| The period called "Baroque" in music history extends roughly from 1600 to 1750. Baroque music is tuneful and very organized and melodies tend to be highly decorated and elaborate. Conflict and contrast between sections in a piece and between instruments are common, and the music can be quite dramatic. |
March 5, 1685 - July 27, 1750
Baroque Period
Johann Sebastian Bach held three major jobs in his life: first he worked for a duke, then for a prince, and finally, he became director of music at the St. Thomas Church and School in Leipzig, Germany. Even though his job in Leipzig kept him very busy, in his spare time, Bach conducted a group of musicians who liked to get together to perform at a local coffee house.
During his lifetime, people thought of Bach as just an ordinary working musician. No one really knew much about his music until 100 years after his death, when another composer, Felix Mendelssohn, conducted a performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion.
Bach is now seen as one of the greatest geniuses in music history. He wrote all kinds of music -- for organ and other keyboard instruments, orchestras, choirs, and concertos for many different instrumental combinations.
Prelude and Fugue c minor
Italian Concerto
Agnus Dei
Toccata and Fugue D minor
chaconne
BACH I.S. BBC DOCUMENTARY
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February 23, 1685 - April 14, 1759
Baroque Period
Georg Friedrich Händel was born in Halle,
Germany. But since he spent most of his professional life in England,
he's better known as George Frederick Handel.
Baroque Period
Even though Handel was very interested in music, his father (who was a barber and surgeon) was not. There's a story that Handel smuggled a clavichord -- a VERY quiet instrument -- into the house so that he could practice in secret. Handel's father insisted that his son become a lawyer, until the day that Handel sat down at the keyboard and dazzled a duke. The duke convinced Handel's father to let his son study music.
What Handel really loved was opera. At the time, Italy was the place to learn about that, so Handel went to Italy for four years. After he got home to Germany, he was hired as court composer to a prince. But he immediately asked for time off to go to England, where people really liked Italian opera. (When the English got tired of opera, Handel built a whole new career for himself composing oratorios.)
Through a strange set of circumstances, Handel's princely German employer wound up becoming king of England. When he got to London, he didn't need to hire a court composer, because he found his court composer from Germany -- namely Handel -- was there!
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Stabat mater dolorosa ("The sorrowful mother stood").[4] The Stabat Mater hymn, one of the most powerful and immediate of extant medieval poems, meditates on the suffering of Mary, Jesus Christ's mother, during his crucifixion. It is sung at the liturgy on the memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows. The Stabat Mater has been set to music by many composers, with the most famous settings being those by Palestrina, Pergolesi, Alessandro Scarlatti and Domenico Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Haydn, Rossini, Poulenc, and Dvořák.
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From the Clavichord to the Modern Piano
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DOMENICO SCARLATTI
One of music’s great individualists, Domenico Scarlatti was born in Naples in 1685, the son of one of the most famous musicians of the day, Alessandro Scarlatti. Alessandro was primarily a composer of opera and church music, and in the early part of his career Domenico seemed to be heading in the same direction, first in Naples, then in Venice and finally in Rome, where in 1713 he became assistant and later maestro at the Cappella Giulia at St Peter’s.
It was his similar, parallel appointment at the private chapel of the Portuguese ambassador, however, that seems to have changed his life, as it was presumably this contact which led to his departure from Italy in the early 1720s to take charge of the patriarchal chapel in Lisbon. There he also acted as harpsichord tutor to the king’s daughter, the Infanta Maria Barbara, and when in 1728 she married the Spanish Crown Prince Fernando, Scarlatti followed her to Madrid. He was to remain a member of the Spanish royal household, apparently quite content with duties confined to teaching and playing the harpsichord, until his death nearly thirty years later.
Scarlatti’s reputation today rightly rests on his harpsichord sonatas – over 500 of them, mostly written for Maria Barbara – which over the years have been a treasured part of the repertoires of harpsichordists and pianists alike. Though few depart from a standardised and simple formal design – a single movement in two repeated halves – their virtuoso techniques and quirky surprises mark them out as the work of a highly active imagination, while their rhythmic vigour, harmonic sensuousness, open air excitement and drowsy lyricism seem a clear response to the seductive atmosphere of his adopted Spanish homeland.
Scarlatti’s vocal output is generally more conventional; a handful of secular chamber cantatas written in Spain echo the extrovert fantasy of the sonatas, but the church music he produced in Rome is mostly in the consciously conservative style favoured by the authorities there, and only the austerely expressive choral Stabat Mater and a beautiful late, Spanish Salve regina for soprano and strings have found a regular place in the modern-day repertoire. Much of the music of the 15-or-so operas he composed for Naples and Rome is lost. Frustratingly sketchy, also, are details of his character, from which we are perhaps left to conclude that, for one with such a strong creative personality, he was an unusually retiring man.
