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As to the opera-house, he must by now have felt that he was its unquestioned autocrat, and he could not help being aware that he was without a rival in Europe as far as the stage was concerned, for old Scarlatti had gone to his grave, and the younger generation had produced no composer of such outstanding eminence.
"An undefined and sudden thrill, Which made the heart a moment still, Then beat with quicker pulse." The music of Allessandro Scarlatti was then current and universally popular in Italy.
It is just possible that Handel may have met Alessandro Scarlatti at Pratolino in the previous autumn, as his opera Il Gran Tamerlano was produced there in September; he may well have met him between January and April of 1707. From April to September Alessandro Scarlatti was in Urbino. Handel's movements now become very difficult to follow.
"The fault with many students, however, is the very erroneous idea that genius or talent will take the place of study and work. They minimize the necessity for a careful painstaking consideration of the infinite details of technic. To them, the significance of the developments of Bach, Rameau, and Scarlatti in fingering means nothing. They are content with the superficial.
Of course, a successful performer must have a strong individuality, and all of his interpretations must bear the mark of this individuality, but at the same time he should seek variety constantly. A Chopin ballade must have quite a different interpretation from a Scarlatti Capriccio. There is really very little in common between a Beethoven Sonata and a Liszt Rhapsody.
He was beaming all over, none the less, and soon making arrangements with other guests for a series of picnics and boating excursions getting on swimmingly, in fact, when the thoughtless Madame Steynlin captured him and began to talk music. He repeated that remark, too good to be lost, about the spinet; it led to Scarlatti, Mozart, Handel. He said Handel was the saviour of English music.
Domenico Scarlatti got some wonderful results; but his music simply tickles the ear for a moment: meaning it has none. Polyphonic music of every sort had now to go for a while; monodic music was coming in. But before it could come in with any degree of security something else had to come and something else to go.
Domenico Scarlatti is said to have identified him at Venice at a masquerade by his playing of the harpsichord.
People went to talk and to be seen as well as to see and hear; they do so in certain opera-houses still. And the Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket possessed the greatest opera-composer living, a greater even than Scarlatti himself. It was a period when there was still a considerable tradition of musicianship among the amateurs of English society.
Despite the great number of études that have been written, imagine for one moment what a desert the technic of music would be without Czerny, Clementi, Tausig, Pischna to say nothing of the great works of Scarlatti and Bach, which have an effect upon the technic, but are really great works of musical art.
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