Monteverdi, Lully, Purcell and the Origin of Opera

Vivaldi and the Concerto Grosso (The Seasons)

George Frideric Handel

(Court Music and Sacred Music) (Royal Fireworks, Water Music, The Messiah)

Johann Sebastian Bach

(Sacred Music: Cantata Wachet Auf, St. Matthew Passion, Mass in B Minor, Keyboard Music : Tocatta and Fugue ; The Goldberg Variations; Concerto: The Brandenburg Concertos)

Baroque Music (1600-1750)

During the Renaissance music had emerged out of the mystical Medieval era, out of the shrouds of the Dark Ages. Renaissance secular music was light, polished and dance-like. Renaissance sacred music was pure and refined. Polyphonic texture dominated, and composers explored modal scales to express the sacred and transcendent.

Leaving the Renaissance, composers sought driving expressions of emotional drama. This search for a new sound led to the development of a new harmony based on the major and minor tonal systems. The modes possessed too little drama and tension in them. Renaissance artists envisioned a world of mathematical clarity and order. The Baroque era was in violent motion: dynamic and dramatic. (Merrill Notes)

Baroque vs. Renaissance Music

French Nobility in Court Dress Late 17th c. Braun and

Schneider’s History of Costume

Originally, the term baroque was used in derision, indicating lack of order, chaos and grotesque. The period is now regarded as one of individual genius and diversity of expression.

Rome was the center of the Baroque and of the Counter-reformation. Baroque Art originally was used as propaganda to bring people back to the church by appealing to emotion. During the 17th and 18th centuries Italian music established itself as a universal vocabulary from which composers throughout Europe drew inspiration.

“Baroque”

The Hell Hole, a backdrop for a scene design by Lodovico Burnacini, late 17th c.

Composers sought to realize a more personal manner of expression and to represent more intense and varied emotional states (the affections). This quest led to several musical innovations:

-An expressive and dominant melody (treble) supported by a subordinate harmony (basso continuo ) using the major/minor tonality

-Dissonant and chromatic melodic lines, using half-steps of the scale

-The basso continuo organizes harmony and provides unceasing movement and energy to the composition

-Changing rhythms and dynamics to heighten emotional contrasts

-Virtuoso performers are encouraged to display their technical abilities through improvisation within the piece

-The rise of the violin and the string ensemble (Boyden, 163-67) (Grout, 180-85)

Features of the Baroque:

The Doctrine of Affections A unity of mood within whole sections or even whole pieces was one artistic goal of Baroque composers. Another closely related goal aimed at the achievement of mood by means of appropriate figures, rhythms, or harmonies. Any emotional state could be conjured up by the use of the proper musical ingredients. This “Doctrine of Affections” became codified towards the end of the Baroque Period. (Boyden, 189-92)

Bach, Durch Adams Fall ist ganz verderbt. (Through Adam’s Fall all is lost)

The pedal point of the organ has a reiterated figure of a descending interval, representing the fall over and over again.

The opera began as an offshoot of Italian Humanism intent upon reviving the artistic ideals of classical antiquity.

In Florence @ 1600 a group of musicians began experimenting with a new way to represent words with music

Rejecting polyphony, they believed that a dramma per musica could be realized most effectively by declaiming the text to music in a style of reciting called stile recitativo.

The first operas featured recitativo declaimed to the accompaniment of figured bass and interspersed with moments of song (Boyden, 167)

The Invention of Opera

Detail of an engraving of an opera performance in Milan c.1750.

History of Opera

Detail from an engraving of an opera performance from the 1760s.

History of Opera

Giovanni Panini, Theatre (1750)

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643)

Monteverdi bridged the composing styles of the Renaissance and the Baroque

In operas like Orfeo (1607) Monteverdi combined the new style of recitativo and aria with the dance forms and choruses of the Renaissance.

Monteverdi’s most important innovation was his insight into the potential of this new form to dramatize the deep emotions of extreme psychological situations, like the moment when Orfeo is informed of the death of his wife Eurydice (“Tu se’ morta”). At first he cannot believe or understand, but gradually, as his loss becomes real to him, his recitativo becomes more impassioned. (Boyden, 167-171)

Eurydice recitativo Tu se’ morta.

