PhD Program in Historical studies
Alessandro Scarlatti
Alessandro Scarlatti (Palermo, May 12, 1660 – Naples, October 24, 1725) was an Italian composer of Baroque music, particularly famous for his works. In the opera, he is considered one of the founders of the great Neapolitan School of music. Born in Palermo, was the father of Domenico Scarlatti and Pietro Filippo Scarlatti and elder brother of Francesco Scarlatti.
«Alessandro Scarlatti è un grand’uomo, e per essere così buono, riesce cattivo perché le compositioni sue sono difficilissime e cose da stanza, che in teatro non riescono, in primis chi s’intende di contrapunto le stimarà; ma in un’udienza d’un teatro di mille persone, non ve ne sono venti che l’intendono».
Thus, Count Francesco Maria Zambeccari, acute investigator of the musical costumes and tastes of contemporary audience, identified first (1709) one of the main reasons that contribute to the progressive and inexorable disappearance from the repertoire of almost all the immense work of Alessandro Scarlatti, ie the extreme formal complexity that characterizes the language of an author voted in a severe and rigorous style, supported by the most robust contrapuntal doctrine, learned initially in Palermo, and subsequently refined in the Rome dominated by the figure of Giacomo Carissimi (1605-1674), a composer with whom (according to some scholars) the young Alessandro carried out a brief but intense period of apprenticeship during the first months of his stay in the Eternal City. Already in that period, the Sicilian musician (who in 1678 had obtained the post of Kapellmeister at the Church of S. Giacomo degli Incurabili) was known for the amazing mastery of the most complex rhetorical devices, which he was able to use in his works not separately from the sublime vein of melancholy that was beginning to veil the freshness of the melodies still mindful of the predominant influence of the Venetian school and Alessandro Stradella (1644-1682), the protagonist of Roman music that was going to end his ill-fated romance and parable of man and composer in the distant Genoa at the hands of an unnamed murderer.