Sources and References

Primary textbook — J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout, and Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western Music, 9th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014)

Score anthology — J. Peter Burkholder and Claude V. Palisca, eds., Norton Anthology of Western Music (NAWM), 7th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014)

The Baroque Era

Naming an Era

The word Baroque carries a complicated history. Its probable root is the Portuguese barroco, a term used by jewellers to describe an irregularly shaped pearl — one that deviated from the smooth, classical ideal. By the eighteenth century, French critics had adopted the word as a term of disapproval, using it to mock music and architecture they found excessively ornate and irrational. The composer and theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau used it in 1734 to criticise what he regarded as overly dissonant Italian music, and the encyclopaedist Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1768 Dictionary of Music defined Baroque music as one in which “the harmony is confused, charged with modulations and dissonances, the melody is harsh and little natural, the intonation difficult.” The term remained pejorative through much of the nineteenth century. Only in the twentieth century — particularly after 1950 — did scholars reclaim it as a neutral and useful label for the period spanning roughly the end of the sixteenth century to the mid-eighteenth, encompassing composers from Monteverdi to Bach and Handel.

The Baroque era is defined by striking contradictions. In music, it represents a decisive break with the Renaissance polyphonic tradition — the birth of opera, the rise of instrumental genres, and the development of tonality — yet it unfolded against a backdrop of absolute monarchy, in courts where princes and kings were the primary patrons of the arts. The seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were, in political terms, an era of bloody conflicts: the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) devastated central Europe, while religious and dynastic struggles convulsed France and England. Yet this same period produced some of the most ambitious and exuberant art in Western history.

Baroque Art: Drama, Virtuosity, Emotion

A glance at Baroque visual art clarifies what distinguishes this aesthetic from the Renaissance. Michelangelo’s David (1501–04) presents its subject in a state of composed, self-contained readiness — an idealized figure at rest. Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s David (1623–24), by contrast, depicts the young hero in the midst of action, his body twisting violently as he prepares to hurl the stone, his face contorted with effort and determination. Where Michelangelo aimed for timeless stillness, Bernini aimed for captured movement and psychological intensity. The same three qualities that define Baroque sculpture — drama, virtuosity, and emotion — define Baroque music equally well. Composers sought to move their audiences, to deploy elaborate technical resources in the service of heightened expressive effect, and to create music of theatrical power whether in the opera house, the church, or the chamber.

Music of the Early Baroque: Characteristics of a New Era

Three Streams

The history of Baroque music can be organized around three parallel streams of development, each of which carried through from the early seventeenth century into the Classical period that followed.

The first stream is vocal music, comprising opera, oratorio, cantata, and the many forms of song for voice with instrumental accompaniment. It was in vocal music that the most radical innovations of the early Baroque were born: the development of monody, the creation of opera, and the new expressive relationship between words and music.

The second stream is the rise of the violin family, which provided the foundation for the orchestra and for the emerging genres of the sonata and concerto. The violin family gradually superseded the older viol family during the seventeenth century, and by 1700 the modern orchestral ensemble was essentially in place.

The third stream is keyboard music — music for harpsichord, clavichord, and organ. The Baroque era was a golden age of keyboard composition, producing the toccata, the fugue, the suite, and the prelude, culminating in the towering achievements of J. S. Bach.

General Characteristics of Baroque Music

Texture: Basso Continuo and Treble-Bass Polarity

The most distinctive textural feature of Baroque music is the basso continuo, a system of accompaniment that underpins virtually every genre of the period. The bass line, played by a low melodic instrument (typically a cello, bassoon, or viola da gamba), was reinforced harmonically by a keyboard or plucked instrument (organ, harpsichord, lute, or theorbo) that improvised chords above it. This improvisation was guided by a system of figured bass notation: numerals written beneath the bass line indicating which intervals above the bass should be filled in, but leaving the precise voicing and elaboration to the performer’s discretion. The result was music with a clearly polarized texture — a prominent melody in the treble and an equally prominent bass foundation, with inner voices filled in more or less freely. This treble-bass polarity is fundamentally different from the equal-voice polyphony of the Renaissance, and it marks Baroque music as a new departure.

As the Baroque progressed, the continuo group typically involved two instruments: a melodic bass instrument that reinforced the bass line, and a chordal instrument that provided the harmonic filling. Different instrument combinations were chosen for expressive effect: a theorbo (a long-necked lute capable of very deep bass tones) lent an intimate, plucked quality, while an organ provided sustained warmth appropriate to sacred music.

The Baroque also saw the expanded combination of voices and instruments, producing new colours and contrasts. This mixing of timbres introduced a new practical challenge: instruments of different families were tuned according to different systems. String instruments could be readily adjusted in pitch, but keyboard instruments could not. The most common keyboard tuning system of the early and middle Baroque was mean-tone temperament, which produced beautifully pure thirds in the most common keys but harsh, unusable results in distant keys. The gradual move toward equal temperament — dividing the octave into twelve equal semitones — represented a practical compromise that sacrificed a small degree of harmonic purity in exchange for the ability to play in any key with equal facility. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier is the most famous demonstration of what equal (or near-equal) temperament made possible.

Harmony

Baroque composers were making a decisive shift from the modal system of the Renaissance — a collection of different scale patterns inherited from medieval practice — toward the tonal system of major and minor keys that would govern Western music for the next three centuries. Rather than thinking primarily in modes, they began to hear music as organized around a tonic, a central pitch to which all other harmonies ultimately refer. The bass line became the foundation from which harmonies were built upward, and a much wider range of dissonances was permitted than had been the case in Renaissance polyphony, provided they served expressive ends. The greater tolerance for dissonance was one of the period’s most contested features, as the Artusi-Monteverdi debate would make vivid.

Rhythm

Baroque music introduced the consistent use of bar lines and time signatures, regularizing the organization of music into repeating metric patterns. Yet this regularity coexisted with a deliberate stylistic contrast: pieces in free, improvisatory styles (such as preludes and toccatas) alternated with strictly measured passages (such as fugues and dance movements). This contrast between the rhythmically free and the metrically strict was a central expressive resource throughout the period.

Emotion and the Doctrine of the Affections

Baroque aesthetics were shaped by a philosophical framework known as the doctrine of the affections (Affektenlehre). This doctrine held that music could and should arouse specific emotional states — affections such as sadness, joy, love, or rage — in the listener, much as a skilled orator could move an audience through the artful deployment of rhetorical figures. These emotional states were understood, in the medical thinking of the time, as associated with the balance of bodily fluids or humors; by arousing the appropriate affection, music could literally affect the listener’s physical state. Crucially, Baroque music typically sustained a single affection throughout a movement or section, rather than shifting between contrasting moods. This is one of the most audible differences between Baroque and Classical music.

Embellishment — the addition of ornaments not written in the score — was understood as a means of intensifying emotional impact. Performers were expected to add trills, mordents, and elaborate melodic decorations to the written notes, and the choice of ornamentation was considered an expression of the performer’s taste and feeling.

A Dramatic Shift in Musical Practice: Monteverdi and the Artusi Controversy

The transition from Renaissance to Baroque musical language was not gradual or uncontested. It was inaugurated, in part, by a bitter public controversy surrounding the music of Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), whose Fifth Book of Madrigals (1605) pushed the expressive use of dissonance far beyond the limits accepted by conservative theorists.

Monteverdi’s madrigal Cruda Amarilli (from the Fifth Book) sets a five-voice Italian poem in a way that exploits word painting — the use of musical gestures to illustrate the meaning of the text — with startling boldness. At the word cruda (cruel), Monteverdi introduces an unprepared dissonance: the soprano sustains a note that clashes harshly against the harmony below it, arriving without the careful preparation that the rules of Renaissance counterpoint required. At a passage depicting jeering laughter, the voices adopt a mocking, interrupted rhythmic figure. The music does not merely accompany the text; it enacts it.

The music theorist Giovanni Maria Artusi attacked these procedures in his treatise L’Artusi, overo delle imperfettioni della moderna musica (1600), singling out passages from the Cruda Amarilli (without naming Monteverdi directly) and condemning them as violations of the established rules governing the preparation and resolution of dissonances. For Artusi, these rules were not merely arbitrary conventions but rational principles derived from the natural properties of sound; to break them was to produce ugliness without justification.

Monteverdi’s brother Giulio Cesare published a reply in 1607 articulating what became one of the period’s most important aesthetic distinctions. He described two practices of composition:

The First Practice (prima prattica), associated with the Flemish master Willaert and codified by the theorist Zarlino, placed the perfection of the harmonic rules above all else. The voice was subordinate to the harmony, and dissonances were governed by strict rules of preparation and resolution. Palestrina was the benchmark of this practice.

The Second Practice (seconda prattica) reversed the hierarchy: the harmony was subordinate to the text. If the meaning or expressive force of the words demanded a dissonance that violated the First Practice rules, that dissonance was justified. It was not that rules did not exist, but that their purpose — and their master — had changed.

This distinction proved enormously consequential. It articulated a principle that would drive Baroque vocal music throughout the seventeenth century: music’s highest calling was to move the listener, and it could deploy whatever harmonic and melodic resources that goal required.

The Birth of Opera

The Florentine Camerata

The invention of opera — the most consequential new genre in the history of Western music — grew out of a circle of intellectuals in late sixteenth-century Florence known as the Camerata (camerata being Italian for “society” or “club”). The group met in the 1570s and 1580s at the home of the nobleman Giovanni de’ Bardi, and its members included musicians, poets, and scientists — among them Vincenzo Galilei, father of the astronomer Galileo. Also central was Giulio Caccini (1551–1618), one of the finest singers in Florence.

The Camerata’s discussions ranged across literature, science, and the arts, but a central preoccupation was the music of ancient Greek theatre. Members speculated that the power of Greek tragedy to move its audiences — to produce the cathartic responses described by Aristotle — derived from the fact that the text was sung, not merely spoken. They criticized the contemporary practice of polyphonic madrigals, arguing that when multiple voices sang different words simultaneously, the text became unintelligible and its emotional power was lost.

Their solution was monody: accompanied solo singing, in which a single voice delivered the text over a simple instrumental accompaniment. In monody, every word could be heard clearly, and the vocal line could mirror the rhythm and inflection of natural speech. The texture was simple — a solo voice plus basso continuo — but the expressive potential was considered revolutionary. This prototype of what would become recitative made opera possible.

Caccini and Monody

Caccini’s songs, published in the collection Le nuove musiche (The New Music, 1602), are among the earliest surviving examples of monody. His song “Amarilli, mia bella” illustrates the new style: a single vocal line over a bass, with the melody carefully shaped to reflect the accents and emotions of the Italian text, ornamented with the kinds of embellishments that Caccini regarded as the singer’s prerogative. The style points directly toward recitative, that musico-dramatic parlance halfway between song and speech that made opera possible.

Opera and Its Antecedents

The word opera is simply the Italian for “work” — more fully, opera in musica, “work in music.” But before opera as a genre could crystallize, several earlier forms of musical-dramatic entertainment helped prepare the ground.

Pastoral drama was a literary and theatrical form depicting idealized shepherds and nymphs in an Arcadian landscape. One of the earliest musical pastoral plays, Fabula di Orfeo by Angelo Poliziano, was performed in Mantua as early as 1471.

The madrigal had developed during the sixteenth century as a vehicle for dramatizing lyric poetry, and through the device of the madrigal comedy — a series of madrigals linked by a comic scenario — it had already taken tentative steps toward staged musical drama.

The intermedio was an important staging post. An intermedio was a spectacular musical interlude performed before, after, or between the acts of a spoken play, typically on a pastoral, allegorical, or mythological subject. The most famous intermedi were those performed in Florence in 1589 for the wedding of Grand Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici and Christine of Lorraine: six elaborate theatrical spectacles drawing on the finest poets, painters, and musicians of the day. These intermedi demonstrated that spectacular musical theatre was both technically feasible and enormously popular. Opera was only a short step away.

Jacopo Peri and the Recitative Style

The first works generally recognized as operas were Dafne (1597–98, music mostly lost) and L’Euridice (1600) by Jacopo Peri (1561–1633), both with libretti by Ottavio Rinuccini. L’Euridice was performed at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence in October 1600, as part of the celebrations for the wedding of Maria de’ Medici to Henry IV of France, and it survives complete — the earliest opera we can hear today.