Jean Baptiste Lully

Monteverdi’s opera was widely imitated, particularly in the court of Louis XIV under Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-87) . Lully’s carefully measured recitatives reflected the high literary standards of the French, and he also incorporated dances popular at court into his operas. Lully also introduced an overture to opera which was characterized by a slow stately section followed by an animated fugue. (Boyden 172-73)

French Overture

In England, Henry Purcell (1659-1695), introduced opera to the restoration court of King William in a marvelous piece, Dido and Aeneas (1689) based on the famous episode from Vergil’s Aeneid. Here is the last aria (song) from the opera in which Dido, abandoned by her lover, sings of approaching death. “When I am laid in earth, remember me…” Note the string accompaniment over a chromatic ostinato. It is followed by a chorus sung by angels as they carry her soul to heaven. (Boyden 174-75)

Lamento aria

Henry Purcell

Rubens, Suicide of Dido (1606)

Baroque Instrumental Music: The KeyboardThe Baroque Era featured the flowering of instrumental music, fully emancipated from its role as accompaniment for the voice.

Baroque composers had inherited from the Renaissance a modal system grounded in vocal polyphony whose potential for harmony was limited. By the end of the 17th century, musical forms became more complex because composers had begun experimenting with sophisticated modulations of key within a composition

Many compositions were designed to demonstrate the virtuosity of the individual performer’s talents. A tocatta is a composition which aims to suggest the effect of an improvised performance. Toccatas best exhibit the out thrusting, fantastic, and dramatic aspects of the Baroque spirit in music. (Grout 233-34)

Bach: Toccata and Fugue in D minor

Bach: Prelude and Fugue in A minorAbbey Church at Amorbach

with Pipe Organ

Bach’s Goldberg Variations

Bach’s music for keyboard includes masterpieces in every form known to the late Baroque: preludes, fantasies, tocattas, fugues, dance suites, early sonatas, and concertos.

One popular form of Baroque keyboard music was the theme and variations. The Aria with Different Variations (1741) (better known as The Goldberg Variations), displays Bach’s mastery of composition. The entire piece is a perfectly organized structure of magnificent proportions.

The theme is a sarabande in two balanced sections; its essential bass and harmonic structure is preserved in all thirty variations. The variations are grouped in threes with the last of each group being a strict canon. The non-canonic variations are of many different types, including inventions, fugues, a French overture, slow arias, and sparkling bravura pieces for two keyboards. The diverse moods and styles of the variations are unified not only by the recurring theme but also by the symmetrical order in which the movements are arranged. (Grout 267)

Aria da capo #1 #4 #7 #9 #11 #12 #13 #20 #24 #25

Baroque Instrumental Music: The Violin

Baroque composers wrote music for a remarkable new instrument: the violin. During the Baroque Era, string music became the dominant form of classical music. The violin became popular because of two essential properties: its ability to imitate the human voice and its technical capabilities to inspire virtuoso performances.

Compositions for strings took many different forms: trio sonatas and solo sonatas were written for small ensembles.

Pachabel, Canon in D Major

Bach Chaconne for Solo Violin

Bach Sonata for Violin

The Baroque Concerto: Vivaldi’s Four SeasonsTowards the end of the 17th century, a distinction of styles began to be made between chamber music and orchestral music– that is between ensemble music with only one instrument to a part and ensemble music with more than one instrument playing the same part. (Grout, 247)

A new kind of composition, the concerto, appeared at the end of the 17th c. and became the most important form of Baroque orchestral composition after 1700. The concerto helped synthesize several different Baroque compositional innovations: exploiting the virtuoso abilities of a performer, contrasting two unequal and opposing masses of tone, building a composition with a firm bass and a florid treble, organizing the sonority of a composition around the major-minor key system, and building a longer work out of separate autonomous sections or movements. (Grout, 248)

A concerto grosso presents a concertino accompanied by a string orchestra. Listen to the contrast between the soloists in the concertino with the greater mass of the orchestra (the ripieno, literally, “the filling”) Listen also for the alternation between the ritornello (the statement of the main theme by the orchestra) and the soloists’ development of that theme. (Boyden, 212-13)

Vivaldi, The Seasons, Spring, (1725) Allegro, Largo, Allegro

Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos

Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos (dedicated to the Margrave of Brandenburg, 1721) demonstrate his remarkable ability to extend previous composers’ ideas in any form of composition. Bach equals Vivaldi in his sparkling melodies and driving rhythm, but his compositions enliven the harmony; they expand instrumentation, mixing string and wind instruments in varied combination; and they mix the concertino and ripieno instruments in a polyphonic texture so that the bodies of tone are less differentiated. (Boyden 214)

Bach, “Brandenburg” Concerto No. 2

Allegro Adagio Allegro

Note the concertino of violin, flute, oboe and trumpet, the orchestral body of strings and the figured continuo.

Gentleman and Lady of the Court of Louis XIV

Braun and Schneider History of Costume

George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)

Handel was born in the German speaking town of Halle and studied extensively in Italy before coming to England in 1711 under the patronage of George I, the previous Elector of Hanover. His success in London with the Italian opera Rinaldo inaugurated the vogue for opera and oratorio in England.

