Giovanni Legrenzi (about 1625-1690), though only five years younger than Cesti, made a much larger contribution to the development of his art, especially on the instrumental side of vocal music. He is credited with being one of the first composers to display a real instinct for instrumental music, and he is said to have reorganized the orchestra used to supplement the organ at St. Mark’s, Venice, increasing it to 34 performers--8 violins, 11 violette (small viola), 2 viole da braccia, 2 viole da gamba, 1 violone (bass viol), 4 theorbos, 2 cornets, 1 bassoon, and 3 trombones. His accompaniments show great vivacity and in general a variety of style in strong contrast to those of most of his co-workers. He published many cantatas in which the music runs along uninterruptedly from beginning to end. The succession of recitatives, melodious passages, and what might be called arias varies in each cantata according to the demands of the texts. A great variety is also noticeable in the form of the arias, which are remarkably free in rhythm and declamatory flow. His cantatas are among the best types of this seventeenth-century form. II Alessandro Scarlatti (1659-1725) undoubtedly looms largest among the figures in Italian music of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century, with especially marked influence in the fields of opera and cantata. One of the most prolific composers of all ages, he completed 115 operas, many masses (at least 10 survive), 8 oratorios, and a vast number of cantatas[53] (500 have come down to us), besides quantities of music in other forms. The extraordinary number of his chamber cantatas that survive him is strong evidence of his estimate of and affection for this form, examples of which cover every period of his life and reflect as faithfully as do Beethoven’s sonatas the various phases and stages of the composer’s artistic unfolding. Scarlatti was the greatest of the writers of chamber-cantatas and only a few of his successors approached him in excellence in this field. Indeed, the popularity of this form seems to have spent its force in Italy soon after the middle of the eighteenth century. Many of his cantatas bear internal evidence that he regarded them as ‘carefully designed studies in composition,’[54] in the working out of which he brought to bear his best musicianship. One of the finest examples of this careful and beautiful workmanship is the cantata _Andata a miei sospiri_, two settings of which he wrote for and sent to his composer-friend, Gasparini, in 1712.