Giovanni Battista Pergolesi - Biography

Composer, born in Jesi, EC Italy. He attended the Conservatorio dei Poveri di Gesù Cristo at Naples, became a violinist, and in 1732 was appointed maestro di cappella to the Prince of Naples. His comic intermezzo La serva padrona (1732) was highly popular, and influenced the development of opera buffa. He wrote much church music, and in 1736 left Naples for a Capuchin monastery at Pozzuoli, where he composed his great Stabat Mater.

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (January 4, 1710 – March 16, 1736) was an Italian composer, violinist and organist.

Biography

Pergolesi was born in Jesi, where he studied music under Francesco Santini there before going to Naples in 1725 where he studied under Gaetano Greco among others.

Pergolesi was one of the most important early composers of opera buffa (comic opera).

Among Pergolesi's other operatic works are his first opera La conversione e morte di San Guglielmo (1731), Lo frate 'nnammorato (The friar in love, 1732), L'Olimpiade (1735) and Il Flaminio (1735).

Pergolesi also wrote sacred music, including a Mass in F. It is his Stabat Mater (1736), however, for male soprano, male alto and orchestra, which is his best known sacred work. The work remained popular, becoming the most frequently printed work of the 18th century, and being arranged by a number of other composers, including Johann Sebastian Bach, who used it as the basis for his psalm Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden, BWV 1083.

Pergolesi wrote a number of secular instrumental works, including a violin sonata and a violin concerto. A considerable number of instrumental and sacred works once attributed to Pergolesi have since been shown to be falsely attributed. Much of Igor Stravinsky's ballet, Pulcinella, which ostensibly reworks pieces by Pergolesi, is actually based on spurious works.

Pergolesi died at the age of twenty-six in Pozzuoli from tuberculosis.