SCARLATTI: SONATAS - Fabio Zanon, guitar

In 1719, a successful and well-connected composer of opera and sacred music, well into his thirties, decided to leave the exuberant musical life of Rome and accept the position of harpsichord instructor to a princess and her brother in the distant capital of Portugal. After a brief spell back to Italy, he followed Princess Maria Barbara, now married to the crown Prince of Spain, first to Seville and then to Madrid, where he remained for the rest of his life at her service. It is risky to make parallels between a composer's output and his biography and personality traits. One cannot help feel that the explanation for Domenico Scarlatti's mysterious conduct lies in the fact he had sensed that, in relative obscurity and away from the pressures of earning a living in a highly competitive scene, and writing for the entertainment of a restricted circle of enlightened aristocrats, he could best engage himself in the solution of a very specific artistic problem that might have sparked his artistic imagination: the composition of harpsichord sonatas, or exercises, as he called them, of which he wrote more than 555 in a space of a couple of decades. This adherence to the microcosm of a single form, which exhausts itself in the sphere of a single instrument, is testimony to a unique creative travail, which, in its obstinate determination, has almost the nature of a scientific research. As a result of his thoroughness and single-minded­ness, Scarlatti managed to raise himself to the elite echelon of composers who seem to create, with their corpus of works, a self-sufficient reality, which functions in accordance with rules evolved from itself, excluding the need for external paradigms. Once Scarlatti found his own voice, he became more or less immune to outside musical influences.