Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757), Piano Sonata, K. 32 

The eighteenth-century Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti wrote 555 keyboard sonatas during his years of service to the Portuguese and Spanish royal families. His late-Baroque compositions looked forward to the balanced structure, simple melodic writing, and harmonic exploration of the Classical era. The large leaps in this excerpt’s melody hide a more simple underlying long-range melodic motion from the submediant to the tonic.