Giovanni Battista Pergolesi

“ At home you will be the second master, I promise you.
(Enter Uberto, dressed to go out.)
Uberto I hope that my servant – or now, better to say, my mistress – will grant me permission to leave the house.
Serpina Look at this! Without my permission, he got himself dressed.
Uberto Now indeed your impertinence has come to the summit. Arrogant! And she dared to ask me to marry her!
Serpina (to Vespone) Hide in that room for a minute, And at the right time, come out.
Uberto Here she is now. Let's get this over with. Can I or cannot I? Will you, or will you not, my lovely mistress –? ”

“ Eminent among these young men, whose work and fame are to be permanently preserved and esteemed, is Giovanni Battista Pergolese, the span of whose life hardly exceeded a quarter of a century, and the number of whose compositions appears small in proportion to the influence he exerted and the new impulse he imparted to the musical world a hundred and fifty years ago. ”

“ There seems, however, no ground for supposing that this work made any noticeable difference to the composer's already established reputation as a writer of comic opera. About this time (1733-1734) Pergolesi entered the service of the duke of Maddaloni, and accompanied him to Rome, where he conducted a mass for five voices and orchestra in the church of St Lorenzo in Lucina (May 1734) . There is no foundation for the statement that he was appointed maestro di cappella at the Holy House of Loreto; he was, in fact, organist of the royal chapel at Naples in 1735. ”

“ Get out of here. Still, I brought her up, from when she was born Eh! you're crazy! Softly, for heaven's sake! Eh... better not think of it. But... I have a fondness for her, And yet, that wretched girl... She's coming back... ”

“ There is no high seriousness in most of them. And our triplex form came sliding into music on a burst of youth. A star danced and it was born.
What gave definite shape to this fundamentally simple form is the Italian love of melody. So far as it may be traced to the influence of one man, it may be traced to Giovanni Pergolesi, whose trio-sonatas first gave to the world as a prototype of the classical triplex form what is now known as the ‘singing allegro.’ Pergolesi was born in 1704 and lived to be only thirty-three years old ”

“ Karl the Jager, and the valet who attended, had left the box and retired to their own gallery, where they criticised the play and the music with more interest than did their master. The Prince lay back in his chair, watching the piece listlessly through the gauzy screen, [190] and listening half heedlessly to the music—the wonderful music of Pergolesi.
The fairy world of song and harmony, peopled by fantastic and impossible creatures who exist only for the sake of the melodies which give them birth, was not devoid of powerful and pathetic phases of passion and of character ”

“ Yet from their first inventor they come with a freshness that can be better felt than described, and three or four of Pergolesi's best works appear to present in a concentrated form what has since been spread by others over hundreds of operas and masses. It is impossible not to trace their influence in the works of Jommelli, of Cimarosa, of Haydn (in oratorio) , and of Mozart. Yet there remains a something which is still essentially Pergolesi's own. One important fact is too little remembered. ”

“ Pergolesi likewise designed silver plate, and many of his patterns are almost instinctively attributed to the brothers Adam by the makers and purchasers of modern reproductions. There is, moreover, reason to believe that he aided the Adam firm in purely architectural work. In later life Pergolesi appears, like Angelica Kauffmann, to have returned to Italy. ”

“ Then, without waiting for an answer, she opened a music book containing one of Pergolesi’s Masses.
“ Do you know this?” she asked. “The signor loves Pergolesi. He plays this ‘Miserere' sometimes, when the people are coming into church. I will play it for you.”
John Carteret moved away from the organ, and Diana sat down; but the notes were mute.
“ Ah!” she said, “you’ve had Phil Amos to blow, and he’s gone to sleep: he always does if one leaves off for a minute. Phil! Phil!” she cried—“wake up, wake up!” ”

“ In his old age Rameau said that if he were twenty years younger, he would go to Italy and take Pergolesi for his master in harmony. This brilliant genius, Pergolesi, died in 1736, at the age of twenty-six. It was consumption that carried him off, and I find no record of any love of his. The saccharine romance-monger, Elise Polko, has a rather mawkish story which she connects with his name, though on what authority, I am ignorant. As Lincoln said, "For those that like that sort of thing, it is about the sort of thing they'll like." ”