Peri described his new vocal style in the preface to L’Euridice in terms that illuminate the Camerata’s goals: he aimed at something midway between the sustained melody of song and the rhythm of ordinary speech. In his recitative style, stressed syllables coincide with consonant harmonies in the bass, while unstressed syllables may fall on dissonances — mirroring the natural stresses of Italian as spoken. The vocal line does not repeat text or build large formal structures; it moves through the words once, following their meaning and rhythm. This through-composed quality — no repetition, constant forward motion — is the hallmark of recitative, and it made possible the continuous dramatic action that opera required.

Two excerpts from L’Euridice illustrate the two main styles of monody Peri used:

Tirsi’s song, “Nel pur ardor”, is an aria (or “air”) — a more song-like style with regular rhythmic patterns derived from dance music. It is introduced by a sinfonia (a brief instrumental prelude) and set in a pastoral style: compound duple meter (6/4) that gives it a lilting, triple-subdivision feel; a drone in the bass imitating a bagpipe; two recorders playing in parallel thirds; and a charm that was meant to evoke the rustic world of Arcadian shepherds.

Dafne’s recitative employs the new style directly. The vocal line mirrors speech — syllabic setting (one note per syllable), many repeated notes on a single pitch (imitating the monotone of excited speech), and cadences marking the ends of phrases. Dafne enters breathless to deliver terrible news: Euridice is dead, bitten by a serpent. Orfeo’s subsequent reaction is rendered with unprepared dissonances, notes that clash harshly against the bass as if struck suddenly, and unexpected harmonic progressions that convey grief too profound for the smooth grammar of Renaissance counterpoint.

Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo

Where Peri pioneered the form, Claudio Monteverdi transformed it into a masterpiece. L’Orfeo (1607), composed when Monteverdi was about forty and serving as court musician to the Gonzaga family in Mantua, was not the first opera but it was the first truly great one — and the first that has remained continuously in the operatic repertoire.

The libretto, by Alessandro Striggio, follows the same mythological subject as L’Euridice — the poet-musician Orpheus who descends to the underworld to retrieve his dead wife Eurydice — but expands Rinuccini’s five scenes into a prologue plus five acts. The opera was performed in February 1607 for the Accademia degli Invaghiti in the private apartments of the Gonzaga palace: an intimate courtly entertainment, not a public spectacle.

Musically, L’Orfeo is far more ambitious than its predecessors:

Recitative is more varied than Peri’s. Monteverdi ranges from simple narration to passages of intense chromatic expressivity, and he matches the style of the recitative precisely to the dramatic situation — the joyful chatter of the nymphs and shepherds early in Act II, the devastating narrative of the Messenger, and Orfeo’s grief-stricken lament each receive entirely different treatment.

The orchestra is larger and more colourful than anything in Peri’s score. Monteverdi specifies particular instruments for particular dramatic effects: a wooden pipe organ and theorbo accompany the scenes in the underworld, lending a dark, plucked quality; brighter, more festive ensembles introduce scenes on earth. The printed score calls for approximately forty instruments.

The characters span three worlds — the allegorical (La Musica as a prologue figure), the pastoral (nymphs and shepherds in Arcadia), and the underworld (Charon, Pluto, Proserpina) — and the chorus plays a role modelled on Greek tragedy: it comments on the action, empathizes with the protagonist, and draws the moral lesson from the drama.

Act II: From Joy to Grief

Act II of L’Orfeo contains one of the most dramatic structural contrasts in opera. It opens in an atmosphere of pastoral bliss.

Orfeo’s aria (“Vi ricorda, o boschi ombrosi”) is strophic — the same music repeated for each stanza — with a strong dance rhythm and a ritornello (a recurring instrumental refrain of five parts) framing each verse. The bass continuo alone accompanies the voice. The music radiates uncomplicated joy, and the regularity of the strophic form suggests a world in happy equilibrium.

A short shepherd’s song continues the pastoral mood.

Then the Messenger (Silvia) arrives, and the entire harmonic and timbral world changes. The Messenger’s recitative shifts the basso continuo to a wooden pipe organ and theorbo — instruments chosen, as in the underworld scenes, for their dark, hollow timbre. Her narration moves between plain, syllabic delivery (for the facts of Euridice’s death) and increasingly chromatic, dissonant passages (for her emotional response). The dialogue between the Messenger and the other characters — their attempts to comprehend what they are hearing — is rendered through rapid alternation of voices, each interruption punctuated by the continuo.

Orfeo’s lament (“Tu se’ morta”) follows: barely more than a few phrases, but among the most devastating moments in Baroque music. The voice can barely sustain a line; the bass continuo (again the wooden pipe organ and theorbo) moves chromatically beneath. At the words “addio terra, addio cielo” (farewell earth, farewell sky), the music drops suddenly to a low register — a word painting of descent and loss that strikes with physical force.

The Chorus then performs in two sections that function as a Greek chorus: first sharing in the grief of the characters (the bass voice of the opening chorus takes up Orfeo’s initial melody, as if the whole pastoral world is weeping with him), then drawing a moral commentary on the transience of earthly happiness.

Early Baroque Vocal Music for Church and Chamber

Barbara Strozzi

Barbara Strozzi (1619–1677) was one of the most remarkable figures of the seventeenth-century musical world. She was probably the natural daughter of the Venetian poet and librettist Giulio Strozzi, who gave her an exceptional musical education in Venice. She studied composition with the great Francesco Cavalli and was the only woman admitted to Giulio’s Accademia degli Unisoni, a learned society that met to discuss literature, science, and the arts. She sang beautifully at its meetings — and she published more secular vocal music than any other composer of her era, male or female: eight collections of cantatas, arias, and madrigals appeared between 1644 and 1664. Because she was a woman, the public opera stage was largely closed to her, and so she composed almost exclusively for the intimate private chamber.

Lagrime mie (My Tears), Cantata

Strozzi’s cantata Lagrime mie (“My Tears”), published in her Diporti di Euterpe (1659), is a masterwork of the secular chamber cantata and a demonstration of how completely the techniques of early opera had been absorbed into other genres.

A cantata (cantata being Italian for “piece to be sung”) was a secular vocal work for one or more singers with basso continuo accompaniment, intended for private performance. It was not staged or costumed; the drama was entirely in the music and text. Lagrime mie sets a free-form poem from a male speaker’s perspective, lamenting his separation from his beloved Lidia, whose father has imprisoned her after seeing them together.

The work is organized into several contrasting sections, cycling through the three characteristic vocal styles of the Baroque:

Recitative carries the narrative forward with text-driven melodic inflection and no repetition of phrases.

Arioso — a style midway between recitative and aria, more melodically shaped than recitative but freer in form than a full aria — appears at lyrical moments in the text where the narrative pauses for emotional reflection.

Aria provides the most formally structured and melodically memorable moments.

The opening lament (mm. 1–22) deploys an array of Baroque word-painting conventions that Strozzi inherited from early opera: a long melisma on the word “Lagrime” (tears), in which the voice ornaments a single syllable with an extended run of notes; the key of E minor, long associated with grief; dissonant augmented intervals (for instance, the leap D♯ to C♮, drawn from the harmonic minor scale); and a descending melodic line on the opening syllable — the falling line was a Baroque convention for depicting tears, death, and lamentation, derived ultimately from Italian poetry’s association of descending motion with sadness.

A passage around mm. 49–62 returns to a descending bass line in triple meter, with the voice tracing a long melisma on the word “weep” — a technique structurally related to the ground bass or basso ostinato that Purcell would later employ with comparable power in Dido’s lament.

The strophic aria (mm. 71–87) provides formal contrast: four-line stanzas of verse set to a repeating musical structure, more regular in rhythm and more immediately memorable in melody than the recitative sections.

What is so impressive about Lagrime mie is the seamlessness with which these contrasting styles are woven together. Every section applies some technique derived from early opera — word painting, expressive dissonance, text-driven melody — to create a sustained psychological portrait of grief.

Giacomo Carissimi and the Oratorio

Giacomo Carissimi (1605–1674) served from 1629 as Master of the Chapel and teacher at the Jesuit Collegio Germanico in Rome. He was celebrated in his time as a “musical orator” whose works were protected by Papal decree — a measure of the esteem in which he was held. Tragically, the archives of the Collegio were largely destroyed following the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773 and Napoleon’s subsequent raids; many of Carissimi’s works survived only in copies scattered across European libraries.

Carissimi is the central figure in the history of the oratorio, a genre that emerged in Rome in the early seventeenth century and became one of the most important large-scale vocal forms of the Baroque. The word “oratorio” comes from the Italian for “prayer hall,” naming both the place where the form was first performed and the pious society (Arciconfraternita del SS. Crocifisso) that sponsored those performances.

An oratorio is a large-scale musical setting of a sacred dramatic text, combining narrative, dialogue, and commentary — like an opera, but not staged. The cast of characters does not wear costumes or act out the story; instead, a narrator (the testo or “text”) describes the action while soloists representing individual characters sing their parts. The chorus plays a much larger role than in opera, providing commentary (like the Greek chorus) and intensifying the emotional impact of key moments. Oratorio was the only kind of musical performance permitted during Lent, when the opera houses were closed, and this liturgical calendar gave the genre its institutional home.

NAWM 80: Historia di Jephte (ca. 1648)

Carissimi’s Historia di Jephte (Story of Jephthah) draws on the Book of Judges, paraphrasing the biblical narrative in Latin. The plot centres on the Israelite leader Jephthah, who vows to God that if he is victorious in battle, he will sacrifice the first person to greet him upon his return. That person turns out to be his daughter, who comes out singing and dancing in celebration of her father’s victory, innocent of the fate that awaits her.

The excerpt from the final scene includes two of Carissimi’s most powerful inventions:

Filia’s solo recitative with echo, “Plorate colles” (Weep, Hills), is a lament of extraordinary intensity. The basso continuo is provided by a single theorbo, and two supporting singers provide echo responses — repeating the last words of Filia’s phrases, like the hills and valleys taking up her grief. The technique of the echo had been used in earlier Baroque music for acoustic novelty, but Carissimi turns it into an expression of cosmic mourning: the natural world itself weeps. The vocal writing deploys all the tools of the Baroque lament — flattened melodic pitches (borrowing from the minor mode to produce a more plaintive colour), expressive dissonances in the harmonies, and arioso passages that interrupt the recitative with brief outbursts of more formed melody.

The final chorus, “Plorate filii Israel” (Weep, Sons of Israel), is a six-voice choral lament of the kind that had no precedent in earlier sacred music. Carissimi sets the last four lines of Filia’s lament for the full chorus, with the bass voice descending twice through a fourth at the opening — a gesture that derives from the Baroque convention of descending bass lines as signs of lament. The voices then move downward in all parts, building increasing harmonic tension through accumulated suspensions (where a voice holds a note from one chord into the next, clashing with the new harmony before resolving downward) that pile up at the end of each section.

Heinrich Schütz

Heinrich Schütz (1585–1672) was the most important German composer of the seventeenth century. Born into a wealthy family and trained in both law and music, he studied with Giovanni Gabrieli in Venice between 1609 and 1612 — absorbing the polychoral style of the Venetian school — and made a second visit in 1628 to study with Monteverdi. From 1615 until his death, he served as Master of the Electoral Chapel in Dresden, except for interruptions caused by the devastating Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), which reduced the size and resources of his ensemble dramatically.

Schütz’s career thus spans the entire arc of the early Baroque: he studied with the greatest masters on both sides of the Alps, absorbed both the Venetian polychoral tradition and the Monteverdian expressive style, and synthesized them into a distinctively German musical language.

NAWM 81: Saul, was verfolgst du mich? (ca. 1650)

This work, from Schütz’s third collection of Symphoniae sacrae (Sacred Symphonies), was composed after the Thirty Years’ War had ended and Schütz had the full forces of the Dresden chapel available to him once again. It sets a dramatic biblical text: the moment when Saul of Tarsus, on the road to Damascus, is struck down by a blinding light and hears the voice of Christ asking, “Saul, why do you persecute me?” The text is drawn from Acts 9 and describes the event that converted Saul into the apostle Paul.

The work is a sacred concerto — a large-scale composition mixing vocal soloists and instruments in the grand polychoral style Schütz had learned from Gabrieli. The scoring is extraordinary: two violins, six solo voices (soprano, soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, bass), two four-voice choirs doubled by instruments, and basso continuo (organ and cello/theorbo for recitative sections). The work exploits this vast ensemble to dramatize the text with theatrical force.

