Alessandro Scarlatti Biography

Alessandro Scarlatti, a native of Palermo, made his principal career in Naples, where he was instrumental in the development of 18th century Neapolitan opera. He wrote more than a hundred operas and some six hundred cantatas, a considerable amount of church music and a smaller number of purely instrumental works. An important and influential composer, the nature of his compositions particularly with changed fashions in opera and less appetite for cantatas, serenades and oratorios of this period, has led to otherwise unjustified current neglect, in spite of Scarlattis extreme fecundity.