Domenico Scarlatti - Sonata in G Minor, K.30 “Cat’s Fugue” (Analysis)

Domenico Scarlatti Sonata in G minor K.30 Cat’s Fugue
An extraordinary fugal subject, a cat that may never have walked across Scarlatti’s keyboard, and a legend that followed the music for two centuries: K.30 transforms its initial uncertainty into a compelling musical architecture.

The opening phrase of K.30 seems to have entered the music before deciding what kind of music it belongs to. A solitary note sets the line in motion, but the expected melodic path never arrives. Wide leaps, chromatic edges and remote-sounding intervals delay any firm recognition of G minor. We sense that an order is taking shape, yet for a few moments its centre remains withheld.

From this arresting beginning grew the story that carried the piece far beyond the harpsichord world: a cat, so the tale goes, walked across Scarlatti’s keyboard, and the composer preserved the accidental succession of notes as the subject of a fugue. The image suits the subject wonderfully, but no source from Scarlatti’s lifetime confirms that the episode occurred. Neither the first edition nor the preface to the Essercizi mentions a cat, and the familiar nickname belongs to a publishing and concert tradition that emerged decades later.

That historical distance does not make the work less intriguing. It reveals its double life. On one side stands the last of the thirty Essercizi per gravicembalo, the only substantial collection of Scarlatti’s sonatas issued under his direct supervision. On the other stands the nineteenth century’s “Cat’s Fugue”, circulated in anthologies, arrangements and virtuoso programmes until the anecdote nearly eclipsed the music’s genuine audacity.

Even the word “sonata” calls for a small qualification. The original print presents the pieces as numbered Essercizi—exercises, trials or studies for harpsichord—without the later individual titles by which many are now known. “Sonata in G minor, K.30” is the established modern catalogue name: K refers to Ralph Kirkpatrick’s catalogue, while L preserves the earlier numbering of Alessandro Longo.

The composition date cannot be stated with complete confidence. The London edition appeared in 1738–39 and was dedicated to King João V of Portugal, but K.30 predates the print and survives within a complex network of manuscript and printed sources. It is therefore important to separate the date of composition, which remains uncertain, from the date of publication, which is securely associated with the first edition of the Essercizi.

The piece’s position at the end of that volume is nevertheless highly suggestive. After twenty-nine works exploring velocity, leaps, hand crossings, repeated notes and the brilliance of the keyboard, Scarlatti closes the sequence with a severe fugue. This is no dutiful retreat into an older style. It sounds more like a final demonstration of how an inherited contrapuntal process could absorb his own unsettled harmonic imagination.


Movements / Structure

K.30 is a single fugal movement of 152 bars, written in 6/8 and marked Moderato. It does not divide into repeated halves like many of Scarlatti’s one-movement sonatas, nor does it depend on a symmetrical binary plan. Its continuity grows from successive appearances of the subject, episodes derived from smaller elements of that subject, and a long harmonic trajectory that eventually restores G minor with far greater weight than it possessed at the opening.

The initial exposition introduces the voices one after another and gradually gives the strange subject a polyphonic setting. A broader developmental span follows, alternating thematic returns with sequences, suspensions, chromatic shifts and episodes of increasing harmonic mobility. Near the close, denser writing and a firmer assertion of the tonic transform the opening uncertainty into a conclusion that has been earned across the whole course of the fugue.


Musical Analysis

A subject that withholds its ground

The subject begins on G, yet what follows does little to establish the tonic immediately. Its line opens abruptly towards remote notes, passes through chromatically charged intervals and turns back in a descending tail that seems to seek its point of origin after the fact. Its identity lies in more than a collection of “odd” leaps. Those intervals delay functional interpretation: the contour is memorable before its harmonic purpose becomes predictable.

This delay is the work’s first dramatic resource. Had the subject declared G minor unequivocally, the later entries would merely confirm an identity already known. Instead, every return adds meaning to the first statement. The fugue does more than repeat its subject; it gradually teaches us how to hear it.


The exposition and the creation of depth

When the second voice takes up the subject, the first does not disappear but continues in free counterpoint. Further entries widen the register and suggest a four-voice conception, although the texture does not remain permanently divided into four equally independent strands. 

At times the lines are sharply distinct; elsewhere they gather into pairs, parallel thirds or sixths, suspensions and more chordally conceived sonorities.

This flexibility is central to Scarlatti’s design. Counterpoint does not operate as a mechanism fixed at one density. It contracts and expands according to harmonic need. Space opens when an entry must be heard clearly; as a cadence or climax approaches, the lines draw together and the keyboard assumes a heavier, almost orchestral presence.


