Solo keyboard music is, in its origins, a total monstrosity. The early keyboards of the Middle Ages and Renaissance were completely bound by the human voice, either in terms of imitating it or by improvising or composing decorative glosses around it. Even as instruments became sturdier and acquired a greater range by the late Renaissance, the essentially parasitic quality of the instrument remained in the works of the first great soloists—mostly in England and Italy—for the harpsichord. By tracing the various levels of inspiration for solo keyboard music—from the strains of the human voice and folk song to the rhythms of dance and movement, whether courtly or popular—we, paradoxically perhaps, come to a realization of the inherent powers of the harpsichord independent of any other sound worlds. In this sense, Orlando Gibbons and Domenico Scarlatti wrote music of the same basic kind, even if they came out of worlds that had no immediate conception of harpsichord language in and of its own idiosyncrasies and internal meanings. In Gibbons’s case, the harpsichord starts to speak independently (that is to say, on its own terms) through successive variations that put the human voice far behind the recesses of the listener’s sonic mind. In Scarlatti’s case, the harpsichord comes into its own through a dialectic between abstract musical logic and an almost grotesque imitation of every possible sound—even the grunting of animals. In these cells of imitation and melodic invention, Scarlatti found kernels for his own form of motivic and harmonic development, which, in turn, liberate the harpsichord from other methods of sound-production.

While Handel’s 1720 collection of eight “great” suites (called so to differentiate them from the lesser suites of 1733, issued without the composer’s authorization by his ever-enterprising publisher John Walsh) were issued for the London market, there is no doubt that the composer’s robust, and even experimental, style at the keyboard—insofar as it was known in manuscript copies throughout Germany—had a tremendous impact on J. S. Bach. The Suite No. 2 in F Major from Handel’s collection (HWV 426–433) is a case in point when it comes to understanding Handel’s quietly innovative style, with a searching arioso for the first movement and recitative-like third (concluding in the dominant of the relative minor), giving a sense of something much more classical—and indeed, forward-looking—than the standard suite sequence of Allemande-Courante-Sarabande-Gigue. What we have in the F-Major Suite is more accurately described as a sonata in the Italian form, concluding with a fugue on the sort of bold, stirring theme one finds in larger-scale works for vocal and instrumental ensemble. This handling of expressivity at the harpsichord (through the prism of what is essentially orchestral music) does not, however, mean that Handel was somehow lacking in sympathy for the keyboard compared to Bach; in fact, his ability to evoke a wide range of sonic landscapes was exactly what Bach emulated in his larger-scale suites.

Like his standoffishly gregarious sonatas, Scarlatti seems rather more mysterious than a good many of his contemporaries. We know more than the basic details about his life; yet, behind the gaze of the couple of portraits we have at hand, it is very hard to make out a distinct personality. Surely someone who depicted life with such varied brushstrokes and vivid colors must have been a rather singular human being. At a time when composers and artists were basically imported (particularly from Italy and France to places like England, Spain, and the German-speaking world) for their mastery of national idioms—which in turn were prized as aesthetic commodities that showed off the sophistication of their patrons—Scarlatti showed himself remarkably adept at absorbing the sounds of his adopted Iberian home, first in Portugal (1719–1727) and then in Spain (1727–1757). To be sure, there is an overwhelming sense of a distillation of life through a courtly lens in his music, but the fundamental mixture of rawness and delicacy that characterizes Scarlatti’s style is as removed from the central musical language of the period as can be imagined. To say that he grimaces where others frown might hold true for a handful of pieces that entered the pianistic canon largely by virtue of their shock value—hence the preponderance of what Burney called “original and happy freaks” in the collections of dilettantes predisposed to see Iberian music as primarily concerned with the senses to the exception of all else. But for most of the sonatas—some 90 percent of which are still virtually unknown to the average listener—Scarlatti’s genius lay in his ability to call upon all the tools of tonal music to conjure the poetic impression that occupies a gray space between objective truth and pure feeling. Scarlatti is particularly unique among his contemporaries for confronting and engaging with ideas whose full expressive potential would in other, more conservative, hands most likely be compromised.

With J. S. Bach we have a completely different set of values. Here the capabilities of the plucked string are taken to a point so distant from the voice and the lute and the organ that his writing is often taken as being somehow unidiomatic for the harpsichord. One hears this as an unquestioned collective wisdom only, alas, among harpsichordists—the justification being that basically everything else written in the 18th century is easier to navigate on the harpsichord than Bach. Besides being an example of a confusion between antiquity and greatness in the case of 90 percent of old composers, this mindset represents a profound misunderstanding of why Bach decided to write for the harpsichord in the first place: We should remember, of course, that he knew what the pianoforte was, and he chose not to write for it. For what the instrument lacks in the kaleidoscopic monumentality of the organ, or the pastel-colored whispers of the clavichord, it possesses a greatly underestimated ambiguity between an angular clarity and a positively sensual ability to blur and separate notes with infinite variety—reminding us of the power of the pencil sketches and etchings of great masters.

The sixth of the so-called English Suites (BWV 811)—while ostensibly built on the High Baroque model particularly in terms of its succession of movements—has many of the elements of the more fashionable styles coming out of Italy and England alike. The opening Prélude is obviously an example of the transference of Italian concerto style to a solo keyboard instrument with two manuals, a relatively new development in instrument design in the early 18th century. Bach most likely composed the English Suites while he was Hoforganist at Weimar (1708–1717); this was also where he transcribed a considerable number of modern concertos by Vivaldi and others that were brought to the court by the reigning prince’s younger brother, himself an enthusiastic musician. The rest of the dances likewise exhibit the meeting of the French keyboard manner with the bold and plastic themes inspired by Italian music. The Courante in particular, with its running bass, is reminiscent of movements in François Couperin’s Les Apothéoses that combine the styles of Lully and Corelli, the two great exponents of their respective national styles who meet in heaven and each play their violins simultaneously as Couperin imagines the transcendent beauty of the gouts réunis. Surely it is this meeting of styles (and minds and distinct personalities) that forms the primordial soup from which Bach developed his own musical language.


—Mahan Esfahani