To modern ears, four basic building blocks of music—melody, harmony, rhythm, and dynamics—may seem to have little to do with the four classical elements of earth, air, fire, and water. Yet in the eyes of many theorists and philosophers of the Baroque era, both were conceptually linked to the four bodily temperaments (phlegmatic, melancholy, choleric, and sanguine). These humors, in turn, were held to influence an individual’s musical taste and perception in accordance with what was known as the doctrine of the affections. Just as orators stir audiences’ emotions with spoken words, so too were musicians believed to move their listeners’ “affects” through the medium of tones. One 18th-century writer went so far as to relate the four natural elements to the “elemental” voices (soprano, alto, tenor, and bass) in polyphonic music. In short, far from merely imitating nature, music created an equally potent alternative reality. As another contemporary theorist wrote, “If a storm or rage is to be described in a symphony, their notes give us so natural an idea of it that our souls can hardly receive a stronger impression from the reality than they do from the description.” Those words can serve to introduce the cross-section of Baroque vocal and instrumental music on tonight’s concert.
Serse was the last opera Handel wrote for the King’s Theatre in London. By the time it reached the stage in 1738, the prolific German-born composer was diverting most of his energy to oratorio, a genre he reinvented almost singlehandedly. The plot of Serse revolves around amorous intrigue at the court of the ancient Persian king Xerxes. In his noble opening aria, the monarch praises a majestic plane tree growing in his garden.
Based on a tale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the pastoral-themed masque Acis and Galatea marked Handel’s debut on the English-language stage (although it may have been first performed outdoors on the estate of his patron, the future duke of Chandos). In this scene from Act I, the lovesick nymph Galatea first compares her ardor favorably to nature’s delights, then calls upon the birds to “cease your song” and “bring back [the shepherd] Acis to my sight.”
Rameau virtually defined the genres of tragédie lyrique and opéra-ballet in the 18th century with such masterpieces as Castor et Pollux and Platée. Les Indes galantes celebrates love in the Indies, lands that Europeans called “exotic.” The opening ballet is interrupted by this swashbuckling entrée of flag-bearing warriors led by the goddess of war, who goes on to urge the revelers to seek glory instead of pleasure.
Handel’s Rinaldo delighted London audiences in 1711, thanks in part to its crowd-pleasing waterfalls, fireworks, and other scenic effects. Hoping to score another hit, Handel returned to the stage two years later with a spectacle-filled opera set in ancient Athens. In this spirited “vengeance” aria, King Aegeus vows to punish Medea for abducting Agilea, the sorceress’s rival for the heart of the hero Theseus.
Popularized in the 1991 film Tous les matins du monde, Marais was the most celebrated viola da gamba virtuoso of his time. In addition to an extensive body of viol music, he composed four tragédies en musique, of which Alcyone may be the best. Although contemporaries praised Marais’s vocal writing, it is the instrumental pieces from the opera, such as this vivid depiction of a raging tempest, that are most often heard today.
This dazzling showpiece from Giulio Cesare, which purports to recount the Roman dictator’s expedition to Egypt in 48–47 BCE, was written for superstar soprano Francesca Cuzzoni. Accompanied by violins and continuo, Cleopatra proclaims her freedom from captivity and Caesar’s deliverance from harm. Like other arias on tonight’s program, “Da tempeste il legno infranto” is in rounded da capo form, with the first part repeated after a contrasting middle section.
Vivaldi’s name is virtually synonymous with the four richly atmospheric violin concertos known as The Four Seasons. Each concerto was prefaced by a sonnet intended, in the composer’s words, as “a very clear statement of all the things that unfold in them.” Vivaldi’s music abounds in pictorialism, from the specter of the inexorably approaching storm in “Summer” to the glacial blast of arctic wind in “Winter” (excerpted later on the program).
