Except in his grand operas and his ecclesiastical pieces, he asked for no large forces of singers or players. In his masses he wrote as usual for four voices, although he seems to have preferred five, and he not infrequently required in them two choirs, each in five parts. The "Stabat Mater" is for two voices only, and its accompaniment is so simple and so thin that Paisiello subsequently wrote additional instrumentation for it. The "Serva Padrona" has only two characters and the accompaniment requires only the string quartet; yet so ingenious, so bright, so gay and so apposite is all the music, that the hearer never finds it monotonous or tedious.
That Pergolese should have began his musical life as a violinist and yet should have written for the voice with perfect expressiveness and exact adaptation, has sometimes been thought strange. But his is by no means an isolated case, for many of the best writers of vocal music have begun their studies as instrumentalists and have even excelled as performers; besides which, he put aside the violin as soon as the larger scope of his gifts was discovered and further improved his feeling for the voice by association with Vinci and Hasse when he was once free of the Conservatory.
[Illustration: Reproduction of original title-page and a portion of musical manuscript of the celebrated "Salve Regina," by Pergolesi, now in the possession of the British Museum. The added note on title-page made by Mr. Venna is probably incorrect, for the best authorities agree that he died in 1736, aged 26.]
Pergolese's limitations sprang from the same source whence flowed his power--his understanding of the natural adaptation of the means of expression to the ideas and emotions to be conveyed. He could not or would not pass into the theatrical, the meretricious and the exaggerated, and hence it is that his music sometimes fell short of the effect which he had hoped for it or lacked the variety of color and manner without which a large and extended work must weary the ear, or at least fail to keep it alert and interested.
He excelled in grace, simplicity and purity of style, although his music, written for singers who had been trained to depend upon themselves and not to lean upon accompaniments, may appear abstruse and difficult to present readers. He brought to his time the vitality, movement, spring and sincerity of life which it had not, and he used his means with tact and directness in appealing to sentiment, mirth, pathos and piety according as he wished to evoke them. If he cannot be accorded the honor of having created a new manner of musical composition, he must be awarded that of having beautified and enlivened the art as he found it, and of having done the world a lasting benefit, greater perhaps in the impulse given to contemporary and subsequent thought, than in the impression directly made by him upon his time and his people.
