This is an early sonata by Scarlatti that first appeared in the volume of Essercizi per gravicembalo (30) in 1738. It could well date back one or two decades or so before that year, like most of the works appearing in that publication, which was the first containing keyboard sonatas by Scarlatti. This C minor effort is less lively sounding than one would expect from its Allegro marking, and while it is not exactly leisurely paced, either, it comes across as one of Scarlatti's more reflective and darker early works.

The Sonata opens with a melancholy but graceful theme, presented in the right hand but taken over by the left, which, in a clever contrapuntal maneuver, deftly graduates from harmonic support to assuming the main line, managing the switch in an ingeniously seamless transformation, all the while maintaining its dark but consolatory character. The second subject is brighter, even playful in its livelier music, but despite the suddenly more upbeat mood, the overall sense of gloom is not dispelled. Scarlatti develops his thematic material in the latter half of the work, following a pattern he used throughout his series of 555 keyboard sonatas. Here he continually contrasts the melancholy with the playful, and the dark with the spirited. This three-minute masterwork ends quietly, ambivalently.

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