Мадрид

Madrid keeps the queen who kept Scarlatti. The concert record's Madrid address is the Parroquia de Santa Bárbara — the church of the royal Salesas convent — and it holds a musical tomb of the first order: Barbara de Braganza, the Portuguese queen of Spain who founded the convent, lies here in marble splendour, and it was for her — his pupil from her childhood in Lisbon to her death — that Domenico Scarlatti composed the greater part of his five hundred and fifty-five keyboard sonatas: the largest single act of patronage in the harpsichord's history, buried under a Madrid altar beside King Ferdinand VI. A church as a footnote to a sonata catalogue — Madrid's musical depths begin there and widen to the Teatro Real's opera, the Auditorio Nacional's seasons, the Zarzuela's native genre and a concert life as dense as any capital's.

Above ground, the city runs on its triangle of paintings — Prado, Thyssen, Reina Sofía, from Las Meninas to Guernica within one stroll — its Habsburg plazas and Bourbon boulevards, the Retiro's crystal palace, and a nocturnal metabolism famous on the continent. San Isidro's fiestas keep the chulapo folklore; the tapas crawl is municipal infrastructure. A queen, her teacher, five hundred sonatas: Madrid's grandest music hides in a parish.