"Alessandro Scarlatti (1659-1725), father of Domenico Scarlatti, has too long stood in the shadow of the four great masters of the eighteenth century, Bach and Handel, and Haydn and Mozart. With this readable introduction to Alessandro Scarlatti's operas, Donald Jay Grout contributes to the revaluation and restoration of Scarlatti's work that he has begun with his complete modern edition of the operas. Historically, Scarlatti's operas mark the culmination of the first hundred years of Italian opera. Their conventions of stage scenery and costume, of dramatic subject matter, of poetic form and language, and of musical form, though they may seem remote to us today, are perfectly consistent within themselves and perfectly consonant with the social conditions of their time and place. With this book Professor Grout helps make those conventions understandable to today's music-lovers. He discusses Alessandro Scarlatti's life and work in the context of eighteenth-century Naples and Rome, and presents an analysis of the music and librettos of the operas. This book is based on Professor Grout's Ernest Bloch Lectures, delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1976." --Dust jacket.