In the long unfolding of European music, where each century reshapes its own language as a way of thinking and breathing, Alessandro Scarlatti stands as the point where form becomes consciousness and consciousness becomes song. His work is not merely the genesis of a school but the founding act of a new measure in the sonic world: a balance born in Naples, poised between the severity of contrapuntal tradition and the theatrical fervor of a people who turn words into gesture and gesture into emotion. In him, Italian music of the seventeenth century undergoes transfiguration, passing from the affective rhetoric of Carissimi and Cavalli to the organic structure that anticipates Haydn and Mozart. “He was the greatest master of Italy,” wrote Charles Burney in his General History of Music (1773), “for none before him had given such clarity to harmony and such nobility to melody.” But clarity, in Scarlatti, is never reduction: it is light piercing through complexity, order that does not suppress pathos but renders it intelligible. It is the Greek idea of metron, mirrored in the voice of an age that frees itself from mannerism and discovers the responsibility of form.

The Naples that welcomed him in 1684 as maestro of the Royal Chapel was a crossroads of tension and splendor. While the city lived the contradiction of courtly magnificence and widespread poverty, the conservatories were forming generations of musicians destined to populate the chapels of Europe. In this environment Scarlatti built the grammar of a tonal language that would irradiate modernity. His oratorios, his cantatas, his operas were not born to exalt power but to explore the human voice as an inner theatre. His art lies in the precision of design and in the freedom hidden within it: as though form, instead of imprisoning emotion, purified it by giving it direction. In this resides his genius—and perhaps also his solitude. For while Europe looked to Lully and Corelli, he was constructing a personal language that belonged neither to court nor to street, but to a realm of listening.

From Griselda to Mitridate Eupatore, his theatre is never pure spectacle but moral drama. The accompanied recitatives that Händel would later bring to London are born with him as instruments of introspection. Scarlatti’s characters do not move; they meditate, they pause, they listen to their own voices. In those silences where the bass continues to vibrate and the melody suspends itself, one perceives the birth of a musical psychology. Yet discipline never yields to abstraction: pathos is contained, but never denied. His da capo aria, with its varied reprise and ornamental commentary, becomes the most perfect form of Baroque self-consciousness. “Repetition,” wrote Johann Mattheson in Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739), “is not mere copy but reflection of feeling in its harmonic mirror.” Scarlatti had intuited this half a century earlier: repetition is not return but time folding upon itself, living memory.

There is nothing mechanical in this construction. Every cadence has the necessity of a Latin phrase, every modulation the precision of a syllogism. It is the legacy of his Roman study with Giacomo Carissimi and Francesco Foggia, yet he transforms that austerity into elegance, transferring into melodrama the lucidity of the oratorio. In his sacred works—Caino overo Il primo omicidio, Il primo pentimento di Adamo, La Santissima Trinità—form is already theological doctrine: not a decoration of faith but the embodiment of divine measure. Polyphony is no longer a medieval fabric but a dialogue of consciences. Behind his fugues one hears the echo of that metaphysics of light which Neapolitan culture, through Tommaso Campanella and natural philosophy, had bequeathed to the seventeenth century: the idea that beauty is an order of the intellect. And thus, in Scarlatti’s music, grace is not feeling but knowledge.

When the Sinfonie di concerto grosso were copied and circulated in Germany, Johann Sebastian Bach studied them as models of clarity and proportion. There is no direct proof of personal influence, yet Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, in his letters of 1775, wrote that “the Neapolitan school of Scarlatti opened to Europe the language of heart and reason.” It is a posthumous acknowledgment, but a just one. The very Vienna that would generate Haydn and Mozart was already prepared by the Scarlattian seed: the idea of a form that thinks for itself, not a sum of parts but a living organism. Carl Dahlhaus, in his Esthetics of Music (1979), defined this moment as “the point at which composition becomes reflection of time within time itself.” The definition fits Beethoven, yet it begins with Scarlatti, who first conceived music as temporal architecture.

There is nothing abstract in this architecture. Scarlatti knows the human voice as a body: he measures its strain, its tension, its breath. His vocal writing is an act of love toward the word, not an exercise in virtuosity. He teaches the voice to speak the truth of feeling, yet always within the line of decorum. In this sense his art is profoundly Apollonian: measure governs fervor without extinguishing it. “One must not believe,” wrote Fedele d’Amico in his 1967 essay on the Neapolitan masters, “that Scarlatti’s composure is coldness; it is the awareness that passion, to be true, requires a form.” Here lies the moral lesson of Baroque music: intensity without disorder, emotion turned into language.

His works move within a space of equilibrium continually threatened by chaos. The melody ascends like a thought seeking its own height, and the bass, in its steady motion, restrains it as reason restrains desire. In this dialectic of tension and measure the entire subsequent history of Western music is prefigured: the restlessness of the Romantic subject born within the very heart of Baroque order. Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, would recognize in music the battlefield of Apollo and Dionysus. Scarlatti, two centuries earlier, had already embodied that contention in his daily practice as composer. His melodic line is Apollonian, yet his harmony is Dionysian: a feverish underworld, a telluric breath moving the foundations of song. If Viennese classicism is the reconciliation of these forces, Neapolitan Baroque is their original revelation.

