II
In Italy itself, three men stand out most prominently, Alessandro Scarlatti, his son Domenico, and Arcangelo Corelli. Alessandro Scarlatti is one of the most brilliant figures of the period. Unhappily it is but another proof of the futility of opera music of that time that so little of his work has survived. His productiveness is nothing short of prodigious. He wrote at least 114 operas and, besides these, 500 cantatas, both for solo voice and for two voices, church music and oratorios. Born in Sicily and living at two periods in his life at Naples for several years, he was long held to have added a new flavor to Italian opera and to have founded a school of opera in Naples distinct in character from other Italian opera. But, except for the unusual charm of his personal genius and a higher artistic instinct than that with which most of his contemporaries were endowed, his music hardly differs from theirs. Certainly he is one of the most important figures in the history of music, in that he rounded Italian opera into smooth, polished shape and left it clearly defined as a model for all opera composers during the course of the next century. He was born in Sicily in 1659; the exact place is not known, but his family was of Tuscan origin. His youth was spent in Rome, where serious traditions of music still lingered; and there, under what teachers no one knows, he acquired a thoroughly solid foundation and that light, sure grasp of technique which shows in his music in striking contrast to the careless work of many a contemporary then famous. From 1684 to 1702 he was in Naples, occupied principally in composing operas for production at the royal palace or at the theatre of San Bartolomeo. The Neapolitan taste was frivolous and, there can be little doubt, was harmful to the composer, by nature inclined rather to comply with it than to defy it. Yet by 1702 Scarlatti could stand it no longer, and for nine years lived in various of the big Italian cities, always writing operas, successful and highly honored. He returned to Naples in 1713. A few years later the Neapolitans lost interest in his music and he went again to Rome. In 1723 he was back again in Naples, quite out of favor with the public, apparently forgotten by his own generation; and here he died on the 24th of October, 1725. During the last year of his life Johann Adolf Hasse, destined to universal popularity as a composer of operas in the Italian style, was his pupil.
The great number of da capo arias in Scarlatti’s works gave rise to a belief prevalent for many years that he was the inventor of this form, which is mainly responsible for the degeneration of Italian opera into the state of meaningless vapidity in which it is found during the following century; but the growth of the form and its use can be traced in the works of his predecessors. He gave to the form, however, its perfect outline, and, though none of his arias can be said to touch any emotional depth, they are models of a perfect vocal style never since excelled, and even to-day are pleasing by the faultlessness of their structure and the elegant smoothness of their flow. Scarlatti established this conventional form to the exclusion of all others. How strongly it prevents dramatic action has already been shown in a previous chapter; but Scarlatti in establishing it so firmly in Italian opera was but complying with the demands of audiences of his time, and should be less blamed for his acquiescence to popular taste than praised for the beauty with which he was able to clothe it. He bequeaths to his followers thereby one of the few valuable accomplishments of Italian opera composers of the seventeenth century, a form of music wonderfully adapted to show off the beauties of the human voice.
Moreover, he may be said to have invented the accompanied recitative. At any rate his opera Olimpia vendicata (1686) gives us the earliest known examples of it, and, though he used it seldom, that he thought to use it at all is indicative of his genius, which, not bold enough to explore the realm of effects in the face of a frivolous public, might, under more favorable circumstances, have broken free of the conventions closing tighter and tighter about Italian opera. With his operas appear the first approximately definite models of the Italian overture. These overtures when played with the operas to which they were preludes were called sinfonie, but when played in concert apart from the operas were called overtures. They consisted of three distinct parts or movements—the first a solid allegro, the second a slow expressive movement, and the last light and lively. How much the form had influence upon the development of the symphony is shown by the fact that several of Haydn’s early symphonies were published under the name of overtures.
Other works even nearer general oblivion than Scarlatti’s operas are his secular cantatas. These are less influenced by the demands of the public, and are in general representative of his ideals. Not only are the recitative and the arias in smooth, flawless style, but the accompaniments, frequently enriched by instrumental parts added to the figured bass, are full of expressive harmony. That they are less remembered than the operas is due to the fact that the form ceased to be cultivated after his death. Handel’s cantatas, like his operas, show the influence of Scarlatti; but Handel’s cantatas, too, are forgotten.
In that he left in his operas a model of perfect form for that style of opera which was popular and successful during the next century, his influence was strongly felt, and he was imitated by countless composers who, unhappily, fell far short of his musicianship. Hasse was actually his pupil, Handel his follower; they alone were worthy of their predecessor. His figure is a striking one in the history of music, both by itself and in relation to the time which cramped and confined it.
His friend Arcangelo Corelli won a lasting fame as the first great violinist and composer of music for the violin. He was born at Fusignano in Italy in February, 1653. During his early life, about which little is known, he appears to have travelled in Germany and France, but before 1685 he had settled in Rome, where, save for a few journeys, he remained till the end of his life in January, 1713. In his lifetime he lacked neither friends nor appreciation. His works achieved immediate popularity in all the countries of Europe. Only in Naples, whither he went in 1708, did he fail to win success. Stories of his meetings with Scarlatti and with Handel show him to have been a man of gentle, kindly nature, unspoiled by the homage done him by royalty and by the first people in Italy. His position in the history of music is of twofold importance; for not only was he a great player who laid a firm foundation for the future development of violin technique, but a composer who summed up in his works what had been done in music for an ensemble of string instruments, and left models of genuine musical worth which were to serve composers of instrumental music until the full development of the symphony.
