Giovanni Battista Pergolesi composed his masterpiece "Stabat Mater" while dying of tuberculosis, creating haunting sacred music from his sickbed that would influence composers for generations. Born on January 4, 1710, in Jesi, a small town in the Italian Marche region, he showed musical talent early and was sent to study at the Conservatorio dei Poveri di Gesù Cristo in Naples at age 15. Naples in the 1720s was the center of European opera, and Pergolesi absorbed its traditions while developing a style that was simpler and more emotionally direct than his contemporaries. His comic opera "La serva padrona" premiered in 1733 as an intermezzo between acts of a serious opera, and it was the intermezzo that audiences remembered. The work became one of the most performed operas of the eighteenth century and triggered the Querelle des Bouffons in Paris, a fierce debate about the merits of Italian versus French opera that divided the French intelligentsia. Pergolesi was 23 when that premiere happened. He was dead at 26, killed by tuberculosis in a Franciscan monastery near Naples in March 1736. The "Stabat Mater," commissioned by a confraternity of noblemen, was completed just days before his death. It became the most frequently printed musical work of the entire eighteenth century. Bach admired it enough to arrange it himself. Stravinsky quoted it two centuries later. A brief but incandescent moment in Baroque music where raw emotion and technical brilliance collided in one frail, brilliant body.