contact: Jeff Matthews

It is relatively easy to find something familiar and enjoyable in literature and painting from the year 1600 —Shakespeare and Rubens, to name but two from an incredibly long list. Yet, music from that year presents some problems. All those things that are familiar and likeable to the average concert-goer today —the symphony, the concerto, the opera, the orchestra, itself— did not yet exist in 1600, and only a music historian, a specialist, would be able to discern in the music that Shakespeare and Rubens surely must have listened to, the ancestor of Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner.      (image above, artist unknown)

It is only in the 1600s, with the development of the Italian opera by Claudio Monteverdi and his contemporaries, that we find music opening to the commercial world beyond the confines of the church and gaining the impetus for new forms, new instruments and new concepts of melody and harmony. Alessandro Scarlatti stands at the end of this period. He is, briefly, the summing up of the entire tradition of Italian music to that time. He inherited a music that did not yet know the forms we accept today as "classical"—the symphony, the concerto, etc.— a music that had still not even settled on our modern harmonic and melodic concepts of major and minor, and a music with meager instrumental resources, to say the least. He left as his heritage advances in the modern opera, the beginnings of the symphony and a decidedly modern direction for harmony and melody; also, by including horns and woodwinds in the orchestra, he laid the foundation of the modern symphony orchestra. 

He was born in Palermo, but spent much of his active life as a composer in Naples and Rome. He was one of the most prolific composers in history, writing 20 oratorios, 600 chamber cantatas, 200 masses, suites for various instrumental combinations and 150 operas! His division of operatic overtures into "movements" was the forerunner of the modern symphony, and his single comic opera, The Triumph of Honour (cover image, above), performed in Naples in 1718, paved the way for the later comic operas of Pergolesi, Cimarosa, Paisiello, Rossini and Mozart.

Here is a short audio excerpt from The Triumph of Honour.

Goethe's remark that "architecture is frozen music," certainly applies to the great German composers of the Baroque. One can easily see in the mind's eye cathedrals lofting and arching on high to the music of Bach and Haendel. Yet, much of Scarlatti's music is just as "cathedralesque," if you will. He was, however, an extremely versatile composer, and therein lies his fascination to the student of music history, even today. For while the Baroque side of him spired heavenward right alongside his German colleagues, the Enlightenment, after all, had dawned, and its attendant musical expression required fewer cathedrals and more architecture of human dimension. Scarlatti's attention to the grace of newer and less ornamental forms set the stage for classicism, and his sense of melody, and even his sense of humor, imbued his art with the kind of musical humanism that would one day be the hallmark of Romanticism, itself.

A. Scarlatti is entombed in the church of Santa Maria di Montesanto in Naples.

2. Alessandro's son, Domenico Scarlatti (1685 in Naples – 1757 in Madrid) (born the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frederick Handel) was the sixth of ten children of Alessandro Scarlatti. Domenico also became a well-known composer. He is classed primarily as a Baroque composer chronologically, although his music was influential in the development of the Classical style. Like his renowned father he composed in various musical forms; today he is known for his 555 keyboard sonatas. He spent much of his life in the service of the Portuguese and Spanish royal families.


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