THE ENGLISH CULT OF DOMENICO SCARLATTI

Abstract

THE long popularity of Domenico Scarlatti's harpsichord music in England may well be accounted one of the most curious things in our very curious musical history. Unlike Bach, he has never needed a Mendelssohn or a Samuel Wesley to re-discover him; unlike the Virginalists, he has never had to wait for a radical change of taste to dispel more than a century's ignorance and misunderstanding: on the contrary, the reputation he gained here during his lifetime, though based on his earlier compositions only, was vital enough to withstand the momentous changes of the late eighteenth century, and has indeed survived, enhanced by a knowledge of his complete output, into our own day. His special excellences are of so un-English a character that we could hardly have been surprised if they had been but coldly appreciated here; yet between I739 and 1800 more than a hundred of his sonatas were printed in England (far more, that is, than in any other country), and manuscript copies were eagerly sought after. In the following pages it is proposed to trace, so far as may be, the stages by which this extraordinary popularity was achieved. In 1709 a young Irishman, Thomas Roseingrave, was in Italy, where he had been sent to study music. At Venice he met a grave young man in black with a black wig , some five years his senior, whose harpsichord playing made him think that ten hundred d ls had been at the instrument; he had never heard such passages of execution and effect before . This was the beginning of the relationship between Domenico and England-or, as the late Dr. Grattan Flood would probably have pointed out, between Domenico and Ireland-and it was to have far-reaching consequences. Burney has described the meeting at length, from the account given him by Roseingrave himself, and it need not be quoted here again. It is important for us, because the intense admiration that Roseingrave during the next year or two conceived for was directly responsible for the beginning of the Scarlatti tradition in England.