The structure is sectional, with each section exploiting a different combination of forces:

The opening (mm. 1–16) presents the divine question “Saul, why do you persecute me?” in pairs of solo voices that emerge from the lowest registers and rise progressively: D minor to A minor to F major to D major. The word verfolgst (persecute) is set to an intense dissonance — a dense, clashing harmony that conveys the violence of persecution. This is not merely decorative: Schütz is applying the doctrine of musical figures (Figurenlehre), a system of melodic and harmonic devices codified by German theorists of the period, in which specific musical gestures were given standard expressive meanings. Two prominent figures appear here: a harsh cadential note (a dissonance at a moment of harmonic arrival) and a harsh leap (a wide, jagged interval in the melodic line). These were codified devices for expressing pain, violence, and shock.

The following section (mm. 17–23) brings in the full choral and instrumental ensemble in grand concerto style, with echo effects created not by physical placement but by dynamic contrast: the passage is marked forte, then mezzo-piano, then pianissimo, imitating the effect of sound reflecting off distant walls.

A brief recitative-style passage for solo tenor with basso continuo (mm. 24ff.) delivers the second line: “It will be difficult for you to kick against the pricks” — Christ’s reproach to Saul. The word “kick” is illustrated by an ornamental turn in the voice, and in a later recitative passage, this ornament expands into a long melisma, as if the single word gathers meaning and weight as the text progresses.

The work concludes in a passage (m. 60) that combines recitative-style and polychoral textures simultaneously, growing in intensity until it ends in a hushed pianissimo echo — the divine voice receding into silence, leaving Saul — and the listener — profoundly shaken.

Baroque Instrumental Music I: The Violin Family

Two String Families

The Baroque era inherited two distinct families of bowed string instruments that had co-existed during the Renaissance, each with its own character, technique, and social associations.

The viol family (viola da gamba, “leg viol”) had been invented in Spain in the late fifteenth century and spread throughout Europe during the sixteenth. The instruments were held between the legs, like a modern cello. They had six strings tuned in fourths (with a third in the middle, like a lute), frets made of gut tied around the neck (like a guitar), and were bowed underhand — the bow held from below with the palm upward. This underhand grip produced a somewhat softer, less brilliant tone than the overhand bow used by the violin family. Viols came in various sizes (treble, tenor, and bass), and the bass viol — the violone — persisted as a continuo instrument well into the Baroque.

The violin family (viola da braccio, “arm viola”) emerged independently in northern Italy around 1550. It included the violin, viola, and violoncello. These instruments had four strings tuned in fifths, no frets, and were played with an overhand bow — the palm downward. This grip enabled a more powerful, projecting tone and greater agility. Violins were first used primarily as dance music instruments, but their expressive range and brilliance made them increasingly attractive to composers.

Throughout the seventeenth century, the violin family gradually superseded the viols in most contexts, particularly as the orchestra developed. By the mid-seventeenth century, the rise of the orchestra was essentially synonymous with the rise of the violin family.

A Baroque violin differs from its modern successor in important respects: shorter neck, lower string tension (gut rather than metal-wound strings), a differently shaped bow, and a lower bridge — all contributing to a somewhat thinner, more transparent sound better suited to the intimate spaces of the seventeenth century than to the large concert halls of today.

Baroque Genres for Strings

The Baroque Sonata

The sonata (sonata being Italian for “piece to be sounded,” as opposed to the cantata, “piece to be sung”) was one of the most important instrumental genres of the Baroque. Early Baroque sonatas were single-movement works organized into contrasting sections; by the middle of the century, these sections had expanded into separate movements.

By the later seventeenth century, four types of sonata had become standard:

A sonata for unaccompanied instruments required the performer to suggest harmonic fullness through melodic means alone — a formidable challenge, and the basis for Bach’s unaccompanied violin and cello works.

The trio sonata was the most common instrumentation after around 1670. Despite the name, it required four performers: two treble instruments (usually violins) played independent melodic lines above a basso continuo, which itself typically comprised two players (a cello reinforcing the bass line and a keyboard instrument filling in the harmonies).

The sonata da chiesa (church sonata) was intended for church performance or private use in a church context. It typically consisted of four movements in a slow–fast–slow–fast pattern, with abstract or dance-derived movements that bore no titles but were understood as stylized rather than literally danced.

The sonata da camera (chamber sonata) was a stylized suite of dances, typically performed in aristocratic households.

NAWM 84: Marini, Sonata IV per il violino per sonar con due corde, Op. 8 (ca. 1626)

Biagio Marini (1594–1663) was among the first composers to write idiomatically for the violin — to exploit what the instrument could do that no voice or viol could replicate. His Sonata IV for violin and basso continuo, from his Op. 8 collection, is a sectional single-movement work that moves freely through contrasting affects, paralleling the structure of vocal monody. The title, “for two strings,” refers to the use of double stops — playing on two strings simultaneously to produce chords, a technique only possible on unfretted string instruments where the fingers can reach across adjacent strings.

The work unfolds in ten contrasting sections:

Opening passages in a slow, tardo style suggest the freedom of recitative — the melodic line meanders through rapid figurations over a slowly moving bass, with no regular pulse. More rhythmically defined passages take on the character of aria: a more regular beat, melodic sequences, and the lyrical double stops of the title. Later sections add thrills (long trills), large leaps that would be impossible for a voice, alternations of tardo and presto that create dramatic contrast of another kind, and an “affetti” section that deploys slow chromatic expressivity in a way that directly parallels vocal laments.

The work demonstrates how early Baroque composers transferred the expressive vocabulary of vocal music to instruments — and then pushed beyond what voices could do.

NAWM 96: Corelli, Trio Sonata, Op. 3, No. 2 (1689)

Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713) brought the Baroque sonata to its mature form. Working in Rome under the patronage of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, Corelli established himself as the preeminent violin composer and teacher of his age, and his twelve trio sonatas of Op. 3 became models studied and imitated throughout Europe.

This trio sonata exemplifies the sonata da chiesa in its standard four-movement form (Grave – Allegro – Adagio – Allegro), scored for two violins and basso continuo (cello and organ), with four performers in total.

Movement 1 (Grave): The slow opening movement is built on a walking bass — a continuo line that moves steadily in even notes, providing a rhythmic foundation beneath the overlying voices. The two violins engage in chains of suspensions: each voice holds a note over a harmonic change, creating a dissonance that resolves downward before the next suspension arrives, producing a linked sequence of harmonic tensions and releases that was one of the signature textures of Baroque music.

Movement 2 (Allegro): The fast movement is fugal — all four voices (including the basso continuo) engage in imitative counterpoint, each stating a common theme in turn before weaving it into a contrapuntal texture.

Movement 3 (Adagio): Marked sarabande, this slow movement is in binary form (two sections, each repeated) and triple meter, with an emphasis on the second beat characteristic of the sarabande dance. The two violins alternate between imitation (one entering after the other) and parallel thirds (both moving together in the same direction a third apart), creating the texture of a lyrical vocal duet.

Movement 4 (Allegro): A gigue — the dance associated in French with “jig” — in binary form with compound meter (12/8), wide melodic leaps, and continuous triplets. Each of the two sections begins with imitation, and Corelli employs a sophisticated compositional device in the second section: its subject is the inversion of the first section’s subject (turned upside down, every upward interval becoming a downward one), creating motivic unity beneath the outward contrast.

Antonio Vivaldi and the Concerto

Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741) was born in Venice, the son of a violinist at St Mark’s Basilica. He was ordained as a priest and served as a conductor, composer, and teacher at the Ospedale della Pietà — one of four Venetian institutions that provided exceptional musical education to orphaned, illegitimate, or otherwise disadvantaged girls. The Pietà’s ensemble was one of the finest in Europe, and Vivaldi’s enormous output of concertos, sacred music, and eventually forty-nine operas was shaped in large part by the demands of that extraordinary institution. His later career was troubled: he was censured for irregular priestly conduct in 1737, left Venice for Vienna with hopes of court patronage, and died in poverty in 1741.

The concerto (from the Latin concertare, to contend or collaborate together) is a composition in which one or more solo instruments contrast with a larger orchestral ensemble. Two main types existed in the Baroque:

The concerto grosso contrasted a small group of soloists (the concertino) with the full orchestra (the ripieno or tutti).

The solo concerto — the type Vivaldi did most to develop — contrasted a single soloist with the orchestra.

NAWM 95: Concerto for Violin in A Minor, Op. 3, No. 6

This concerto is from Vivaldi’s L’estro armonico (Harmonic Inspiration), Op. 3 (1711), a collection that was enormously influential across Europe: Bach transcribed many of these concertos for keyboard. The work follows the standard Baroque concerto plan of three movements — fast–slow–fast — with the fast movements in ritornello form.

Ritornello form is one of the most important structural innovations of the Baroque. A ritornello (Italian for “little return”) is a recurrent passage for the full orchestra that functions as a structural pillar, marking the beginning of the movement and returning at various points throughout in different keys. Between the ritornello statements come episodes — virtuosic passages for the soloist that explore contrasting material or develop ideas from the ritornello. The ritornello is typically built from several small, recognizable units (often labelled a, b, c by analysts), which can be combined, shortened, or reordered in their various returns, giving the form both architectural clarity and expressive flexibility. The final ritornello returns in the tonic key, providing closure. The contrast between the full orchestra’s ritornello and the soloist’s episodes was the Baroque concerto’s primary dramatic mechanism.

The slow middle movement presents a completely different character: the orchestra retreats almost entirely, and the soloist sings a long, ornate melody in the minor mode, over a walking bass — the concerto’s lyrical heart, framed by the vigor of the outer movements.

Baroque Instrumental Music II: Keyboard Music

Keyboard Instruments

Three keyboard instruments were central to Baroque music, each with distinct acoustic properties and expressive capabilities.

The harpsichord was the dominant keyboard instrument from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. Its strings are plucked by a small quill or leather plectrum mounted on a jack that rises when the key is depressed. The harpsichord cannot vary its dynamics through key touch — pressing harder or softer does not change the volume, since the plucking mechanism is binary. However, many harpsichords had two manuals (keyboards) and multiple sets of strings at different pitches, allowing the performer to change registration by coupling or uncoupling them, producing different tonal colours.

The clavichord was smaller and quieter than the harpsichord, intended for private domestic use. Its strings are struck by a brass tangent that remains in contact with the string as long as the key is depressed — unlike the piano, which immediately releases. This sustained contact allows the player a small degree of dynamic control and even a slight vibrato (Bebung). The clavichord was particularly valued by CPE Bach for its expressive intimacy.

The organ used pressurized air driven through pipes of different sizes and materials — flue pipes (where air flows across an opening to produce a tone) and reed pipes (where a vibrating metal tongue produces the sound). Different sets of pipes (called ranks) could be engaged or disengaged by stops, allowing enormous variety of colour. The organ had one or more manuals and a pedal keyboard played with the feet, enabling the organist to sustain bass notes independently of the hands. The organ’s ability to sustain notes indefinitely — impossible on the harpsichord or clavichord — made it uniquely suited to polyphonic and contrapuntal music, and to the long-breathed architecture of prelude and fugue.

The Italian Keyboard Toccata

The word toccata comes from the Italian toccare (to touch), and it describes a keyboard work intended to sound like improvisation — a virtuoso exploration of the instrument’s capabilities, of the mode or key, and of the performer’s technical command. Toccatas moved freely through a range of harmonies, figurations, and textures, often serving as preludes that established the key and character of a following piece.

Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583–1643) was one of the most celebrated keyboard composers of the early seventeenth century. He served as organist at St Peter’s Basilica in Rome — one of the most prestigious musical posts in Europe — and his Toccatas and Partitas Intabulated for Harpsichord, Book I (1615) was among the first keyboard collections conceived entirely for harpsichord rather than for a generic keyboard instrument.

Frescobaldi, Toccata No. 3

This toccata for harpsichord maintains forward momentum through constant melodic motion, evaded cadences (cadences that approach a point of rest but deflect to another harmony), and rapid style shifts that give the piece its restless, improvisatory character. Like most toccatas, it proceeds as a series of brief phrases or sections, each with distinct figuration and each closing (or seeming to close) with a cadence before moving unexpectedly in a new direction. The opening resembles vocal recitative in its rhythmic flexibility and rhetorical quality. A following section adopts arioso character with chains of suspensions over a walking bass — the same technique Corelli would employ in his trio sonatas. An imitative passage introduces contrapuntal texture. The remainder of the piece shifts freely between styles every two or three measures. Even the ornaments were improvised: performers were expected to add embellishments according to their taste, and the written notes represented only a skeletal version of the full realization.

