The fertility of the period in forms of this character was notable in itself and in its prefiguring of the completed sonata-form that followed. Instrumental music was approaching a great culmination, to the success of which many minds contributed and in which several lines of previous effort were united and fused. In practical advance the Germans and the Italians took the lead, the former being strongest in contrapuntal methods, the latter in suggestions derived from operatic and purely secular styles. All were feeling their way toward architectonic types of the greatest breadth.
Here, again, no exhaustive survey of workers is possible. But certain
pioneers require special mention:—
Domenico Scarlatti (d. 1757), born at Naples in 1685, the son of Alessandro Scarlatti, the opera-writer, studied with him and with Gasparini at Rome. His genius as a clavecinist developed early, but his first known works were operas at Naples and Rome (from 1704). In 1709 at Rome he and Handel were pitted against each other on the harpsichord and the organ, and were adjudged equal on the former. From 1715 he was Baj's successor as choir-*master at St. Peter's in Rome, from 1719 opera-cembalist at London, from 1721 court-cembalist at Lisbon, and from 1729 in court service at Madrid. Of his many clavier works, all notably compact, he himself published only two collections (probably between 1730 and 1745). Though not fully appreciated in Italy, his extreme originality was widely known elsewhere. He contributed to the range of keyboard execution, especially in the use of the crossed hands, double runs, repeated notes, wide skips, etc., and also to the emancipation of keyboard composition from its contrapuntal trammels in the direction of a free style that was essentially modern in its homophonic and harmonic point of view. He thus distinctly advanced the tendency toward the modern sonata, though his own works were usually dances in fantasia-form, and are regularly cast in one movement only.
J. S. Bach (d. 1750), whose life covered almost exactly the same years as the foregoing, was a diligent worker in this field. In it, as elsewhere, he stood preeminent for depth of intuition and freshness of invention. His greatest strength was put forth in the sonatas and concertos in which solo instruments and the clavier were combined in a semi-orchestral manner. In these, as in many preludes, toccatas, etc., for the organ or the clavier alone, he showed a prescient sense of the contrast in subjects and the progress in keys that mark the later sonata, though his prevailing idiom of expression was too intricate in texture for a permanent type.
Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach (d. 1788), the second surviving son of the great Bach, was the most important link between this period and the next in the use of extended forms. Born at Weimar in 1714, thoroughly trained in music by his father and finally educated otherwise at Leipsic and Frankfort, from before 1740 he was clavecinist to Frederick the Great. In 1767 he followed Telemann as cantor at Hamburg, where the balance of his life was spent. He