Operas and oratorios form the most important part of Handel’s work although he wrote pieces for keyboard instruments and string ensembles. His mastery of technique enabled him to write music suggesting the contrasting moods (the affections) with enormous poetic depth. He deliberately emphasized melody and harmony rather than counterpoint, and his appeal to the middle class audience reflected the social changes transforming society as a whole. (Grout 275-81)

"The Beggar's Opera" allegorical engraving by Hogarth contrasting the English taste for Gay's Ballad opera with Italian opera

Handel’s Royal Fireworks Music and Water MusicIn 1749 Handel was commissioned to write a grand piece of music as part of a national celebration of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle that was to include a massive fire works display. The music was not only a great success but was the occasion of London’s first recorded traffic jam: the London Bridge was out of action for hours.

The Fireworks Music itself is a grand suite whose overture has a broad, majestic opening suitable for an open air performance. The French suite was an orchestral piece that incorporated several miniature pieces inspired by dance rhythms such as the the courante, sarabande, and so on, all highly stylized and refined. (Grout 239)

The Water Music was written thirty years earlier for an royal water party on the Thames during an early summer evening. The evening’s entertainment included a choice supper at Lord Ranelagh’s villa on the river at Chelsea. (Cudsworth, Disc Notes) In these spectacles the King asserted power: he and only he could attract the wealth which made England able to conduct its wars and so become a world power.

Fireworks Suite:

Ouverture

Minuet and Trio

Water Music Suite in D Major

Hornpipe

Minuet

Lentement

Handel’s Messiah

Handel’s great oratorios are based on the musical machinery of Italian opera, to which he adds the massive power of the large scale Anglican church chorus. The orchestra functions as a supporting accompaniment to the individual voice or the chorus.(Boyden 195-96)

The Messiah (1741) is Handel’s most famous oratorio. The story of Jesus’ nativity, passion and resurrection is retold in epic fashion by means of recitatives, arias and choruses. Like in Italian opera, virtuoso arias occur throughout the action. The choruses vary from homophonic to polyphonic.

In the “Hallelujah” chorus, the most exciting and famous piece in The Messiah, Handel achieves extraordinary emotional intensity through varying devices: massive full chords contrast with imitative counterpoint and then with single voices proclaiming a short phrase. (Boyden 201-03)

Chorus: “Hallelujah”

Chorus: “For Unto Us a Child is Born”

Johan Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

Bach is generally regarded as the greatest composer of his time: he absorbed every style and form current in the early 18th c into his music and then transformed them. In his music the opposed principles of harmony and counterpoint, melody and polyphony find equilibrium. The beauty of his themes, the inventiveness and clarity of his expression, the technical perfection of his composition, and the grand proportion of his works make his music timeless.

Yet Bach would have been astonished by the awe with which his achievements are held today. In his time he was regarded as a virtuoso organist but not as a master composer. He regarded himself as a conscientious craftsman doing a job to the best of his ability for the satisfaction of his patrons, for the pleasure of his fellowman, and to the glory of God. (Grout 261, 274)

Bach’s Cantatas

Bach spent most of his career in the service of the Lutheran Church, first as an organist and later as director of music at two churches in Leipzig. For this post Bach was required to compose and produce music for the Lutheran service each week, and over the course of twenty years, he produced approximately three hundred cantatas. (Boyden 204)

The cantata was the main music of the lengthy Sunday service, composed about a text suitable for a particular Sunday of the year. The music for the cantata was fairly elaborate, using various combinations of choruses, simple settings of the chorale, recitatives, arias, and duets. The cantata was accompanied by the orchestra in addition to the organ playing the figured bass. (Boyden 204)

Wachet Auf (Sleepers Awake) Cantata No.140 is one of Bach’s most famous. It was composed for the 27th Sunday of Trinity in the year 1731 and is based on the parable of the wise and foolish virgins who await the coming of Christ as the bridegroom to whom their souls will be united. (Matt. 25:1-13) This cantata combines large scale chorus, with recitatives and arias in the form of duets between Christ and the Soul. (Boyden, 204-06)

This selection is from the opening chorus:

Bach’s St. Matthew PassionIn addition to the cantatas, Bach composed sacred music on a far larger scale for extraordinary occasions. In the St.Matthew Passion (1729) Bach represents scenes from the final days of Christ by means of a large chorus, soloists, and orchestral accompaniment. It relies on a plan not unlike that of a Neapolitan opera: a series of scenes each comprised of a narrative and then a lyrical reflection on it. Some scenes are simple recitative and aria, permitting the individual to express an emotional reaction to what has taken place. In other scenes the reflective and emotional commentary takes the form of a chorale in which the collective emotion of the whole Christian congregation is expressed. (Boyden 207-08)