The French Baroque Keyboard Suite

Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre (1665–1729) was a child prodigy who sang and played at the court of Louis XIV from the age of five. She spent her career in Paris, composing, teaching, and performing, and became one of the most celebrated harpsichordists of her generation. Her first publication — harpsichord pieces — appeared in 1687, when she was in her early twenties, and the Pièces de clavecin of that year remain her most enduring legacy.

A suite was a collection of stylized dances, all in the same key, designed to be performed as a coherent group. The individual dances were not meant to be literally danced; they were stylized — abstract compositions that preserved the characteristic metre, tempo, and gesture of each dance type while transforming them into psychological and aesthetic studies.

Most suite movements were in binary form: two repeated sections (||: A :||: B :||). In Baroque binary form, the first section typically moves from the tonic to the dominant (or relative major, if in a minor key), while the second section returns to the tonic. Some scholars distinguish between simple, balanced, and rounded binary depending on whether material from the first section returns at the end of the second.

Suite No. 3 in A Minor (ca. 1687)

Jacquet de la Guerre’s Suite No. 3 includes the movements standard in a French Baroque suite:

The prélude opens without bar lines or time signature — a notation that explicitly invites improvisatory performance. The slur marks indicate sustained notes and phrase groupings, but the rhythm is largely at the performer’s discretion. The prelude explores the key of A minor and serves to establish the emotional world of the suite.

The allemande (“German”) is in moderate 4/4 meter, beginning with an upbeat. Its characteristic texture of continuous eighth and sixteenth notes creates a flowing, meditative quality.

The courante is in a moderate triple or compound meter with an upbeat, and its defining rhythmic feature is hemiola — the shift between 3/2 and 6/4 metric groupings, creating a sense of rhythmic ambiguity that gives the dance its gentle momentum.

The sarabande is slow and dignified, in triple meter with a characteristic emphasis on the second beat — a weighty suspension that gives the dance its stately quality.

The gigue (English “jig”) is fast, in compound meter (6/4), with wide melodic leaps and continuous triplet subdivisions.

Ornamentation in French Harpsichord Music

French harpsichord style of the late seventeenth century was profoundly influenced by the lute, an instrument whose technique had been adapted for keyboard in what was called the style luthé (lute style). From the lute came the practice of arpéger (breaking chords upward), spreading notes that would otherwise be played simultaneously, and a rich vocabulary of ornaments (agréments) that served both aesthetic and practical purposes.

The harpsichord’s strings are plucked, not struck, and the resulting tone decays rapidly. Ornaments compensate for this acoustic limitation by sustaining the expressive weight of important notes beyond what the bare note-value could achieve — a trill keeps a note alive by alternating it rapidly with its neighbour, while a mordent animates it with a brief lower neighbour. The ornament table included the pincé (mordent), the tremblement (trill), the double (turn), and the port de voix (appoggiatura-plus-trill).

A related French convention was notes inégales (“uneven notes”): a performance practice in which written passages of even short notes were performed with a lilting rhythm, alternating longer and shorter values to produce a gentle swing. This was not notated but was understood as the natural interpretation of melodic passages in French style.

German Organ Music: Buxtehude

The German Lutheran organ tradition of the seventeenth century was one of the richest in Baroque music. The period from 1650 to 1750 is often called the golden age of Lutheran German organ music: a period when the large multi-manual organs of the north German churches — with their bright, articulate mixtures and powerful pedal divisions — inspired a generation of composers to extend the range of organ composition in unprecedented ways.

Dietrich Buxtehude (ca. 1637–1707) served as organist at St Mary’s Church in Lübeck from 1668 until his death — one of the most prestigious positions in north Germany. He kept his manuscript music private and did not publish his works; they were preserved in copies made by students and admirers. His famous Abendmusiken (evening music concerts) were a series of free public concerts held during the weeks of Advent, drawing music-lovers from a wide region. In the winter of 1705–06, the young Johann Sebastian Bach walked 378 kilometres from Arnstadt to Lübeck to hear Buxtehude play and to study with him — staying for four months rather than the weeks he had been given leave for.

In the Lutheran liturgy, the organ prelude (Praeludium) had an important function: it opened the Sunday service, setting the tonal and emotional character for what followed.

NAWM 97: Praeludium in E Major, BuxWV 141

This late seventeenth-century work for organ (two manuals plus pedal) exemplifies the north German praeludium — a genre essentially identical to the Italian toccata in its alternation of free, improvisatory sections with imitative or fugal sections. Buxtehude’s plan is a large-scale alternation: Free – Fugue – Free – Fugal/Figurative – Fugal Transition – Fugue – Coda, creating four substantial imitative sections each preceded by a passage in free style. The fugal sections all work with related themes, providing motivic coherence across the work’s expansive architecture.

The pedal writing is particularly demanding — the feet must execute independent melodic lines at high speed, a technique that distinguishes the north German organ tradition and that Bach would inherit and develop to unprecedented heights.

A characteristic detail: the actual sounding pitch of this piece is a half-step higher than written, because the organ at St Mary’s was tuned to a higher standard than modern concert pitch.

J. S. Bach I: Instrumental Music

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) is, by any reckoning, among the three or four most important composers in the history of Western music. Unlike his near-contemporaries Handel and Vivaldi, he worked primarily within the German Lutheran tradition, in court and church appointments rather than in the public opera house, and he did not compose operas. Yet the range, depth, and technical mastery of his output is without parallel: he absorbed every style and genre of his era — German, Italian, French — synthesized them on terms entirely his own, and produced music of inexhaustible complexity and emotional power.

Review of Fugue

Bach’s instrumental music is inseparable from his mastery of fugue — the most demanding form of imitative counterpoint in the Western tradition.

A fugue is a musical genre based on the systematic imitation of a theme (called the subject) through a texture of independent melodic lines called voices. The term “voice” refers to these melodic lines abstractly — a fugue for keyboard has two, three, or four voices without implying any singers; the ranges correspond to the soprano, alto, tenor, and bass registers.

A fugue begins with an exposition: a section in which each voice states the entire subject exactly once. The first voice states the subject alone in the tonic key. A second voice then enters with the subject transposed up a fifth (or down a fourth) — this transposed statement is called the answer. While the second voice is presenting the answer, the first voice often continues with a countersubject: a secondary theme designed to sound well against the subject in counterpoint, and typically recurring whenever the subject appears. A third voice then enters with the subject (usually in the tonic again), and so on until all voices have been heard once. The exposition ends at that point.

After the exposition, a fugue typically alternates between episodes — sections in which the subject is absent, usually built from fragments of the subject or countersubject in sequences — and statements of the subject in various keys, moving through a circle of modulations before eventually returning to the tonic. Advanced fugal techniques include:

Stretto: overlapping entries of the subject, where one voice begins the subject before a previous voice has finished stating it, creating an intensification of the imitative texture.

Augmentation: the subject in doubled note values (twice as slow).

Inversion: the subject turned upside down (every upward interval becomes a downward one).

Diminution: the subject in halved note values.

NAWM 102: Bach, Prelude and Fugue in A Minor (ca. 1715)

This work for organ, composed during Bach’s years at the Weimar court, is one of his most important early organ compositions and represents a crucial development in his style: the integration of the Italian concerto idiom into German organ music.

The Prelude is in A minor and opens with a violinistic figuration — rapid arpeggiated patterns in the right hand that evoke the idiomatic writing of Vivaldi and the Italian concerto composers, transposed to the organ keyboard. A passage around mm. 37–38 introduces chains of suspensions directly comparable to the texture of Corelli’s sonatas, demonstrating Bach’s assimilation of both the brilliant and the learned Italian styles.

The Fugue takes this Italian influence further: its subject recalls the ritornello of a Vivaldi concerto, with its clear phrase structure and motivic energy. The episodes function like solo sections in a concerto, with sequential patterns derived from the subject; the returns of the subject function like ritornello statements. Bach has essentially imported the architecture of the solo concerto into the fugue.

Beyond this structural parallel, Bach deploys a sophisticated array of fugal techniques. The exposition presents the subject in four voices in the order soprano–alto–tenor–bass. Later statements use stretto, with one voice entering with the subject before a previous voice has completed it. At various points, Bach states only part of the subject — sometimes just its second half, sometimes beginning in one voice and completing in another. These manipulations allow the subject to appear constantly while always seeming fresh.

Bach’s Music for Harpsichord: The Well-Tempered Clavier

The Well-Tempered Clavier (Das Wohltemperierte Klavier, WTC) is one of the most important works in the history of keyboard music. Published in two books (Book I in 1722, Book II around 1740), each book contains twenty-four preludes and fugues — one pair in each of the twenty-four major and minor keys, arranged systematically from C major through all the chromatic keys to B major and B minor.

The collection has a pedagogical purpose that goes beyond mere technical exercise. The title refers to tuning: in near-equal temperament (the tuning system Bach favoured), the twelve semitones of the octave are adjusted so that all keys are usable, unlike mean-tone temperament, in which only a subset of keys sounded acceptable. The WTC is both a demonstration of what near-equal temperament made possible and a compendium of compositional styles and techniques, offering a different approach in almost every pair.

NAWM 104: Prelude and Fugue No. 8, WTC Book I

The eighth pair in WTC Book I makes the tuning demonstration explicit: the Prelude is in E-flat minor (six flats), while the Fugue is in D-sharp minor (six sharps). These keys are enharmonic equivalents — E-flat and D-sharp name the same pitch on a keyboard instrument, but in mean-tone temperament, they could not both be in tune simultaneously. That Bach can move seamlessly between them demonstrates the entire harmonic spectrum available under the new tuning.

The Prelude has an unsettled quality among analysts: it could be heard as an Italian concerto slow movement (with its persistent repeated chords suggesting an orchestral texture) or as a French sarabande (with the dotted rhythms and ornamentation typical of French keyboard style). This ambiguity is characteristic of Bach’s cosmopolitan mixture — his synthesis of national styles.

The Fugue is in three voices (alto, soprano, bass) rather than the more common four, beginning in the middle range. Its subject is notably archaic in style — narrow in range, moving mostly by step — recalling the vocal polyphony of earlier centuries. Yet Bach treats it with astonishing contrapuntal invention: the subject is almost omnipresent throughout the fugue, appearing in its original form, inverted, augmented, and in stretto; episodes are brief and transitional. The fugue ends with a short coda that provides harmonic closure.

J. S. Bach II: Vocal Music

NAWM 105: Cantata BWV 62, Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland (1724)

The German cantata was the centrepiece of the Lutheran church service. Performed between the reading of the Gospel and the sermon, the cantata set a biblical text or a paraphrase of a chorale (a Lutheran congregational hymn) for soloists, chorus, and orchestra. The congregation would recognize the chorale melody — they sang it themselves — and could follow its transformation through the composer’s setting.

Bach composed over two hundred cantatas, and BWV 62 belongs to his second annual cycle (1724–25), in which he set chorales as the framework for each cantata. It was first performed on 3 December 1724, the first Sunday of Advent — the beginning of the church year. The text draws on a chorale by Martin Luther himself: a German adaptation of the Latin Advent hymn Veni redemptor gentium (“Come, Redeemer of the Gentiles”), using the first and last stanzas of Luther’s eight-stanza version as the opening and closing choruses, with paraphrases of stanzas 2–7 providing the texts for the interior arias and recitatives.

The cantata is a chorale cantata — a sacred setting of a Lutheran hymn that incorporates the chorale melody directly into the music. Its instrumentation includes horn (which doubles the soprano melody in the first movement), two oboes, first and second violins, viola, and basso continuo (organ and violone).

The Six Movements

The cantata proceeds through six movements, moving from maximum complexity and weight to maximum simplicity:

1. Chorale motet (chorus): B minor — the most complex and elaborate movement, discussed below.
2. Da capo aria (tenor), G major: in minuet style, with a contrasting middle section (B) in minor and long melismas running to twenty bars.
3. Recitative (bass): angular, with wide leaps and text painting — a run of sixteenth notes on the word “run,” a large leap downward on “fallen.”
4. Da capo aria (bass), D major: violins and violas play the same line as the bass, an octave higher — a texture called colla parte unison.
5. Accompanied recitative (soprano and alto): modulates through a series of keys toward B minor.
6. Chorale harmonization (chorus): the last stanza of Luther’s hymn in four-voice SATB harmony, doubled by instruments — a congregational sound, simple and direct.

