»By the genius and abilities of Ales. Scarlatti«

After the early death of Alessandro Scarlatti’s father (before 1678), the young musician left Palermo to gain a foothold in Rome. His early patrons included culturally influential figures of Roman society such as Cardinal Benedetto Pamphilj and the exiled Swedish Queen Christina. Christina founded a literary academy, which gave birth to the Accademia dell’Arcadia. This academy brought together many of Scarlatti’s other patrons like Prince Francesco Maria Ruspoli and Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni. The latter was probably crucial in Scarlatti’s admission to the Arcadians in 1706. A large number of texts that Scarlatti set to music originate in the setting of the Roman academy, e. g. those by Antonio Ottoboni, the father of the above-mentioned ecclesiastical dignitary. With more than 600 cantatas (mostly for solo voice and basso continuo), which have been preserved in thousands of copies, Scarlatti influenced the genre like almost no other composer of his time. One characteristic of these cantatas for Roman patrons catches the eye: the exclusivity of the compositions for certain performance contexts. The cantatas were composed for the accademie and conversazioni of the Roman elite and unlike numerous other compositions, they were hardly ever circulated in the form of handwritten or printed copies, because they remained stored in the libraries of the aristocracy before they were rediscovered from the late 18th century onwards. Therefore, Berthold Over’s thesis on the exclusivity of Handel’s Roman cantatas for his Roman patrons, which has recently been verified by the example of Antonio Caldara’s cantatas for Ruspoli, appears to favour Scarlatti in that particular context as well. The article aims to give an overview of Scarlatti’s Roman cantatas, relating them to the more exclusive group of compositions on texts by Antonio Ottoboni and singles out one typical cantata to demonstrate the specifics in more detail.