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.