Movement 1: The Opening Chorus

The opening movement is a chorale motet — a setting of a chorale in the style of the sixteenth-century polyphonic motet. This is Bach at his most architecturally ambitious, combining two entirely different compositional worlds within a single movement.

The new element is the ritornello structure borrowed from Vivaldi. The movement opens with a sixteen-bar instrumental ritornello for the full orchestra, derived from the chorale melody itself (mm. 3–6 in the bass, mm. 15–17 in the oboes), and this ritornello returns in varied form at the end of the movement. Between its appearances, ritornellos frame the four phrases of the chorale — each choral verse arriving like an episode between concerto statements.

The old element is the cantus firmus technique (cantus firmus being Latin for “fixed melody”): the soprano line, doubled by the horn, presents the chorale tune in long notes — slow, sustained values that make the familiar melody audible above the dense contrapuntal texture. Beneath this soprano cantus firmus, the alto, tenor, and bass voices sing imitative counterpoint: each voice takes up an idea derived from the chorale phrase before the soprano arrives with the full melody, preparing the listener for each new phrase.

The chorale thus permeates every layer of the movement simultaneously: as the slow cantus firmus in the soprano, as the basis of the ritornello in the orchestra, and as the source material for the imitative counterpoint in the lower three voices. This total integration of a single melodic source across every dimension of a complex movement is one of the distinguishing characteristics of Bach’s mature style.

Late Baroque Opera

Baroque Opera in France

While Italian opera had conquered much of Europe by the mid-seventeenth century, France maintained its own national tradition under the powerful influence of King Louis XIV (reigned 1643–1715), the Sun King. French taste resisted the Italian model for reasons that were partly aesthetic and partly nationalistic: Italian opera emphasized virtuosic singing, and the florid ornamentation of Italian recitative was considered incompatible with the rhythms and prosody of the French language. French culture gave priority to dramatic eloquence over vocal display — to the clarity of the text and the dignity of the theatrical action.

The result was a specifically French operatic form created through the collaboration of the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–87) and the librettist Philippe Quinault: the tragédie en musique (later called tragédie lyrique).

Lully was by birth Italian but had come to France as a young man, joining the court of Louis XIV initially as a dancer. He impressed the king with his ability in both dance and music, was appointed to a series of increasingly important positions, and eventually gained an exclusive royal patent to produce opera in Paris — effectively a monopoly. No other composer could stage opera in the capital without his permission.

The Tragédie Lyrique

The tragédie lyrique (lyric tragedy) was a characteristically French form of opera combining the traditions of classical French drama (modelled on the tragedies of Racine and Corneille), court ballet, and Italian opera. Its features distinguished it sharply from Italian opera seria:

Its dramatic structure was a prologue plus five acts, larger than the typical Italian three acts, and its plots drew on mythology and allegory. The orchestra consisted primarily of all strings (the famous “vingt-quatre violons” — twenty-four violins of the Versailles orchestra — in five-part string writing), supplemented by some winds. The style prized dramatic eloquence over vocal brilliance: arias (airs) were typically shorter and more declamatory than their Italian counterparts. Spectacular choruses and extensive ballet divertissements (entertainment interludes featuring dancing and spectacle) were essential components of every act.

Central to Lully’s achievement was the adaptation of recitative to the French language. He reportedly based his recitative on the delivery of the great French actors at the Comédie-Française — studying how they paced their lines, where they placed emphases, and how they used pauses for dramatic effect. The result was a recitative that alternates freely between bars of two, three, and four beats, following the natural rhythms of French speech rather than the regular metres of Italian recitative. The vocal line mirrors the declamation of the text as closely as possible.

Lully, Armide (1686)

Armide is widely regarded as Lully’s masterwork. Its libretto, by Quinault, is set during the First Crusade: Armide is a Saracen princess and sorceress who enchants the crusader knight Renaud, causing him to fall in love with her and abandon his sacred quest. Two of his fellow knights eventually rescue him by showing him his reflection in a diamond shield, and he resumes the Crusade, causing Armide to destroy her enchanted realm in despair.

The excerpt from Act II, Scene 5 — in which Armide finds the sleeping Renaud and prepares to kill him, only to find herself unable — is one of the most dramatically intense moments in French Baroque opera.

The Overture opens the opera in the standard French overture form that Lully invented: two sections in ||: A :||: B :|| structure. The first section (A) is slow, duple, and majestic — a stately, homophonic texture with characteristic dotted rhythms, performed with overdotting (the dotted note held even longer than written, the short note shortened further) and notes inégales. The second section (B) is faster, in compound triple meter (6/4), with imitative counterpoint among the instruments. At the end of section B, the tempo slows and the duple meter briefly returns, giving the overture a sense of enclosure.

The Divertissement (Act II, Scene 4, “Laissons au tendre amour”) is an extended interlude of ballet, solo airs, and choral singing intended as pure entertainment — the divertissement was a fixed structural feature of every act, and French audiences expected and relished it.

The scene in which Armide discovers Renaud asleep (Act II, Scene 5, “Enfin il est en ma puissance”) is introduced by a prelude that is tense and harmonically charged, drawing on the rhetorical weight of the overture’s slow style without the formal architecture of the French overture. The recitative that follows demonstrates Lully’s prosody: the meter shifts between duple and triple bars following the stresses of the French text, the bass continuo accompaniment supports without dominating, and dramatic rests punctuate Armide’s indecision at crucial moments. Before the aria, as the emotional intensity builds, the recitative adopts a more regular metric character — a brief stabilization that prepares the formal arrival of the air.

The air (“Je vais percer un coeur”) is accompanied first by the orchestra and then — in a more intimate register — by basso continuo alone. It is in minuet style (triple meter, moderate tempo), with syllabic text-setting and a simplicity quite different from the ornate arias of contemporary Italian opera. This simplicity is not a limitation but a deliberate aesthetic: Lully’s vocal lines serve the drama and the text rather than displaying the singer’s technique.

Opera in England: Purcell and Dido and Aeneas

At nearly the same moment that Lully was consolidating French opera in Paris, Henry Purcell (1659–1695) composed what would become the only fully through-sung English opera of the Baroque: Dido and Aeneas (1689).

Purcell was the most gifted English composer of the seventeenth century, serving as organist at Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal. Dido and Aeneas is unique in his output: his only opera in which the entire text is set to music, with no spoken dialogue. Its libretto, by Nahum Tate, derives from Book IV of Virgil’s Aeneid but departs significantly from the original: a witches’ coven (absent in Virgil) drives the plot by deceiving Aeneas into believing he must leave Carthage. The date and venue of the premiere are disputed — the earliest documented performance was at Josias Priest’s Boarding School for Young Ladies in Chelsea, possibly in 1689, and the work has dimensions that suggest it may have begun as a school performance piece.

NAWM 90: From the End of Act III

The final scene of Dido and Aeneas comprises three closely connected sections that move from recitative through aria to chorus.

Recitative: “Thy hand, Belinda”

Dido’s brief recitative is laden with word painting. A melisma (a single syllable set to multiple notes) extends and darkens the word “darkness.” Sighing figures — short descending motives that suggest a caught breath or sob — accompany the words “death” and similar expressions of grief. A stepwise descent through a seventh (C down to D, through a chromatic passing note) underlines the desolation of the text.

Dido’s Lament: “When I am laid in earth”

This aria is built on one of the most celebrated musical devices in the Baroque repertoire: the ground bass (basso ostinato, “persistent bass”). A ground bass is a short melodic pattern in the bass that repeats continuously throughout a piece or movement, while the melody above it changes freely. Purcell’s bass pattern descends chromatically from G down through F♯, F♮, E♮, E♭, and D before returning to G — a five-bar unit that the bass line states eleven times in succession.

The choice of a ground bass was not arbitrary. The descending chromatic bass had been associated with lament in Italian music since the early seventeenth century — it appears in Monteverdi’s operatic laments and becomes a recognizable convention throughout the Baroque. By anchoring Dido’s final aria on this symbol, Purcell places her death within the entire tradition of operatic grief. The melody Dido sings above the repeating bass is deliberately dissonant against it at key moments: suspensions and clashes accumulate as her final phrases arrive, and the repeating bass continues remorselessly beneath the vocal line, as if the world keeps turning even in the face of personal tragedy.

Chorus: “With drooping wings”

The opera ends with a choral lament for the Cupids, marked by three descending melodic figures in succession — drooping, falling gestures that enact the text’s image of wings bent in mourning. The function is that of the Greek chorus: stepping back from the personal drama to offer a collective meditation on what has happened. Purcell sets it simply, homophonically, with the three descents growing in sadness as they accumulate.

Handel, Giulio Cesare (1724)

George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) was born in Halle, Germany, the same year as Bach, but his career took an entirely different path. After training in Germany and Italy — where he absorbed the Italian operatic style at its source — he settled in London, becoming the dominant figure in English musical life for four decades. Where Bach worked within the Lutheran church and court, Handel wrote primarily for the public — for London’s opera houses, for subscription concerts, and eventually for the English oratorio, a genre he effectively invented for his London audiences.

Giulio Cesare in Egitto (Julius Caesar in Egypt, 1724) is one of his greatest operas, with a libretto by Nicola Haym in Italian (the prestige language of opera, accepted by London audiences without question). The opera is set in Egypt in 47–48 BCE and combines a historical plot with complex characterization and Handel’s inexhaustible melodic invention.

Opera Seria

Giulio Cesare belongs to the genre of opera seria (serious opera) — Italian opera based on classical mythology or historical subjects, governed by a strict formal code that had developed in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Opera seria was structured around an alternation of recitative and aria: the recitative reported the action (dialogue, events, decisions), while the aria provided the emotional response — a static, formally organized reflection on the dramatic moment.

The most important formal type was the da capo aria. The term da capo means “from the beginning” — an instruction in the score to repeat the first section after the second. The resulting form is ABA’: a first section (A) establishes the main key and text; a contrasting middle section (B) moves to a related key and often presents a contrasting mood; the first section then repeats, but with the singer improvising elaborate embellishments (abbellimenti) added to the written melody. This improvisation was expected and demanded by audiences: a singer who merely repeated the A section exactly would be met with derision.

A consequence of the da capo form was a kinetic-static dramatic rhythm: the recitative carried the action forward rapidly, then the drama paused as an aria presented a single emotional state at length. Giulio Cesare contains twenty-nine arias — each a moment of arrest at which a character reflects on their situation through the lens of a single affect.

Castrati were adult male singers who had undergone surgical castration before puberty to preserve the soprano or alto range of the boy’s voice. The combination of an adult’s lung capacity and technique with a high voice that projected with extraordinary brilliance and power made the castrato the pre-eminent operatic voice of the Baroque. In Giulio Cesare, the title role of Caesar, as well as Nero and Ptolemy, were written for castrati. Today these roles are performed by countertenors (male falsettists) or by women. The last surviving castrato was Alessandro Moreschi (1858–1922), whose recordings, made around 1902–03, are the only direct sonic evidence of the voice type.

Act II, Scenes 1–2: Cleopatra’s Aria “V’adoro, pupille”

In Act II, Scene 1, Cleopatra — disguised as a serving-woman named Lidia — arranges an elaborate spectacle for Caesar: she appears as the goddess Virtue, enthroned and surrounded by nine musicians representing the Muses. Caesar arrives, overwhelmed by the sight and sound.

Scene 1 recitative (Secco): A short dialogue between Nireno and Cleopatra, then Cleopatra exits as Caesar arrives. The recitative is accompanied only by basso continuo — recitativo secco (“dry recitative”), the standard mode for rapid dialogue in opera seria.

Scene 2 begins with a short recitative over which the opening of a sinfonia begins: Caesar interjects comments as the music for Cleopatra’s aria starts, the two planes of drama overlapping. The sinfonia introduces a four-note, dotted-rhythm motive that will pervade the entire aria.

The aria “V’adoro, pupille” (I adore you, eyes) is a da capo aria in F major:

The A section is in a sarabande rhythm (triple meter, emphasis on the second beat) and is accompanied by the soloists on stage — the nine musicians representing the Muses, who are physically integrated into the dramatic spectacle. The four-note motive from the sinfonia recurs throughout, binding the A section together.