Episodes, sequences and shifting tonal perspective

After the exposition, K.30 never fully abandons its subject, even when the complete statement falls silent. Fragments of its descending tail, rhythmic shapes and intervallic memories pass into the episodes, where sequences carry the music from one harmonic region to another. The effect resembles movement through adjoining rooms under changing light: the original shape remains recognisable behind each alteration of perspective.

Suspensions postpone resolution, syncopations displace metrical weight, and chromatic inflections briefly blur the direction of travel. The intensity does not depend on spectacular dynamic contrasts—hardly the harpsichord’s principal resource—but on the friction between the motion of individual lines and the harmony produced by their meeting. As a sequence rises or falls, familiar material acquires a different gravitational pull without surrendering its identity.


The 6/8 meter: movement without lightness

Six-eight might invite a buoyant, even dance-like reading, but the Moderato marking and the weight of the fugal writing establish a different atmosphere. The two broad beats in each bar sustain a measured flow, while the smaller subdivisions allow the voices to pass through one another without breaking the sense of continuity.

The deepest rhythmic tension arises where the melodic line refuses to settle comfortably on strong beats. 

Syncopations and held notes create expectations that resolve later than anticipated; the descending portion of the subject can sound at one moment like a completed statement and at another like an impulse still driving the music onwards. 

Time is not a neutral frame here. 

It participates directly in the work’s harmonic restlessness.


Accumulated energy and return

As the fugue proceeds, thematic entries cease to feel like isolated events and become landmarks within a larger journey. The texture gains weight, harmonic distances seem broader and cadences become more consequential, while the original material remains recognisable throughout. A subject that initially sounded almost alien has acquired a memory: every return carries the resonance of what preceded it.

The final restoration of G minor therefore sounds like more than the fulfilment of a formal obligation. The key that was first implied more than proclaimed now possesses the force of a destination. The music arrives where it began, but our hearing has changed. Ambiguity has become structure, and the unconventional line has revealed itself as the bearer of an increasingly inevitable harmonic order.


Fugue at the end of the Essercizi

K.30 belongs to the relatively small group of Scarlatti’s explicitly fugal keyboard works, yet its place in the collection makes it especially significant. The Essercizi survey an extraordinary range of technical and compositional problems: rapid repetition, wide leaps, hand crossings, rhythmic drive and abrupt harmonic turns. 

The final fugue concentrates that exploratory spirit within a procedure already associated with the learned art of counterpoint.

Scarlatti does not treat fugue as an exercise in reproducing a single model, and comparison with Bach should not become a scale of value. In K.30, the polyphonic process serves a strongly harmonic conception. The voices retain relative independence, yet the drama depends just as much on cadences, sequences, suspensions and changes of density. Learned procedure and freedom are not opposing principles; the second renews the first from within.


Tonal ambiguity and harmonic framework

G minor is the work’s stable point of reference, but not a reality offered complete at the beginning. The subject avoids the most obvious signs of tonic confirmation and includes notes whose purpose becomes clearer only when the line is placed within a contrapuntal setting. This is why the opening seems so enigmatic: we hear identity before we hear certainty.

Beneath the surface of successive entries, however, lies a firm harmonic framework. Sequences organise large spans, cadences create temporary zones of stability, and suspensions turn the meeting of voices into points of expressive pressure. Harmony is not merely the passive result of counterpoint. It becomes a second narrative mechanism, equal in importance to the recurring subject.


Three voices or four? A texture in motion

K.30 is commonly described as a four-voice fugue, a useful account of its overall contrapuntal conception. It should not suggest four permanent, uninterrupted lines of equal independence. 

The keyboard texture continually narrows and expands: voices merge in parallel motion, inner strands emerge or recede, and the number of genuinely distinct layers changes from moment to moment.

This mobility is not a failure of contrapuntal rigour. It is Scarlatti’s way of adapting fugue to the physical and harmonic character of the keyboard. The performer must therefore shape a moving perspective rather than a fixed hierarchy: which line temporarily carries the narrative, which supports the harmony, and which prepares the next entrance?


Harpsichord and piano: two kinds of illumination

The first edition designates the Essercizi for harpsichord, and on that instrument K.30 reveals the clarity of its articulation, entries and suspensions with particular immediacy. Since expressive weight is not controlled by key pressure as on the modern piano, hierarchy depends on note length, articulation, subtle timing and the performer’s ability to distinguish several levels within one sonorous surface.

On the piano, the long harmonic trajectory can acquire greater dynamic depth and the voices can be separated through carefully graded planes of sound. That freedom brings a danger. 

Continuous legato, generous pedalling or an insistently Romantic crescendo can blur the articulation and turn polyphony into an undifferentiated mass. 

A persuasive piano performance need not imitate the harpsichord, but it must keep the architecture audible.