What astonishes, today, in listening again to Mitridate Eupatore or Griselda, is the modernity of their dramatic rhythm. Scarlatti does not yet know the sonata form, yet he possesses its emotional intuition: the idea that a thematic conflict can resolve itself through modulation and recapitulation. His music is already “processual,” as Theodor W. Adorno would say: not a mere succession of affections but a dialectical journey. Each aria is a microcosm, a parable closing upon itself without ceasing to signify. The perfection of this construction is never arid, for life flows within it. Scarlatti’s vitality is that of one who knows the finitude of time and transforms it into rhythm. In his music, time is not what passes, but what measures: a breath that becomes consciousness.

When he died in 1725, Europe was already different. In Leipzig, Bach was writing the St. Matthew Passion; in Venice, Vivaldi was publishing his last collections; in Vienna, a young Fux was teaching the rules of counterpoint that Scarlatti had already turned into poetry. Yet, in the silence of his Neapolitan death, one century closed and another began. He left no direct disciples, but he left a system. Francesco Durante, Leonardo Leo, Nicola Porpora, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi—all, in different ways, drank from his source. Even Händel, passing through Naples in 1707, heard his music and carried its imprint to London. “The manner of Scarlatti,” he wrote in a letter to Telemann in 1711, “is like a noble speech that has no need to raise its voice.”

Three centuries later, that noble speech remains the measure by which we judge the dignity of music. Where modernity has shattered form and scattered it into noise, Scarlatti reminds us that form is the most human of disciplines, for it is born of listening. To listen means to measure time with respect, to accept limit as the place of freedom. Every aria of his is a meditation on limit; every fugue, an attempt at order amid chaos. He knows the melancholy of thought that is aware of its own mortality, and he transforms it into beauty. In this, Scarlatti is the first modern musician: not because he anticipates the future, but because he understands it.

In the oblique light of his tricentennial, what remains is not merely the greatness of a master but the perception that through him music learned to think itself. His symphonies, his cantatas, his oratorios are not relics of a lost age but fragments of a knowledge that still concerns us: the conviction that beauty is a moral act. As Paul Valéry wrote, “Form is the face of substance when it has reached consciousness of itself.” Scarlatti possessed that consciousness entirely and bequeathed it to the world in the form of song. And perhaps no definition captures his greatness better than that offered by an anonymous Neapolitan copyist who transcribed one of his oratorios: “Music of Scarlatti, that speaks as a soul at peace with God.”

And yet, despite his centrality, Alessandro Scarlatti remains surrounded by an aura of silence. His greatness has often been obscured by the fame of his son Domenico, whom posterity has preferred for his pianistic modernity, forgetting that the freedom of that language was born from the father’s discipline. In truth, between them there exists not only a bond of blood but of vision: the same tension toward the unity of musical thought, the same will to transform technique into a poetic act. Domenico opened the keyboard to Europe; Alessandro opened the soul to music. The son translated into virtuosity what the father had conceived as architecture. Both were builders of labyrinths—one in space, the other in time.

From this perspective, the tricentennial of his death is not merely an act of remembrance but an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of form as an ethical act. In a century dominated by fragmentation and the loss of the center, Scarlatti restores to us the nostalgia for unity—not the false and rhetorical unity of academies, but that which is born from the harmony of differences. His works, read today, speak in a language of extraordinary modernity: every melodic line is a balance between tension and repose, between the desire to expand and the necessity to return to the beginning. As in life, every fugue returns to its theme, every error seeks resolution. In him, music is the clearest image of ethics: it does not command, it persuades.

In Griselda (1721), his final theatrical masterpiece, the heroine endures the trials imposed by her husband with a patience that is not resignation but awareness. Scarlatti makes her a symbol of sacrifice as knowledge: the suffering voice becomes wisdom. Nothing is further from him than tragic rhetoric or the excesses of virtuosity; his tragedy is composed, as though Christian pity had become style. His music is an act of moral balance, a lesson in measure. Where other composers of his time sought surprise, he sought the truth of feeling.

No art like music expresses so fully the measure of man before the infinite. Scarlatti understood this and made it his religion. In his oratorios, faith manifests itself not through excess but through clarity: divinity speaks by proportion. One may say that in him divine and musical architecture coincide. The fugue, in his writing, is a meditation on the coexistence of unity and multiplicity: each voice moves independently, yet all converge toward a single point of light. It is a theological image, but also a human one—the plurality that tends toward concord. Is this not the very essence of harmony, the most metaphysical of words born from the sonic world?

When Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach spoke of the “language of heart and reason,” he may have had this unity in mind. For Scarlatti’s music, though born in an age still dominated by dogma, is already secular in its depth. It speaks of man before it speaks of heaven, and within its rigor we find a sense of dignity that no Romanticism could later restore with such serenity. Modernity has often confused freedom with dispersion; Scarlatti reminds us that true freedom lies within form, not outside it. Rule, for him, is not a prison but a passage. In the discipline of counterpoint lives the highest idea of spiritual liberty: that which is born of respect for harmonic law.

