HOME workouts have flourished in the pandemic but, forsaking the latest gadgets and gurus, I’ve been sticking to the free Domenico Scarlatti exercise programme at the living-room piano: a regimen three centuries old, and as effective today as it was when it put baroque bodies to the test.

Hand-crossing was the domestic keyboard workout of choice for the 18th-century virtuoso and amateur, and Scarlatti was the most flamboyant purveyor of the technique. Born in 1685, the same year as Bach and Handel, the Italian spent most of his career on the Iberian peninsula.

He outlived his celebrated contemporaries, maybe because his keyboard calisthenics gave him the edge in the longevity race.

His instrument of choice was the harpsichord — the piano still being the new kid on the keyboard block —  and all worked equally well for Scarlatti’s self-improvement schemes.

His collection of 30 sonatas was published as the Essercizi (Exercises) in London in late 1738 or early 1739. For those who had the money to buy this sumptuous volume, here was a hand-crossing workout regime graduated in difficulty from the almost relaxed to the downright sadistic.

Scarlatti’s keyboard exercises are not the treadmill drudgery of 19th-century piano pedagogues Hanon and Czerny. Instead, Scarlatti’s workouts are full of irreverent humour, bizarre ideas and exotic touches.

His sonatas require not only dexterity but a level of physical fitness literally out of reach of some, perhaps even the composer himself in his later years.

One devotee claimed that Scarlatti eventually grew “too fat to cross his hands as he used to do.” But the portrait of Scarlatti painted around the time of the publication of the Essercizi, when he was in his 50s, shows him trim enough to get through his own workout regimen.

So capricious and obsessively “unidiomatic” were the uses to which Scarlatti put these techniques that in some cases he introduced them as arbitrary feats of virtuosity rather than for musical considerations.

For the fleet parallel thirds of the penultimate number of the Essercizi (K.29), Scarlatti specifically demands that they should be played with the hands crossed, when they could far more easily be delivered without such contortions. Thus the easy is made difficult and the exertions remain imperceptible, it is hoped, to any listener unable to see the player.

Hand-crossing spread north at least a two decades before the publication of the Essercizi. Many touring musicians met Scarlatti in Italy before his removal to Portugal in 1719. These travellers would have brought back reports of his astounding virtuosity at the keyboard and, perhaps, some of his music, as apparently Thomas Roseingrave did when returning to England after his encounter with Scarlatti in Venice in about 1710.

The German Handel faced off against Scarlatti in a famous contest at the harpsichord and organ in Rome in 1708 or 1709. Handel’s published works offer only a glimpse of his activities as a keyboard virtuoso and provide but a single example of hand-crossing. These tricks don’t span a great distance, but Handel does make things difficult for the player by placing the hands in tight quarters at high velocity.

From the middle of the 1720s, the Bach family also set about exploring the potential of this crowd-pleasing technique. JS Bach finished off his first published keyboard piece, the Partita in B flat of 1726, with a joyous and gimmicky gigue (baroque dance) dedicated to hand-crossing. Bach’s sons and students were soon practising and composing pieces that revelled in kindred high jinks.

In 1728, Jean-Philippe Rameau, the towering figure of 18th-century French music, published his Nouvelles Pieces de Clavecin (New Harpsichord Pieces), which include a celebrated instance of hand-crossing, Les Trois Mains (The Three Hands).

The title brings to mind physical feats  — or deformities — that pushed far beyond the everyday. The piece begins with the hands on top of each other and soon breaks into a spate of vaulting, though the approach is more poised than the unbuttoned exuberance of Scarlatti’s efforts.

Four years earlier, Rameau had introduced some lively hand-crossing into Les Cyclopes, where the left ricochets back and forth over the right, perhaps evoking the flailings of the blinded Polyphemus trying to fell the fleeing Odysseus.

The difference is that the harpsichordist must hit the mark each time. Rameau beat JS Bach into print by two years with his take on the newest keyboard agility drills.

Even though the Essercizi were not published until 1738 or 1739, they were most likely composed 15 or more years earlier, before the composition of Bach’s first partita or Rameau’s three-handed crowd-pleaser.

By mid-century, these keyboard calisthenics had spread the length of Europe to Sweden, where the German-born organist HP Johnsen produced a set of six sonatas that contains numerous hand-crossings and other technical idiosyncrasies strongly indebted to Scarlatti.

Versions of the workout routine were cultivated in Spain too, where Scarlatti’s pupil Antonio Soler continued to explore these musical aerobics with great calorie-burning originality.

The initial examples of hand-crossing that appeared within a few years of each other in the 1720s and the 1730s could not have been independent, isolated events. The experiments with this awkward idiom by northern Europeans like the Bachs took inspiration from the same “ingenious jesting with art” flaunted by Scarlatti in the preface to his Essercizi.

The keyboard workouts logged from Leipzig to London to Madrid to New York, and from the 18th century to the 21st, prove the irresistible appeal of outlandish musical challenges for mind and body.

This article first appeared in Counter Punch, counterpunch.org. David Yearsley's latest book is Sex, Death, and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks. He can be reached at  dgyearsley@gmail.com.