Introduction

During his lifetime Alessandro Scarlatti’s style was considered “difficult”, despite being highly praised by eighteenth-century music historians such as Burney. The difficulty of offering an in-depth profile of this author is mainly due to the scarcity of editions available for performers and musicologists. The choice to focus on the Roman sacred repertoire is explained by the importance of this city for Scarlatti and a substantial corpus of scores that were written in Rome. The book aims to offer an overview of this production, written for the various Roman institutions and patrons, and to fully publish all the archival documentation relating to Scarlatti’s professional activity as a composer of sacred music.