Pergolesi's Vision.

The strange account of Mozart's death has been told many times, and everyone knows it; his so celebrated Requiem was his last and unquestionable masterpiece. If we are to give credence to an ancient and respectable Neapolitan tradition, long before Mozart, facts no less mysterious and no less interesting would have preceded, if not brought about, the premature death of a great master: Pergolesi. I heard this tradition from the very mouth of an old peasant of Naples, that land of the arts and of memories; he had received it from his grandparents, and in his devotion to the illustrious master of whom he spoke, he took care to alter nothing in his account.

I shall imitate him and tell you faithfully what he told me.

He said to me: “You know the little town of Casoria, a few kilometers from Naples. It was there that, in 1704, Pergolesi came into the world.

“From the earliest age the artist of the future revealed himself. As his mother, like all our mothers do, hummed beside him the rhymed legends of our land, to lull il bambino to sleep, or, according to the ingenuous expression of our Neapolitan wet nurses, in order to call to the side of the cradle the little angels of sleep (angelini del sonno), it is said that the child, instead of closing his eyes, opened them wide, fixed and shining; his little hands stirred and seemed to applaud; from the joyful cries that escaped his panting breast, one would have said that this soul, only just opened to life, already trembled at the first echoes of an art that one day was to captivate it entirely. “At eight years of age, Naples admired him as a prodigy, and for more than twenty years all of Europe applauded his talent and his works. He made the musical art take an immense step; he cast, so to speak, the germ of a new era, which was soon to produce the masters who are called Mozart, Méhul, Beethoven, Haydn and others; in a word, glory crowned his brow with the most brilliant halo. “And yet, one would have said that over that brow there hovered a cloud of melancholy, making it bend toward the earth. From time to time the artist's deep gaze rose toward heaven, as though he sought something there, a thought, an inspiration.

“When he was questioned, he answered that a vague aspiration filled his soul, that in the depths of himself he heard as it were the uncertain echoes of a song of heaven, which transported him and lifted him up, but which he could not capture, and that, like a bird whose wings, too weak, cannot, at its will, raise it into space, he fell to the earth, without having been able to follow that gentle inspiration. “In this struggle, little by little the soul wore itself out; in the most beautiful age of life, for he was then only thirty-two years old, Pergolesi seemed already to have been touched by the finger of death. His fertile genius seemed to have become sterile, his health withered day by day; in vain his friends sought the cause of it, and he himself was incapable of discovering it. “It was in this painful and strange state that he spent the winter of 1735 to 1736.

“You know with what piety we here celebrate, even in our days, despite the weakness of faith, the touching anniversary of the death of the Christ; the week in which the Church recalls it to its children is indeed truly, for us, a holy week. Thus, carrying yourself back to the age of faith in which Pergolesi lived, you can imagine with what fervor the people flocked in throngs to the churches, to meditate upon the moving scenes of the bloody drama of Calvary. “On Good Friday Pergolesi accompanied the crowd. As he approached the temple, it seemed to him that a calm, long unknown to him, came over his soul, and when he crossed the threshold, he felt himself as if enveloped by a cloud at once thick and luminous. Soon he saw nothing more; a profound silence fell around him; then, before his wondering eyes, and in the midst of the cloud, in which until then he seemed to have been carried, he saw taking shape the pure and divine features of a virgin, entirely clad in white; he saw her lay her ethereal fingers upon the keys of an organ, and he heard as it were a distant concert of melodious voices, which imperceptibly drew near to him. The song that those voices repeated filled him with enchantment, yet it was not unknown to him; it seemed to him that this song was the one of which he had been able to perceive only vague echoes; those voices were indeed the very ones that, for long months, had cast disturbance into his soul and now brought him a happiness without limit. Yes, that song, those voices were truly the dream that he had pursued, the thought, the inspiration that he had vainly sought for so long. “But while his soul, transported in ecstasy, drank in long draughts the simple and celestial harmonies of that angelic concert, his hand, as if moved by a mysterious force, stirred in space and seemed to trace, in spite of itself, notes that rendered the sounds his ear was hearing.

“Little by little the voices drew away, the vision disappeared, the cloud faded, and Pergolesi saw, on opening his eyes, written by his own hand, upon the marble of the temple, that song of sublime simplicity which was to immortalize him, the Stabat Mater, n which from that day the whole Christian world repeats and admires.

“The artist rose, left the temple, calm, happy, and no longer anxious and agitated. But on that day a new aspiration took hold of that artist's soul; it had heard the song of the angels, the concert of the Heavens. Human voices and earthly concerts could no longer suffice it. This burning thirst, the impulse of a great genius, ended by exhausting the breath of life that remained to him, and it was thus that, at thirty-three years of age, in exaltation, in fever, or rather, in the supernatural love of his art, Pergolesi met death.” Such is the narrative of my Neapolitan. As I said, it is no more than a tradition. I do not defend its authenticity, and History will perhaps not confirm it on all points, but it is too touching for us not to take delight in its account.

Ernest Le Nordez. n Petit Moniteur of December 12, 1868.

[1]

[YouTube — Katia Ricciarelli – Pergolesi – Stabat Mater (Dolorosa).]

[2] [Ernest Le Nordez was born in 1839 in Montebourg, died in Marseille, in 1905; he was a French journalist and writer, author of “Guide du Baigneur à St Quay Portrieux” .]