From Clementi and Reicha to Liszt

K.30 acquired an unusually rich afterlife. Early in the nineteenth century, Muzio Clementi included it in the second volume of his Selection of Practical Harmony under a title already presenting it as the celebrated “Cat’s Fugue.” 

Around the same period, Anton Reicha used Scarlatti’s subject in a fugue of his own, later incorporated as No. 9 in the Trente-six fugues. The unusual theme had begun to live independently of its original setting: a musical object recognisable enough to be borrowed and reimagined.

Franz Liszt and Ignaz Moscheles later helped carry the piece into the concert hall, while arrangements and editions adapted it to nineteenth-century pianistic expectations. Scholars have also noted a resemblance between the unusual intervallic profile of K.30 and the second movement of Handel’s Concerto grosso, Op. 6 No. 3, composed in 1739. The chronology makes the possibility attractive, but it does not establish direct borrowing. The connection is best treated as a plausible relationship, not as a documented fact.


💡 Musical Insight 

When did the cat enter the story?

The scene is so vivid that it seems older than the sources that tell it. We picture Scarlatti at his harpsichord, perhaps in a quiet room at court. A cat climbs onto the instrument, crosses the keys and leaves behind a sequence with no obvious melodic logic. The composer pauses, hears within the accident something no one else would have noticed, and turns its trace into a fugue.

Yet the sources from Scarlatti’s lifetime are silent. The first edition identifies the piece simply as the thirtieth Essercizio. It says nothing about a cat, and no surviving letter or contemporary testimony ties the subject to such an incident. Even the name “Pulcinella”, frequently repeated today as if it were a biographical detail, has no secure eighteenth-century documentation and should not be presented as fact.

The cat appears later. In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, Clementi printed the work under the title “The Celebrated Cat’s Fugue”, wording that suggests the nickname was already recognisable. Editions, performances and anecdotes gradually supplied additional detail until a compact title became a complete narrative: the animal, the composer, the accidental keys and the instant of discovery.

The legend survived because the music makes it sound possible. The subject lacks the smooth symmetry of a melody apparently designed to be sung. Its wide spaces and delayed tonal clarification create the impression of notes that have fallen upon the keyboard and acquired meaning only afterwards. The listener’s imagination seeks an image for that unorthodox opening, and the cat provides an irresistible one.

Historical honesty need not dispel the story’s charm. We can acknowledge that the cat most likely belongs to the work’s reception while understanding why it became inseparable from the music. Perhaps the more revealing tale is not how an animal composed the subject, but how generations of listeners heard its opening and felt that such strangeness demanded a legend.

🎧 Listening Guide

At the subject’s first appearance, resist the urge to locate G minor immediately. Listen instead to the contour: the opening G, the widening intervals and the descending tail that turns back towards its point of departure.

As further voices enter, the line ceases to sound isolated. Each new statement casts it in a different harmonic light, while the voices already present continue around it and create depth.

During the episodes, attention can shift from the complete subject to its smaller residues. Sequential motion, descending figures and rhythmic cells keep its memory alive even when the full statement is absent.

In suspensions and syncopations, tension grows through delay. One note remains in place while the harmony moves beneath it, creating friction that needs no dramatic change of volume to be felt.

Near the close, G minor becomes firmer and the texture gains weight. The return does not merely restate the beginning: the subject now sounds familiar because the fugue has taught us the logic by which it lives.


🎶 Further Listening

These three performances illuminate contrasting aspects of K.30 and make possible a revealing comparison between the harpsichord’s articulated clarity and the modern piano’s dynamic resources.

  • Scott Ross — harpsichord: lucid and unsentimental, with sharply focused entrances and a strong sense of the work’s complete trajectory.
  • Ottavio Dantone — harpsichord: a more rhetorical, flexible account, alive to pulse, articulation and the changing density of the texture.
  • Yevgeny Sudbin — piano: a modern piano reading that uses colour and dynamic depth while preserving the fugue’s layered architecture.

📚 Further Reading

  • Ralph Kirkpatrick — Domenico Scarlatti: The foundational study of Scarlatti’s life, sources, chronology and musical language. Later scholarship has revised some details, but its importance remains undiminished.
  • W. Dean Sutcliffe — The Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti and Eighteenth-Century Musical Style: The major modern analytical study of the sonatas, especially valuable on form, harmonic syntax, repetition and Scarlatti’s aesthetics of disruption and surprise.
  • Marco Moiraghi, ed. — Sonate per clavicembalo, vol. 10: Essercizi per gravicembalo: Casa Ricordi’s critical edition systematically compares printed and manuscript witnesses and provides the strongest modern textual basis for K.30.
  • Dana Gooley — The Virtuoso Liszt: Essential context for nineteenth-century concert culture and for the place of the “Cat’s Fugue” in Liszt’s programmes, where Scarlatti’s work acquired a new public identity.