The St. Matthew Passion is the apotheosis of Lutheran church music: in it the chorale, the concertato style, the recitative, the arioso, and the da capo aria are perfectly united under the ruling majesty of the religious theme. All these elements, save the chorale, are equally characteristic of Baroque opera. (Grout 273)

Of the theological ideas that permeate Bach’s work, the most central to his thought were the ideas of atonement and redemption. According to Protestant theology, mankind was eternally cursed with original sin through Adam’s Fall, but man was saved from eternal damnation by Christ’s supreme sacrifice on the cross, which atoned for Man’s original sin and redeemed each Christian believer. For Bach death held no terror; on the contrary, it held out to him the promise of eternal salvation: reunion with the Savior in paradise where all sin has been washed away by the sacrifice of the Lamb of God. (Boyden 205)

Bach’s St. Matthew Passion

Here is the opening chorus. “Come ye Daughters, share my anguish.” It uses two choirs, two orchestras, and a third unison choir of boys.

In this arioso, the chorus interrupts the tenor periodically to comment emotionally as the soloist declares that he too would pray with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. “I would beside my Lord be watching”

Here is the alto recitative “Ah, Golgotha”

Here is the soprano aria “In Love my Savior now is dying”

And here is the final Passion Chorale after Jesus’ death on the cross.

In the final recitative note the stupendous three measures of chorus on the words “Truly this was the son of God” (Grout 273) (detail) Supper at Emmaus

Rembrandt 1648

Bach’s Mass in B MinorThe Mass in B Minor does not belong to the mainstream of Bach’s activities as a churchman. In 1733 Bach sought the patronage of the Catholic sovereign Augustus III, the King Elector of Poland-Saxony who had his court in Dresden. To accompany his petition, Bach composed and sent to Augustus the Kyrie and Gloria of the Mass in B Minor. Later Bach completed the other parts of the Mass (Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei).

The Mass in B Minor is Bach’s grandest and most monumental work. From the opening chords of the Kyrie, we are in the presence of music of overpowering magnitude. The dynamic energy of its rhythm carries us forward with a never-ceasing movement, and the extended long arc of the vocal lines sustains the tremendous span of the sound.

The Latin text of the Mass still survived in abbreviated form in the Lutheran liturgy. Some of the texts are set to traditional music from Gregorian chant. (Credo) Other texts are set in a manner suggested by theology: the Et in unun Dominum is composed for alto and soprano in free canon, two voices using the same music, to symbolize the oneness of Christ and God. The mood of the Mass ranges from the somber to outbursts of praise and adulation.

The Mass in B Minor is Bach at his greatest. It transcends denominational limits. Bach distills the joys and sorrows of Christendom into one tremendous affirmation of universal faith. (Boyden 209-11)

Bach’s Mass in B Minor

The Mass in B Minor consists of choruses and arias, but there are no chorales or recitatives. The Mass was written in the final years of Bach’s creative life, but he drew on compositions from throughout his musical career for its various sections. It can be seen as a compilation of his life’s work.

The opening chorus of the Kyrie:

The Credo in unum Deum (based on Cantus firmus from Gregorian Chant):

The Et in Unum Dominum (soprano/alto canon):

The Cum Sanctu Spiritu in Gloria Dei Patria (the final movement of the Gloria):

The Crucifixus (note the ostinato bass):

Followed by Et resurrexit tertia die: Durer, Albrecht Self-Portrait at 28, 1500

Works Cited

An Introduction to Music (1956) by David D. Boyden, Alfred A. Knopf, New York

A History of Western Music (1964) by Donald J. Grout (Cornell University) W.W. Norton and Company Inc. New York

Music Examples from

The Norton Anthology of Classical Music, Part One Ancient to Baroque

Vivaldi The Seasons, Spring from Vivaldiana via the MP3 Website

The Goldberg Variations via the MP3 Website

Bach Brandenburg Concerto #2 via MP3 Website

Bach Mass in B Minor performed by ProArte Orchestra and Chorus. Kurt reidel conductor (1993) Philips Classics

Bach’s St. Matthew Passion performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra and Choir, Verner Klemperer conductor (1962) EMI Classics

Handel Messiah performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and Choir Sir Colin Davis conductor (1966) Philips Classics Productions

Handel Music for the Royal Fireworks and Water Music performed by Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Sir Neville Marriner conductor (1972) Decca Record Co.