Father of classical music has a vision and seeks an audience

Ask any listener or concert-goer to name a piece by Alessandro Scarlatti that they really like and I guarantee they will struggle. In two of the more frequented superstores for classical music, Spotify and the BBC Proms, his stock is low. The Proms is not, of course, noted for its inclusion of music that predates Mozart but in more than 125 seasons there have only been five Scarlatti performances, mostly arias, and none this century. On Spotify, where the most popular Handel tracks can notch up 20 million streams, the highest score for Scarlatti measured in September 2025 is O cessate di piagarmi recorded by Nora Fischer in 2018. Clocking in at just over four million this is not your customary Baroque authenticity: stripped of vibrato and ornamentation, accompanied by an electric guitar, her performance is closer to jazz and pop. At number five in the same Spotify chart is Cecila Bartoli’s recording of the same aria, sung straight as though plucked from Il Pompeo, Scarlatti’s third opera. A well-known aria for beginner singers, its heartfelt melancholy over a lilting accompaniment, typically Italian, has instant appeal. It was written when he was still only twenty-two. The other eight most played tracks of his trail behind at around the 500,000 mark, a mixture of arias and concerto grosso movements. 

The quantity of music composed by Scarlatti is astonishing: over 600 chamber cantatas (some say 800), more than 100 operas, 34 oratorios, 10 masses and 70 instrumental works. “No Italian Baroque composer produced more varied or more vividly singable music in his time than Alessandro Scarlatti” ¹ and yet three major categories of his oeuvre are little known and rarely performed: his sacred music, oratorios and operas. Are there other gems like O cessate that have remained hidden in this unexplored oeuvre? There are passages in the St Cecila Mass, which comes closer to the end of Scarlatti’s career, that indicate there might be. After all, scale has not been such a deterrent to Telemann, so is there some other barrier?

Edward Dent, endeavouring to do for Scarlatti what Spitta had done for Bach and Chrysander for Handel, had to admit that much of his music (with notable exceptions) tended to be dull, citing one of Scarlatti’s many letters that reveals something of the composer’s methods, whereby he seems to imply that composition was almost a mechanical process for him, and that the function of the imagination was not to direct but to criticize. And indeed the process, strange as it may seem to a generation that has not yet been able to shake off the false sentiment of the romantic movement, was yet legitimate and natural enough to a composer who belongs to the severest period of classicism, when beauty and purity of style were still considered as more important than originality and violence of expression. ². Scarlatti was in some ways less fortunate than Bach or Handel. He had to write to make a living and to compete with other musicians for audiences that had been attuned to musical drama for nearly a hundred years. The requirement for perspiration rather than inspiration relied on the application of considerable amounts of musical formulae and, indeed that ‘mechanical process’ is instantly recognisable in many passages of the St Cecilia Mass, especially in the Kyrie and Gloria.

Before looking at the many redeeming features of the mass, a brief history. Towards the end of his life Alessandro Scarlatti, back in Rome after a second spell in Naples, wrote a series of sacred works for the Basilica Santa Cecilia including the St Cecilian Vespers (1720) and the St Cecilia Mass (1721) together with its companion gradual Audi filia, et inclina aurem, and some motets. They were commissioned by and dedicated to Cardinal Francesco Acquaviva of Aragona, an important supporter of the cause of Philip V in the War of the Spanish Succession and benefactor of said titular church ³. 

The Basilica is said to have been erected in the time of Pope Urban I over the site of St Cecilia’s 3rd-century Roman house and her relics are preserved beneath the high altar, marked by Stefano Maderno’s recumbent statue (ca. 1600). Today it remains the conventual church for the adjacent Benedictine abbey, and the feast of Saint Cecilia on 22 November continues to draw pilgrims, choirs, and musicians from around the world.

Was Cecilia a real person? Some scholars now think she is mythological but that her husband Valerian and his brother Tiburtius were indeed early Christian martyrs referenced in contemporaneous texts. Remains that were attributed to her were discovered in the catacomb of St. Callistus in Rome and were transferred to the church in Trastevere around the year 820. During the move, Pope Paschal I proclaimed that Cecilia was an incorruptible—a saint whose body decomposes incredibly slowly, or not at all. A similar proclamation was made in 1599, when Cecilia’s tomb was being renovated, but her remains reportedly disintegrated after inspection. It was also in the 16th century that the cult of St Cecilia evolved, beginning in France, and she became increasingly associated with music, “appearing in visions to all musicians” as Auden would write four centuries later. The cult was certainly well-established musically by Scarlatti’s time: Charpentier’s St Cécile, Purcell’s ode Hail, bright Cecilia (1692) and Quirino Colombani’s Il Martirio de di Santa Cecilia (1701) are all precedents for Scarlatti’s oratorio with the same title, written in 1708 to a libretto by Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni. ⁴. Scarlatti’s Martirio is a dark and tragic work and contains an especially beautiful aria at the point where Cecilia dies. It’s a companion piece to two other oratorios he wrote with tragic subjects in the previous years: Sedecia, re di Gerusalemme (1705) (notable for its duet Col tuo velo singled out for special praise by Dent) and Cain overo Il primo omicidio (1707).

