Although not quite reaching the scale of the Bach dynasty, the Scarlatti family of musicians was certainly one of the most impressive during the baroque era, with eight members claiming individual entries in the New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians. Two are well-known today, Alessandro and Domenico, but this recording will introduce many to the impressive talents of Francesco Scarlatti. Alessandro the opera composer, born in Palermo, Sicily, in 1660, had seven siblings, one of whom was a younger brother named Francesco Antonio Nicola, born (also in Palermo) in 1666. Alessandro had 10 children, the middle one of which was Giuseppe Domenico. Thus Francesco Scarlatti was Alessandro’s brother and Domenico’s uncle. Most of Alessandro’s siblings were professional musicians, either composers, singers or instrumentalists, working either in Sicily or on mainland Italy. In 1684, Alessandro was made maestro di cappella at the Royal Court in Naples, but the appointment over a local musician caused great upset, and life was not easy either for Alessandro or the various family members, including Francesco and his sister Anna Maria, who were brought in by Alessandro to work under him at the court. Opera singer Anna Maria was forced out of her post, being required to go with her female companions either to a convent or to leave the city. Francesco was leader of the court orchestra and worked there for his brother for seven years before moving back to Palermo in 1691. It’s not entirely clear what post he held there, but he seems to have remained in Sicily for the next c24 years. He applied unsuccessfully for the post of Vice-Kapellmeister in Vienna in 1715, though he was highly commended by Johann Fux, and a few years later, in 1719, he moved to London. Work for musicians was plentiful there, and continental musicians held significant posts, notably Handel, Bononcini and Geminiani. Violinist Geminiani was a former pupil of Alessandro Scarlatti who led the Neapolitan orchestra a few years after Francesco Scarlatti had returned to Palermo, and his success in London, and also in Dublin, may well have encouraged Francesco to move there. Francesco’s name turns up in many London concert programmes in the 1720s, though he did not manage to echo Geminiani’s fame in terms of appointments and recognition, and in 1733 he moved to Dublin. Sadly the only concrete evidence we have of him during his years in Ireland are concerned with marital problems and illness. A newspaper reported in August 1733 that 'Jane Scarlatti … hath eloped from her said Husband … This is to desire that noBody may give any Credit to the said Jane Scarlatti on account of her said Husband; for he will not pay any Debts that she shall contract'. Then in 1741 a benefit concert was advertised for him, since the composer—'though a long confinement by sickness, is reduced to very distressful circumstances'. The advert runs: 'At Geminiani’s Musick Room in Dame-street, on Saturday the 7th of February, will be performed a CONCERT OF MUSICK. In which Mr Dubourg will perform a solo, and Mr Worsdale sing some Songs.' There is no record of his death that has been found, but it is assumed that he died in that same year.

In 2023 Armonico Consort issued a recording of Francesco Scarlatti’s two large-scale sacred works, his Missa and Dixit Dominus (Signum SIGCD740). Now the group has turned its attention to his only surviving oratorio, Il Daniele nel lago de’ leoni—‘The [prophet] Daniel in the lake [or den] of lions’. Francesco appears to have composed at least four oratorios, two in Latin (both lost) and two in Italian, between 1699 and c1710. Mirroring the larger output of his brother Alessandro, those in Latin were performed in Rome, and those in Italian were performed in the south, in Naples or Palermo. We know that one of the Italian pieces, La profetessa guerriera, was performed in 1703 at a convent in Palermo, though the first performance of Daniele remains unknown. The composer appears to have brought copies of his two Italian oratorios to England: a small fragment of La profetessa survives in the British Library (the bulk of the work is lost), but fortunately Daniele survives complete in an autograph score in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, along with some secular cantatas.

The term ‘oratorio’ refers to the buildings in which dramatic musical renditions of biblical stories were performed during Lent when the opera houses were closed. Composers and librettists often described their works using different terms reflecting their dramatic nature. Francesco Scarlatti’s Latin oratorio Agnus occisus from 1699 was entitled ‘Melodramma’, and he described his Daniele as a ‘Dialogo a 5 voci’.

