Francesco Scarlatti

Francesco Antonio Nicola Scarlatti (Palermo, 5 December 1666 – Dublin, after January 1741) was an Italian composer, the elder brother of Alessandro Scarlatti. He is known above all for his relationship with his brother and for an itinerant career between Naples, Sicily, Vienna, London and Dublin, of which only rather fragmentary documentary evidence survives.

He was trained in Naples, to which he moved around 1672–1674, and where he studied at one of the conservatories. In February 1684 he joined the royal court as a violinist, the same year in which his brother Alessandro was appointed maestro di cappella. Around 1690 he married Rosolina Albano, with whom he had at least five children; she died in Palermo in June 1706. A year after the wedding, in February 1691, he obtained permission to travel to Sicily, where he remained for at least twenty-four years. In a petition of 1715 he claimed to have been maestro di cappella in Palermo for twenty-six years, though not at the royal chapel; his activity as a professional musician in the city is confirmed by his presence on the membership lists of the Unione dei Musici in January and July 1694.

In Palermo, works of his were performed, such as the five-part dialogue La profetessa guerriera (1703) and the Latin oratorios staged in Rome in 1699 and 1710. Also attributed to this period are a Dixit Dominus and a mass for sixteen voices and instruments, as well as the chamber cantata Belle pupille care and the serenata Il nuovo sole, composed for the birthday of Charles VI. In 1715 he unsuccessfully applied for the post of deputy maestro di cappella at the Viennese court, despite the support of J. J. Fux, and the Miserere in G minor is considered probably to have been composed to support that application.

After returning to the Italian peninsula, in 1719 he was still drawing a salary linked to his former post in Naples. That same year he travelled to London, perhaps at the invitation of Handel or Geminiani, and his name appears in concert advertisements between 1719 and 1724. He later settled in Dublin, around 1733. Accounts of his private life are confused: a Neapolitan register of 1726 lists Francesco as dead, an advertisement of 1733 mentions a supposed wife who had abandoned him, and in 1741 a benefit concert was announced for an ill and impoverished musician, probably himself, who died shortly afterwards.

His legacy is modest and to a large extent lost or uncertain in authorship, but his sacred and vocal output reflects the passage of the Neapolitan school into the courtly and concert circuits of eighteenth-century Europe.