Other notes - Domenico Scarlatti

For our Good Friday worship service the Emmanuel Choir offers a very rare and beautiful work by Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757), his Stabat Mater for 10 solo singers and continuo. 

Scarlatti wrote this impressive, comprehensive piece early in his career, long before he escaped the oppressive influence of his father Alessandro (who was Italy’s leading opera composer) by moving to the Iberian Peninsula.  In Spain and Portugal, during the last 30 years of his life, he wrote his extraordinary series of over 500 keyboard sonatas, laying full claim to recognition as third great master, with Bach and Handel, of the late Baroque. 

This mastery was hardly hidden while he was a young composer.  Even his dominating father, in a rare effort to support his son’s independence, recommended his nineteen year old son as “an eagle whose wings are grown, he must not remain idle in the nest, I must not hinder his flight.”  Nevertheless hinder he did, soon recalling him, and steering him toward opera, which was not his natural bent.

The Stabat Mater text is a 13th-century Franciscan hymn. It has attracted many composers, among them Josquin, Palestrina, Alessandro Scarlatti. Pergolesi, Dvorak, Lizst, and Verdi.  Although such settings are often positioned late in the Lenten cycle, we offer it near the beginning, confident that its dignified but never distant character will strongly establish the temper of the season.

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