15 Facts About Domenico Scarlatti

Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti was an Italian composer.

Domenico Scarlatti is classified primarily as a Baroque composer chronologically, although his music was influential in the development of the Classical style.

Domenico Scarlatti spent much of his life in the service of the Portuguese and Spanish royal families.

Domenico Scarlatti was born in Naples, Kingdom of Naples, then belonging to the Spanish Empire.

Domenico Scarlatti was born in 1685, the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel.

Domenico Scarlatti was the sixth of ten children of the composer and teacher Alessandro Scarlatti.

Domenico Scarlatti was appointed as a composer and organist at the Chapel Royal of Naples in 1701 and briefly worked under his father, who was then the chapel's maestro di cappella.

Domenico Scarlatti was already an accomplished harpsichordist; there is a story of a trial of skill with George Frideric Handel at the palace of Cardinal Ottoboni in Rome, where Domenico Scarlatti was judged possibly superior to Handel on the harpsichord, although inferior on the organ.

Domenico Scarlatti was Maestro di Cappella at St Peter's from 1715 to 1719.

Domenico Scarlatti remained in Spain for the remaining 25 years of his life and had five children there.

Domenico Scarlatti befriended the castrato singer Farinelli, a fellow Neapolitan enjoying royal patronage in Madrid.

Domenico Scarlatti was buried at a convent there, but his grave no longer exists.

Only a small number of Domenico Scarlatti's compositions were published during his lifetime.

Domenico Scarlatti himself seems to have overseen the publication in 1738 of the most famous collection, his 30 Esercizi.

The many sonatas unpublished during Domenico Scarlatti's lifetime have appeared in print irregularly in the past two and a half centuries.