ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a repertoire with a character all of its own: It is music written as an homage to the most prestigious musical institution of the time, which already by the second half of the seventeenth century occupied an anomalous situation compared to other Roman musical institutions. The case of Scarlatti is, in some ways, unique. Even if he never belonged to the Sistine Chapel, he aimed to refer to an old tradition, to the point of naming one of his Masses “a Palestrina,” but without following all the stylistic features of this model. In fact, within this strict framework to which every musician had to conform in composing for the Sistine Chapel, new expressive resources emerged, as evidenced in particular by Scarlatti’s Miserere. The expressiveness of this work could not find a place of acceptance in the impersonal dimensions bound to liturgical tradition at that time.
