Alessandro Scarlatti: Spanish Folies for Piano Keyboard

The Italian composer Alessandro Scarlatti is most famous as a composer of operas and related forms, but he wrote other music too including keyboard works such as this "Spanish Folies". The idea of the Spanish Folies is a sequence of chords, one per bar, which repeat allowing the composer to create a set of variations. In a way this sequence is like the "12-bar blues" of its day, and many composers (especially during the baroque era) have used this same sequence to create their own variations. It was called Spanish Folies because the thinking was the chord sequence originated in Spain but no-one knows the original composer. Alessandro Scarlatti's Spanish Folies is quite a short work, consisting of just 4 variations on the chord sequence. As well as the name "Spanish Folies" the musical theme is sometimes referred to as "La Folia".

There is an oddity in the 4th variation of Scarlatti's verion because many scores and recordings feature 2 bars which are repeated, so the final variation is 18 bars long rather than 16 like all the other varations. It might be that this is intentional and Scarlatti wrote the extra bars to add drama to the final variation. Personally I wonder if perhaps there was a transcription error at some point which has been perpetuated in multiple editions over the years, and no-one has noticed or commented because it sounds OK. For mathematical perfection, the repeated bars have been omitted from our midi and mp3 files, though our sheet music score indicates the bars as an optional repeat. These downloads and other links are included in the left-hand menu.