L’erra

Alessandro Scarlatti was only 24 and had just begun his enormously successful operatic career when he set a libretto by that great Roman patron of the arts, Cardinal Pamphili, on the subject of repentance and divine grace. It was performed before a distinguished audience by a small group of leading singers and instrumentalists of the day in March 1685—the year of the birth of Alessandro's son Domenico (in fact, as a matter of interest, three days before the birth of J. S. Bach). This simple little morality (oratorio is too grandiose a term for it) shows Magdalen torn between youthful pleasures and repentance for hedonistic living: the subject is treated in a sequence of extremely brief arias (and a few duets) and recitatives, which add up to a rather bitty effect, all the more because of seemingly haphazard key-sequences.

Carl Heinrich Graun (1703/4–59) was one of the two most famous composers of Italian opera in 18th-century Germany, his only serious rival being Johann Adolf Hasse at the court in Dresden. He was the court composer of Prussian King Frederick the Great. He wrote at least 26 highly acclaimed operas for the Berlin Unter den Linden opera house that Frederick built for that purpose, in addition to the six he had written for an earlier patron.

Les rares femmes au pouvoir, dans l'entreprise ou en politique, ont longtemps été considérées avec méfiance. Suspectes "d'être pire que les hommes", d'avoir réussi grâce à une promotion canapé, d'avoir de l'ambition, un gros mot pour le sexe faible. Les réflexes conditionnés ont la peau dure mais ils évoluent au nom du principe de réalité. …

Until recently all traces of Alessandro Scarlatti’s oratorio Il martirio di Santa Cecilia had been lost. Discovered in the manuscript collection of the Fondation Martin Bodmer in Cologny, near Geneva, this oratorio which had been undiscovered for decades was immediately performed in Zurich. Karl Böhmer (the booklet author) and Oliver Mattern produced the first modern edition of the work. The interpreters on that occasion are again featured on the present recording. This sacred tragedy could rightly be termed one of the most dramatic and mature oratorios of the Roman baroque.