The following text revisits and expands our lecture delivered at the Caffè Gambrinus in Naples, at the invitation of the Fondazione Pietà de’ Turchini, during the meeting dedicated to the Neapolitan School and the tradition of partimenti.
The Existence of the Neapolitan School
In musicological literature, the Neapolitan School is often discussed with a certain caution. There seems to be hesitation in clearly affirming the existence of what was an exceptional phenomenon in the history of Italian and European music. One prefers to speak, almost sotto voce, of the “so-called Neapolitan School,” or to debate its “mythology,” or simply its “myth.”
In Walter Piston’s harmony manual—an Anglo-American textbook translated and endorsed by the SIdM (Società Italiana di Musicologia)—one even finds the assertion, when discussing the Neapolitan sixth, that it is difficult to determine what is truly “Neapolitan” about that chord, and that it continues to bear the name merely because everyone uses it. And yet, in the preface, this manual is described as “useful” for updating teaching practices in Italian Conservatories.
«The major triad whose root is the lowered second scale degree is known as the Neapolitan sixth. It is difficult to say what is ‘Neapolitan’ about this chord, but the name is universally accepted.»
Walter Piston, Harmony, p. 396 of the Italian edition.
To this terminological uncertainty is added another persistent legend: that the musicological congress held in New York in 1961 “banned” the term Neapolitan School from the horizons of music historiography. Lost in sterile polemics, it is claimed that Alessandro Scarlatti cannot be considered a founder because he supposedly taught for only one or two months at Santa Maria di Loreto, and it is insinuated that Florimo’s books should be treated with caution because they are unreliable.
But before debating labels, conferences, and suspicions, it is better to begin with the facts. And the simplest fact—precisely the one most often neglected—is the so-called Neapolitan sixth.
A Name Without a History?
The manual under discussion is again Walter Piston’s Harmony. In explaining the chord, the author does not cite a single example drawn from a Neapolitan—or even Italian—composer.
In the chapter devoted to the Neapolitan sixth, spanning some ten pages, the examples are taken, in order, from Beethoven, Bach, again Beethoven, Mozart, Schumann, once more Beethoven, Mozart, Weber, Chopin, Handel, Brahms, Brahms, Chopin, Schubert, Schubert, Chopin, then Beethoven, Chopin, and finally—once again—Beethoven.
Reading the chapter, one might conclude that the Neapolitan sixth was born in the German lands. The reader could legitimately be convinced of this, since not even incidentally is a Neapolitan composer mentioned, and nowhere in the book does a single Neapolitan sixth appear drawn from the work of an Italian master.
And yet examples would not be lacking. One need only cite Alessandro Scarlatti, a leading representative of the very Neapolitan School that gave the chord its name. If a chord bears a geographical designation, perhaps it is not devoid of historical roots. Perhaps it reflects a consolidated practice, not a casual terminological habit.
The issue, then, is not whether Beethoven or Chopin used the Neapolitan sixth—of course they did. The real question is whether it is appropriate to explain a chord called “Neapolitan” while systematically ignoring those who, over the course of history, made it almost a stylistic hallmark.
Briciole di storia
The Congress That “Would Have Banned” Naples
In 1961, during a congress of the American Musicological Society in New York, the Neapolitan School is said—according to a widespread narrative—to have been “banned.” In reality, the discussions concerned specific stylistic questions and did not amount to any historiographical decree. No congress can abolish a historical phenomenon documented by institutions, archives, and centuries-long pedagogical continuity. History is not erased by a vote.Born in the German Lands?
If the Neapolitan sixth were truly “difficult to define as Neapolitan,” as Piston suggests, one would have to explain why it appears systematically in the works of masters trained in Naples.
Let us consider Alessandro Scarlatti. In the aria Per un vago desire, we find a clear and unequivocal example of the Neapolitan sixth, employed with expressive and theatrical function. It is not an ornamental detail, but a conscious harmonic choice, fully integrated into the dramatic language.