“ His fame, hitherto solely confined to Naples, seems now to have spread as far as Rome, for he was engaged to compose an opera for the Tordinone theatre in that city. This was 'L'Olimpiade'—the book Metastasio's, the music in its composer's happiest vein. It was, however, received with apathetic indifference, while 'Nerone,' an opera composed for the same house at the same time by Egidio Duni, greatly Pergolesi's inferior, had a brilliant success. ”

“ The success of the 'Serva Padrona' appears to have been very limited, but was the greatest that ever fell to Pergolesi's lot. His next operas, the 'Maestro di Musica' (very popular at a later date) , and 'Il Geloso schernito,' seem to have met with little or no recognition. 'Lo Frate innamorato,' a buffo opera, in Neapolitan dialect, was performed at the Fiorentini theatre in 1732. The San Bartolomeo produced the 'Prigionier superbo,' and repeated the 'Serva Padrona.' For this theatre, in 1734, he wrote 'Adriano in Siria,' an opera in three acts, and an intermezzo 'Livietta e Fracolo' ”

“ Why did not Grétry go back to the great Italian school that immediately preceded Pergolesi—to the great Scarlatti, the incomparable Stradella—the scope of whose genius is sufficiently attested by the fact that he not only invented the “bouffon” style which Pergolesi has employed divinely in the Serva padrona, but also exercised a real domination over Handel’s mind? But we must think of our artist as an impatient young man, eager to “arrive” and to make the most of the extraordinary facility of dramatic musical expression which he feels fermenting within him. ”

“ Sometimes they could even step in and pray before the altar. Their prayers were always the same, that the Holy Virgin and Saint Anthony, the special guide of those who were lost, would take care of them and bring them safely again to their Babbo and Mammina and their lovely home.
Many days passed in this way, and it was the middle of May before the children ever rode in a boat, for though Giovanni’s father had a gondola, it was his business to take passengers about Venice just like a cab-driver in our own cities, and he did not use it for pleasure rides for Giovanni and his friends. ”

“ It needed only the exuberant spirits of some bright Neapolitan Composer to strike out a new idea worth cultivating, and such a Composer was found in Logroscino. We have already mentioned the radical change effected in the constitution of the Lyric Drama by this talented writer's invention of the Concerted Finale. [52] To that, and to the transcendant genius of Pergolesi, and his successors, Galuppi, Sacchini, Piccinni, Paisiello, and Cimarosa, the Neapolitan and other Italian Schools owe the extraordinary excellence of their Opera Buffa. ”

“ At length, and after he had remained three years in Florence, he returned to his father, who was then occupied with the construction of the church of San Giovanni Battista in Pesaro; then the father perceived by the drawings of Bartolommeo that his son acquitted himself much better in architecture than in painting, and it appeared to him that he had a very fair aptitude to that vocation. ”

“ Then, proceeding to execute the first range below those Loggie, Giovanni used another and quite different method in the distribution of the stucco-work and paintings on the walls and vaultings of the other Loggie; but nevertheless those also were very beautiful, by reason of the pleasing invention of the pergole of canes counterfeited in various compartments, all covered with vines laden with grapes, and with clematis, jasmine, roses, and various kinds of birds and beasts. ”

“ Be all this as it may, of this really good artist, who combined in his work the influence of Raphael and of Perugino, only one piece is left in the place where he learned his art. The Madonna and Saints (No. 7) is a fine specimen of his work. The mother and the child are fresh and beautiful in colour and expression, and all the details of the dresses and the landscape infinitely careful. Note St Jerome, his gloves, his book, his hat and splendid gown. One other picture is ascribed to Giovanni in the same room, but it is greatly inferior in treatment. ”

“ At the rise of the curtain Vespetta sings a delightful little aria in which she enumerates her qualities as chambermaid. [33] The music, full of humour, is of a purely Neapolitan style; Pergolesian before Pergolesi. It has all the nervous vivacity of Neapolitan music, the little broken movements, the sudden halts, the fits and starts, the bantering responses of the orchestra, which emphasises or contradicts the list of Vespetta's virtues:
"Son da bene, son sincera, non ambisco, non pretendo"...
Pimpinone appears. Vespetta, in a German aria, begins to wheedle the old man ”