As a Jewish musician associated with the Gonzaga court in Mantua, where Monteverdi served as maestro di cappella from 1601 to 1612, Rossi (known as “hebreo”) had some of Italy’s top musicians at his beck and call. This sinfonia, from the third of his four books of instrumental pieces, prefigures the Baroque trio sonata in combining a pair of intertwining melodic voices with a slow-moving harmonic bass, or continuo.
Handel’s gift for noble simplicity is illustrated by the concluding aria from his 1737 oratorio Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno. (A later version of the work would be titled first in Italian and then in English The Triumph of Time and Truth.) In stately cadences accompanied by an obbligato violin, the allegorical figure of Bellezza (Truth) foreswears her “treacherous wish” and “empty desire” and vows to devote herself to God.
In depicting the changing seasons of the year, Vivaldi built on a long tradition of programmatic instrumental music; but which came first, the descriptive titles or the four concertos themselves, is impossible to say. Yet The Four Seasons is more than an exercise in tone-painting. The inexhaustible variety of Vivaldi’s rhythms and the distinctive piquancy of his harmonies are as arresting today as they were to his contemporaries.
A solo violin also plays a prominent supporting role in this alto aria from J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. An eloquent plea for divine mercy, the aria comes immediately after Jesus, at the Last Supper, foretells his denial by the apostle Peter. Stricken with remorse, Peter falls to the ground weeping; Bach’s tender, rapturously beautiful music signals his ultimate redemption.
Although his contemporaries knew him best as a virtuoso keyboard player, Bach spent most of his life in the service of the Lutheran Church. “A pious but not fanatical Lutheran,” in the words of musicologist Christoph Wolff, he defined his mission in life as composing “well-regulated church music to exalt God’s glory.” Central to that project were his more than 200 sacred cantatas, including the penitential Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut (My heart swims in blood), from which this recitative and aria for solo soprano are taken.
The biblical parable of Susanna and the Elders inspired Handel to compose an oratorio that downplayed weighty, moralizing choruses in favor of arias written in what one contemporary described as a “light operatical style.” Here the heroine, pining for her absent husband, seeks refuge from the summer heat in a burbling brook, a scene that Handel paints in gently rippling rhythms and incandescent harmonies.
Although the 1738 production of Serse was a flop—it received only five performances and was never revived in Handel’s lifetime—it is one of his most popular operas with modern performers and audiences. Nor is its appeal confined to the vocal music; the short Sinfonia for oboe, strings, and continuo that serves as the overture to Act 3 is as mellifluous and expertly crafted as any of Handel’s instrumental works.
The Brockes Passion dates from the early years of Handel’s residence in London. The highly emotive German libretto by Barthold Heinrich Brockes, whom Handel had befriended as a student in Halle, was also set to music by Telemann and several other composers. This sturdy chorale expresses a Pietistic longing for a holy life nourished by Christ’s benevolence.
Like most of his contemporaries, Handel freely recycled his own music and appropriated that of other composers. All five movements of this engaging trio sonata—scored for a pair of equal-voiced melodic instruments supported by continuo—derive from pre-existing orchestral works by Handel. The tautly sprung dance rhythms of the Gigue were conceived for his ballet Terpsicore.
Semele, mother of the wine god Bacchus, was a decidedly unconventional subject for an oratorio designed to be performed during Lent in 1744, and the overtly theatrical style of Handel’s music offended some of his longtime admirers. This joyful, florid duet for Semele and Ino comes shortly after Jupiter, Semele’s adulterous lover, announces the sisters’ reunion in the well-known aria “Where’er you walk.”
A favorite of Louis XIV, Destouches occupied several high-ranking positions in the king’s musical household before becoming director of the Académie Royale de Musique in 1728. Seven years earlier, his opera-ballet Les élémens (The Elements) had been premiered in the Tuileries Palace, with the young Louis XV dancing in the corps de ballet. This courtly dance, based on a repeating bass pattern, graced the last of the work’s four sections, “Earth.”
—Harry Haskell