🔗 Related Works

  • Domenico Scarlatti — Fugue in C minor, K.58: Another example of Scarlatti’s fugal writing, useful for hearing how differently he reshapes contrapuntal procedure from one work to another.
  • Johann Sebastian Bach — Fugue in G minor, BWV 861, from The Well-Tempered Clavier: The shared key highlights two distinct conceptions of fugue: Bach sustains a more continuously linear discourse, while K.30 gives unusual weight to harmonic displacement and fluctuating texture.
  • George Frideric Handel — Concerto grosso, Op. 6 No. 3: second movement: Its unusual fugal intervals have been linked with K.30. The resemblance is worth hearing, provided it is treated as a possible relationship rather than proven borrowing.
  • Anton Reicha — Fugue in G minor, Op. 32 / No. 9 from the Trente-six fugues: Reicha explicitly adopts Scarlatti’s subject and carries it into the experimental world of fugue around 1800.
  • Amy Beach — Fantasia fugata, Op. 87: A 1923 work that consciously revives the idea of a feline-generated subject, demonstrating how far the cultural shadow of Scarlatti’s legend extended.

🎼 Closing Reflection

The “Cat’s Fugue” became famous through a story that probably never happened. Its music, however, preserves something more truthful than the anecdote: the instant at which an unfamiliar succession ceases to sound accidental and begins to disclose its hidden necessity.

In K.30, order is not given in advance. It comes into being as we listen.

📖 References & Sources

This revision draws on a comparison between the first edition of the Essercizi per gravicembalo, modern critical editions and catalogues, and the principal scholarship on Scarlatti’s form, harmonic language and performance practice. Evidence for the cat story has been treated separately as part of the work’s later reception, so that the early printed use of the nickname, its concert circulation and the anecdotes subsequently attached to it are not confused with a documented event in the composer’s life.

Scores and critical editions

  • Scarlatti, Domenico. Essercizi per gravicembalo. London: B. Fortier, 1738. First printed edition of the collection, with K.30 as the final Essercizio.
  • Scarlatti, Domenico. Sonate per clavicembalo — Edizione critica. General editor Emilia Fadini; vol. 10, Essercizi per gravicembalo, ed. Marco Moiraghi. Milan: Casa Ricordi, 2021.
  • Scarlatti, Domenico. Sonates, vol. 1, ed. Kenneth Gilbert. Paris: Heugel, 1984, pp. 96–99.
  • Kirkpatrick, Ralph, ed. Sixty Sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti. New York: G. Schirmer, 1953 and later editions.

Primary sources and reception documents

  • Scarlatti, Domenico. Preface and dedication of the Essercizi per gravicembalo to João V of Portugal, 1738.
  • Clementi, Muzio. Selection of Practical Harmony, vol. 2. London, early nineteenth century. K.30 already appears under the title The Celebrated Cat’s Fugue.
  • Reicha, Anton. Fugue composée sur un thème du célèbre Domenico Scarlatti, Op. 32, c. 1802; later No. 9 in the Trente-six fugues pour le pianoforte, Vienna, 1803.
  • Beach, Amy. Fantasia fugata, Op. 87. Philadelphia: Theodore Presser, 1923. A later document in the creative reception of the feline fugue legend.

Secondary studies

  • Kirkpatrick, Ralph. Domenico Scarlatti. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953; revised reprints.
  • Sutcliffe, W. Dean. The Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti and Eighteenth-Century Musical Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
  • Boyd, Malcolm. Domenico Scarlatti: Master of Music. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986.
  • Pagano, Roberto. Scarlatti: Alessandro e Domenico, due vite in una. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1985.
  • Pagano, Roberto, with Malcolm Boyd. “(Giuseppe) Domenico Scarlatti.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, vol. 22. London: Macmillan, 2001.
  • Newton, Richard. “The English Cult of Domenico Scarlatti.” Music & Letters 20, no. 2 (1939): 138–156.
  • Gooley, Dana. The Virtuoso Liszt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
  • Keefe, Simon P., ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Concerto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Relevant to discussion of the possible relationship between K.30 and Handel’s Op. 6 No. 3.

Digital and institutional sources

  • Casa Ricordi — Domenico Scarlatti Critical Edition: official account of the edition’s method, editors and volume devoted to the Essercizi.
  • Bibliothèque nationale de France: authorised title and catalogue information for Sonata K.30.
  • RISM — Répertoire International des Sources Musicales: catalogue records for the first edition and surviving sources.
  • IMSLP / Petrucci Music Library: digitised historical scores of the Essercizi, K.30, Reicha’s fugue and Amy Beach’s Fantasia fugata.
  • Bärenreiter: edition data for Reicha’s 36 Fugues for Piano and identification of Scarlatti’s subject in Fugue No. 9.