Listening today to one of his cantatas, such as Bella madre de’ fiori, or to an opening symphony, one perceives a lightness that no longer belongs to time but to the mind. It is the lightness of one who knows the toil of the world and yet chooses beauty as response. Scarlatti does not construct sonic cathedrals but inner temples. His music is like the pumice stone of the Neapolitan gulfs: porous, light, yet incandescent in its depths. The fire that passes through it is the awareness of death, the consciousness that every form is ephemeral and therefore worthy of perfection.

The Naples of Scarlatti was a city where misery and magnificence coexisted like two voices of the same chorus. In its churches resounded the motets of his pupils, in its theatres his operas; but behind the appearance of splendor lay a civic tension. Neapolitan Baroque was always political as well: beauty as resistance, measure as opposition to disorder. In this sense Scarlatti was not only an artist but a legislator of the soul. His formal rigor is an act of pity toward the world, a response to the disharmony of his age’s social and spiritual life.

Posterity has not done him justice, for his greatness is not measured by clamor. He did not seek the public, but listening—and listening, in our time, has become a revolutionary act. To listen means to slow down, to measure time with the heart, to rediscover the patience of meaning. In this gesture—apparently simple—lies the entire Scarlattian ethic. All his music is an invitation to reconcile man with time. Amid the noise of the present, to remember him is to acknowledge that every civilization begins with attention.

It is no coincidence that modern musicology, from Fedele d’Amico to Carl Dahlhaus, has rediscovered Scarlatti not as a “forerunner” but as a consummation. “With him,” wrote Dahlhaus, “Italian music attains its dialectical maturity: the unity of form and content is no longer an ideal but an operative reality.” This judgment, sober yet profound, restores the truth of a composer who needs no adjectives. In an age that idolizes innovation, he teaches us that the highest originality is fidelity to inner truth.

Perhaps this is why his music, though so luminous, is traversed by a shadow of melancholy—not the melancholy of the misunderstood artist, but that of the sage who knows the fragility of his own knowledge. Scarlatti knows that every harmony is provisional, that every equilibrium is a truce. His genius lies in transforming that awareness into serenity—the serenity of one who, contemplating the world’s instability, chooses to respond with beauty. There is no resignation here, but a higher sense of limit: the understanding that limit itself is the condition of grace.

His example still has something to teach us. In an era when music risks dissolving into mere consumption, Scarlatti invites us to return to the original meaning of art: to make time habitable. Each of his compositions is a microcosm of order, a workshop of balance. To listen to him today is to rediscover lost measure, that capacity to think in proportions which modernity has forgotten. As Luigi Pareyson wrote, “Form is the way in which freedom becomes visible.” Scarlatti, with his patient hands and lucid mind, made freedom a visible art.

We do not know whether, on his final evening in Naples, he still heard within himself the voices of his works. Yet we may imagine that in the silence of sunset, amid the scent of the sea and the tolling of bells, his mind felt the same peace his music has preserved. Time, for him, was not an enemy but a companion: an ordered flow in which memory and future touch. For this reason his art never ages. It is always current because it speaks of the eternal in the language of the finite.

Three centuries later, every time a conductor raises the baton to rekindle his notes, history renews itself. There is no celebration more worthy of his name than the simple performance of his music—the pure act of listening that recreates form in the present. “Music does not die,” wrote Ferruccio Busoni, “because it is itself the substance of time.” In Scarlatti that substance finds its perfect geometry. He left us no monuments of stone, but architectures of air—and in that air he still lives, like a breath crossing the centuries.

To listen to him today, on the tricentennial of his death, is to recognize that music is not a language of the past but a still-living form of knowledge. Scarlatti speaks to us not from a distant century but from a region of the soul that is always present. His lesson is that beauty is not a luxury but a mode of understanding. In his industrious silence reflects the highest idea of civilization: that which transforms rigor into grace, science into humanity, measure into light.

In this sense he does not belong to the Baroque but to eternity. His music is the demonstration that time can be conquered not by force but by harmony. Every chord closing one of his arias, every cadence that rests like a promise fulfilled, is a victory over disorder. And in that victory, so discreet and so absolute, we recognize the greatness of man.

“Whoever wishes to understand the order of the world,” wrote Hegel in his Lectures on Aesthetics, “should listen to music, for it is thought that has no need of words.” If these words apply to art in general, in Scarlatti they find their purest incarnation. His thought required no words because it was already word made sound. In every page of his work is accomplished the reconciliation between intellect and sensation, between the human and the divine.

Thus, in the silence that follows the last note of an orchestra performing Caino overo Il primo omicidio or La Santissima Trinità, one seems to hear not an ending but a breath that continues. It is the very breath of time, disciplined by form and at once liberated by grace. In that breath resounds the voice of Alessandro Scarlatti—architect of harmony, inventor of form, witness to the possible order between chaos and light.