His works were published in six sets or opera, still justly famous. Sets one and three consist of twelve sonate da chiesa; two and four, of twelve sonate da camera. The fifth contains twelve solo sonatas for violin with bass and figured bass; and the sixth is made up of concerti grossi for three solo instruments, called the concertino, and an accompaniment for two violins, viola, violoncello, and figured bass, called the tutti. The sonate da chiesa and the sonate da camera differ from each other more in name than in content. The sonate da chiesa or church sonatas are, as might be expected, of rather serious character, the chamber sonatas are more frankly rhythmical; and, whereas the movements of the former are without titles and stand as absolute music, those of the latter frequently bear the names of the dance forms from which we have seen the sonata da camera developed. But the two kinds are closely related. The form in which all are cast is fundamentally tripartite, with an introductory movement. The introduction is in a slow, solid style, after the manner of the old pavan. The first movement proper is in the dignified contrapuntal style of the allemande, the second in the style of the sarabande—slow and expressive—and the last is lively and usually in the rhythm of the gigue. They are all written for three instruments, with figured bass for organ, harpsichord or lute. What is most striking about them, apart from their excellent fitness for the instruments for which they were written, is the compactness of form, the neat balance and proportion toward which composers had been toiling during the century. Here at last is mature instrumental music, music that can stand alone, that is firm and articulate. In the church sonatas, it is true, he sometimes chokes the life of the music in the contrapuntal web which was still in his day the high serious ideal of musicians, but the chamber sonatas are astonishingly free from it. Even more striking is the fine mastery of form and style shown in the twelve solo sonatas. These, too, are of the two kinds, church sonatas and chamber sonatas. In them there is no trace of uncertainty nor of insecure experiment. Master of the violin as he was, his treatment of the solo passages and his ornamentation have lost none of their beauty to our ears more than two hundred years after he wrote them. There is no trace of the slow-moving vocal style which had so long hampered his predecessors; all is purely instrumental. In him a great victory was won and a branch of music established for all time. It is noteworthy, too, that he was guided by a good taste which restrained him from writing passages merely for technical display. The feverish desire to astonish audiences, evident in the works of his famous contemporary, Vivaldi, is nowhere evident in his own; and, though they may seem to lack fire on this account, they are the more musical for being the less brilliant. His works still have their place in the repertories of great violinists. What must strike the listener is the just proportion between form and content, giving them a serene dignity; for, as the form is simple, so is the emotion equable and cool, and there is no empty pretentiousness, on the one hand, nor inadequacy of means, on the other.
The concerti grossi present a relatively new form. The first eight are built upon the same plan as the sonate da chiesa; the last four contain dance movements in the style of the sonate da camera. In the eighth is the famous ‘Pastorale.’ The term is used as early as 1698 (Lorenzo Gregori: Concerti grossi, op. 2) to signify a composition for two or three solo instruments with more or less elaborate orchestral accompaniment or background. The solo instruments repeat what the orchestra plays, with some elaboration and fine shading. Out of the concerti grossi Torelli and Vivaldi developed the solo concerto, limiting the concertino to one single violin. In this new form the solo passages present new material independent of what the tutti has announced, and are distinct episodes filled with brilliant pyrotechnics.
Arcangelo Corelli.
Corelli and Scarlatti must both be given an important place in the history of music. Of the two men, Scarlatti had the greater genius, but he turned it to use in a form of music which could not develop beyond where he left it, which was radically false and destined to oblivion. Corelli, on the other hand, composing far less, gave violin music the secure foundation upon which all later musicians have built, and left examples of simple instrumental music which still hold their place by force of their calm, genuine feeling. It is strange to think of Corelli on tour in Naples some two hundred years ago, sitting nervous and confused at the head of Scarlatti’s orchestra, stupidly making mistakes; and of Scarlatti, then at the pinnacle of fame, polite and kind.
Alessandro Scarlatti’s son, Domenico, was born in Naples in 1685, during the second year of his father’s stay there. With whom he studied is unknown, but in his youth he was both in Naples and Rome. His first work was in Naples. In 1705 his father sent him to Venice with the great singer Nicolino, and gave him a letter to Ferdinand de Medici in Florence in which he wrote: ‘This son of mine is an eagle whose wings are grown; he ought not to stay idle in the nest, and I ought not to hinder his flight.... Under the sole escort of his own artistic ability he sets forth to meet whatever opportunities may present themselves for making himself known—opportunities for which it is hopeless to wait in Rome nowadays.’
