Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti was an Italian composer, born 26 October 1685 in Naples (the same year as J.S. Bach and Handel) and died 23 July 1757 in Madrid. The sixth child of composer Alessandro Scarlatti, he worked in Naples, Venice, and Rome before entering the service of the Portuguese royal family in Lisbon in 1719 as music master to Princess Maria Barbara. He followed her to Spain after her 1729 marriage to the Spanish crown prince and spent the rest of his life at the Spanish court. Although he composed operas and sacred works, Scarlatti is remembered above all for his 555 single-movement keyboard sonatas, mostly written for Maria Barbara in his final decades and saturated with the sounds of Iberian folk music, guitar strumming, and castanets.

Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas radically expanded the technical and expressive vocabulary of the harpsichord through daring modulations, hand-crossings, rapid repeated notes, and Iberian-inflected harmony and rhythm, anticipating textures later exploited by Classical and Romantic composers. Though chronologically a Baroque composer, his galant-leaning style influenced the development of the emerging Classical idiom, and his sonatas — because of their guitar-like figuration — became, alongside their central place in harpsichord and piano repertoire, an important gateway work for classical guitarists. He has been cited as an influence by composers and performers from Chopin and Brahms to Bartók and Scott Ross, who made the first complete recording of all 555 sonatas.

Compare recordings piece by piece — 23 works of Domenico Scarlatti with more than one performance on the site →

Sources:

• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Domenico-Scarlatti