Scarlatti question

I have sort of a strange question... When I was a teenager I was quite fond of a book called The Porcelain Pagoda (touchstone doesn't work so I guess it must be pretty obscure). It was a historical novel about a girl who sails with her father on a clipper ship to China. In the book she mentions her mother, on board ship, playing a sonata by Scarlatti. She describes it as "the one with the ghost returning from his tomb, dragging his crippled foot up the steps, as he searches for his lost bride." Well, for some reason I've always remembered this description. It made an impression on me and I've always wanted to hear that sonata.
The problem is that I can't figure out which sonata -- out of more than 500 -- it is. (I'm assuming it's Domenico Scarlatti, because that's whom "Scarlatti sonata" usually refers to.) But they are all numbered, of course, rather than named, and as far as I can tell none of them are associated with any particular story or drama, certainly nothing about a ghost.
Do you think the author was just making it up? Or is this a known story associated with one of Scarlatti's compositions?

This book? Porcelain Pagoda

In the next room I have Ralph Kirkpatrick's still-authoritative critical bio of Domenico Scarlatti. I'll be sitting down to dinner soon, but will get back here with whatever I can find. Meanwhile, I don't recall anything like a reference to this enchanting attempt at verbal poetry to match this unquestioned and incomparable musical poetry of DS. What I CAN tell you, from long experience as a concert-goer, collector, and music-historian is this. There is no authentic instance of Scarlatti's attaching descriptions or programs to any of his works. Even the story of the so-called "Cat's Fugue" is probably a pious legend, charm but not much more.
On the positive side, I have a possible source, which you might be able to explore on the Internet. The great harpsichordist Wanda Landowska -- may God rest her, I cannot believe she's been gone for almost half a century -- recorded a number of DS Sonatas, though not (to my knowledge) the entire batch. She had a lively sense of the word, and made several charming attempts to attach images, and sometimes even little stories, to these miniature masterpieces. Sadly, I no longer have any of her recordings here, so I can't check her program notes, but, as I said, she may have inspired your novelist, either to simply appropriate her idea, or to confect something in her style.
You have posed a very fine question. Incidentally, this Group is not very active. You might get a quicker and more satisfactory answer if you repeat your query in the Group of BBC Music Listeners. Several of the participants in that group are also serious collectors of recordings, and that might help. I myself am in Dispersal-Mode. Good luck, -- Goddard (Harry)

Stolen moment during dinner. I think we should keep open minds about this question, not simply because some things are poetically true, even if not empirically accurate. Aside from that, I have lived and worked and studied long enough in the world of music to expect the unexpected -- always. The story about Handel and the blacksmith, though plausible, is false, while the story about Bruckner and the cheese-sandwich, though unlikely, is true. More later . . . OK, dinner's over. Music history has never paid me much, but I have almost always eaten well -- which, sadly is more than could have been said of Scarlatti, toward the end. Anyway, my remarks on programmatic associations are fully confirmed by Kirkpatrick, but he does remind me that Sacheverell Sitwell wote a little book entitled A Background for Domenico Scarlatti. I've never seen it, but knowing something of Sitwell's outlook and style, I wouldn't be surprised to find that he may have been the origin of the crippled-ghost image -- assuming the dates are right; Sitwell's opusculum was published in 1935.

I don't recall ever coming across any programmatic links to the sonatas either. Is the quotation in #1 exact? Scarlatti composed operas and arias, the usual sources of such vivid content. I wonder now whether he reused motifs... with 555 sonatas (I think), it wouldn't be very surprising...

But this is assuming that the author worked from some specific reference (documented or merely suggested). It could be a deliberate invention or an error.

Harry, do you know whether it is known for certain that Scarlatti's Amleto was drawn from Saxo and not Shakespeare? I remember from when I was collecting Hamletiana that there was tantalizingly little known about this (lost?) opera.