Nor is Scarlatti an isolated case. Francesco Durante, another eminent representative of the Neapolitan School, uses the same chord with identical stylistic awareness, for example in a fugue from 1755. The chord does not appear as an exception, but as a structural element of musical discourse.
So was the chord truly born in the German lands?
The designation “Neapolitan” is not a lexical accident. The chord was widely employed in the works of composers trained in the Neapolitan School and appreciated for its dramatic and melancholic character. The name reflects a practice, not a terminological whim.
Gaspare Selvaggi, in his Trattato dell’Armonia ordinato col nuovo metodo (Naples, 1823), after examining partimenti, devotes specific attention to the Neapolitan sixth, which he considers characteristic of the Neapolitan School and even of popular origin:
«Accordo molto adoperato dai nostri antichi, molto in uso nelle canzoni popolari del nostro regno, e di bellissimo effetto.»
(An accord much used by our ancients, widely employed in the popular songs of our kingdom, and of most beautiful effect.)
Gaspare Selvaggi, Trattato di Armonia, Naples 1823.
In more recent times, the DEUMM observes:
«Il nome di sesta napoletana giustifica soprattutto l’impiego fattone dai compositori di scuola napoletana che l’usarono moltissimo per esprimere una tinta drammatica e lamentosa.»
(The name “Neapolitan sixth” is justified above all by the use made of it by composers of the Neapolitan school, who employed it extensively to express a dramatic and plaintive color.)
DEUMM, Lessico.
Selvaggi, who stood at the crossroads between two pedagogical strands within the Neapolitan School—the leista current associated with Leonardo Leo and the durantista current linked to Francesco Durante—defines the Neapolitan sixth as characteristic of the musical School of Naples. It was taught systematically in partimenti—not as a sporadic device, but as an integral component in the training of young composers.
We encounter it in both cultivated and popular genres. Pergolesi, Durante, Leo, and Jommelli use it. It appears in opera seria as well as in opera buffa. A clear example is an aria by Pergolesi from Livietta e Tracollo (1734); numerous Neapolitan sixths can also be found in the duet of Uberto and Serpina from La Serva padrona (1733). In short, those who look will find.
The chord was so admired that it was adopted elsewhere as well. In Venice, for instance, Antonio Vivaldi employs it with full dramatic awareness, as can be observed in the concerto L’Estate.
The question, therefore, is not whether Beethoven used it—clearly he did, as the Neapolitan style spread throughout Europe. The question is different: is it plausible to explain a chord called “Neapolitan” by citing exclusively German or Austro-German composers, while systematically ignoring the Neapolitans?
Is it coherent to choose Beethoven—who never set foot in Naples—to exemplify a chord that was born and systematized within the Neapolitan School?
The Existence of the Neapolitan School
Another crucial issue is the very existence of the Neapolitan School. What defines a School? Not a suggestive label, not a critical formula, but a verifiable historical reality.
A School is first characterized by a physical place, by an institution in which organized teaching activity takes place. In eighteenth-century Naples there were Conservatories dedicated to musical instruction, active uninterruptedly from the late seventeenth century until the second half of the nineteenth century. This is a documentary fact, not an opinion.
A School is also distinguished by a recognizable pedagogical method. Here again Naples leaves little room for doubt: its teaching was structured and systematic, grounded in singing, partimenti, and counterpoint according to a consolidated tradition transmitted with continuity.
A third defining element is the existence of a group of artists who share a common orientation, a method of work, a stylistic grammar capable of producing coherent results despite individual differences. It is precisely this aspect that has been most contested, culminating in the debate surrounding the 1961 congress in New York.
Yet over the span of roughly two centuries, the Neapolitan School produced an impressive number of masters. And these masters did not remain confined to Naples: they traveled, taught, composed, and disseminated their style throughout Europe.
Consider Nicola Porpora, not only a great pedagogue but a composer of the highest level, author of about forty operas and active in several European capitals. He taught in Venice, was Haydn’s teacher, and served as vocal instructor to Farinelli, Caffarelli, Porporino, and Salimbeni. He did not confine himself to teaching; he carried a distinct style into European theaters and courts, contributing to the formation of a genuine musical koiné.
