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The traveller who visits Palermo today will still be impressed by a city immersed in a thousand-year-old history. After making the pilgrimage to the Teatro Massimo and the Arab instruments decorating the ceiling of the Medieval Cappella Palatina, music lovers can then search the urban landscape for signs from the period that bore witness to the greatest composer of opera prior to Handel: Alessandro Scarlatti
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Alessandro’s theatrical vocation was innate. He was the son of the musician Pietro Scarlata, who after the death of his father was adopted by the composer Marcantonio Sportonio. On his mother’s side, Scarlatti was a descendant of Vincenzo Amato, who had been maestro di cappella of the cathedral of Palermo and was one of the most representative composers of the island. Although nothing is known about his childhood, the Scarlatti family moved to Rome in 1672 and six years later, Alessandro went to live, with his wife Antonia Maria Vittoria, in the palace of the architect and sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the leading figure of the Baroque in Rome. It is very likely that the Neapolitan artist’s influential position led to the beginning of Scarlatti’s rapid success and career in the service of the most important churches and cardinal families until he was discovered by Queen Christina of Sweden and invited to become part of her splendid Roman court. His first opera, Gli equivoci del sembiante, was a huge success, followed by at least another five operas performed in Rome by 1683, in addition to oratorios, cantatas and sacred music.
At the age of 23, Alessandro was already considered one of the most important composers in Italy, and some of his patrons assisted him in the ambitious idea of setting off to conquer one of the main theatrical centres of his time: Naples. The path of the Baroque, on which Alessandro Scarlatti left an indelible mark, can also be traced in the urban landscape of this southern capital. According to the most recent art historians, the Roman Baroque, represented by the ephemeral festival aesthetic, was not introduced into Naples until the arrival of the new viceroy, the Marquis del Carpio, from Rome in 1683. Apart from the musicians headed by Scarlatti, del Carpio’s entourage also included the Schor brothers, Filippo and Giovanni Paolo, architects and decorators and heirs to Bernini. Del Carpio himself had met all these artists thanks to Prince Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna, grand constable of Naples, who was in Rome at the time the former was Spanish ambassador to the Holy See.
Alessandro Scarlatti officially arrived in Naples to take over the direction of the Teatro di S. Bartholomeo, where his operas were already being performed. But after just a few months he was contracted as maestro of the palace’s Real Cappella, together with some of the musicians who collaborated with him. The viceroy’s decision to name Scarlatti maestro without following the usual processes led to a vehement protest by the Cappella’s musicians, who were behind the sixty-year-old Neapolitan Francesco Provenzale. Six of them left the Cappella and were immediately substituted by Roman musicians Scarlatti had brought to Naples. This was the most significant sign of Scarlatti’s distant attitude towards the mechanism of the closed Neapolitan musical world represented by Provenzale, which led him to be labelled il Palermitano. However, less than 10 years later, when Alessandro began to leave Naples with increasing frequency to attend to the international commissions of his works, his substitute as vice-ma-estro was that same Provenzale.
Although he remained in close contact with his patrons in Rome, Scarlatti seemed to acclimatize himself well to the city of the Greek siren Parthenope until around 1700. This was perhaps also due to the extraordinary momentum viceroy del Carpio had given to the arts and spectacle in Naples. Scarlatti composed sacred works for the city’s numerous churches, commemorative cantatas and serenatas for the summer festivals and, above all, 30 operas that brought him fame throughout Europe and allowed Naples to rival Venice for the first time as the operatic capital of Italy.
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