In re #5. Cara Lola, I am just too exhausted to face any more serious reading tonight. I CAN check Kirkpatrick tomorrow, but I suspect that the scholarship on DS's operas may have developed significantly beyond what it was when K published his book, though I think his analyses of the Sonatas survives not merely intact, but unexcelled.
For the rest involved in this thread, let me point-out one of those tantalizing ways in which later writers have fooled-around with the earlier work of greater creative spirits. If, as Lola suggests, this is "deliberate invention or an error", that process could have been encouraged by the later writer's awareness that Scarlatti's contemporaries Couperin and Rameau never tired of wrapping their keyboard music with fanciful titles. For us it all gets blurred, because of the nature of modern musical experience. In the Eighteenth Century, Scarlatti's musical environment was light-years away from that of les clavecinistes in France

Just for fun, I Googled "Scarlatti ghost" to see if there's any consensus in attributing ghosts to a particular sonata. Apart frpm demonstrating that there seem to be a lot of fictional characters called "Scarlatti", it came up with one reference to K.119 that might lead somewhere, although it's not very specific: http://soniclabyrinth.blogspot.nl/2010/08/scarlattis-fun-house-sonata-k119.html
There are also quite a few references to a ghost scene in Alessandro's opera Massimo Puppieno

...and a Sylvia Townsend Warner short story from 1973, "The foregone conclusion" that came up on Google Books, in which a ghost writer plays an unspecified Scarlatti sonata. Porcelain Pagoda is from 1976, so it might be worth looking at publications about Scarlatti from the sixties and early seventies.

It is Porcelain Pagoda (not sure why The made that much difference.) The quote is not exact but it's pretty close and it's definitely a sonata. However, I do see upon re-reading that possibly it could be taken as the narrator's fantasy of what the sonata is about. It's not really clear. She also refers to another sonata as being "the one with the peasants dancing the tarantella." I think at the time it gave me that impression that these were well-known stories associated with the sonatas, but perhaps F.N. Monjo was just having a little fun.

I found this quote on the internet of one of Landowska's descriptions:

Of the Sonata in E minor (The Farewells), she writes:

This is, without doubt, one of the most beautiful and significant sonatas. At first it appears to lack balance because Scarlatti introduces a love theme and then interrupts it suddenly with a theme of energetic decision. But these mystifying interruptions and the opposition of the two themes are explained by their arrangement and alternation. They emphasis the accents of the drama which is about to unfold.

In fact, it is a little opera that we are witnessing. The first bars create the dry heavily-scented atmosphere of the piece. In the silence a woman's voice is raised, sustained by arpeggios on a guitar. We have scarcely heard this tender entreaty than it fades away. A decided theme springs up: it is a man's footstep resounding on the pavement. This theme is in its turn interrupted. A silence...then once more the woman's voice is raised, entreating and voluptuous. The theme of decision mingles with the more and more passionate accents of the worman. Their dialogue becomes a struggle in which the theme of decision triumphs: Fate ordains that the man shall depart. Again the footsteps are heard, near at first then fading away - an effect of perpective of which Scarlatti was particularly fond. The woman remains alone. The last bars, which are a pathetic summary of this tragedy, express the poignant farewells of the deserted woman.

Though the story is not the same, the passage in Porcelain Pagoda mentions the sound of the ghost's footsteps climbing the stairs. I suppose that Scarlatti may have re-used this effect or F.N. Monjo may have spun a story of his own, based on Landowska's.

In re #9. Exactly what I was suggesting last night. I am sure that the little prose-poem is a latter-day fantasy based on the sorts of thing we discussed. But it never hurts to know that extra-musical tone-poetry was in the air centuries ago: some musical effects, even if not actually identified by their composers, are unmistakable. I was thinking of a piece written by Froberger, in memory of his friend Blancherocher. The latter died accidentally in a fall -- and at the end of Froberger's piece we hear a downward run which has to represent the actual circumstances of his friend's demise.
Incidentally, as we read Landowska's comments we have to remember how DS could deliver the lover's footsteps first near, then farther away: on the instruments of that time, there weren't the tonal opportunities (and limitations) of modern pianos. Dynamics were what we called "terraced" achieved by different keyboards, or stops, and (secondarily) subtle shifts of phrasing which suggests comparative quiet without actually producing it. The harpsichord, even under the fingers of a genius like Landowska, cannot actually create a fade: if you have VU meters on your home audio-system, this is an instructive thing to check.