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During the Nineteenth Century, the fame reached by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi was so large that the historical figure of the composer born in Jesi was transformed in a “dramatis persona”. Pergolesi appears as a character in two different operas dated to 1857. The first one is “Pergolese” by Temistocle Solera and Stefano Ronchetti Monteviti, performed in Milan at the Teatro alla Scala; the second one is “Pergolesi”, a “melodramma semiserio” by Fedrico Quercia set to music by Paolo Serrao and staged at the Teatro del Fondo in Naples. The two works mix historical elements with details drawn from pure fantasy. Their main purpose is to exalt the figure of the unfortunate and tormented artist, transforning him into a romantic icon. Both the composers insert in their scores fragments of music by (or falsely attributed to) Pergolesi: Ronchetti Monteviti echoes four sections of the “Stabat mater” (“Vidit suum”, “Quando corpus”, “Stabat mater” and “Cuius animam”); Serrao quotes the spurious aria “Tre giorni son che Nina” and the “Eia mater” and the “Vidit suum” from the “Stabat”. This treatment can be connected to the process of “fictionalizing of music history” well studied by Sarah Hibberd, as well as to a larger tendency to actualize the musical past by means of revivals and historical concerts.

Nel panorama palermitano di Cinque e Seicento appare indiscusso il ruolo musicale della Real Cappella di San Pietro, comunemente nota come Cappella Palatina. Il prestigio dell’istituzione fu tale da spingere Ottavio Tiby, musicologo palermitano, ad occuparsene per primo in un saggio del 1952, 'La musica nella Real Cappella Palatina', per molti anni unico esempio di analisi delle attività musicali nelle istituzioni ecclesiastiche cittadine. Recenti indagini condotte presso l’Archivio di Stato di Palermo hanno tuttavia integrato le informazioni in nostro possesso, dimostrando come le ricerche di Tiby avessero tralasciato una parte della documentazione, offrendo un quadro sostanzialmente incompleto. In particolare due esempi confermerebbero i legami che intercorrevano fra la Cappella palermitana e la Cappella Reale di Napoli, facilmente ipotizzabili ma finora non dimostrati o adeguatamente sottolineati. Scopo del contributo sarà quello di ricostruire le attività della Palatina fra XVI e XVII secolo, inserendole con maggiore precisione nel contesto musicale del periodo e mettendo in luce i rapporti fra le due più importanti istituzioni musicali del viceregno spagnolo nella penisola italiana. In sixteenth-seventeenth-century Palermo, the musical role of the Royal Chapel of St. Peter, commonly known as the Palatina Chapel, was undisputed. The prestige of this institution was such as to induce the Palermitan musicologist Ottavio Tiby to deal with it for the first time in a 1952 essay, 'La musica nella Real Cappella Palatina', for many years the only example of analysis of musical activity in the ecclesiastical institutions of the city. Recent researches at the State Archives of Palermo, however, have integrated the information in our possession, showing how Tiby had overlooked part of the documentation, providing a substantially incomplete picture. In particular, two examples would confirm the close link between the Chapel of Palermo and the Royal Chapel in Naples, which was easily presumable, but so far not sufficiently proven or underlined. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the activities of the Palatina in the 16th and 17th centuries, by setting them more precisely in the musical context of the period and highlighting the relationship between the two most important musical institutions of the Spanish Viceroyalty in the Italian peninsula.