And like him many others: Leonardo Leo, Francesco Feo, Paisiello, Piccinni, Jommelli, Traetta—all trained in the Neapolitan Conservatories, all protagonists in the European diffusion of an elegant, refined, and innovative musical language.
To claim that Neapolitan production “does not exist” because it does not differ from what was heard elsewhere in Europe is to invert the historical perspective. It was not a peripheral region imitating a dominant center. On the contrary, Neapolitan masters played a decisive role in shaping the very language later recognized as European.
What is expected? That Neapolitan musicians compose in dialect in order to be recognizable? Their strength lay not in isolation but in their capacity to establish themselves as an international model.
The Neapolitan School produced not only composers and teachers but also exceptional performers—singers and instrumentalists active in courts from Saint Petersburg to Lisbon. Its output covered every genre: sacred, instrumental, vocal, operatic, chamber music. Alongside this flourished a rich didactic production, including partimenti and vocal methods.
Nor was the flow one-sided. Musicians from north of the Alps also traveled to Naples to update their training. Johann Adolf Hasse is an evident example.
To speak of the non-existence of the Neapolitan School is to ignore the historical perspective.
There is also an irony worth recalling. At the official musicological congress in New York in 1961, the term Neapolitan School was allegedly “banned.” Yet the most important musical institution in New York had been founded by a representative of that very tradition: Philipp Trajetta, son of Tommaso Traetta, trained in Naples under Fedele Fenaroli and Niccolò Piccinni.
“The Era of Bach and Mozart”
Giorgio Sanguinetti, in his book The Art of Partimento. History, Theory, and Practice, places Italian composers, theorists, and teachers “in the era of Bach and Mozart” (p. 10).
And yet, in the span of time that sees Bach born and Mozart die, music largely speaks Italian. Bach studied Caldara, Corelli, and Vivaldi. Mozart undertook three journeys to Italy and, to perfect himself further, was advised to return to Naples a fourth time.
To call that period “the era of Bach and Mozart” is to perform a historiographical reduction that does not withstand scrutiny. It is a very broad span of time, marked by radical transformations—from the late Baroque to Arcadia, from Neoclassicism to the first stirrings of pre-Romanticism.
To speak of an “era” is already debatable; to speak of the “era of Bach and Mozart” is a precise interpretative choice, selecting two names and elevating them to an ideological paradigm.
Between Pericles and Galileo
Robert Gjerdingen of Northwestern University likewise defines eighteenth-century music as “the era of Bach and Mozart.”
But in the strict sense, “classical art” properly refers only to that of the Greeks of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Everything else is historiographical construction—categories devised after the fact to organize complexity, sometimes opportunistically.
Bach lived in the full age of the Enlightenment and died as Neoclassicism was taking its first steps. Mozart traversed diverse languages and changed style multiple times over the course of his career. Elevating both to a single paradigm for an entire century flattens historical complexity.
Between 1685 and 1791 more than a hundred years elapsed. Reducing this period to two names chosen from the German-speaking world implies a selection that is anything but neutral.
What becomes of the two Scarlattis? Of Vivaldi? Galuppi? Anfossi? Sarti? Boccherini? Cimarosa? Paisiello? Salieri? Clementi? Viotti? And the thousands of Italian masters active across Europe? And the Bohemian, Czech, Polish composers? And those working in Mexico or Peru?
To define the eighteenth century as “the era of Bach and Mozart” is like baptizing a historical age “the era of Pericles and Galileo”: two figures far removed from one another, used as symbolic labels without coherent historical unity.
“The Mythology” of the Neapolitan School
If The Art of Partimento accepts without hesitation the “era of Bach and Mozart,” the Neapolitan School, by contrast, is treated with suspicion.
In chapter four, page 29, we read that nineteenth-century historians—Giuseppe Sigismondo, Carlo Antonio de Rosa, Marquis of Villarosa, Francesco Florimo, Michele Ruta—allegedly “constructed the mythology of the Neapolitan school.”