Scarlatti’s Daniele conforms in all general aspects to the typical Sicilian oratorio of the late-seventeenth century, which was itself closely modelled on Roman practice: four or five singers inhabit character roles, without a separate narrator, together with a chorus often consisting of the soloists singing in ensemble. The anonymous libretto of Daniele is notably different to those found in other contemporary oratorios that concern Daniel, such as the Oratorio di Daniele profeta with music attributed to Giacomo Carissimi, or Il Daniele with a libretto by Giovanni Battista Grappelli published in Rome in 1708. Rather than focusing mainly on the lions’ den, it comprises an amalgam of different parts of the Book of Daniel, including the later chapters that are generally regarded as apocryphal in the Protestant tradition and deuterocanonical in the Roman church. This allowed the addition of another dramatic encounter in the form of Bel and the smoke-loving dragon who endures a splendidly gruesome demise. The singers are as follows: Daniel and the Angel are sopranos, King Darius the Mede is an alto, the Prophet Habbakuk a tenor, and the Demone (dragon) a bass.

A literal translation of the Italian text does not always make the drama clear to anyone unfamiliar with the complete Book of Daniel, so a mix of synopsis, translation and paraphrase has been used in this booklet. The aim of contemporary librettists was to do much more than simply report the biblical narrative. One of the leading writers of the time, Arcangelo Spagna, wrote in his Oratorii ove Melodrammi sacri (Rome, 1706) of the desire to produce works of real spiritual melodrama, absorbing techniques from the secular genres of opera and cantata as necessary. As is found in other printed libretti, Spagna introduces each of his texts with an ‘Argomento’, introducing the story to the readers before presenting the libretto itself.

Francesco Scarlatti’s Missa and Dixit Dominus are impressive for their musical imagination, with the composer employing innovative ideas such as the use of quartets of a single voice part. Daniele reveals an equally inventive musical mind, with flexible structures, varied scoring for the string parts, and most notably an echo aria in which the echos are not sung by played by two instruments. The precise allocation of the string parts written in the score is not always clear since the parts are not named, the only clue being the selection of ranges and clefs, but the echo instruments would seem to be a violin and viola, used here to represent the cavernous acoustics of the lions’ den. Elsewhere Scarlatti provides frantic demisemiquaver scales and triplet semiquavers to depict Daniel’s fight with the dragon, and throughout the work care is given to contrasting tutti and solo groups of strings to provide textural variety across and within the arias. Francesco adds a trumpet to the basic string ensemble, thus giving the same overall scoring as used in his Missa and Dixit.

Since the work dates from around the turn of the eighteenth century, the arias are in the early manifestation of the ‘Da capo’ pattern. In the more familiar late-baroque aria the A section of the ABA structure is substantial and a shorter B section provides a clear music contrast. Here, the A section is generally shorter and the B section offers less contrast but more development of the opening material. However, structural flexibility is an important element of mid-baroque music, and whilst the Angel’s aria ‘Tutto governa’ is more like the later pattern with its long A section and shorter, contrasted, B section, Habbakuk’s aria ‘Correre per soccorrere’ adds a contrasting C section before the A section returns. Francesco’s harmonic style employs all the variety found in Italian music of the period, including of course the chord for which Naples has always been associated, the ‘Neapolitan 6th’, heard for example to good effect on the word ‘miserabile’ near the start of Daniele’s aria ‘Non son per credere’.

It would be surprising if Francesco’s oratorios weren’t influenced to some extent by those composed by his older brother Alessandro, who composed 38 mostly Italian oratorios dating from after 1679 (21 of which survive). But Francesco’s inventive string writing in Daniele more than matches his brother’s efforts. A BBC Radio 3 programme once described Alessandro as the ‘Sicilian Godfather of the Oratorio’. Francesco’s Daniele represents a small but brilliant contribution to this fortunately more benign family business.

Geoffrey Webber © 2025