Even those of us who believe that the European Music Year is an invention of Saatchi and Saatchi can hardly deny that la generazione dell'ottantacinque was a formidable crew. How J.S. Bach, Handel and Domenico Scarlatti all came to be born in 1685 must be ascribed to chance; no juggling with the facts of cultural history can possibly account for it. Indeed, the common factor between them is precisely that they were all outsiders in one way or another: Bach because he was a Kantor, Handel because he worked in England, Scarlatti both because he lived in Spain and because he remained a very specialised keyboard player and composer. The insider would have been an Italian opera composer playing the European market. He would have been unlikely to be a virtuoso player. That was to come in Mozart's time with the invention of the pianoforte.

LRB 19 September 1985 | PDF Download