This passage deserves careful attention. A label such as “the Bachian and Mozartian era,” retroactively applied to more than a century of European musical history, is accepted as a legitimate category. A School documented by institutions, methods, treatises, archives, repertories, and two centuries of pedagogical continuity is instead presented as a “controversial idea.”
The paragraph devoted to Naples is in fact titled: “The Neapolitan School, a Controversial Idea.” And already at its first mention, in reference to Scarlatti, the expression “so-called Neapolitan” appears.
So-called. Is it excessive simply to call it the “Neapolitan School”?
From the very first pages, doubt is planted in the reader: perhaps it never existed. Perhaps it is a historiographical construction. Perhaps it is a nineteenth-century myth. Even the monumental volumes of Francesco Florimo are described as “controversial.”
But in scholarship, what is not controversial? Do dogmatic truths truly exist in musicological manuals?
Apparently so. Everything may be questioned—sources, historians, institutions, pedagogical traditions—everything, except the “era of Bach and Mozart.”
Legend, Fiction, or Reality?
Throughout Sanguinetti’s book, an implicit idea takes shape: the Neapolitan School, if it existed at all, would concern at most the pedagogy of partimenti. Nothing more.
The 1961 musicological congress held in New York, organized by the American Musicological Society, is cited. According to a widespread narrative, the notion of the Neapolitan School was “officially banned” from musicological discourse on that occasion.
Banned. The term is revealing, as though it referred to a lexical abuse to be eliminated rather than a historical problem to be examined.
But this is not how things stand. No congress can erase a phenomenon documented by archives, conservatories, treatises, international careers, and continuous pedagogical transmission. A category may be redefined, debated, problematized; it cannot be abolished by decree.
To claim that the Neapolitan School is a fiction amounts to asserting that for two centuries there was no organized system of musical training in Naples, no conservatories, no shared methods, no recognizable network of masters and pupils.
Is that truly the argument?
If the Neapolitan School is a mythology, one must then explain what the Conservatories of Santa Maria di Loreto, the Poveri di Gesù Cristo, Sant’Onofrio, and the Pietà dei Turchini actually were. One must explain why thousands of partimento manuscripts built on common patterns exist. One must explain why masters trained in Naples dominated European theaters for generations.
History cannot be erased by the title of a paragraph.
The Interventions at the Congress
What is attributed to the American musicological congress of 1961 is, in itself, far more controversial than Florimo’s pages. Yet that episode is often invoked as though it were an irrevocable verdict.
Consulting the actual program of the American Musicological Society conference reveals that the Neapolitan School was discussed only on the afternoon of Wednesday, September 6, among papers devoted to Liszt, Wagner, and medieval music. There are no records of declarations of illegitimacy, nor any formal acts abolishing Neapolitan traditions.
That same week, moreover, congress participants attended a performance of Il re Teodoro by Paisiello, a composer trained in the Neapolitan School. An opera officially performed within the congress that, according to a certain narrative, would have denied the School’s very existence only days earlier.
The two claims are difficult to reconcile.
During the meetings, discussions ranged from Ars Nova to modern music, from aesthetics to theory, across diverse repertoires. Naples was mentioned marginally and in relation to a circumscribed topic. Nothing justifies speaking of an “official ban.”
So Was It Banned or Not?
The interventions of Helmut Hucke and Edward O. D. Downes concerned the “Neapolitan tradition in opera,” not the denial of the Neapolitan School as a historical institution. The discussion addressed operatic style, limited to a specific genre and grounded in analytical criteria that are inevitably open to interpretation.
Stylistic analyses, by their nature, do not produce definitive verdicts. If two groups of scholars were to work separately on the same repertories, they would hardly reach identical conclusions.
Moreover, in 1961 the corpus of Neapolitan partimenti was still largely unknown or had not been systematically studied. Partimenti were not discussed at the congress at all. And yet it is precisely there that the School’s pedagogical continuity is rooted.
No speaker “banned” the Neapolitan School. Style was debated. A centuries-old tradition was not abolished.
