UNIVERSO SCARLATTI CONFERENCE PAPER, LISBON, 2025
NEW SOURCES OF ITALIAN BAROQUE CANTATAS AND ARIAS DISCOVERED
Amongst a small number of musical materials formerly held by the Biblioteca G. Salomone, Nicosia, are six manuscript volumes of miscellaneous cantatas and opera arias attributed to composers such as Emanuele d’Astorga, Giovanni Bononcini, Fortunato Chelleri, Francesco Mancini, Pietro Pizzolo, Nicola Porpora, Giuseppe Porsile, Alessandro Scarlatti, Antonio Vivaldi and Domenico Zipoli, as well as many others. With at least four cantatas by Scarlatti identified in these hitherto undocumented sources (collectively comprising approximately 100 works copied by multiple individuals during the period ca.1700-ca.1730), it seems very appropriate that they should be brought to scholarly awareness in the composer’s anniversary year. In addition to a large body of ascertained works, these sources also contain a significant number of unknown compositions, not only by composers with established reputations, but also by a handful who have yet to be identified in modern scholarly literature. The sources broaden our knowledge and understanding of extant Italian baroque cantata repertoire, shedding new light upon the genre and its role in Palermo and wider Sicilian spheres during the early eighteenth century. Carrying non-consecutive numbering, the volumes evidently constitute valuable surviving fragments of a much larger body of manuscript repertory, presumably lost or still waiting to be rediscovered. This paper will give a preliminary overview of these sources, setting them in the context of their period and demonstrating possible links with known archival collections. In the process, it aims to lend further weight to the view that in the field of the Italian baroque cantata there is still much to be learned about the role, function and definition of a genre which, in terms of the quantity of scholarly literature, still languishes disproportionately when compared to opera and oratorio.
