Giovanni Battista Pergolesi and his teatrum Dolores
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15633/pms.563Keywords:
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, opera, comic opera, opera buffa, the Enlightenment, sentimentalism, galant styleAbstract
Stabat Mater is one of the last compositions by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi and today it is probably the most well-known and valued arrangement of those ancient sequences. The composer translated the incredibly moving medieval poem into the sounds with a great mastery. He managed to create a musical fresco placing us in the centre of the suffering true mystery. The power of his music is so real and stimulating that it is not possible to remain indifferent.
The following essay presents the phenomenon of Pergolesi’s artistic genius on the background of that time cultural changes and it focuses on his posthumous fame. The author analyses the composer’s achievement of galant style and discusses Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater in relation to the language of emotions related to sentimental literature. Moreover, he suggests to comprehend that music through the prism of the Italian Marian devotion phenomenon. Scientists are still intrigued by the figure of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. They try to reconstruct his life story and to deal with the confusion concerning his legacy. The success story of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater is particularly interesting. Thus, successive generations of musicologists ask a question what the fame origin of this work and its creator could be. The author of this essay presents a few clues that might help us to get closer to the answer to this question.
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Copyright (c) 2013 Paweł Szywalski
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