Die spekulative Kunst des Komponierens Scarlatti und das polyphone Madrigal

In his monumental standard work The Italian Madrigal (1949), Alfred Einstein mentions Scarlatti on just two occasions: as a composer of baroque and decadent arias and cantatas, and for setting Guarini’s madrigal »Cor mio deh non languire« to music. Einstein would only have known this one madrigal, printed by Giovanni Battista Martini in 1775 in his Saggio fondamentale. Since then, Scarlatti’s eight extant madrigals have been published, and their bibliographical provenance has been precisely worked out, without much attention being paid to the music itself. This study is therefore devoted primarily to composition and especially to the textual setting of Scarlatti’s madrigals. It also looks into the possible motives why Scarlatti, the composer of operas and cantatas, showed such great interest in a musical form that, at the turn of the 18th century, was already considered archaic and obsolete. Until now, the opinion has prevailed that the five-part polyphonic madrigal continued to be cultivated above all in the urban academies, as if it were an intellectual examination of a musical genre that was in itself extinct. Scarlatti’s madrigals, however, can rather be located in the milieu of the high nobility. In a letter in 1706 he sent one of his madrigals to the hereditary prince Ferdinando de’ Medici, with a request to the music lover to take a close look at the piece and point out any compositional errors. And the famous »Cor mio deh non languire« is related to Spain’s King Charles III, later Emperor Charles VI, and was probably composed for him. This article attempts to provide an explanation for this princely interest in the madrigals.