The Founder of the Neapolitan School
The figure of Alessandro Scarlatti is likewise diminished in The Art of Partimento. From being a central protagonist in the emergence of a tradition destined to influence all of Europe, he appears almost suspended between myth and reality.
But the issue is not celebratory. It is historical.
If Scarlatti’s role is called into question, one must explain how the network of pupils was formed, how teaching in the Neapolitan Conservatories was structured, and how recognizable compositional practices were transmitted across generations.
Reducing everything to “mythology” evades the central question: the documentable existence of an institutional, pedagogical, and stylistic continuity that neither arises from nothing nor dissolves at the whim of historiography.
The Neapolitan School is not a romantic nineteenth-century invention. It is a historical phenomenon that demands analysis, not systematic suspicion.
An “Appropriate” Interpretation?
To support his position, Sanguinetti refers to Francesco Degrada, who argues that the Neapolitan School, as presented by Francesco Florimo, was the product of a “political agenda.” Florimo, according to this view, would have emphasized Naples’s musical greatness in order to compensate for the city’s loss of capital status after Italian unification.
This interpretation is described as “truly appropriate.” Yet acknowledging the historical weight of Naples in the formation of European musical culture does not amount to propaganda. It means recognizing verifiable facts: institutions, masters, pupils, repertories, and pedagogical methods that shaped musical life for over two centuries.
If there is an agenda at work, it lies in reducing a complex historical phenomenon to ideological suspicion.
“Neapolitan School” or “Italian School”?
In The Art of Partimento, the concept of the Neapolitan School is ultimately reduced to the existence of the four Neapolitan Conservatories. At least this, it is conceded, is beyond dispute.
In the chapter titled “Neapolitan School or Italian School?”, it is suggested that it might be more accurate to speak of an “Italian School,” and shortly thereafter of a “European School.”
Following this logic consistently, one might just as well speak of an “Italo-American School,” since the Neapolitan tradition was transplanted and institutionalized in the United States.
The son of Tommaso Traetta, Filippo—who became Philipp Trajetta in America—was among the founders of the first conservatories in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. He had studied in Naples with Fedele Fenaroli and Niccolò Piccinni. He did not export a label; he exported a concrete formation: partimenti, counterpoint, and a structured pedagogical practice.
The Neapolitan School in America
It was precisely in New York—according to a rather imaginative reconstruction the very city that would have “denied” the Neapolitan School in 1961—that Trajetta had already transplanted the “School of Naples” in 1812.
The first concerts of the American Conservatory were held in his residence on Fulton Street, Manhattan. This was not a symbolic echo, but a concrete pedagogical continuity.
Tommaso Traetta had learned the art of partimenti from Francesco Durante. His son Filippo studied with Fedele Fenaroli and was adopted by Niccolò Piccinni. He took part in the revolutionary movements of 1799, composed patriotic hymns, was imprisoned at Castel dell’Ovo, escaped with a false passport, and changed his name.
In the United States, he transferred a method, a grammar, and a conception of musical training. It is no coincidence that the first New York institution was called a “Conservatory” rather than an Academy: the designation was not ornamental, but programmatic.
The First American Oratorio
In 1829, in Philadelphia, the Conservatory founded by Trajetta performed in world premiere The Daughter of Zion, an oratorio composed and conducted by Trajetta himself. Biblical text, orchestra, chorus, and soloists: a European model reworked within the American context.
It was the first oratorio composed in the United States. From that experience emerged a tradition that would culminate, at the end of the century, in works such as Hora Novissima by Horatio Parker.
The line of transmission is documented. It is not a speculative interpretation.
Selective Omissions
In The Art of Partimento, the 1961 New York Congress is meticulously recalled, yet Tommaso Traetta and his son Filippo—or Philipp Trajetta—are not mentioned.
The same silence appears in Robert O. Gjerdingen’s volume Music in the Galant Style.
Walter Piston, who published his harmony manual in New York, questioned the origin of the so-called “Neapolitan” chord. And yet, only a few blocks away, on Fulton Street, Philipp Trajetta had lived and taught, formed within the Neapolitan partimento tradition.