The B section moves to the minor, with a constant rhythmic pattern of eighth notes in the orchestra, which then drops out entirely — only the stage musicians continue. Cleopatra pauses; Caesar interjects again with a secco recitative, breaking operatic convention by inserting dramatic action into the aria’s formal structure. Handel uses the strict da capo form as a framework and then pushes against it, maintaining dramatic momentum that the form might otherwise suppress.

Messiah (1741)

Messiah, composed in twenty-four days in 1741 for its first performance in Dublin, is Handel’s most famous work and the culmination of the English oratorio tradition he had developed. Its opening sinfonia is modelled on the French overture: a slow, stately first section in dotted rhythms, followed by a faster second section in imitation. The aria “Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion” was originally composed in 12/8 meter (the compound meter suggesting a dance-like quality) — the version preserved in Handel’s autograph manuscript, with a 12/8 time signature in the treble voice against a plain 4/4 in the bass. A later revision (ca. 1749) recast the aria in straightforward 4/4, and this revision became the more commonly performed version.

Ballad Opera and Early Classical Opera Reform

The Ballad Opera

By the 1720s, Italian opera seria had established itself as the prestige entertainment of London’s aristocracy, but its artificialities — the stop-start drama, the castrato voices, the heroic subjects, the Italian language — provided irresistible targets for satirists. The ballad opera emerged as a characteristically English response: a genre of comic plays in which spoken dialogue alternated with songs, new words set to borrowed tunes (folk songs, popular dances, well-known airs from Italian operas), and the characters were drawn from everyday urban life rather than ancient history.

NAWM 112: The Beggar’s Opera (1728)

John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, with music likely arranged by Johann Christoph Pepusch, opened at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre on 29 January 1728 and ran for an unprecedented sixty-two consecutive performances. Its satire was double-edged: it mocked Italian opera tradition by replacing ancient heroes with modern London thieves, highwaymen, and prostitutes, and it simultaneously satirized the corruption of British political life (particularly the Prime Minister Robert Walpole) by drawing parallels between the criminal underworld and the government.

The mockery of Italian opera was specific and pointed:

The heroes of opera seria — Caesars, Alexanders, Agamemnons — were replaced by the highwayman Macheath and his associates.

The famous quarrel between rival Italian divas Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni — a scandal that had erupted at the King’s Theatre in 1727 — was parodied through the quarrels of Polly Peachum and Lucy Lockit, both claiming Macheath.

The elaborate virtuosic arias of opera seria were mocked by simple popular tunes that anyone could sing — no castrato training required.

Recitative was dispensed with entirely, replaced by spoken dialogue — a deliberate rejection of the sung-through conventions of Italian opera.

Gay’s aria “My Heart Was So Free” (Macheath) is structured like a simile aria from serious Baroque opera — a convention in which the character’s situation is compared to a vivid natural image, with the music painting that image. The tune itself is immediately recognizable as a popular courting song, and the effect is comic precisely because the high-minded formal conventions of serious opera are applied to low subject matter.

The success of The Beggar’s Opera and its many imitations created a fashion for ballad opera that peaked in the 1730s. Over time, composers began writing original music for the songs rather than borrowing existing tunes, and the genre gradually evolved toward a proto-operatic form that ran parallel to the French opéra comique.

La serva padrona and the Querelle des Bouffons

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710–1736) lived barely twenty-six years but achieved posthumous fame far exceeding his actual output — a fame complicated by the fact that many works attributed to him were spurious additions to his catalogue by unscrupulous publishers exploiting his name after his death.

La serva padrona (The Maid as Mistress, 1733) was composed as an intermezzo — a short comic opera in two parts performed between the acts of a serious opera. In this case it was inserted between the acts of Pergolesi’s own Il prigionier superbo (The Prideful Prisoner). The intermezzo was an eighteenth-century genre of Italian comic opera: typically in two parts, for two or three singing characters (usually including a comic bass — the buffo), alternating between recitative and arias.

La serva padrona has two characters who sing: Uberto (the comic bass bachelor) and Serpina (his scheming soprano maid, who manipulates him into marrying her). A third character, Vespone (Uberto’s valet), is mute.

The work demonstrates the musical features that would make Italian opera buffa (comic opera) the most influential operatic style of the mid-eighteenth century:

The recitative alternates between simple secco style (only basso continuo) for the dialogue and accompanied recitative (with the full orchestra) for Uberto’s moments of exaggerated emotion — here used not for tragic gravity, as in opera seria, but for comic exaggeration. The harmony modulates rapidly in the accompanied sections, mirroring Uberto’s confused mental state.

The da capo aria “Son imbrogliato” (I’m all mixed up) parodies the conventions of opera seria: the double statement of text in the A section, the patter-song style (rapid syllabic delivery of a quickly repeated phrase), and the angular comic motive that accompanies Uberto’s indecision. In a serious aria, the da capo repeat would be the occasion for elaborate vocal embellishment; here, Pergolesi specifies that it should not be embellished — a comic inversion of the genre’s expectations.

The Querelle des Bouffons (1752–54)

When La serva padrona was performed in Paris in 1752, it ignited one of the most famous controversies in the history of music: the War of the Comic Actors (Querelle des Bouffons, literally “Quarrel of the Buffoons”). The dispute was ostensibly aesthetic — a debate between those who preferred the simple, natural, and immediately expressive style of Italian comic opera and those who defended the elaborate, learned French tradition of Lully and Rameau. But it was also philosophical and political: the Italian party, which included Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Encyclopédistes, aligned simplicity and naturalness with the Enlightenment ideals of reason, feeling, and the common person, while the French party was associated with royal and aristocratic tradition.

Rousseau composed his own short opera in the simple Italian style, Le devin du village (The Village Soothsayer, 1752), as a demonstration of his aesthetic principles. Remarkably, this humble piece was performed at the court of Versailles to royal approval — Louis XV was reported to have hummed one of its airs.

La serva padrona became the defining model for comic opera in the second half of the eighteenth century. Its contrast of styles (from comic patter to lyrical melody), its mixing of the serious and the comic, and its central comic dynamic of servants outwitting masters (at Uberto’s expense) directly anticipated the operas of Mozart.

The Opera Reform Movement

By the mid-eighteenth century, a broad opera reform movement had emerged among composers, librettists, and critics who felt that Italian opera seria had grown corrupt: singers dominated composers, formal conventions had hardened into dead routine, and the stop-start rhythm of recitative-aria pairs prevented genuine dramatic continuity. Reformers called for:

Greater flexibility in the relationship between recitative and aria, including the use of accompanied recitative for dramatically intense moments.

More extensive use of orchestra and chorus in dramatic contexts, not merely as decoration.

Resistance to the unreasonable demands of star singers, whose insistence on specific aria types regardless of dramatic appropriateness had distorted the musical drama.

The most important figure in this reform was the composer Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–87), who, working with the librettist Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, produced a series of “reform operas” beginning with Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) that put these principles into practice.

The Early Classical Style

Europe in the Mid-Eighteenth Century

The Classical style emerged in a Europe undergoing profound social and intellectual transformation. Improvements in agriculture increased food production and supported a growing population; urbanization accelerated; and the rise of the middle class fundamentally changed the economic base of musical culture. Where Baroque music had been sustained almost entirely by royal courts, aristocratic households, and the church, Classical music increasingly found audiences among the urban middle class — a socially diverse public that attended public concerts, bought published music, took lessons on keyboard instruments, and read the growing number of music journals and newspapers.

The result was a new kind of patronage that coexisted with the old: public concerts alongside private court performances; commercial publishing alongside manuscript circulation; an emerging market for amateur performers (particularly women, who were expected to play the keyboard and sing, though not professionally) alongside the professional musicians who served them. The cosmopolitan ideal of the Enlightenment found expression in music: composers wrote for all of Europe, not just for local courts, and a shared musical language sought to transcend national boundaries.

Enlightenment thought — the philosophical movement associated with Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, and Diderot — brought the values of reason, nature, and progress to bear on all aspects of human life. Applied to music, Enlightenment ideals favoured the natural over the artificial, the immediately communicative over the learned and complex, and the emotionally expressive over the abstract. The operatic reforms discussed above, the preference for simple melodic style in the galant idiom, and the French philosophers’ enthusiasm for Italian comic opera all reflect these values.

The Terms of the Period

The Classical period is conventionally dated from the 1730s to around 1815, encompassing the mature careers of Haydn, Mozart, and the early Beethoven. The term carries an analogy to Greek and Roman art: an aesthetic of noble simplicity, balance, formal perfection, and diversity within unity. Like all such labels, it is applied retrospectively and simplifies a reality in which many styles co-existed and overlapped.

The galant style (from the French galant, “elegant”) was the foundational idiom of the new musical language. It was characterized by:

• Song-like melodies with short periodic phrases of two to four bars, built from clearly defined segments
• Simple harmony that changed less frequently than in Baroque music
• Frequent cadences providing regular points of rest
• Light accompaniment — typically a homophonic texture rather than Baroque counterpoint
• An origin in Italian comic opera, whence it spread to all instrumental genres

The empfindsam style (from German Empfindsamkeit, “sentimentality” or “sensibility”) was the characteristic idiom of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and other north German composers. Where the galant style sought smooth elegance, the empfindsam style sought psychological intensity: surprising harmonic turns, chromaticism, nervous rhythmic patterns, rhapsodic melodic gestures, and speech-like melodic shapes — a musical analogue to the sensibility literature of the same era (Rousseau’s Confessions, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther).

Musical Features of the Classical Style

Melody

Melody was the focus of the Classical aesthetic in a way it had not been for the Baroque. The Baroque priority on bass-driven harmony and contrapuntal complexity was replaced by a new ideal of periodic melody — melody organized into clear, symmetrical phrases and periods.

A phrase is a short melodic unit (typically two or four bars) that feels like a musical thought. Two or more phrases combine into a period — a complete musical statement, like a sentence, concluding with a cadence. Periods are built from phrases; compositions are built from periods. This hierarchical organization gives Classical music its characteristic clarity of structure and its sense of logical proportion.

Within phrases, melodic segments (short motives or gestures) function as building blocks. The internal organization of a theme — the way its segments combine into phrases and phrases into periods — was what theorists like Heinrich Christoph Koch (in his Introductory Essay on Composition, 1782–93) analyzed when they described Classical formal structure.

Harmony and Texture

Classical harmony supports the melodic phrase structure: harmonic rhythm (the rate at which chords change) is synchronized with phrase structure, so that harmonic arrivals reinforce the melodic cadences. Compared to Baroque music, harmonies change less frequently, placing greater emphasis on the melody itself.

The characteristic texture of Classical keyboard music includes the Alberti bass: an accompaniment pattern in the left hand in which the notes of a chord are broken into a repeating low–high–middle–high pattern. Named after the composer Domenico Alberti (though he did not invent it), this pattern creates a steady pulse without the harmonic density of Baroque counterpoint, keeping the texture light and transparent.

Form and Emotion

Classical forms are organized by the functional contrasts within a movement: the musical material fulfils different roles — beginnings that establish a character and key, middles that create tension and instability, endings that confirm and close. These functional roles correspond to the rhetorical structure of a formal speech or oration, as theorists of the time recognized.

Emotion in Classical music is in constant flux, unlike the Baroque doctrine of stable affections. A single movement can move through contrasting moods, characters, and emotional states — the galant and the learned, the comic and the serious, the lyrical and the dramatic — often within a single theme. This capacity for rapid emotional change, for wit and surprise, is one of the defining features of the Classical style at its most sophisticated.

Classical Keyboard Music

Scarlatti and the Keyboard Sonata

Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757) was the son of Alessandro Scarlatti, one of the most celebrated opera composers of the late Baroque. He and Handel were close friends and rivals, meeting in Rome around 1707 in the famous keyboard “duel” organized by Cardinal Ottoboni (in which Handel was judged superior on the organ, Scarlatti on the harpsichord). After a career in Italy and Portugal, Scarlatti moved to Spain as music teacher to the Princess of Asturias (later Queen Maria Barbara of Spain), for whom he composed an enormous collection of keyboard works — eventually compiled into several volumes and containing over five hundred individual pieces.

