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By Michael Clive
Precious little of Giovanni Pergolesi’s music survives today, and there wasn’t much of it to begin with—considering that he died at the tragically young age of 26. But what we do know of his creative output is tinged with mystery and even a hint of glamor. Music historians agree that Pergolesi is the first example in European classical music of a composer whose greatness was not fully discovered until many years after his death. By the time his reputation and his music were rescued from obscurity, much of both had been lost. Today he is esteemed for two works in particular: the brashly witty opera La serva padrona (“The Servant-Mistress”) and the beautiful Stabat Mater.
Biographical notes on Pergolesi’s life resemble those for any number of composers whose careers flared brightly only to be extinguished too soon. He was born in the Italian town of Iesi. His father, a surveyor, was sufficiently well-connected to assure his talented son a good musical education and opportunities for commissions after graduation. But his talent proved even more important, earning him a substantial operatic commission before he was out of conservatory. By age 26, when he succumbed to what is believed to have been a respiratory illness (probably tuberculosis), he had established himself as an important figure in the development of 18th-Century Italian opera.
The story might have ended with his untimely death in 1736, except that the rediscovery of his delightful La serva padrona posthumously re-ignited Pergolesi’s fame, which then ascended to heights that the composer had not known in life. In France, where the opera was published in 1752 and later revived in an adaptation called La servante maîtresse, Pergolesi’s brief comedy (composed as an “intermezzo opera”, it’s scarcely twenty minutes long) became cannon fodder in a kind of operatic trade war. Opera buffs will recall that Donizetti’s La fille du regiment had also sparked protests by partisans of musical style at its premiere in Paris in 1840. Guardians of authentic French-ness in music, including Berlioz, were incensed. Were there not equally fine comic operas by French composers? Frankly, the answer was no. Pergolesi’s opera, as Helmut Hucke notes in the 1980 edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, is a work of “true genius.” At that particular moment, native-born practitioners of French operatic comedy were not composing at that level.
Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater is further proof of his genius, and, like La serva padrona, it became enormously popular. The text of the Stabat Mater is a depiction of Mary sorrowfully watching her son die on the cross, and Pergolesi’s rendering combines the melodic richness and grace of his operas with a depth and maturity befitting its solemn religious subject. It was composed in the last year of the composer’s life, and it is likely that Pergolesi, who had always suffered from ill health and whose only siblings had died in childhood, was contemplating his own mortality with each note. But while the score abjures the buffo conventions of his operas, it is far from austere; instead, it has a vibrancy that vivifies its religious themes. The scoring, for two vocal soloists and string orchestra, is identical to that for the Stabat Mater of Alessandro Scarlatti, suggesting that both were composed for one of the innumerable musical competitions of the time.
Critics consider the Stabat Mater to be Pergolesi’s greatest surviving composition. First published in London in 1749, it became the most frequently printed musical work of the 18th Century in Europe.
It’s possible that composer Igor Stravinsky and conductor Ernest Ansermet were victimized by overzealous Pergolesi enthusiasts when they collaborated on the score for Pulcinella. The musical source material for the ballet, first attributed to Pergolesi, turns out to have clouded origins—probably other Baroque composers. But does that really matter? Whatever its sources, the music for Pulcinella is vintage Stravinsky above all, and it is brilliant.
It is also decorous, elegant, and classically proportioned. These are adjectives that no one expected to describe a work by Stravinsky in 1919, just five years after the revolution he fomented with his thunderous Sacre du printemps; in fact, Stravinsky himself was skeptical at first. Ernest Ansermet had been approached by impresario Serge Diaghilev to serve as music director for his latest brainchild: a ballet based on an 18th-Century play, Quatre Polichinelles semblables (“Four Identical Pulcinellas”) in the commedia dell’arte tradition. It was Diaghilev who found the musical sources in Naples and London, where then-current scholarship credited them to Giovanni Pergolesi. Though time has since cast doubt on their attribution, they are gorgeous, and in Stravinsky’s hands they glitter like diamonds. The sophisticated rhythms, cadences and harmonies are distinctively Stravinsky’s.
Writing for the authoritative The New Grove in 1980, Eric Walter White and Jeremy Noble chose not to dwell on either Stravinsky’s initial resistance or the question of musical authenticity, noting “Stravinsky obviously fell in love with the Pergolesi pieces that had been put at his disposition; and the resultant ballet Pulcinella was a great success when produced at the Paris Opéra (15 May 1920).” We’ll call that British understatement. This was a level of creativity twhat made Paris in the Twenties legendary: Diaghilev’s storied Ballets Russes in an inspired new ballet with costumes and sets by Pablo Picasso, choreography by Leonid Massine, and music by Stravinsky.
Pulcinella inaugurated what came to be known as Stravinsky’s neo-classical period. As the composer himself wrote, “Pulcinella was my discovery of the past, the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible. It was a backward look, of course—the first of many love affairs in that direction—but it was a look in the mirror, too.” In later years, the touchstone for Stravinsky’s profoundly modern neo-classicism was his reverence for the music of Joseph Haydn.
The story of Pulcinella presents recognizable commedia dell’arte archetypes and situations. Its saucy soubrettes toy with suitors who are ambitious and lovesick by turns. The scenario enfolds three romantic couples and two protective fathers in a single act divided into 21 sections and as many complications, pranks and disguises. After bouts of jealous scheming and mistaken identity, all is resolved in a triple wedding.
Pulcinella is scored for a chamber orchestra with three vocal soloists: soprano, tenor and bass. Stravinsky revised the score in 1965, and also arranged it as an orchestral suite without vocal parts, but the full ballet score with vocal soloists works marvelously when presented in concert.