Had the answer been sought not only in German repertories but also in the concrete history of musical pedagogy, the necessary elements would not have been lacking.
Neapolitan sixths were played in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York—not by terminological inertia, but because that harmonic grammar was part of a precise formation, exported from southern Italy.
Philipp Trajetta in New York
Philipp Trajetta played a decisive role in the birth of American musical education. He was the first in New York to found a Conservatory of music. He was among the first to compose an opera intended for an American audience, into which he poured his Neapolitan training. He was the first to compose an oratorio on American soil.
He worked as an impresario in the Southern states and contributed significantly to the musical growth of Philadelphia, so much so that the city earned the nickname “the American Athens.” With the assistance of Uri Keeler Hill, his former pupil in Boston, he laid the foundations for a musical school explicitly modeled on the Neapolitan experience.
He founded and directed the Conservatory of Philadelphia. He left manuals of singing, devised solfeggio systems adapted to the English language, composed operas, sacred music, and chamber works. He taught singing and composition until his death.
The obituary published in the Dwight’s Journal of Music in 1854 recalls that his return to the North was encouraged by his friend and pupil H. K. Hill, with whom he founded the Conservatory of Philadelphia, which in 1828 produced the oratorios Jerusalem in Affliction and The Daughter of Zion.
This is not rhetorical suggestion, but a documented genealogical line:
Durante → Fenaroli → Traetta → Trajetta → America.
If this does not constitute a School, the term itself would need to be redefined.
Partimenti and Jazz
It is not far-fetched to hypothesize that the partimento knowledge transmitted by Trajetta may have left a mark—directly or indirectly—on the subsequent development of American music, including jazz.
The language of Neapolitan partimenti is not a rigid system of rules, but a method of structured improvisation. It functions much like the scenarios of the commedia dell’arte: it provides frameworks, guided basses, harmonic and contrapuntal formulas that the student must develop extemporaneously.
To learn partimento is to learn to think musically in real time, constructing harmonic and melodic discourse upon shared structures. The conceptual affinity with certain improvisational practices of the American tradition is evident, at least on a methodological level.
The Neapolitan School Reaches America
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Naples could boast not only its four city Conservatories, but also an overseas expansion: at least three centers in the United States directly linked to Neapolitan training, in addition to the primacy in the birth of the American oratorio and the earliest operatic experiments.
The Neapolitan School thus took root in the New World.
Philipp Trajetta and Lorenzo Da Ponte even planned an opera together. The project did not come to fruition due to financial difficulties, yet the very collaboration between a librettist of such stature and a musician trained in the school of Fenaroli testifies to the existence of a concrete cultural network.
Founder of the New York Conservatory
The foundation of the New York Conservatory does not date from 1820, as long believed, but at least from 1812.
The proof appears on the title page of Filippo Traetta’s song Lovely Maid: Song or Duetto with an Accompaniment for the Piano Forte, written expressly for the American Conservatorio of New York, A.D. 1812, with words by Uri Keeler Hill.
The work was performed as a duet at a concert of the Philharmonic Society of New York and presented at Washington Hall on November 4, 1813. It was later republished in Philadelphia in 1844 with notes and additions by the composer.
The evidence is unequivocal: in 1812 an American Conservatorio of New York already existed.
Further Documentary Evidence
Additional newspaper articles confirm the existence of the Conservatory before 1820.
An announcement dated August 9, 1817 states that tickets for the concert of August 13 could be purchased “at the Conservatory, No. 8 Ross’s Buildings, Fulton Street.” The “U. K. Hill’s Oratorio Concert” was conducted by Philipp Trajetta.
Another concert at the American Conservatory was advertised on October 7, 1818: the program included one composition by Uri Keeler Hill and ten by Trajetta.
The Albany Gazette of September 27, 1817 announced a concert by the “Professors of the American Conservatorio of New York” to be held in Albany.
This was therefore not an ephemeral initiative, but a functioning institution, with faculty, concerts, students, and structured teaching activity.
The Neapolitan School transplanted to New York was not an abstract idea. It was an operative reality, capable of teaching instruments, composition, and improvisation according to the method of partimenti.
