Editing Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (section)

== Legend and posthumous fame ==
In life, despite numerous awards, Pergolesi's fame was almost exclusively limited to the Neapolitan and Roman musical milieu. Nonetheless, he has influenced poets and artists who, during the 19th century, reinterpreted the composer in a romantic light.

As the historian and traveler [[Charles Burney]] wrote: {{Quotation|…from the moment his death became known, all Italy manifested a keen desire to hear and possess his works.}} 
Indeed, the myth that was born throughout Europe around his life and work after his death represents an exceptional phenomenon in the history of music. Mozart will experience a similar phenomenon after his death. Thus, more than three hundred works have been attributed to him, of which only about thirty have been recognized by modern critics as true Pergolesi's compositions, a phenomenon which testifies the reputation of the composer.

However, already in the middle of the 18th century Pergolesi was immensely better known than he had been in life: as mentioned, the numerous prints of his compositions began to spread throughout Europe. Several years after Pergolesi's death, the performance in Paris, in [[1752]], of ''La Serva padrona'' by an Italian comic opera troupe, triggered the famous [[Querelle des Bouffons]] between the defenders of French music and the supporters of the [[opera buffa]]. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in particular, the freshness and the grace of his music was the dazzling demonstration of the superiority of Italian opera over [[French lyric tragedy]]. The French composer [[André Grétry]] said: {{Quotation|Pergolesi was born, and the truth was known!}} Above all, the scarcity of tangible information about his life and works was fertile ground for the flourishing of imaginative anecdotes of all kinds. The doubt crept in that his tragic end was due not to natural causes but to poisoning by musicians envious of his talent.<ref>Biografie e ritratti di uomini illustri piceni pubblicate per cura del conte Antonio Hercolani. 1839, p. 169</ref> Apollonian beauty and numerous tragic loves were attributed to him.

Because of this extraordinary posthumous fame, the catalog of his works had an unpredictable destiny: during the 18th century and 19th century spread in Europe the practice of publishing under his name, for the purpose of speculation, any score having the musical style of the Neapolitan school. By the end of the 19th century, this led to over five hundred compositions in the ''informal'' catalog of his works. Contemporary studies have reduced Pergolesi's compositions to less than fifty, and of these only twenty-eight are the works whose paternity is considered sure.

[[File:Pergolesi Denkmal in Jesi (Marken) 2008.JPG|thumb|Monument to Giovanni Battista Pergolesi in Jesi]]There are still serious doubts about the attribution of various works, even among the best known, such as the ''Salve Regina in F minor''. Several music and record editions perpetuate these uncertainties about the authorship of various compositions, publishing in his name compositions certainly produced by other authors, such as the arias ''Se tu m'ami'' (certainly composed by the musicologist [[Alessandro Parisotti]] in the second half of the 19th century and included in one of his collections of baroque arias under the name of Pergolesi) and ''[[Tre giorni son che Nina]]'' (attributed to [[Vincenzo Legrenzio Ciampi]]) or the ''[[Magnificat]]'' in D major, composed by his teacher [[Francesco Durante]].

The situation of extreme uncertainty that distinguishes the catalog of Pergolesi's works can be easily described with the case of ''[[Pulcinella (ballet)|Pulcinella]]'' by [[Igor Stravinsky]]: composed in [[1920]] as a tribute to the style of the composer from Jesi, the most recent music critics have established that of the 21 pieces used for this composition, as many as 11 are to be attributed to other authors (mainly [[Domenico Gallo]]), two are of dubious attribution and only eight (mostly taken from his operas) can be attributed to Pergolesi.