I have a new obsession. Yes, they do happen on a pretty regular basis. I apologize for my obsessive compulsive disorder up front without any hint of sarcasm.
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It's Alessandro Scarlatti, an Italian Baroque composer. As with so many things, I bumped into him completely by accident. I had heard a snippet of a song in the 8th episode of Poker Face on Peacock, and I really wanted to know what the song was. So I Googled about, and found a couple of websites that purported to list the complete soundtracks for each episode of the series. For the 8th episode, one of the pieces listed which looked like a possible match with my Unknown Music was La Giuditta (version for 3 voices): Part II: Lullaby: Dormi, o fulmine di guerra (Nutrice) by...you guessed it, Alessandro Scarlatti. As it turns out, I knew within a second (literally...and I mean that literally) that this wasn't the droid I was looking for, but it was so fuckin' lovely that I kept listening. And then I started wondering...who is this Scarlatti guy? I'm not very knowledgeable about classical music, but I thought I knew a little something something. So I went looking for more information.
I really wanted to see if I could find a book about him, but the first chance I had to read anything about him was just a chapter in a book, Jack Allan Westrup's "Il Mitridate Eupatore (1707)," which is the fourth chapter of New Looks at Italian Opera: Essays in Honor of Donald J. Grout, edited by William W. Austin. The essay is primarily focused on the bad things that Giuseppe Piccioli did to Scarlatti's work when he did his own version of it. Westrup uses words such as "disfigured" to describe Piccioli's "work" on Il Mitridate Eupatore, so even though much of the information contained in the 18 pages of this chapter were beyond me in terms of technical descriptions of the music, I definitely got the gist of it.
Best of all, though, was that this book gave me leads to several other books about A. Scarlatti: Alessandro Scarlatti: His Life and Works by Edward Joseph Dent and Alessandro Scarlatti: An Introduction to His Operas by Donald Jay Grout. Not to mention Mr. Grout's A Short History of Opera, which includes at least three pages on a Scarlatti aria. My library doesn't have any of those books...though it did have New Looks at Italian Opera (albeit in Remote Shelving, which is never a good sign for a book). They can be purchased at any of the Usual Suspect Places, but even better, at least for me, is that all four books are available via Internet Archive...as well as quite a few of Scarlatti's albums.
Near the end of his essay, Westrup has this to say:
"Of Alessandro it would be certainly true to say that he was capable of a nobility of utterance which was surpassed by none of his contemporaries and by few of his successors. It is this sublimity that is so finely represented in the aria in Act II of Il Mitridate Eupatore...." (150)
Well, I don't know about you, but I am going to need to go looking for that aria. The whole opera is online (at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3OiDU8pUDE), but that could make locating the aria tricky, so I'm going to see what else I can find vis-à-vis that.
Later I think this is it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeVHYtM2BCU I hope it is, because it's quite lovely.
Also, here's what Wikipedia has to say about Il Mitridate Eupatore:
"Il Mitridate Eupatore (Mithridates Eupator) is an opera seria in five acts by the Italian composer Alessandro Scarlatti with a libretto by Girolamo Frigimelica Roberti. It was first performed, with the composer conducting, at the Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo, Venice, on 5 January 1707. A failure at its premiere, Mitridate Eupatore is now considered one of the finest of Scarlatti's operas."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitridate_Eupatore
So that's how that goes.
And BTW, I've been eyeing a boxed set of Alessandro Scarlatti's music which I found at Amazon (🐍hssss🐍) for $60. It includes 30 cds. Here's what that looks like:
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