And while in the twentieth century some debated whether the Neapolitan School had ever existed, in the nineteenth century it had already crossed the Atlantic.
A Multifaceted Personality
Philipp Trajetta was not merely a composer and pedagogue. He was a multifaceted personality in the fullest sense of the term. He spoke several languages, cultivated scientific interests, and even engaged with mathematics. Contemporary accounts describe him as a skilled violinist, capable of performing on instruments beyond the violin and the piano.
He even invented an instrument: the lira da plettro, probably similar to a guitar, designed to allow ladies to accompany themselves easily in choral singing. Versions existed in different sizes, and the patent for the “Plettro Lira” has been preserved, providing concrete evidence of his inventive initiative.
This was no obscure provincial teacher, but a central figure in the transmission of Neapolitan musical knowledge across the Atlantic.
The Cat and the Lion
In 1961, at the New York Congress, knowledge of partimenti was infinitely more limited than it is today. The basso continuo was casually confused with the Neapolitan school partimento.
To claim that basso continuo and partimento are the same simply because both involve realizing a bass at the keyboard is like confusing a cat with a lion on the grounds that both belong to the feline family: formally correct, substantively misleading.
The basso continuo is an accompaniment practice. The partimento is a generative pedagogical system that forms the composer, the improviser, the very structure of musical thought. The difference is not terminological. It is structural.
A Certified School
The names speak for themselves: Fago, Greco, Leonardo Leo, Francesco Durante, Nicola Porpora, Pasquale Cafaro, Carlo Cotumacci, Giuseppe Arena, Nicola Sala, Giuseppe Dol, Fedele Fenaroli, Giovanni Paisiello, Giacomo Insanguine, Giacomo Tritto, Giovanni Furno, Niccolò Zingarelli.
This is not a vague “stylistic current,” but a network of Masters connected by concrete transmission: real Conservatories, identifiable pupils, documented teaching methods.
The partimenti preserved in manuscripts are tangible evidence of a specific pedagogical system. To reduce them to a mere “common European style” is to ignore their didactic function, their genealogy, their context.
The mistake of certain readings lies in treating partimento as an immobile language, identical to itself across centuries. Yet no living language remains unchanged for two hundred years.
A Mutable Art
The Art of Partimento gathers examples spanning more than two centuries. The whole is presented as “the Partimento,” yet without a systematic historical distinction between phases, authors, and contexts.
Similarly, in Gjerdingen’s volume on the galant style, geographical areas and formative paths are not rigorously distinguished: German, French, Neapolitan, Roman, and Venetian composers appear to participate in a single, undifferentiated language. The formulas seem to belong to a uniform and almost timeless European koiné.
This flattened vision overlooks a decisive historical fact: that European language spread through Italian musicians—largely trained in the School of Naples—who carried it to courts across Europe, from Lisbon to St. Petersburg.
In Gjerdingen’s catalogue of patterns, Leo, Feo, Mozart, and Haydn appear to adopt the same language without substantial variation. In such a leveled narrative, the Neapolitan School inevitably dissolves.
If everyone composes in the same way for over a century, what sense would it make to speak of a local School? The galant era becomes an indistinct container, a cauldron without genealogies, centers of irradiation, or dynamics of transmission.
But history does not function this way. Schools exist when institutions, methods, masters, pupils, and recognizable continuity exist. And Naples, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, possessed all these elements.
Characteristics of the Neapolitan School
Those who speak today of partimenti often ignore their historical differences. It is mistakenly assumed that authors and musical practices remained substantially unchanged between 1680 and 1850, as though two centuries of history had no impact on language, technique, taste, or pedagogical priorities.
Thus, if Fenaroli does not clarify a particular aspect of practice, it is supplemented by drawing from a manual written a century earlier or decades later, without regard for context. The individuality of the Masters, the differences between generations, the internal transformations of the tradition are flattened.
It is in this flattening that the Neapolitan School truly disappears—not in a congress held in 1961.
