This was the penultimate conference in a series dedicated to Giovanni Battista Pergolesi on the third centenary of his birth (2010). Previous conferences were hosted in Naples, Milan, Rome, Dresden, Tokyo and Vienna. One last meeting at Georgetown University will close this ‘Pergolesi world tour’. The whole cycle was promoted by the Fondazione Pergolesi Spontini based in Iesi, whose efforts deserve all our admiration, especially in these hard times for culture funding in Italy (and all over Europe). A captivating example of their support for Pergolesi's music was the fine performance of Lo frate 'nnamorato (directed by Fabio Biondi in the city's theatre, which dates from 1790) that conference-goers had the pleasure of attending on the first evening. Organized by Francesco Cotticelli (Seconda Università di Napoli) and Paologiovanni Maione (Conservatorio D. Cimarosa di Avellino), the title ‘Pergolesi, from Iesi to Europe’ referred to the pathways of Pergolesi reception and to the provenance of the eleven speakers – from Austria, Germany, Great Britain, Spain and Italy (further two speakers on the programme could not participate in the conference in the end).

Before the conference proper was opened, the first printed proceedings from the foregoing succession of conferences – volume 6 of the Studi pergolesiani/Pergolesi Studies series – were presented to the public by Renato Di Benedetto (Università Federico II di Napoli) and their editor Claudio Toscani (Università Statale di Milano). The volume gathers the papers presented at the conference ‘G. B. Pergolesi: la critica dei testi, i testi della critica’, held in Milan in May 2010. The proceedings from the other jubilee conferences will follow in 2012 (published by Peter Lang, Berne).

In the first session Francesco Cotticelli and Paologiovanni Maione presented two complementary papers, stressing the importance of the commedia dell'arte model even for the innovative theatrical forms in Naples in the 1720s and 1730s: Metastasian opera seria and the commedeja ppe mmuseca, the specifically Neapolitan buffo genre in local dialect. Cotticelli focused on Metastasio's libretto for Adriano in Siria, Maione on Gennarantonio Federico's Frate 'nnamorato, comparing them to sources of scenari, both manuscript and in print (the Arte rappresentativa by Perrucci).

In the next session, Mario Armellini (Université de Rouen) worked his way backwards through the various editions of the Dictionnaire portatif by Lacombe to the spring of 1752. He showed that the lineaments of the Pergolesi myth – his death by poison and the concentration on a few titles, such as the Stabat mater, the Salve regina and La serva padrona – were already present in French intellectual discourse before they gained popularity in the querelle des bouffons. Armellini proposed that the querelle was by no means the result of a chance event – the performances of the Bambini troupe in Paris in summer 1752 – but of carefully timed propaganda; it is significant, he argued, that the illuministes and bouffonistes were at that time almost the same circle. Francesc Cortés (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona) examined the reception of Pergolesi in Spain, centring on the series of reworkings of the Stabat mater in the nineteenth century (other compositions were much less in evidence). I found his reference to the private archives of the Dukes of Alba particularly interesting, as the previous patron of the archive – James Fitz-James Stuart, Duke of Berwick, the Spanish ambassador in Naples – had commissioned a cantata from Pergolesi and was the dedicatee of the posthumous print of his four cantatas (Naples, 1738). Teresa Casanova (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) reported on her discovery of new librettos in Toledo. The number of documented performances of intermezzos in Madrid between 1738 and 1758 can now be raised from seventeen to twenty-five. Moreover, in Madrid some unique intermezzo sources in manuscript parts have been discovered, some of them by Jommelli. The reception of Italian intermezzos – which were nearly always performed as independent works, and not as entr'actes – can be divided into two stages. To begin with, many older Neapolitan works were restaged in Madrid. After Farinelli's appointment as royal theatre director in 1747 newer works were performed. The Spanish reception started, we should note, exactly when the intermezzo vanished from the Neapolitan theatres, following the taste of the new Neapolitan king, Charles of Bourbon.

Michael Burden (University of Oxford) presented a varied picture of Pergolesi reception in London. Quite early, in the 1740s, the Academy of Ancient Music had performed several sacred works by the composer. With Handel, Pergolesi was in fact the only contemporary performed in the Academy concerts. La serva padrona also enjoyed considerable success in London, especially in English translation in the summer theatre of Marylebone Gardens. Still to be examined is the relationship between these performances and publications (both the Stabat mater and the Mass in D major were first published in London, after all); some connection is likely, considering the entrepreneurial spirit of London publishers. Burden showed that the London public approached Pergolesi with a remarkable degree of religious tolerance when faced with the musical qualities of sacred works by this ‘Romish’ (Roman Catholic) composer.

The first speaker in the last session was Iris Winkler (Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt), who reconstructed how the discussion of Pergolesi in the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung gradually shifted its focus from aesthetic polemics in the late eighteenth century to a critical view of the composer in terms of music history. The extensive knowledge of his music by figures such as Kiesewetter or Chrysander notwithstanding, more and more spurious works were added to nineteenth-century lists of his compositions. Danièle Lipp (Universität Wien) gave an overview of Pergolesi sources in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in order to illustrate the reception of La serva padrona in the Austrian capital, where three performances are documented, in 1746, 1765 and 1770. Both of the older librettos are from performances in Italian at the Kärntnertortheater, and use a translation by Johann Ludwig van Ghelen. Intriguingly, this translation had already been printed in the libretto for the performance in Graz in 1739 – the first documented performance of the intermezzo north of the Alps. The relationship between the theatre in Graz and the Kärntnertortheater still awaits close scrutiny. The 1770 performance, by contrast, was fairly remote from the original. Paolo Giorgi (Università di Pavia in Cremona) discussed some of the numerous reworkings of the Stabat mater. In Leipzig, Pergolesi's masterwork attracted the attention of Bach in 1747 and 1748, Hiller in 1770 and 1774, and Mendelssohn in 1825. The so-called ‘Wiener Fassung’, which was recently published, was actually a collective enterprise – the result of layers of interventions over many decades by Salieri, Süßmayr, Eybler, Ignaz von Seyfried and Nicolai (see the review of the edition by Martin Haselböck, by Jane Schatkin Hettrick, in Eighteenth-Century Music 8/2 (2011), 337–339). As a curiosity, Giorgi concluded with a ‘brevissima’ version from Rome by Jannacconi (1815) which reduced the Stabat mater to only a few pages of music, and even scored it a cappella. Milada Jonášová (Akademie věd České Republiky) drew a colourful picture of the various troupes performing Italian intermezzos in Prague during the eighteenth century, first in the private theatre of Franz Anton Spork and later in the theatre in Kotce and the Nostitz theatre. Finally, Maria Scherbakova (Marinsky Theatre Archive) showed documents and portraits of the noble amateurs – especially young girls in private colleges – who performed Pergolesi's La serva padrona and other works in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

In sum, the theme of Pergolesi reception appears to be almost inexhaustible: the early dissemination of his works and popular myths about his biography make him a key figure in the development of sacred music and musical theatre in eighteenth-century Europe. New insights into the French and German context, about which surprisingly little is known, are always welcome. My personal curiosity was especially aroused by the promising tracks leading to Britain and to Spain – up to now almost blank pages in Pergolesi studies.