Scarlatti’s sonata is a one-movement work in binary form, typically for harpsichord. Three subtypes of binary form are relevant:

Simple binary form has two repeated sections: ||: A :||: B :||, where B does not bring back the opening material of A.

Balanced binary form has two sections in which the closing material of the first section returns at the end of the second section, but in the tonic key. The first section typically moves from tonic to dominant (I → V); the second section returns to the tonic (V → I), and the harmonic emphasis of the closing bars reappears in the tonic. This is the typical format for Scarlatti.

Rounded binary form brings back the opening material of section A at the start of section B’s second part — the precursor of sonata form.

Sonata in D Major, K. 119 (ca. 1740s)

Scarlatti’s K. 119 follows the balanced binary plan, which can be schematized as:

||: A       B    C  :||: D        B    C  :||
    I → V   v    V       V → I   i    I

where the closing material (B and C) of the first section returns at the end of the second section, but transposed to the tonic.

The piece showcases several idiomatic features of Scarlatti’s harpsichord style. The opening deploys several ideas in quick succession, each immediately restated — a technique that recalls the rapid contrasts of Italian comic opera style. Large leaps, rushing scales, and rapid arpeggios exploit the brilliance of the harpsichord. Crossed hands — where the two hands trade registers, crossing over each other — were a favourite Scarlatti effect, derived from the technique of keyboard players who studied lute repertoire. The music also exhibits a distinctly Spanish character: rhythmic patterns that simulate the castanets and strummed figures that suggest guitar strumming (clusters of six notes played rapidly) reflect the musical environment of the Spanish court where Scarlatti spent his mature career.

CPE Bach and the Empfindsam Sonata

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788), the second surviving son of J. S. Bach, was one of the most influential keyboard composers of the eighteenth century. He served for nearly three decades at the court of Frederick the Great in Berlin before moving to Hamburg as civic music director. His treatise Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments (1753–62) is one of the most important documents of eighteenth-century performance practice.

CPE Bach composed prolifically for keyboard — primarily clavichord in his earlier career, and later for the fortepiano, the early piano that had been invented in Florence around 1700 and was rapidly supplanting the harpsichord. The early fortepiano (also called Hammerklavier or pianoforte) differed significantly from modern instruments: it had a lighter wooden frame (rather than a metal one), a shorter range (around five octaves), and strings struck with small leather hammers — producing a tone less powerful than a modern piano but more dynamic in nuance. The player could control dynamics continuously through touch (pressing harder produces a louder sound), unlike the harpsichord, and on some instruments the function of the modern sustain pedal was achieved through knee levers.

Sonata in A, Wq. 55/4, Second Movement (Poco Adagio), 1765

This slow movement from the Six Sonatas for Connoisseurs and Amateurs (published 1779) is a paradigmatic example of the empfindsam style:

Gesture: The opening phrase contains a characteristic melodic sigh — the voice drops a step or third onto a dissonant appoggiatura (a dissonant note approached by step that resolves on the following weak beat), followed by a rest that interrupts the phrase before it completes itself. This sigh-and-rest pattern recurs throughout, giving the movement its halting, emotionally searching quality.

Ornamentation: The melody is heavily ornamented with turns, Scotch snaps (short dotted rhythms with the short note first), and trills — ornaments that are essential to the expressive meaning of the line, not merely decorative additions.

Rhythm: The movement uses an unusually large number of rhythmic patterns in quick succession — short dotted figures, triplets, flourishes of five or thirteen notes — creating a nervous, restless quality quite different from the regular pulse of galant style.

Harmony: The movement modulates to the relative major (A major) but immediately returns to the home key of F-sharp minor — a harmonic surprise that characterizes the empfindsam tendency to undercut stability. Nonharmonic tones, especially appoggiaturas, permeate the melodic texture.

Texture: The overall texture is expressive melody plus light accompaniment — the melody in the right hand, a simple broken-chord pattern in the left, allowing maximum attention to the melodic line’s subtle emotional fluctuations.

Mozart: Keyboard Sonata and Concerto

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) was one of the greatest natural musical talents in history. Born in Salzburg, he was trained intensively by his father Leopold — himself an accomplished violinist and composer — and performed as a child prodigy throughout Europe from the age of six. These early travels exposed him to virtually every musical style and tradition on the continent: he heard and absorbed the music of the London Bach (Johann Christian, the youngest surviving son of J.S. Bach) during a visit to London, assimilated French and Italian styles during tours of Paris and Italy, and developed the cosmopolitan versatility that would distinguish his mature style.

Mozart spent the last decade of his life (1781–91) in Vienna as a freelance musician — performing, teaching, and composing without a permanent court appointment. This was a radical and precarious choice for the era; it reflected both his confidence in his own abilities and his unwillingness to accept the social subordination that court service entailed. He formed a close friendship with Haydn, who expressed unstinting admiration for his younger colleague, and through Haydn developed his interest in counterpoint and the late work of J. S. Bach.

Mozart died in December 1791, aged thirty-five, of a fever. Despite persistent legends of poisoning (most dramatically dramatized in Peter Schaffer’s Amadeus), the evidence points to a mundane cause: probably rheumatic fever complicated by renal failure.

He left over six hundred works: forty-one symphonies, twenty-seven piano concertos, twenty-three string quartets, seventeen piano sonatas, twenty-two operas, and extensive sacred music.

K. numbers (Köchelverzeichnis) identify Mozart’s works: Ludwig Ritter von Köchel catalogued the entire output chronologically in 1862, and his catalogue numbers remain the standard reference.

Piano Sonata No. 12 in F Major, K. 332, First Movement

Sonata form (also called sonata-allegro form or first-movement form) is the most important structural innovation of the Classical period — the form typically used in first movements of symphonies, string quartets, concertos, and keyboard sonatas from the 1760s through the nineteenth century.

Its essential principle, as described by Koch in the 1780s, is an expanded binary form: two large repeated sections, the first moving from tonic to dominant, the second returning to the tonic. But within this framework, three functional areas emerge:

Exposition: The first section, presenting the main musical material in two key areas — the first theme group in the tonic, a transition modulating to the dominant (or relative major), a second theme in the new key, and a closing theme that confirms it. The exposition is typically repeated.

Development: The opening of the second section, which takes the material of the exposition through a series of keys and transformations — fragmenting themes, combining them contrapuntally, and creating harmonic instability.

Recapitulation: The return of the exposition’s material, now entirely in the tonic — including the second theme, which was in the dominant during the exposition.

K. 332 is a model of Mozart’s ability to mix contrasting styles within a single movement, moving between them with such naturalness that the contrasts feel dramatically motivated rather than arbitrary.

First theme group (1T, m. 1): A song-like melody over a broken-chord accompaniment — clearly in the galant style. But at m. 5, Mozart introduces imitation in the left hand, a momentary gesture toward the learned contrapuntal style. At m. 12, hunting horn figures in the outer voices introduce a third style — the pastoral-heroic world of the outdoors aristocracy.

Transition (TR, m. 22): A dramatic shift to the style known as Sturm und Drang (German: Storm and Stress) — a style associated with the German literary movement of the 1770s and characterized by minor mode, forte dynamics, chromatic harmony, and strong dissonances. The sudden violence of this transition, after the gentle opening, is one of the movement’s most striking effects.

Second theme (2T, m. 41): Back to galant style in the dominant key (C major), immediately repeated and varied — a formal procedure recalling the instant repetition of ideas in Scarlatti and Italian comic opera.

Closing theme (CT, m. 71): A series of cadential gestures firmly establishing C major as the key of arrival.

The development introduces a new melody (m. 94) not heard in the exposition — a characteristic Mozart device — before developing the transitional syncopated material. The recapitulation (m. 133) transposes the exposition’s material to the tonic, including a recasting of the second theme in F major.

Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, K. 488, First Movement (1786)

The seventeen piano concertos Mozart wrote in Vienna were his vehicles for the public concerts on which his livelihood depended. They were showpieces designed both to dazzle professional listeners and to satisfy amateur ones. In a famous letter to his father, Mozart described the first three of his Vienna concertos: “a happy medium between what’s too difficult and too easy — brilliant, pleasing to the ear, natural without becoming vacuous. There are passages here and there that only connoisseurs can fully appreciate, yet the common listener will find them satisfying as well, although without knowing why.”

Mozart derived his concerto form from a hybrid of ritornello form and sonata form:

The opening movement alternates between orchestral ritornellos (which function like the tutti passages of the Baroque concerto) and solo episodes (which carry both the expressive content and the structural functions of sonata form — exposition, development, recapitulation). Unlike the Baroque concerto, however, the solo sections do not merely present virtuosic elaborations of the ritornello; they present genuine thematic contrasts, including a second theme and a development section of their own.

K. 488 is among the most lyrical and introspective of the piano concertos. Its scoring omits the oboes and trumpets/timpani present in many others, favouring clarinets (relatively new orchestral instruments in 1786) and a correspondingly warm, slightly veiled orchestral palette. The first movement’s opening orchestral exposition presents the main themes; the solo exposition presents them again with the piano elaborating and adding new material; a development explores the themes in various keys; and a recapitulation brings everything back in the tonic, typically ending with a cadenza — an improvised or composed passage for the soloist alone, exploiting the instrument’s full technical and expressive range.

The Classical Symphony

Origins and Development

The symphony is a large work for orchestra in multiple movements, and it became the most prestigious instrumental genre of the Classical period. Its origins were multiple:

The Italian opera sinfonia (overture) of the early eighteenth century was a three-movement structure — fast–slow–fast — that was eventually detached from its opera and performed independently in concerts. The Neapolitan sinfonia began to develop symphonic characteristics in the hands of composers like Giovanni Battista Sammartini in Milan.

By the 1750s, the four-movement sonata cycle had emerged as the standard symphonic structure, with a minuet and trio inserted as the third movement.

Sammartini and Stamitz

Giovanni Battista Sammartini (ca. 1700–1775), working in Milan, is often credited as the first prominent symphonist — the first composer to systematically cultivate the symphony as an independent concert genre rather than a functional overture. His Symphony in F, No. 32 (ca. 1740) is a short, three-movement work for orchestra of ten to sixteen players, including four-part strings and basso continuo. Its first movement is a compact example of what Koch would later describe as binary repeated form — the prototype of sonata form — with an exposition (mm. 1–14), a developmental second period (mm. 15–24), and a recapitulation (mm. 25–38). The first eight bars present five contrasting ideas in quick succession — hammered octaves, rising scales, a repeated melodic idea, rushing scales, and rising arpeggios over an eighth-note bass — demonstrating the variety-within-unity that would become a hallmark of the genre.

Johann Stamitz (1717–1757) led the orchestra at the court of Mannheim, and his ensemble became the most celebrated in Europe. The Mannheim orchestra was famous for its precision, discipline, and a range of dynamic effects that astonished listeners: the music critic Charles Burney called the players “an army of generals.” Among their most celebrated effects was the Mannheim crescendo — a long, gradual build from pianissimo to fortissimo in the transition section, created through string tremelos and a steady increase in dynamics. This effect, which Stamitz deployed systematically, was enormously influential.

Stamitz’s Sinfonia in E-flat, Op. 11, No. 3 is historically important for several innovations. It was one of the first symphonies to use a consistent four-movement structure, adding a minuet and trio as the third movement — the plan that would become standard. It was also among the first to introduce a contrasting theme in the dominant at the start of the second area of the exposition: two oboes present a more lyrical second theme in B-flat major, clearly distinct in character from the energetic first theme group. The recapitulation is unusual: Stamitz restates the themes out of order, beginning with the second and closing themes before returning to elements of the first theme group in reverse sequence — an experiment in structural flexibility that anticipates Haydn’s playful manipulations.

Joseph Haydn

Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) is often called the “Father of the Symphony,” and while the title simplifies a more complex history, it reflects a real achievement: over the course of a career spanning more than forty years and more than one hundred symphonies, Haydn transformed the symphony from a light, entertaining concert piece into one of the most intellectually and emotionally serious forms in Western music.

Haydn grew up as a choirboy in Vienna and received training in singing, harpsichord, and violin. In 1761, he entered the service of the Esterházy family, powerful Hungarian nobles who were among the most generous musical patrons in Europe. His duties included composing, conducting, training and supervising musicians, maintaining instruments, and — essentially — managing every aspect of the Esterházy musical establishment. In 1766 the family moved to their remote country palace of Eszterháza in the Hungarian countryside: an extraordinary private world of opera houses and theatres, far from the musical capitals of Europe, that both isolated Haydn and gave him the freedom to develop his style without distraction.