In 1708 Handel came to Venice and the two men seem to have gone to Rome together for a competition on harpsichord and organ before Cardinal Ottoboni, the generous patron of Corelli. At any rate, the competition took place and Handel was judged the better organist, while the victory for harpsichord was undecided. After this the two young men, of the same age, became warm friends. Handel shortly after established himself in London, but Scarlatti’s life was always a wandering one. He was at various times in the service of the Queen of Poland in Rome, as composer for her private theatre; maestro da capella of St. Peter’s, where he composed sacred music; in London, producing his operas; in Lisbon; and, finally, at the court of Spain, where he was appointed music-master to the princess of the Asturias. After fifteen years in Spain he returned to Naples, and died there in 1757. He left no money, but his family was provided for by the great singer Farinelli, who, likewise, had been many years at the court of Spain in highest favor.
Domenico Scarlatti’s operas and masses are now forgotten, but his fame as a composer for the harpsichord is immortal. What Chopin and Liszt did for the pianoforte music of their day Scarlatti did for music for the harpsichord in his. It has been often said that he was the founder of the pianoforte style. This is true, unless the French composer François Couperin shares the honor with him. Of the brilliant virtuoso style he is unquestionably the founder. His instinct for style and form made no false step, and his music is astonishingly sparkling and fresh when played by modern virtuosi on the modern pianoforte. The works of his French contemporaries, Couperin and Rameau, are unmatched in delicacy and grace and a most refined sentiment; still it may be said that their charm to modern ears consists not a little in an exquisite old-fashioned spirit which breathes from a court life long since ruthlessly stamped under foot, whereas Scarlatti’s music compels attention and admiration even to-day by its vigor, flash, and daring. Moreover, it is free as air from all heaviness of rhythm or of contrapuntal intricacies and yet is none the less clear-cut and perfect in form. It is, first of all, virtuoso music. Most of the pieces demand the utmost speed and lightness of touch. Among the most difficult devices he frequently employed is the crossing of hands, by which he obtained instrumental effects hardly less brilliant than those of Liszt. And yet his music is not all empty display. There is an epigrammatic clearness about it which has the sparkle of all genuine wit, irrespective of the time which gave it birth, and at times there is a masculine touch of poetry, enriched by various expressive harmonies, notably in one, the most famous of his sonatas, that in D minor, which is familiar to all concert-goers in the elaborated form and higher key into which Tausig has transcribed it. Unlike other composers in his day, he did not set four or five pieces together in a suite, but kept his pieces separate, and called each one a sonata or an exercise. Nor did he label any of them with the dainty suggestive names that became the fashion in France and Germany. They are all short and all in the same form. Each is made up of two sections, one of which begins in the tonic and modulates to the dominant, or, if the key is minor, to the relative major; the other from this key back to end in the tonic, frequently by way of contrasting remote keys. Both sections are repeated in their turn. The effect is one of precise balance and clearness. There are generally two quite distinct figures or even themes which are employed in such a way as to suggest the sonata form of later development, the first given at the start in the tonic key, the second in the second part of the first section in the dominant or relative major; and the sparkling liveliness of the pieces depends not a little on the contrast and play of these two distinct figures, their neat and regular arrangement, and the satisfying return of them in the second section of the piece. Such an aptness, such a clear-headed wit is hardly met with anywhere else in music. If the glitter of Scarlatti’s harpsichord music is sometimes hard, it is never false. It is the glitter of a diamond, not of tinsel. It has never tarnished. It flashes brilliantly from an age when much was false—clean-cut, polished, impervious, and, in its pointed way, defiant.
Thus in Italy three men sum up the seventeenth century and inaugurate the eighteenth. They were not alone in their day, but their contemporaries, once equally famous, have for the most part sunk into an oblivion from which only the enthusiastic historian recovers them. And even the most gifted of these three, Alessandro Scarlatti, becomes daily less a substance and more a shade, though what there was of intrinsic worth in the Italian opera of that time was developed and adorned by him to stand as a model for Handel, for Haydn and Mozart, and for Rossini and Verdi. Corelli, his friend, and Domenico Scarlatti, his son, built with less perishable stuff and on the foundations which they laid for the branches of music in which they were adept great monuments have been reared. Their genius and their musicianship were less great than those of the elder Scarlatti, but their compositions were of a piece with reality, not, like his, the adornment of a false and meaningless convention. Hence their music still speaks for itself to-day, a language sometimes thin, but in the main clear and strong, whereas others must speak for Scarlatti. In the oratorios of Handel and in the vocal works of Bach the best of what the Italian opera composers of the seventeenth century accomplished was perpetuated, and Scarlatti was unquestionably the greatest of these composers. The seeds of his genius were thus transplanted from the sterile soil in which circumstances had forced him to sow them and they bore fruit in strange forms and alien lands.
So ended the supremacy of the Italians in the history of music. After the death of Scarlatti the Neapolitan opera became wholly trivial. The list of composers is long. Some are distinguished by a certain elegance of style, such as Feo, Vinci, and Cafaro, others by a cleverness in handling the orchestra, such as Durante, and still others, notably Porpora and Leo, were very great teachers of singing; but for the most part they were all as like as eggs and none added anything of lasting value to music. The comic opera alone had any real life. This, the last creation of the Italians, was powerful in directing the course of music and will be treated in another chapter.