PERGOLESI, GIOVANNI BATTISTA. — Musician, born on 4 January 1710 at Jesi, died at Pozzuoli on 16 or 17 March 1736. After learning the first rudiments of music in his native city, in 1726, thanks to the assistance of the marquis Pianetti, he studied at the Conservatory of the Poor of Jesus Christ in Naples.
Among his earliest works were the oratorio La morte di s. Giuseppe and the first Salve Regina in C minor, for soprano, with quartet and harpsichord accompaniment (1730), followed by the other oratorio La conversione di s. Guglielmo di Aquitania, performed in the summer of 1731 in the cloister of S. Agnello Maggiore in Naples. In it, the Pergolesian personality already displays a wholly distinctive expressive force in the depiction of character and the truth of the dramatic accents of the individual personages. From 1731, with La Solustia, he began that glorious theatrical activity which culminated in La serva padrona (1733), a gem of opera buffa. On 20 May 1734 he had one of his Masses performed in Rome (S. Lorenzo in Lucina) for the feast of s. Giovanni Nepomuceno. In Naples he completed and conducted several other works and then returned to Rome, where the failure of L’Olimpiade (his masterpiece among the serious operas, 1735) caused him profound distress. Having returned to Naples, he was appointed organist of the Royal Chapel, but tuberculosis was by then undermining him; he conducted the performance of Il Flaminio (1735) once more and withdrew to the Franciscans at Pozzuoli, where he wrote the famous Stabat and where he died in poverty and solitude. Some have wished to see in Pergolesi’s church music, especially in the motets, a cold, careless, and hybrid mannerism, but Fellerer (Der Palestrinastil und seine Bedeutung in der vokalen Kirchenmusik des 18. Jahrh., Augsburg 1929) illuminates, with the scholar’s sound judgment, the compositional technique of P., which he places in a singular light within the history of Palestrinian imitation. His sacred production, together with his chamber and instrumental music, does not yield a lesser P., but a P. who, while an accomplished contrapuntist, knows how to shun the patterns of conventionalism and the stylistic customs of his time in order to draw from the sonic grandeur of Palestrinian vocality pulses of intimate and fervent religious feeling.
Among the numerous sacred works, after the oratorios (one should recall a third, Per la nascita del Redentore, whose score is now untraceable), there emerge the Messe, the Salve Regina, and the Stabat. Of the four Messe—in D major, for four voices with instruments and organ; in D major, for ten voices and two choirs with instruments and organ; in F major, for five voices with instruments; and in F major, for ten voices and two choirs with the accompaniment of two orchestras and organ—the one that most pleased listeners for the pathetic grace of its melody and the magnificent grandeur of its lines, and that was repeated for years at the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin, is the Messa in F major, perhaps composed in Rome in 1734. Among the four Salve Regina, the one in F minor attains truly remarkable artistic sublimity, so much so that Della Corte (v. BIBLICA) places it, together with the Stabat, alongside Bach’s cantatas and Geistliche Lieder, for the gentle tenderness of the accents that pour forth from the soul invoking the Savior. To complete the picture of Pergolesi’s vast oeuvre, one must mention psalms, magnificat,
