Arcangelo Corelli was known in his day as an extraordinary violinist, but as the son of a wealthy landowner he was able to limit his compositional output to those types of works that interested him. Corelli’s comparatively small body of work is largely restricted to three genres: the solo sonata, the trio sonata and the concerto grosso. He was the first composer to achieve widespread fame purely for instrumental music, never composing an opera or (as far as we can tell) any vocal music whatsoever. 

Corelli’s Op. 6 set of twelve concerti grossi are often considered pinnacles of the Italian concerto grosso style, synthesizing and refining what had come before him and setting the stage for those who would follow. (Handel used them as a model for his own famous Op. 6 set of concerti.) Although Corelli assembled these works at the end of his life for publication, he had composed many of them much earlier, polishing and refining them through repeated performances. 

Among the dozen works in his Op. 6, the first eight are in the sonata da chiesa (church sonata) style, while the last four follow the sonata da camera (chamber sonata) format. By far the most famous is No. 8, dubbed the "Christmas Concerto" because of its final movement, marked Pastorale. This term is derived from the Italian word pastori, referring to the shepherds who gathered at the manger in Bethlehem. By Corelli's time it had become an Italian tradition for rural shepherds to journey into a nearby town on Christmas Eve and play their pipes in front of nativity scenes. The music most often associated with this tradition was a gentle, lilting siciliano in 12/8 meter. Corelli may have been the first composer to use this type of tune in a concert work in order to musically depict the nativity scene, but he would certainly not be the last: both Handel (the "Pastoral Symphony" in Messiah) and Bach (the opening sinfonia of the second cantata in the Christmas Oratorio) adopted the technique.

© 2002 Jeff Eldridge