The peak of the Baroque era in music coincided with a broader surge of innovation and curiosity that reshaped ideas about art, science, commerce, and politics throughout Europe. In that Age of Enlightenment, England went through a “Glorious Revolution” that placed more power in the hands of Parliament, which in turn ensured that the monarchy would not return to the contentious Catholic line of rulers. Thus it worked out that a German prince became heir to the British throne, and before he was even crowned King George I in 1714, his staff composer George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) left his native Germany for London, bringing skills honed during time spent in Italy. He was the king of Italian opera in England for decades, but when local tastes changed and his ticket sales faltered, the ever-enterprising Handel began writing oratorios in English, including Solomon from 1748. The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba served as an overture to the third act. Back in 1735, when opera was still thriving, Handel stuck with his winning formula of importing star singers from Italy, including the soprano Anna Maria Strada who sang “Verdi Prati” from Alcina, based on a stock Italian libretto.
In that age of discovery and experimentation, when Sir Isaac Newton was devising the scientific method in England, Antonio Stradivari was in northern Italy perfecting the design of the violin. It was a glorious time to be a violinist, and Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) gladly traded his priest’s vestments for a job teaching music at a well-endowed school in Venice for “orphaned” girls (who tended to be the illegitimate offspring of local merchants). Vivaldi used his talented students to test out and refine his compositions, especially his hundreds of concertos. In 1725, Vivaldi’s publisher in Amsterdam released a set of 12 of those violin concertos under the title Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’invenzione (The Contest Between Harmony and Invention). Vivaldi named the first four concertos after the seasons, and he organized the musical ideas to correspond to descriptive sonnets. In “Spring” from The Four Seasons,
we encounter trilling birdsong in the first movement, a napping goatherd (and his barking dog) in the second movement, and the drone of bagpipes in the finale.
The increase in international trade and travel helped ideas of the Enlightenment cross-pollinate across borders. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), who was born in Germany to a family of professional musicians, was able to expand upon his grounding in Lutheran church traditions when he encountered Italian concertos and French dance suites. He applied those lessons in the Air from Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D Major, which he wrote around 1731 for the amateur ensemble he directed in Leipzig. Known familiarly as the “Air on the G String,” this movement took on a new life when a 19th-century violinist transposed the melody so he could play it all on his lowest string.
Henry Purcell (1659-1695) was born in England a generation before the giants of the Baroque era, and it was only near the end of his short life that he turned his attention to theater music. This Suite from The Fairy Queen features selections from Purcell’s 1692 adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a semi-opera that wove together songs, dance numbers, and spoken dialogue. Johann Pachelbel (1653-1706) also came from the generation that laid the groundwork for the musical explosion of the early 1700s, and the years he spent as an organist in the Bach family strongholds of Eisenach and Erfurt made a lasting impression on the young Johann Sebastian. Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major demonstrates the expressive possibilities of that strict form of counterpoint, in which each voice enters in turn with the same music.
The soprano aria “Da tempeste il legno infranto” from Giulio Cesare shows off the vocal pyrotechnics that made Londoners flock to the operas presented by Handel. Cleopatra’s joy to see Julius Caesar comes through even if you can’t understand the Italian text, which is stretched beyond recognition anyway in this melismatic style designed to make singers shine.
Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) was 50 when he fulfilled a lifelong dream to compose for the theater, and he became his generation’s most successful opera composer. Les sauvages from Les Indes Galantes played on France’s fascination with the Indigenous inhabitants of its American colonies.
The trumpet, originally a tool for military signaling and fanfares, was one of many instruments that found its way into concert repertoire in the 1600s. The Trumpet Sonata that Purcell wrote near the end of his life points to the influence of Bologna, Italy, the epicenter of a trumpet scene that exploited the instrument’s extreme high range to play fluid melodies beyond the bugle-like leaps of the lower range. In the song “If Love’s a Sweet Passion” from The Fairy Queen, Purcell showed that he was equally attuned to the French style, as heard in the dance-like prelude.
When Bach was casting about for a new job in 1721, he sent a set of concertos to a nobleman he had met on a trip to Berlin. Each concerto tested a different configuration of featured instruments set apart from an accompanying ensemble, building on the tradition of the concerto grosso that Corelli developed in Rome. The Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major was especially curious in that it treated all members of the ensemble as soloists, with independent lines for three violins, three violas, and three cellos supported by the basso continuo accompaniment. The equitable distribution is especially clear in the first movement, where the primary motive — a three-note figure that drops to the lower neighbor note and then returns to the starting pitch — cascades through the different voices.
Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677), the illegitimate daughter of a famed poet in Venice, was known as a gifted singer with a talent for accompanying herself on the lute. Her final published collection of songs for solo voice included this fatalistic gem set over a recurring ground bass, “Che si può fare?” (“What Can You Do?”).
Georg Phillip Telemann (1681-1767) was Germany’s leading composer in his lifetime, and arguably the most prolific composer ever, creating at least 3,000 works during his long career. About half of those were cantatas that went along with his role directing music for the principal churches of Hamburg, a prestigious post he held from 1721 until his death 46 years later. Hamburg was a bustling port city on the Elbe River, and Telemann paid tribute to the city’s waterways in the orchestral suite he named “Hamburger Ebb und Fluth” (“Hamburg Ebb and Flow”).
Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687) cemented much of what we now think of as the French style of dance music, and he essentially invented French opera as a counterweight to Italy’s dominance in the genre. Collaborating with the legendary playwright Molière, Lully captured the zeitgeist of the emerging middle class and all its social climbing in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. One character pretends to be a Turkish prince, creating opportunities for colorful music inspired by the Ottoman Empire like this March for the Ceremony of the Turks.
Handel added another English oratorio on a Biblical theme to his company’s repertoire in 1743 with Samson. The most memorable aria went to a bit player in the role of an “Israelitish woman” who sings “Let the Bright Seraphim” just before the final chorus, with rousing interjections from a trumpet soloist. The whole production was a thoroughly international endeavor, designed to appeal to the intellect and emotions of the everyday people in its audience while generating a healthy profit for its private stakeholders — which is all to say, it was pure Enlightenment.
© 2024 Aaron Grad