Benigno Zerafa (1726–1804) and the Neapolitan Galant Style by Frederick Aquilina (review)

The name Zerafa is unknown to most devotees of classical music. His compositions—exclusively sacred—face long odds in overcoming the secular nature of modern concerts. Aside from annual performances of Handel’s Messiah, a concertgoer might have to wait years to hear a significant sacred work, even one by a far more famous composer. Zerafa’s works may also be unfamiliar because they were composed and performed in Malta, which in the world of 18^th-century music was more of an importing than an exporting nation. Zerafa’s reputation, however, may be set for an upgrade thanks to a new book by Frederick Aquilina.

In 1969, a dusty cupboard was opened in the sacristy of the Cathedral of Malta. Inside were nearly the complete works of Zerafa. This huge corpus of music—hundreds of movements for all types of choral ensembles and soloists with orchestra—had been preserved intact for almost two centuries. Like a time capsule, the cupboard held a record of the music heard by the highest echelons of Maltese society from the 1740s to the 1780s. An outsider might wonder if all this music produced at the southern periphery of Europe might be of lesser quality, as if the physical distance from cultural centers translated into a garbled, provincial style. The answer is a clear ‘no’, and the reasons why form much of the narrative of this book.

Born the fifth of a Maltese surgeon’s eight children, Benigno Zerafa knew as a child that the family business would pass to one of his older brothers. For a younger son, a life in the Church was an attractive option. Indeed, payroll records from the Cathedral of Malta show him already receiving a small salary as a choirboy in 1735, when just eight years old. He showed such musical promise that three years later, in the summer of his eleventh year, the Church sponsored sending him to one of the Naples conservatories. This future priest was to be trained as the eventual replacement of a recently deceased chapel master who years earlier had attended the same conservatory.

Naples had four famous conservatories that shaped future professional musicians. All four had begun as orphanages, with the word ‘conservatory’ meaning a home where orphans could be protected and ‘conserved’. Orphanages taught children useful trades, and four Neapolitan conservatories began, around 1630, to teach the trade of music. In the ensuing century these schools perfected a creative and extraordinarily effective means of turning poor urchins into talented court and church musicians. The schools’ fame eventually attracted paying students, one of whom was Zerafa. More precisely, the payer was the Cathedral of Malta. It would cover Zerafa’s expenses in Naples and then recoup its investment through deductions from his future salary.

A recent book by Peter van Tour has detailed the three conservatories in Naples that survived into the second half of the 18^th-century (Counterpoint and Partimento: Methods of Teaching Composition in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples, Uppsala, 2015). The one conservatory excluded from that study—the aptly named Conservatorio dei Poveri di Gesù Cristo (‘The Poor Ones of Jesus Christ’)—is the one that enrolled young Zerafa. He was a student there for more than five years, until the school was shuttered in November of 1743. His return to Malta was delayed by a year, during which time he may have transferred to another conservatory or studied privately with a local maestro. Details of Zerafa’s life at the Poveri help illuminate this once famous institution. For example, we learn that the Poveri was glad to accept young seminarians like Zerafa, whereas at least one other school (the Loreto) was not. In the course of describing this institution and its teachers, Aquilina provides a fine summary of the many prior studies that pertain to the training of young musicians in Naples. There are short biographies of the master teachers, contemporary reports of the students’ daily life, and descriptions...