How Should We Hear Scarlatti on the Modern Piano?

Domenico Scarlatti left 555 surviving keyboard sonatas, with the thirty Essercizi per gravicembalo published in 1738. Today these works are played constantly on the modern piano, which encourages two opposite mistakes: treating them as miniature Romantic piano pieces, or trying to make the piano imitate a harpsichord. The history is less tidy than either view suggests. A harpsichord plucks its strings, while the early piano strikes them with hammers; Scarlatti lived during the period in which the piano was emerging, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that hundreds of his sonatas may have been intended for piano rather than exclusively for harpsichord.

That changes the performance question. Scarlatti repeatedly uses rapid repeated notes, hand crossings, wide leaps, arpeggiated figures and strongly profiled rhythms. What matters most is not reproducing the surface colour of one historical instrument, but preserving the clarity of the relationships these gestures create — rhythm, register, articulation and the separation of voices. A modern piano can certainly use dynamic gradation, but too much pedal, continuous legato or Romantic singing tone can soften the very edges that give the music its energy.

For that reason, I find it useful to listen not only to how a note begins, but to how it leaves. Attack, release and brief spaces are part of the musical structure. A modern piano need not pretend to be a harpsichord, yet it should not automatically turn every piece into the rounded sound world familiar from later piano music. Historically informed playing is most valuable when it reminds us that the same score can preserve its structure across different instruments while producing a genuinely different world of sound.

https://bibliotecanazionalemarciana.cultura.gov.it/mostre/sonate-di-domenico-scarlatti
https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/musical-terms-for-the-seventeenth-and-eighteenth-centuries
https://www.metmuseum.org/pt/essays/the-piano-the-pianofortes-of-bartolomeo-cristofori-1655-1731
https://imslp.org/wiki/Keyboard_Sonatas%2C_K.1-555_%28Scarlatti%2C_Domenico%29