Spiritist Review - Journal of Psychological Studies - 1869

The strange account of Mozart's death has been often told and everybody knows it, whose famous Requiem was the last and indisputable masterpiece. If we are to believe a very old and very respectable Neapolitan tradition, long before Mozart, not less mysterious and interesting facts would have preceded, if not led to the premature death of a great master: Pergolesi.



I heard about that tradition from the very mouth of an old peasant in the countryside of Naples, the land of arts and memories; he would have learned it from his ancestors, and in his worship to the illustrious master of whom he spoke, he was careful not to change anything in his report.



I will imitate him and faithfully tell what I heard from him.



"You know," he said to me, "the small town of Casoria, a few kilometers from Naples; it was there that in 1704 Pergolesi came to life.



"From the most tender age the artist of the future revealed himself. When his mother, as all our mothers do, hummed to him the rhymed legends of our country, to lull his “bambino” to sleep, or according to the naïve expression of our Neapolitan nannies, to summon the little angels of sleep (“angelini del sonno”) around the cradle, the child, it is said, instead of closing his eyes, he kept them wide open, fixed and shiny; his little hands waved and seemed to applaud; to the joyful cries that escaped from his panting chest, it was said that this barely hatched soul was already shivering at the first echoes of an art that was to one day captivate him completely.



At the age of eight, Naples admired him as a prodigy, and for more than twenty years the whole of Europe applauded his talent and his works. He made the musical art to take an immense step; he sowed, so to speak, the seeds of a new era that was soon to give birth to the masters such as Mozart, Mehul, Beethoven, Haydn, and others; glory, in a word, covered his forehead with the brightest halo.



And yet, one would say that a cloud of melancholy wandered around this front, making him lean towards Earth. From time to time, the deep gaze of the artist rose to the sky as if seeking something, a thought, an inspiration.



When questioned, he replied that a vague inspiration filled his soul, that deep within himself he heard like the uncertain echoes of a song of heaven, that carried him and raised him, but that he could not grasp, and that like the bird whose weak wings cannot carry away at will in space, he fell back to Earth, unable to follow that sweet inspiration.

His soul was gradually exhausted in that struggle; at the finest age of life, for he was then only thirty-two years old, Pergolesi seemed to have already been touched by the finger of death. His fertile genius seemed to have become sterile, his health fading away day by day; his friends searched for the cause in vain and he himself could not find it out.



It was in this strange and painful state that he spent the winter between 1735 and 1736.



You know with what piety we celebrate here, even today, and despite the weakening of the faith, the touching anniversaries of Christ's death; the week in which the Church reminds its children of him is truly a Holy Week for us. Thus, by referring to the time of faith when Pergolesi lived, you can imagine the fervor with which the people ran in crowds to the churches to meditate on the touching scenes of the bloody drama of the Calvary.



"Pergolesi followed the crowd on a Good Friday. As he approached the temple, it seemed to him that a long unknown calm took his soul over, and when he crossed the portal, he felt as if enveloped in a cloud that was both thick and bright. Soon he saw nothing else; a deep silence was made around him; then before his astonished eyes, and amid the cloud where until then he was carried away, he saw the pure and divine traces of a virgin entirely dressed in white taking shape; he saw her placing her ethereal fingers on the keys of an organ, and he heard like a distant concert of melodious voices that insensibly approached him. The song that those voices repeated enchanted him, but it was not strange to him; it seemed like the melody of which he often perceived vague echoes only; those voices were indeed the ones that had troubled his soul for many months, and now brought him an unparalleled happiness; yes, that song, those voices, they were indeed the dream he had pursued, the thought, the inspiration that he had so long searched for uselessly. But while his soul, carried away in ecstasy, drank in long slurps the simple and celestial harmonies of that angelic concert, his hand, as if moved by a mysterious force, agitated in space, and seemed to draw, without his knowledge, notes that translated the sounds that his ear heard.



Little by little the voices moved away, the vision disappeared, the cloud vanished and Pergolesi, opening his eyes, saw on the marble of the temple, written with his own hand, that song of sublime simplicity that was to immortalize him, the Stabat Mater, that since that day the entire Christian world repeats and admires. The artist got up, came out of the temple, calm, happy, and no longer worried and agitated. But, from that day, a new inspiration took hold of that artistic soul; he had heard the song of the angels, the concert of heaven; human voices and earthly concerts could no longer suffice for him. That ardent thirst, the impulse of a vast genius, had just exhausted the breath of life that remained in him, and so it was that at the age of thirty-three, in exaltation, in fever or rather in the supernatural love of his art, Pergolesi died.”



That is the story of my Neapolitan. It is, as I said, only a tradition; I do not defend its authenticity, and history may not confirm it in every way, but we cannot help it but feel delighted by this narrative.

Ernest Le Nordez.

Petit Moniteur, December 12th, 1868