The musical offering - Baroque music

UNESCO Courier, Sept, 1987 by Alberto Basso

The musical offering

In music, the term baroque has been used to describe a certain concept of art, a stylistic idiom, but also a method of composition built on a specific component, the basso continuo. Described in simple terms, such compositions consist of a melodic line and a continuous accompaniment in a set form. This type of composition is quite different from that of the preceding period, when the emphasis was placed on polyphony, that is, music in which there are several parts of equal importance.

The starting point of the new epoch is usually taken as the year 1600, when the Italian melodramma (opera) came into being, and its end is generally considered to have come with the death of Johann Sebastian Bach in 1750. The history of music underwent extraordinary changes in this century and a half during which forms that were to exist for hundreds of years were "invented', and the structure of harmony was established on foundations that lasted into much later times.

As the Renaissance drew to a close, one outstanding event dominated the musical world, and later had a far-reaching effect on the development of style in literature, in the pictorial arts, in architecture and even in social life. This was the rise of opera, the logical evolution of the revival of the art of theatre which was ushered in by the Italian courts and was the outcome of the Renaissance desire to recreate classical Antiquity and actualize Hellenistic civilization. Opera originated in Florence, but acquired various characteristics of style and expression in Rome, Venice and Naples. It was the most effective vehicle of the new musical culture in Italy, and rapidly won recognition in other countries, where it almost always retained its original character, except in France where it developed independently and was known as tragedie lyrique.

Claudio Monteverdi, Luigi Rossi and Francesco Cavalli were the leading exponents of this new genre in the early seventeenth century, while later Jean-Baptiste Lully (the Florentine who was the father of French opera) and Alessandro Scarlatti came to the fore as creators of two different kinds of musical theatre that persisted throughout almost the whole of the eighteenth century.

The operatic style that prevailed was that of Scarlatti, which was taken as a model even by German masters such as Handel and Hasse. Opera was originally a "serious' genre, but later it assumed a comic form as well, and became either a theatrical production in its own right or a kind of humorous interlude performed between the acts of a larger production (as in the case of the intermezzo, the undisputed master of which was the Italian composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi). In other countries opera gave rise to entertainments in which spoken dialogue and singing were combined (the English masque, the Spanish zarzuela, the French opera-comique, the German Singspiel), which supplanted the traditional Italian pattern of recitative and aria.

This same pattern also dominated other forms of vocal music, above all the oratorio, the authentic expression of the devotional spirit of the Counter-Reformation which has all the characteristics of a spiritual opera without scenery. At least, this is the case with the most typical, vernacular form of oratorio, such as the splendid works of Stradella and Alessandro Scarlatti, for those written in Latin (mainly associated with Carissimi) were more ecclesiastical in spirit.

Unlike oratorios, which usually relate biblical events or the lives of the saints, Passion music centres on the death of Christ and often uses the words of the Gospels. The finest examples are the Passions of Bach, but other great settings were written by Heinrich Schutz and later by Handel (who was also a master of the oratorio) and by Georg Philipp Telemann.

Opera in miniature, the chamber cantata is a typical expression of Italian vocal music. The thousands of examples of this genre suggest that its popularity exceeded even that of the madrigal in the sixteenth century. One or two recitatives and arias were enough to create a cantata, and the only instrument required, as a rule, was a harpsichord to provide the accompaniment. From Carissimi to Rossi, from Cesti to Stradella, from Pasquini to Scarlatti and Handel, the cantata remained in vogue throughout the baroque period, even in French musical circles, which constantly resisted the Italian style. Indeed, the opposition between Italian style and French taste was one of the most persistent and pervasive features of the baroque era.

As for sacred music intended for use in the liturgy, masses and motets continued to be composed, although at a rather sluggish rate. The great masters of sacred music belonged to the Roman and Venetian schools (Benevoli, Bernabei, Caldara, Gasparini, Legrenzi) and then the Neapolitan school (Scarlatti, Durante, Leo), later being drawn from the Germanic countries, (Biber, Kerll and Fux) and France (Charpentier, Lalande and Couperin). In England, remarkable services and anthems were written for the Anglican Church by composers who were also noted for their secular music, such as Gibbons, Tomkins, Lawes, Blow, and above all Purcell, who inspired even Handel.