Disperato Amore

Alessandro Scarlatti: his prolificacy as a composer of secular vocal music is astonishing, even by the standards of the day; for three decades, dozens of his operas occupied the stages of cities throughout Italy and Germany, and London would develop a taste for opera seria thanks to his Pirro e Demetrio.

The great care he took with both proportion and dramatic expression resulted in a perfect balance between the respective roles of recitative and aria, to which he accorded a great formal freedom. Beyond the extraordinary melodic fluidity that characterizes Scarlatti’s music, it was his structural rigor, a melancholic mood, and even a certain severity in the harmonic progressions of his recitatives that gradually distanced him from his contemporaries, whose tendency toward superficial hedonism increasingly sacrificed dramatic honesty in favour of vocal prowess.