“ He was glad to display these accomplishments, for he liked being away from home, he liked Carina, and best of all he liked the Twins. The three became quite friendly, and Carlotta, seeing this, smiled her sly smile, and winked knowingly at Giovanni’s mother, as though to say: “You see, they are getting used to their new way of living. Soon they will forget their old home, and I shall have no more trouble with them.”
Little by little the children came to know Venice better than they had known Florence, which is not saying much, since in Florence they had so completely lost themselves. ”

“ On the walls of church or oratory the sweetness and languor of emotion became as dignified in beauty as the melodies of Pergolese, and its fervor touched at times the sublimity of tragic passion. Not words but plastic forms were ever the noblest vehicle of Italian feeling. Yet each kind of art may be profitably used to illustrate the other, and the simple phrases of the Rappresentazioni are often the best comments on finished works of painting. ”

“ Early the following morning we turned our faces northward on Perugia, but took a last long look at Perugino’s altar-piece in the church of the Disciplinati. Faint golds, faint greens, a quiet landscape, with low hills falling peacefully on a low stretch of valley. No harsh shadows, no high lights, the shepherds crossing down the paths behind their browsing sheep. The Virgin, a type of purest girlhood with just enough of the woman in the way she holds the Child to show it is her own; young men, for kings, with angel faces, and the smile of saints ”

“ Having come to that period of his life, and not caring to choose any other pursuit than that of painting, to which he was drawn, besides other reasons, by a wish to follow the footsteps of his father in that art, Giovanni Antonio began to learn the first rudiments of design under Domenico Pecori, a painter of Arezzo, who had been, together with his father Matteo, a disciple of Clemente, [31] and who was his first master. ”

“ But it is not only in the marvellous and peaceful beauty of her setting that Perugia is a paradox, for how is it possible to reconcile the pictures of Perugino and his great pupils—Raphael, Lo Spagna, Pinturicchio, and Eusebio di San Giorgio—with the awful deeds of the Oddi and the Baglioni ”

“ Giovanni Spagnuolo, called Lo Spagna, was another disciple of Pietro Perugino: this artist was a better colourist than any of the scholars left by Pietro at his death, and, after that event, would, without doubt, have established himself in Perugia, if the envy of the painters of that city, who were most unfriendly to foreign artists, had not persecuted him to such a degree that he was compelled to depart. He then retired to Spoleto, where his excellence and ability obtained for him a wife of good family, and he was, besides, made a citizen of Spoleto. ”

“ Perugia is not a religious city. It is true that she furnished the most ardent disciples of the thirteenth-century Flagellants; [3] and that Fra Bernadino of Siena, preaching to her from the little pulpit outside the cathedral of San Lorenzo, brought her to such a passion of repentance that not only did she burn her vanities in the piazza before this ardent Flame of God, as the Florentines were to do later for Savonarola, but she built in his memory that exquisite oratory covered with reliefs in terra-cotta by Agostino Duccio, under the shadow of San Francesco. ”

“ This being the case, how was it possible to find the corpse of one old man in order to lay it in consecrated ground? Pietro’s sons tried hard to find it. We read of them: of Giambatisto, Francesco and Michaelangelo, searching diligently but in vain for their father’s bones, that they might lay them in the Church of S. Agostino. [89]
Mariotti the chronicler of Perugino, whose loving and infinitely careful search has soothed, if it could not obliterate Vasari’s spiteful words, ends his notes on Perugino with the following quotation from a Latin poet:—
“Se pictus moreris, non moriturus obis.” ”

“ These men were determined to secure the very best work they could; their seats, their panels, their doors were of the finest wood, worked by the most skilful carpenters and artists of the day. They were not wise in literature themselves, so they applied to the best scholar of their city, Francesco Matarazzo, for instructions, and it was he who most probably arranged the curious mixture of classic subjects and inscriptions which Perugino, with a certain child-like and ingenuous persistence, painted as he had painted all the familiar subjects of the Bible. ”