Page "Alessandro Scarlatti" Paragraph 6

Scarlatti's music forms an important link between the early Baroque Italian vocal styles of the 17th century, with their centers in Florence, Venice and Rome, and the classical school of the 18th century.

Scarlatti's style, however, is more than a transitional element in Western music ; like most of his Naples colleagues he shows an almost modern understanding of the psychology of modulation and also frequently makes use of the ever-changing phrase lengths so typical of the Napoli school.

His early operas ( Gli equivoci nel sembiante 1679 ; L ’ honestà negli amori 1680, containing the famous aria " Già il sole dal Gange "; Il Pompeo 1683, containing the well-known airs " O cessate di piagarmi " and " Toglietemi la vita ancor ," and others down to about 1685 ) retain the older cadences in their recitatives, and a considerable variety of neatly constructed forms in their charming little arias, accompanied sometimes by the string quartet, treated with careful elaboration, sometimes with the continuo alone.

By 1686 he had definitely established the " Italian overture " form ( second edition of Dal male il bene ), and had abandoned the ground bass and the binary form air in two stanzas in favour of the ternary form or da capo type of air.

His best operas of this period are La Rosaura ( 1690, printed by the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung ), and Pirro e Demetrio ( 1694 ), in which occur the arias " Le Violette ", and " Ben ti sta, traditor ".