Baroque music is largely at the service of effect. It is speed and ornamentation. Often its aim is to provoke astonishment through coloratura and ornamentation. To do so, it resorts to a stylistic procedure that, in simple terms, establishes a harmonic cipher so solid and immutable (known as basso continuo) that it allows the high voices (human tessituras, such as sopranos and countertenors, and instrumental, such as violins and flutes) to free themselves from any sonorous function other than that of astonishing by their acrobatic virtuosity....
It is music that carries the historical obligation to astonish, exalt and, at times, transmit the presence of the supernatural.
When does the musical Baroque begin and when does it end?
The musical Baroque developed during the 17th and 18th centuries. Like any artistic current, it is part of a continuous flow that it is imprecise to fragment in a clear-cut way.
However, if we perform a practical exercise to establish significant dates for its beginning and end, we could determine the following:
- Home. Two of the first baroque works, for their innovation in orchestral exuberance, are Claudio Monteverdi's L'Orfeo (1607), considered the first complete operatic score in history, and the Madrigals (1615) by Gesualdo de Venosa.
- End. On a symbolic level, its end can be defined much more clearly: 1750, the year of Johann Sebastian Bach's death.
What does the Baroque oppose?
The Baroque is opposed to the Renaissance, whose virtuosity is not ornamental, but expressive. Of a soft and delicate expression, whose voices resolve emotional tribulations, such as ecstasy and unhappiness, without effects, ornaments or acrobatics. What in the Renaissance is harmony, idealization and balance, in the Baroque is contrast, movement and expressive saturation. The Renaissance is crossed by a kind of beautiful sonorous resignation.
And yet, these apparent contrasts, which in their most simplistic versions the history of Western music has been responsible for accentuating (and perhaps they are accurate in the specific comparison of two works located at the antipodes), do not exist in Bach's music. Or at least, not as opposites.
What came after the Baroque?
Classicism, where music, in a return of Renaissance biases, returns to the service of balance and idea, which is already present in the work of Bach, whose figure, therefore, starts from the Renaissance, runs through and defines the Baroque to inaugurate Classicism and even prefigure not only Romanticism, but also the avant-garde of the early twentieth century. Hence its legend. Hence its greatness.
Who were three important exponents of the musical Baroque and what do I hear from them?
Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre (1666-1729)
Samsoncantata contained in Book No. 2 (1711)
At the beginning of the 18th century the cantata, in the French court, was established as a chamber genre with scenic representation that used to narrate biblical motifs with a narrative articulation around a succession of instrumental numbers, recitatives and arias.
From this rigid structure, Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre's Samson achieves the impossible: it conveys a sense of dramatic continuity that is enveloping and moving. How? She was simply an extraordinary composer, as is evident in Delilah's seduction aria.
Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)
Dixit Dominus RV 594
Concerto for four solo voices (soprano, alto, tenor and bass), two choirs and two orchestras made up of the same ensemble (oboe, trumpet, strings and continuo). A maximum expression of vocal Vivaldi, which can be heard specifically in the section Sicut erat, a sacred text sung in Latin with which Vivaldi constructs a seven-part fugue!
Henry Purcell (1659 - 1695)
Purcell spent his teenage years writing music to amuse the courtiers. His compositions were unlike anything that had been heard in England. In a world (that of the intermediate musical Baroque) dominated by immovable structures and rigid expression, Purcell introduced bold modulations backed by an unpredictable harmonic language of continuous movement, giving the impression of ambiguity. His Fantasiasa genre that in his time was almost equivalent to a fugue, he wrote them in 1680, at the age of 21, and they stand out for the conciseness in the development of the themes, as well as for a deeply intimate, free and ardent expression.
