play a part, though a small one, in modern public concerts. Liszt, for example, was partial to him, and arranged his “Cat’s Fugue”; while Bülow edited a representative selection from his pieces. Czerny published (through Haslinger) two hundred of his so-called Sonatas—though, by the way, the last of these pieces belongs really to the father, Alessandro Scarlatti. Before that time the remains of the master had formed no inconsiderable part of private manuscript collections, such as those of the Abbé Santini in Rome, and others.[45]
Domenico Scarlatti, the famous son of the not less famous Alessandro, who was a composer of operas and chief of the Neapolitan School, exhibits in old portraits a serious, severe, even pedagogic countenance. There is also much of the pedagogue in his pieces; yet I think him fresher, gayer, more happy in life and mind than this face would lead one to suppose. His “Exercises” move with vigorous strides, and are far too full of esprit to be pedantic. His life was that of an artist universally honoured, and rejoicing in his fame, a type of which his contemporary Handel is the model; and his biography reveals no less activity than his works. A pupil of his renowned father, in the midst of the volatile, melody-loving, easily-stirred Neapolitan world, he set out early for Rome, in order to become the scholar of the great theorist Gasparini and of the organist and clavier-player Pasquini. In 1709, at the age of twenty-six, he made the acquaintance of Handel at Venice, and in sheer admiration, followed him to Rome. There he remained ten years, and became kapellmeister of St Peter’s, gaining a reputation by the works of his genius. In 1720 we suddenly find him in London as clavicymbalist of the Italian opera. Here his “Narcissus” was performed. A year later again he was in Lisbon, where the King of Portugal made efforts to detain him, and where for a time he gave lessons to the Princess. At this time the fame of his playing and of his compositions reached the farthest bounds of Europe, and he ranked thenceforward as the first executant of the age. He returned again to Italy, and from Italy to Spain. He remained in Madrid from 1729 to his death in 1757. Here all kinds of honours were showered upon him; he was Knight of St James, and chamber-player to the Queen, who still retained a grateful memory of the lessons he had given her at Lisbon when she was Princess of Asturias. To her he dedicated his first-published pieces, prefixing to them the lively preface above quoted.
Italian music has to French the relation which Bull has to Bird, or the virtuoso to the poet. In Scarlatti we seek in vain for any inner motive, nor do we feel any need of an emotional rendering on the part of the performer; his short pieces aim only at sound effects, and are written merely from the love of brilliant clavier-passages, or to embody delicate technical devices. They are not denizens of Paradise, who wander, unconscious of their naked beauty, under over-arching bowers; they are athletes, simply rejoicing in their physical strength, and raising gymnastic to a high, self-sufficient art. We admire them, as we admire an acrobatic troupe of strong and stout character; we admire them—not too much, yet with a certain eager anticipation of the next interesting and unusual feat of skill. We wonder at their mastery of technique, and the systematic development of their characteristic methods; we rejoice that they never, in their desire to please, abandon the standpoint of the sober artists; but our heart remains cold. There is an icy, virgin purity in this first off-shoot[46] of absolute virtuosity, which kindles our sense for the art of beautiful mechanism, for the art of technique per se—an art which, after all, the historian of the clavier must not depreciate by comparing it with that of the inner music.
