Johann Sebastian Bach’s status as the supreme musical genius of the Baroque era, and one of the greatest keyboard players of all time, has been axiomatic since the 19th century. Yet George Frideric Handel and Georg Philipp Telemann stood at least as high in the eyes of their contemporaries, while the lutenist Silvius Leopold Weiss was widely regarded as Bach’s peer as an instrumental virtuoso. Unlike Bach, who seldom ventured beyond his home turf in eastern Germany, Telemann and Handel traveled widely and established bases abroad, the former in Paris, the latter in London. By the time Handel became a naturalized British citizen in 1727, the English had claimed him as their greatest living composer. That mantle had previously been worn by Henry Purcell, who is interred near Handel in Westminster Abbey beneath a tablet proclaiming him “gone to that blessed place where only his harmony can be exceeded.”
Purcell was as cosmopolitan in his musical tastes as any continental composer: A contemporary writer praised him for joining “to the delicacy and beauty of the Italian way the graces and gaiety of the French.” The Gallic style was epitomized by Jean-Philippe Rameau, who virtually defined the genres of the tragédie lyrique and opéra-ballet with such masterpieces as Castor et Pollux, Platée, and Les Indes galantes. Vivaldi’s Italian operas, though highly successful in his day, have been overshadowed by his pathbreaking instrumental concertos. Bach’s first biographer tells us that he learned “how to think musically” by transcribing Vivaldi’s violin concertos for harpsichord. He also arranged one of Weiss’s lute sonatas and the Oboe Concerto of Alessandro Marcello, who was active in Venice at the same time as Vivaldi. Their later 18th-century compatriot Luigi Boccherini spent most of his career in Spain. Along with Telemann and Weiss, he was a leading exemplar of the playfully elegant galant style that flourished in European salons and would soon render Bach’s “learned,” densely wrought contrapuntal style obsolete.
Once dismissed as a lightweight creator of attractive but formulaic instrumental concertos, Vivaldi has come to be recognized as one of most imaginative and forward-looking composers of the early 18th century. First staged in Venice in 1734, L’Olimpiade (The Olympiad) features a libretto by Pietro Metastasio that was set by dozens of composers in the Baroque and Classical eras. The athletic rhythms and sharp dynamic contrasts of the Sinfonia, or overture, seem quite appropriate for an opera about the ancient Olympic Games.
Alessandro Marcello’s Oboe Concerto, among the earliest solo concertos for the instrument, was long attributed to his more famous brother Benedetto, largely as a result of the confusion sown by 19th-century German scholars who included Bach’s transcription of it in the first collected edition of Bach’s works. (The concerto is still often performed with the ornamentation that Bach created for the harpsichord.) In the central Adagio, the strings’ throbbing eighth notes provide a luminous backdrop for the soloist’s intricate cantilena.
An outstanding cellist as well as a prolific composer, Boccherini wrote dozens of sparkling string quintets for the cello-playing King Friederich Wilhelm II of Prussia. Late in life he performed a similar service for a Spanish nobleman, the marquis of Benavente, an afficionado of the guitar. The last movement of his Guitar Quintet in D Major is a rousing fandango dance, replete with syncopated rhythms, flamenco-style strumming, giddy glissandos, and foot-stomping accents.
Composed around 1720, Bach’s six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin were unprecedented in their scope and sophistication; never before had any composer achieved such breathtaking contrapuntal and harmonic complexity with a single melodic instrument. The majestic architecture of the great D-minor Chaconne rests on the sturdiest, and simplest, of foundations: Its 256 bars are supported by a repeated but ever-changing ostinato bass line that provides the harmonic underpinning for a sequence of 32 stunningly imaginative variations.
On his travels in Italy as a young man, Handel acquired a taste for the concerto grosso, a new genre of music that pitted two groups of instrumentalists, the concertino (solo group) and ripieno (full ensemble), against each other in an amicable contest. The dazzling variety and exalted invention of his 12 concertos of Op. 6, composed in a single month in 1739, made them as popular in Handel’s time as they are in ours. The Fourth Concerto in the set alternates two sublimely spacious slow movements with a pair of allegros, the first of which is a majestic fugue.
Phenomenally productive, Telemann wrote some 125 orchestral “overtures” (today called suites) and a like number of concertos. The “Burlesque” Suite (marked “Ouverture burlesque”) probably dates from the composer’s years as city music director in Frankfurt (1712–1721). Scored for strings and continuo, it reflects the influence of the French orchestral suite in its mixture of dances and other kinds of music. Five of the eight movements are character sketches drawn from the Italian commedia dell’arte: the boastful Scaramouche, the clownish Harlequin, the mischievous Colombine, the love-sick Pierrot, and the duplicitous Mezzetin, who is depicted in the tub-thumping style of Turkish military-band music.
The last of Rameau’s great operatic tragédies, Les Boréades (The Descendants of Boreas) showcases his genius as both composer and musical dramatist. The convoluted plot derives from classical mythology—Boreas was the Greek god of the north wind—and afforded many opportunities for scenic spectacle, dance-filled divertissements, and rousing storm scenes. The tender lyricism of the Act 4 “Entrée pour les muses ...” and other metaphorical characters contrast with the almost pagan energy unleashed in the lively contredanses that bring the opera to its obligatory happy ending.
A renowned keyboard virtuoso, Handel often conducted his operas from the harpsichord in the 18th-century manner. His first volume of harpsichord music, a collection of eight suites published in London in 1720, was a bestseller. A decade or so later, Handel’s publisher, John Walsh, issued a sequel that included this gently ruminative Minuet in G minor. Although Walsh inserted it at the end of the Suite in B-flat Major, scholars have determined that it is in fact unrelated to the preceding three movements; yet, it has remained associated with the suite through the performance history of the work.
Weiss spent most of his career in Dresden, where the music-loving Elector Friedrich August I maintained a top-notch ensemble of instrumentalists and singers. A friend of both Bach and his son Wilhelm Friedemann, who was a church organist in Dresden, Weiss composed hundreds of pieces for the Baroque lute. Like Bach’s D-Minor Chaconne, the Passacaglia for Lute in D Major is a set of variations on a ground bass, a stately triple-time theme that serves as harmonic scaffolding for the virtuoso’s elaborate inventions.
Loosely based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Purcell’s semi-opera The Fairy Queen was first staged in 1692 at London’s Dorset Garden Theatre. In each of the five acts, the musical numbers—a motley mix of solos, choruses, dances, and other instrumental pieces—are clustered together after the spoken dialogue as a kind of masque, or musical pageant. This suite includes three of the short, scene-setting string pieces that precede the overture proper: a brisk Prelude and a high-stepping Hornpipe, both in G minor, and a sweetly subdued Rondeau in B-flat major.
Shortly before his death in 1695, Purcell wrote two pieces of incidental music for a revival of Thomas Shadwell’s free-wheeling adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy The History of Timon of Athens (which he helpfully subtitled The Woman Hater). Ostensibly designed to be played at the beginning of the play, to accompany the raising of the curtain, the “Curtain tune on a Ground” is another ostinato-based piece that throbs with almost manic energy.
Vivaldi’s intimate chamber concerto explores the contrast in both timbre and volume between plucked and bowed string instruments. In the opening Allegro, the lute and two violins are deployed by turns together and separately, the better to maximize contrast and variety. The luminous Largo shines the spotlight on the lute alone as it spins out a limpid cantilena melody over the softly shimmering strings. The second Allegro features garlands of dancing triplets whose fluidity is accentuated by the steady pace of the underlying harmonic rhythm.
—Harry Haskell