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Excerpt from Reginald Gerig's Landmark Work, Great Pianists and Their Technique
Two other outstanding harpsichordists of Bach's time were Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757) and George Frederick Handel (1685-1759). Judging from the color and virtuosity, the wide range of skips, and the many chordal and figural devices of his own keyboard works, we can conclude that Scarlatti's technique was extraordinary. He must have used much arm activity as well as a quiet hand and finger position. His playing overwhelmed a traveling Irish harpsichordist by the name of Thomas Roseingrave (1690-1766). Charles Burney, the famous eighteenth century music historian, related Roseingrave's reaction:
Being arrived at Venice on his way to Rome, as he himself told me, he was invited, as a stranger and a virtuoso, to an academia at the house of a nobleman, where, among others, he was requested to sit down to the harpsichord and favour the company with a toccata, as a specimen della sua virtu. And, he says, "Finding myself rather better in courage and finger than usual, I exerted myself, my dear friend, and fancied, by the applause I received, that my performance had made some impression on the company." After a cantata had been sung by a scholar of Fr. Gasparini, who was there to accompany her, a grave young man dressed in black and in a black wig, who had stood in one corner of the room, very quiet and attentive while Roseingrave played, being asked to sit down to the harpsichord, when he began to play, Rosy said, he thought ten hundred devils had been at the instrument; he never had heard such passages of execution and effect before. The performance so far surpassed his own, and every degree of perfection to which he thought it possible he should ever arrive, that, if he had been in sight of any instrument with which to have done the deed, he should have cut off his own fingers. Upon enquiring the name of this extraordinary performer, he was told that it was Domenico Scarlatti, son of the celebrated Cavalier Alessandro Scarlatti. Roseingrave declared he did not touch an instrument himself for a month...
Although Handel, the writer of many excellent harpsichord suites, did not possess J.S. Bach's all-encompassing harpsichord technique, his playing still was excellent enough for Burney again to remark, "His touch was so smooth and the tone of the instrument so cherished that his fingers seemed to grow to the keys. They were so curved and compact that when he played no motion and scarcely the fingers themselves could be discovered."
J. Mainwaring compared the harpsichord styles of Scarlatti and Handel when he wrote in 1760 in his Memoirs of Handel:
Though no two persons ever arrived at such perfection on their respective instruments, yet it is remarkable that there was a total difference in their manner. The characteristic excellence of SCARLATTI seems to have consisted in a certain elegance and delicacy of expression. HANDEL had an uncommon brilliancy and command of finger: but what distinguished him from all other players who possessed these same qualities was that amazing fullness, force, and energy which he joined with them.
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