Page:A Dictionary of Music and Musicians vol 2.djvu/700

688 and went to the sea at Pozzuoli. Here, though growing steadily worse, he did not desist from his labours. He wrote the Cantata for a single voice, 'Orfeo e Euridice,' and the beautiful 'Salve Regina,' also for one voice, with two violins, viola and organ, both among his happiest inspirations, the latter in particular unsurpassed in purity of style, and pathetic, touching expression.

His old master, Feo, who loved him tenderly, came to visit him during his illness, and, finding him working at the Stabat Mater, entreated him to lay it aside, telling him that he was unfit for any exertion. Pergolesi answered that he had been paid ten ducats for a composition which would not be valued at ten bajocchi, and that he could not but fulfil his agreement. Not many days after, Feo found him sinking, and scarcely able to say that the Stabat was finished and sent off. He expired on March 16, 1736, having just completed his 26th year, and was buried in the precincts of the cathedral of Pozzuoli, where, nearly a century afterwards, a monument to his memory was erected by the Marquis de Villarosa and the Cavaliere Corigliano.

He had no sooner ceased to live than he became the object of an interest only equal to the indifference shown him in his lifetime. It was currently asserted that his death was due to poison—a report for which there was no foundation. The failure of his health was slow and gradual, the result of natural causes, and partly, perhaps, of excesses to which disappointment and depression may have rendered him prone. But public curiosity, once awakened, knew no bounds. Unlike most other Italian composers of his century, who, the objects of unmeasured admiration during their lives, are now forgotten, or recalled occasionally by way of a curiosity, Pergolesi's renown was entirely posthumous. Rome revived the despised Olimpiade, and found that it was good. All Italy was bent on possessing and performing, not his best works only, but trivial farces and intermezzi, probably written as 'pot-boilers.' The Serva Padrona was introduced into France in 1750, and made a furore [App. p.746 "before the successful performance of 'La Serva Padrona' in France it had failed there in 1746"]. It, and the Maestro di Musica, were translated into French, and have been popular in Paris ever since. Rousseau, Marmontel and d'Alembert extol his truth, simplicity and pathos, asserting that he restored music to nature, and freed her from the conventional trammels of an arid science. Chateaubriand, on the contrary, finds him too artificial, and, contrasting his sacred music with Gregorian plain-song, says he would have done better if, instead of displaying such a wealth of resources, he had confined himself to imagining a simple cantilena, to be repeated with each strophe. Villarosa remarks that, had he done this, the Stabat Mater would have had the character of French couplets.

The fact is that unjust indifference reacted in a somewhat exaggerated enthusiasm. He did not restore music to nature. He was one of the earliest, and perhaps the most gifted, of a distinguished group of composers who worked, or at any rate began by working, towards that object. Emotion predominated over intellect in his artistic nature, and his science is but slight. Nor did he show much invention in contrapuntal form. Certain devices that suited him he adopted and used repeatedly, but the phrases and forms which are peculiarly his own stand apart from these. His masses for double chorus show a sense of effect which, had he lived longer, might have manifested itself in other styles of composition. But it must not be supposed that a double 5-part chorus means, with Pergolesi, 10-part writing, the division into two choirs being, more often, than not, for purposes of effect. The same is the case with his 'double orchestras.'

His orchestra is simplicity itself, consisting often of the string quartet only, sometimes with oboes, and horns or trumpets. There is, a song in 'Adriano in Siria' with a curious florid oboe dbbligato. He writes for the violins in a way that shows his feeling for the instrument and his knowledge of its expressive powers. The concluding portion of a Kyrie in one of his masses is quoted on the opposite page. It is a very early and a beautiful instance of combined vocal and instrumental effect, and seems to suggest an imaginative power in its composer far beyond what he actually realised in his works.

Pathos and sweetness are more characteristic of his compositions than passion or great dramatic force. His sacred music is said to lack devotional fervour, and often to be more suited to the stage than to the church, there being no definite line to be drawn between his styles of writing for the two, and the same ideas often recurring in each. Variety of expression was in its infancy, and the same thing might be urged against many of Pergolesi's predecessors—with this difference, that their dramatic works seem more suited to the church than to the stage. He undoubtedly repeated himself very much; certain melodic and harmonic sequences and progressions he had a fondness for, and used them in all his works indiscriminately. It seems beyond question that all composers of that time and school no more thought it necessary even to appear to write always what was new, than we should to say something quite original every time we opened our mouths. Just as an ingenious contrapuntal device may be used again and again by its original discoverer, and adapted to the requirements of the working out of various fugues, so when a composer like Pergolesi chanced on a characteristic idea that pleased him, he introduced it wherever it served to illustrate or to adorn his subject, quite without reference to the work in which it may first have appeared. The difference between the two things had not come to be perceived, nor was it fully recognised before Beethoven. Such ideas, so used, were in time added to the general vocabulary, and adopted by others as the setting or background for their own ideas, and have often become known to posterity in this form only. Yet from their first inventor they come with a freshness that can be better felt than described, and three or four of