A new contract in 1779 allowed Haydn to sell his compositions to publishers, and his fame spread rapidly throughout Europe. In 1790, upon the death of Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, Haydn was effectively released from service and undertook two triumphant visits to London (1791–92 and 1794–95), composing his last twelve symphonies for the London concerts promoted by the impresario Johann Peter Salomon.

The Sonata Cycle: Four Movements

By Haydn’s mature period, the four-movement sonata cycle had become the standard symphonic structure:

The plan balanced contrast of tempo, key, and character across the cycle while providing unity through the consistent tonic key in movements I, III, and IV.

Symphony No. 88 in G Major (1787)

Composed at the request of Haydn’s violinist Johann Tost, who took it to Paris, Symphony No. 88 was written with a popular audience in mind. It is immediately engaging — pastoral in mood, witty in manner, learned in craft. Its pastoral character derives from several features: the hymn-like theme of the slow movement, the drone-like thirds in the trio of the minuet (imitating the sound of bagpipes), and the contredanse (English country dance) character of the first and last movements.

Movement 1 (Sonata form with slow introduction): The slow introduction (Adagio) is portentous, creating expectations that the following Allegro both fulfils and playfully subverts. Throughout the movement, Haydn derives variants of two short motives from the first theme, which then appear transformed in the other themes — a technique of motivic unity beneath surface variety. The harmonic surprises and unexpected turns that characterize the development section are characteristic of Haydn’s wit.

Movement 2 (D major): An oasis of calm after the drama of the first movement. The main theme, played by solo cello and oboe in dialogue, is extraordinarily beautiful and appears four times with completely different accompaniments — strings pizzicato, then with oboe countermelody, then with full winds, and so on. At m. 41, the serenity is brutally interrupted: the full orchestra crashes in with loud string tremolos and fortissimo trumpets and drums — material completely at odds with the gentle theme. This is pure Haydn: playing with the audience’s complacency, refusing to let them settle into comfortable expectations.

Movement 3 (Minuet and Trio, G major): The minuet features grace notes on upbeats that lurch with comic awkwardness, and a second phrase that is six measures long rather than the expected four — an asymmetry that creates a slight sense of imbalance, like a dignified person who trips mid-step. The trio section has a lighter texture and drone tones (sustained lower notes while the melody moves above) that evoke rustic bagpipes.

Movement 4 (Rondo, Allegro con spirito): The finale is in rondo form: A B A C A (coda), where the refrain (A) is a rounded binary theme that modulates from G major to B minor in its first section before returning. The form alternates the refrain with contrasting episodes (B and C), providing the rapid, playful character expected in a Classical finale.

Mozart, Symphony No. 41 in C Major, “Jupiter”, K. 551 — Finale

The “Jupiter” Symphony (1788) — the nickname, not Mozart’s own, was given by the impresario Johann Peter Salomon — was Mozart’s last symphony and one of the most celebrated works in the repertoire. The finale is its crowning glory: a movement in sonata form that concludes with a coda built on a five-voice fugato synthesizing all the main themes of the movement.

The exposition presents a first theme group built from several small ideas (labelled a, b, c), a transition introducing a new lyrical idea (d), a second theme group, and a closing theme — many of these ideas derived from or related to one another motivically. Mozart’s use of the four-note stepwise theme (C–D–F–E) as motive a is particularly significant: it is one of the simplest possible musical gestures, traceable to fugue textbooks (it appears in Johann Joseph Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum, 1725, as a didactic fugue subject), and it recurs throughout the movement in various guises, in combination with the other themes, and ultimately in the coda fugato.

The coda (m. 356) is one of the most remarkable passages in symphonic music. After the recapitulation, Mozart launches a fugato in five voices, in which each voice systematically introduces all five main motives of the movement in combination with one another — a combinatorial fugue in which every theme becomes simultaneously a subject and a countersubject. The result is a texture of extraordinary density and contrapuntal ingenuity that is nonetheless completely lucid: the galant-style melodies of the exposition are revealed to be perfectly compatible with the strictest fugal counterpoint. This reconciliation of the learned and the popular styles — of Baroque polyphony and Classical melody — is the philosophical and aesthetic statement of the entire movement. The coda concludes as one theme (b) is withheld from the fugato and reintroduced to signal the return to the symphonic style, with a brief, blazing peroration in C major.

Classical Chamber Music

The String Quartet

The string quartet — two violins, viola, and cello — became the most prestigious genre of Classical chamber music, and Haydn was its central architect. Unlike the earlier trio sonata, which had featured a clearly polarized treble-bass texture with an improvised harmonic filler, the string quartet distributed interest equally among all four voices: each could carry the melody, each could provide accompaniment, and the best quartets exploited this equality of voices to create a texture of extraordinary variety. There was no conductor, no continuo player: four individuals in conversation, each simultaneously dependent on and responsible to the others.

Haydn distinguished carefully between the style appropriate to a symphony (which must project across a large space to a diverse audience) and that appropriate to a quartet (which was for private, intimate performance by connoisseurs). The quartet style was more refined, more subtle, more dense in its musical argument.

String Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 33, No. 2, “The Joke” (1781)

Haydn described his Op. 33 quartets as composed in “a new and special kind,” and the publication had an immediate and profound impact: Mozart was so impressed that he dedicated six string quartets of his own (“The Haydn Quartets,” 1782–85) to Haydn in tribute. Koch used the Op. 33 quartets as models in his treatise on composition.

The characteristic features of the “new special kind” include a light, popular touch alongside genuine contrapuntal depth, and a sophisticated integration of movements into a convincing psychological whole — each movement contributing a different emotional character, yet all feeling like parts of the same work.

The standard four-movement plan:

The title Scherzo (Italian for “joke”) attached to the second movement signals Haydn’s intention from the outset: this is music with wit.

Finale IV: Rondo “The Joke”

The finale is a rondo — a form that alternates a recurring refrain (A) with contrasting episodes (B and C):

A      B      A      C      A'     Coda
||:a:||:ba:||        a  b  a       Adagio  a'
E♭     A♭–f   E♭     -------E♭---------
m.1    m.36   m.72   m.107   m.141   m.148

The refrain (A) is a perfectly self-contained rounded binary form: ||: a :||: b a :||. Its opening material (a) is just eight bars, and Haydn derives the entire refrain from these first two measures — extreme economy of material that is simultaneously artless (the theme is so simple it sounds trivial) and sophisticated (the developmental possibilities hidden in its simplicity are exploited throughout the movement).

The episodes (B and C) contrast with the refrain in key and character while remaining motivically connected, providing variety without losing coherence.

The joke is structural and temporal. At the movement’s end (m. 148), Haydn writes a coda marked Adagio — a sudden, unexpected slow-down before the finale is over. The first phrase of the refrain reappears in this slow tempo, then a pause, then another phrase, then another pause. The pauses grow longer and more expectant. The audience, uncertain whether the movement has ended or is merely pausing, repeatedly begins to applaud between fragments — only to be startled by another entry. Eventually the music truly ends, but by then no one is quite sure when it happened. The joke is played on the audience’s own expectations: Haydn has built an entire performance situation into the score.

Classical Opera

Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787)

Il dissoluto punito, ossia il Don Giovanni (The Profligate Punished, or The Story of Don Juan), with music by Mozart and libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, received its first performance at the Nostitz Theatre in Prague on 29 October 1787. It remains one of the greatest operas in the repertoire, and the most philosophically complex: simultaneously funny and tragic, comic and deeply serious, refusing to settle into the categories of either opera seria or opera buffa.

Mozart’s Opera vs. Opera Seria

Mozart’s operatic approach, shaped by his collaboration with Da Ponte, departs from Baroque opera seria in several important ways.

Dramatic continuity and forward momentum: Opera seria was organized around discrete numbers — arias, recitatives, ensembles — separated by clear formal boundaries. Mozart’s operas are also “number operas” (the individual pieces are numbered in the score), but they are far more tightly integrated. The recitative is more emotionally charged, transitions between numbers are smoother, and the momentum of the drama does not stop simply because a formal number has begun.

Ensembles: About half the numbers in Don Giovanni are ensembles — duets, trios, quartets — rather than solo arias. These ensemble scenes are dramatically and musically among the most significant moments in the opera: multiple characters express different emotions simultaneously, their voices combined in ways that create psychological complexity impossible in a solo aria.

Characterization: The characters in Don Giovanni are “real” people with complex, contradictory feelings — not the stylized heroes and heroines of opera seria mythology. Don Giovanni himself is witty, charming, violent, and doomed; Donna Elvira is absurd and tragic simultaneously; Leporello’s buffa style is undercut by moments of genuine fear.

Dramma Giocoso

Mozart and Da Ponte called Don Giovanni a dramma giocoso — Italian for “humorous drama” — a comic opera admitting serious characters and themes. The term captures the work’s essential mixing of registers: it is not pure comedy, not pure tragedy, but a genre-blurring work that allows opera seria (serious opera) and opera buffa (comic opera) characters and styles to coexist and interact. Don Giovanni himself speaks in both registers — buffa when dealing with Leporello, seria when confronting the Commendatore. Donna Elvira begins as a seria character (her opening aria is in the style of a Baroque seria rant, with large dramatic leaps) but slides progressively into a position that is both pitiable and slightly ridiculous.

The Overture

The Overture is dramatically integrated into the opera in a way unusual even for Mozart. It is in sonata form with a slow introduction in D minor — the key of the Commendatore’s music — and the slow introduction material returns literally in the opera’s finale, during the terrifying supper scene when the Commendatore’s statue arrives to drag Don Giovanni to hell. The overture thus functions as a microcosm of the opera: D minor for the Commendatore’s supernatural world, D major for Don Giovanni’s brilliant, sunlit surface — the two keys in a dramatic opposition that drives the entire work. After the development section, the overture moves directly into the first scene without a pause — segue — so that the audience never escapes the drama.

Act I, Scenes 1–2: From Comedy to Murder

The opening of Don Giovanni is one of the most dramatically concentrated passages in opera. It presents:

Leporello’s aria, “Notte e giorno faticar” (Night and Day) — a buffa-style introduction in F major in which Don Giovanni’s servant complains about his miserable employment while his master is apparently engaged in an illicit encounter inside Donna Anna’s house. The form is an extended rondo (A B C B D B’), with each section musically characterizing Leporello’s different emotions: the leaping notes and comic patter of section A (his irritation), the smooth, elegant hunting-horn style of section B (his aspiration to a gentleman’s life), the startled rapid patter of section D (when he hears someone coming). The music segues directly into the next scene.

Trio (m. 73) — Don Giovanni, Donna Anna, and Leporello, in B-flat major. Donna Anna, having pursued Don Giovanni out of her house (his face still hidden), struggles to hold him and expose him. Their voices are in dramatic opposition: Donna Anna in the intense, large-leap style of opera seria; Don Giovanni matching her style while trying to escape; Leporello hovering at the side in his repetitive, triadic buffa patter. The confusion of the situation — multiple voices all singing different text simultaneously, the rapid alternation of phrases — is rendered musically through the overlapping of all three voices at once.

Dramatic action (m. 135) — The Commendatore (Donna Anna’s father) enters and challenges Don Giovanni. The music shifts to G minor, with tense string tremolos and rushing scales. The duel begins (m. 167): rapid ascending scales and leaping octaves in the orchestra depict the clash of swords.

Closing trio (m. 176) — The Commendatore is mortally wounded. The three remaining characters — Don Giovanni, Leporello, and the dying Commendatore — sing simultaneously in F minor. The Commendatore’s line consists of increasing silences, sinking chromatic figures, and short phrases separated by rests — the musical representation of a dying man’s failing breath and consciousness. The harmony ends not on a tonic chord but on a G triad — an unresolved, open ending that leads directly, without cadence, into the following recitative.

Recitative (secco) — Don Giovanni and Leporello make light of the murder and exit. The transition from tragedy to comedy is instantaneous: Mozart’s point is precisely that Don Giovanni experiences no guilt, no weight, no consequence — at least not yet.

The entire opening sequence — aria, trio, dramatic action, trio, recitative — is composed as a single, continuous arc of uninterrupted music and drama, covering the full range from comic complaint to murder to callous indifference in fewer than twenty minutes. It remains one of the most audacious openings in the history of opera.