There are explicit references to St Cecilia in the St Cecila Mass as Christopher Hair’s notes to the full score explain:
Structural unification is… evident at various points in the mass through the quotation of the plainsong Introit for the feast of Saint Cecilia, presented in full on the first page of the only surviving manuscript of the work. The fugue subject mentioned above is the first five notes of the introit, as is the countersubject of the sublime Agnus Dei. The second phrase – “de testimoniis tuis” – is quoted during the Credo at the words “et in unam sanctam catholicam”.

There is, indeed, a strong sense in performance that the whole of the Agnus Dei, the Miserere section of the Gloria and at the words Et incarnatus est in the Credo, are designed to empathise with her. They are very different in style to the surrounding music in that there is a deliberate stepping back into stile antico as a metaphor for her incorruptible status. ⁵ 

The prevailing musical style of the Mass is stile moderno. Christopher Hair again:
The St Cecila Mass, together with the earlier Messa per il Santissimo Natale [1707], is the only one of Scarlatti’s ten authenticated masses to be composed in the ‘stile moderno’ rather than in the austere and archaic ‘alla Palestrina’ style. [5. Dent p. 114: It was still [i.e. ca. 1700] the tradition to write masses ‘alla Palestrina’, and Scarlatti accordingly produced the ” Missa Clementina I” in 1703, and in 1706 a mass for Cardinal Ottoboni. The first is well written and contains many canons, but although, judging from the number of copies to be found, it seems to have excited the admiration of professional contrapuntists, like the Mass in F, which is all in canon, it is extremely dry. Of the ecstatic feeling of Palestrina there is not the least trace] Indeed, in some ways the present work is a curious mixture of styles: on the one hand there are moments that look back to the strict counterpoint of the Palestrina style (e.g. the Agnus Dei), while on the other we are transported to the world of the secular cantata and the opera house (e.g. Domine Deus). Scarlatti displays his mastery of contrapuntal devices throughout, nowhere more so that in the two fine fugues – both using the same subject – that conclude the Gloria and Credo: the former is a bipartite double fugue. 

In rehearsal it is immediately apparent that solo voices carry the bulk of the text while the chorus is there primarily to punctuate and emphasise key words. The writing for the soloists is mostly decorative, rippling between adjacent notes and staying close to the tonic key, characteristics that could be enervating in a dry acoustic but calculated to appeal and inspire, as though in adoration, in a resonant church acoustic. 

I sense deeper currents of thought at work in the St Cecila Mass. Dent’s summary concurs: He is entirely devoid of the hysterical romanticism which makes wild experiments in the vague hope of expressing the inexpressible; musical composition is for him a science, “the daughter of Mathematics”. ⁶. Not only mathematics. Scarlatti’s first patron was the self-exiled Queen Christina of Sweden, one of the most erudite women of the 17th century, a generous supporter of the arts and founder of the Academy of Arcadia. She was also heavily into Neoplatonism, magic and astrology so would certainly have subscribed to the Renaissance learning of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), humanist priest and philosopher, the first to translate the entire extant works of Plato:
Ficino believed that the ideas of Plato and other ancient philosophers, especially about virtue and the soul, were divinely inspired, a second revelation parallel to the Hebrew Old Testament, and equally important for understanding the New Testament. ⁷

Ficino folded Platonic theory into Christianity and returned religious thinking to the connection between Man and God, the union with the Divine, rather than splitting hairs about the definition of terminology. He taught a new reverence for the authority of the old, including the power of ancient magic to reveal Heaven on Earth. Music played a vital connective role:
In the Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love  Marsilio Ficino notes that music is the instigator of the soul’s awakening, realignment, and journey toward unification with God or the Neoplatonic Good…. Celestial harmonies awaken the soul and stir within it desire for unification, and they are the final catalyst in preparing it to move beyond itself and into the Good. ⁸

This is just a supposition on my part that requires more thorough research than time allows here, but in their sacred works  Baroque composers seem to be adhering implicitly to Ficino and I detect its strong undercurrent in the closing Agnus Dei of Scarlatti’s St Cecilia Mass, that strives to connect the souls of the performers and audience to the Divine and to something ancient and authentic.

Dent makes no comment on Scarlatti’s religious belief but the St Cecila Mass, with its brief diversions into the opera house, is a sincere statement of his faith and is rightly considered the crowing achievement of his sacred music. The invocation of St Cecilia provides a subtext that elevates it above routine liturgy.

The last word here on Alessandro Scarlatti should go to Dent:
Well did Cardinal Ottoboni describe him for his own age when he wrote upon his tombstone “musices instaurator maximus” We, some two centuries later, tracing the development of his art through Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms along those lines which he was the first clearly to lay down, may legitimately interpret the words — Father of Classical Music. ⁹

Portsmouth Baroque Choir will perform the St Ceciia Mass with the Consort of Twelve in resonant St Paul’s, Chichester on October 18th. Tickets