Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757), son of Alessandro Scarlatti and especially famous as a harpsichord player and composer for this instrument, wrote many cantatas in which the form became more extended, comprising various movements. In this extension of form Scarlatti was followed by Pergolesi (1710-1736), whose cantata _Orfeo ed Euridice_, written in the composer’s last illness, was the most famous of the period. Giovanni Battista Bononcini (about 1660-about 1750), remembered now as the defeated rival of the great Handel in the famous London opera-writing duel, was one of the most prolific of all cantata writers, though the music was quite mediocre. Other well-known Italian composers of the eighteenth century who employed the extended cantata-form were Antonio Caldara (1678-1763) and Niccola Porpora (1686-1766 or 1767). The great Handel himself wrote many cantatas for single voice in the prevalent fashion and in many of them used for his accompaniment such combinations of instruments as strings and oboes. After Handel’s time the cantata of the Italian type described above lost favor and was gradually superseded by the concert aria, a form which Mozart, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn have used with fine results.[56] Mozart gave the name cantata to a composition for three solo voices, chorus, and orchestra in three movements, written about 1783 (Koëchel No. 429). The distinction of having used the chorus in the cantata for the first time, however, probably rests with Giovanni Paësiello (1741-1816), who, in an attempt to revive the waning interest in this form, sought to give greater vocal effectiveness by contrasting choral with solo effects. In this formal respect at least, several of his cantatas (as _Dafne ed Alceo_ and _Retour de Persée_) are prototypes of the present-day form. Thus far in the consideration of the cantata we have been concerned mainly with its secular form and with its development in Italy. The secular cantata in Italian style does not seem to have gained any permanent popularity outside the land of its birth, certainly not enough to attract the attention of the best composers either in France, which had developed a dramatic style of its own along different principles from those of the Italians, or in Germany and England, in both of which countries the influence of Italian opera predominated. In France only unimportant composers cared to employ it. In England native composers of the seventeenth century found two worthy substitutes for the cantata in the masque and the ode.