Denialism
Failing to investigate differences—even when they appear minor but prove substantial—is a shortcut. Comparing manuscripts, identifying variants, and reconstructing contexts requires time, effort, and competence.
It is easier to adopt a non-scientific approach. The first tangible consequence of this renunciation is the denial of the Neapolitan School.
In monographic manuals, partimenti from 1850 are treated as identical to those of 1800, those of 1750 as analogous to those of 1700. Printed and canonized examples are preferred over archival research. Better to cite Bach than Scarlatti, Cotumacci, or Insanguine.
Within this perspective, Bach becomes the absolute beacon and one speaks without hesitation of the “era of Bach and Mozart.” Yet Bach was not Neapolitan and did not belong to the Neapolitan conservatory tradition. If the frame of reference becomes exclusively Germanic, the Neapolitan School appears superfluous—or worse, inconvenient.
Individualities
Neapolitan Masters were sought throughout Europe. They moved from court to court because they were in demand. Kings and emperors did not choose them by accident; they wanted them precisely because they embodied a specific training.
German princes sent their composers to study in Naples. There the musical language was updated.
Each Master preserved his individuality, yet within a shared matrix acquired in the city’s Conservatories. It is this common matrix that defines a School.
Partimenti are called “Neapolitan” because there existed a School that taught them systematically. Philipp Trajetta carried this method to America, founding three Conservatories.
This is not myth. It is documented transmission.
And It Was Not the Only One
Italy did not host only a Neapolitan School. There were at least also a Roman and a Venetian School. The plurality of centers is a historical fact, not a hypothesis.
Contemporary musicology often measures everything through “style,” assessed by ear. But the ear is not a scientific instrument; it is a subjective filter shaped by training and personal taste.
History, however, is written through documents, institutions, genealogies, and methods.
And on these grounds, the Neapolitan School exists.
Principles of Philology
A school, to remain alive, must be in motion. Research evolves, updates itself, and corrects its assumptions. More than sixty years have passed since 1961—ample time to reconsider many certainties, if one truly intends to pursue scholarship.
The greatest damage that can be inflicted upon the theory of partimenti is to treat them as an undifferentiated block, ignoring the personalities of the Masters who conceived them. In the older manuals, by contrast, each author is a specific case, with distinct solutions, preferences, and pedagogical aims.
When a scholar identifies two bass motions that appear formally similar but are treated differently by different authors, they cannot be arbitrarily fused into a personal synthesis. To do so would betray the very principle of philology.
It would be like producing a critical edition that reconstructs an allegedly “authentic” version by mixing sources at will: four notes from one manuscript, five from another, nine from a third.
The result would be scores no author ever wrote—hybrids devoid of historical identity, unrecognizable to the very Masters to whom they are attributed.
Philology does not create arbitrary syntheses. It distinguishes, contextualizes, and respects differences.
Briciole di storia
An Alphabet That Never Existed
If partimenti had remained identical for two centuries, a single manual—one alphabet—would have sufficed from 1680 to 1850. Yet the archives tell a different story: differing manuscripts, variants, personal solutions, progressive transformations.
Each Master reworks what he has received. Each generation modifies what it has learned. This is how a living tradition functions. This is how a School is recognized.
Conclusions
Partimenti differ according to the period in which they were written, the Master who conceived them, and the language they embody. If this were not so, there would exist a single alphabet valid for two centuries. Archival reality tells another story: a plurality of manuscripts, variants, and approaches.
One cannot ignore the differences between one author and another, nor between one manuscript and another. This is not a generic “European discourse” retroactively homogenized.
The Neapolitan School exists not as an ideological construction, not as a nationalist claim, not as a romantic myth.
It exists because in Naples there were concrete institutions—the Conservatories—active for over two centuries.
It exists because there was a documentable pedagogical continuity.
It exists because that tradition changed over time, transformed itself, and renewed itself.
It exists because it formed Masters who profoundly shaped European musical history.
And it exists because that same tradition was exported to America, contributing to the birth of musical institutions and new genres.
To deny the Neapolitan School is to ignore the documents.
To recognize it is to write history.
