Le Chat

Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757), the Italian-born harpsichordist and composer, spent the second half of his career in service to Maria Bárbara of Braganza, who became Queen of Spain on the accession of her husband Ferdinand VI in 1746. Scarlatti had followed Maria Bárbara from Lisbon to Madrid in 1729 and remained as her keyboard master until his death in Madrid on 23 July 1757. The earliest publication of his sonatas was the Essercizi per gravicembalo, a folio of thirty pieces issued in London in 1739 under his own supervision; the Essercizi quickly circulated through European keyboard circles. The thirtieth sonata in the Essercizi, K. 30 in the Kirkpatrick catalogue (Ralph Kirkpatrick, Domenico Scarlatti, Princeton University Press, 1953), is the so-called Cat Fugue. The piece opens with a four-note subject in ascending chromatic motion across nearly two octaves, irregular in interval and unusual in shape, which nineteenth-century European concert programmes began annotating with the tradition that the subject arose from a household cat stepping across the keys of Scarlatti's harpsichord. The cat's name, Pulcinella, is given in late-nineteenth-century Italian biographical sources including Alessandro Longo's preface to the eleven-volume Opere complete per clavicembalo (Ricordi, 1906–1908), and is attributed to the Burney circle of Charles Burney's pupils who travelled to Madrid in the 1770s seeking surviving Scarlatti anecdotes. Modern Scarlatti scholars including Kirkpatrick, Malcolm Boyd (Domenico Scarlatti: Master of Music, 1986), and W. Dean Sutcliffe (The Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, 2003) treat the story as plausible but unverified. Scarlatti himself left no surviving autograph mention of any cat, and the Essercizi preface notes only the technical inventiveness of the harpsichord writing. The cat-fugue tradition is consequently treated in current musicology as an anecdotal halo around an unusually angular fugue subject rather than as a documented compositional event. The story is still routinely repeated in concert programme notes from major harpsichord soloists from Wanda Landowska onward.