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DOMENICO SCARLATTI
One of music’s great individualists, Domenico Scarlatti was born in Naples in 1685, the son of one of the most famous musicians of the day, Alessandro Scarlatti. Alessandro was primarily a composer of opera and church music, and in the early part of his career Domenico seemed to be heading in the same direction, first in Naples, then in Venice and finally in Rome, where in 1713 he became assistant and later maestro at the Cappella Giulia at St Peter’s.
It was his similar, parallel appointment at the private chapel of the Portuguese ambassador, however, that seems to have changed his life, as it was presumably this contact which led to his departure from Italy in the early 1720s to take charge of the patriarchal chapel in Lisbon. There he also acted as harpsichord tutor to the king’s daughter, the Infanta Maria Barbara, and when in 1728 she married the Spanish Crown Prince Fernando, Scarlatti followed her to Madrid. He was to remain a member of the Spanish royal household, apparently quite content with duties confined to teaching and playing the harpsichord, until his death nearly thirty years later.
Scarlatti’s reputation today rightly rests on his harpsichord sonatas – over 500 of them, mostly written for Maria Barbara – which over the years have been a treasured part of the repertoires of harpsichordists and pianists alike. Though few depart from a standardised and simple formal design – a single movement in two repeated halves – their virtuoso techniques and quirky surprises mark them out as the work of a highly active imagination, while their rhythmic vigour, harmonic sensuousness, open air excitement and drowsy lyricism seem a clear response to the seductive atmosphere of his adopted Spanish homeland.
Scarlatti’s vocal output is generally more conventional; a handful of secular chamber cantatas written in Spain echo the extrovert fantasy of the sonatas, but the church music he produced in Rome is mostly in the consciously conservative style favoured by the authorities there, and only the austerely expressive choral Stabat Mater and a beautiful late, Spanish Salve regina for soprano and strings have found a regular place in the modern-day repertoire. Much of the music of the 15-or-so operas he composed for Naples and Rome is lost. Frustratingly sketchy, also, are details of his character, from which we are perhaps left to conclude that, for one with such a strong creative personality, he was an unusually retiring man.
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Vivaldi. Four Seasons. Venice Baroque Orchestra
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March 4, 1678 - July 27 or 28, 1741
Baroque Period
Antonio Vivaldi was born in Venice, Italy,
which is where he spent most of his life. His father taught him to play
the violin, and the two would often perform together.
Baroque Period
Antonio continued to study and practice the violin, even after he became a priest. He was called the "Red Priest" because of his flaming red hair. However, after a while, his bad asthma kept Antonio from saying Mass.
After that, Vivaldi spent all his time writing music and teaching. He taught at an orphanage for girls, and wrote a lot of music for the girls to play. People came from miles around to hear Vivaldi's talented students perform the beautiful music he had written.
Many people think Vivaldi was the best Italian composer of his time. He wrote concertos, operas, church music and many other compositions. In all, Antonio wrote over 500 concertos. His most famous set of concertos is The Four Seasons.
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JEAN-PHILIPPE RAMEAU
(1683 - 1764)
Rameau was the leading French composer of his time, particularly after the death of Couperin in 1733. He made a significant and lasting contribution to musical theory. Born in Dijon, two years before the year of birth of Handel, Bach and Domenico Scarlatti, Rameau spent the earlier part of his career principally as organist at Clermont Cathedral. In 1722 or 1723, however, he settled in Paris, publishing further collections of harpsichord pieces and his important Treatise on Harmony, written before his removal to Paris. From 1733 he devoted himself largely to the composition of opera and to his work as a theorist, the first under the patronage of a rich amateur, in whose house he had an apartment.
Dramatic Works
Rameau contributed to a variety of dramatic forms, continuing, in some, the tradition of Lully. These included tragédies lyriques, comédies lyriques and comédies-ballets. His first success in 1733 was Hippolyte et Aricie, but as time went on fashions changed and the stage works he wrote after Les Paladins in 1760 remained unperformed. Orchestral suites derived from some of Rameau’s stage works at least make a certain amount of this music readily available.
Keyboard Music
Sixty of Rameau’s 65 harpsichord pieces were written by 1728, with a final group appearing in 1741. Published in 1706, 1724 and around the year 1728, these collections, with the final collection of 1741, consist of genre pieces and dances in the established tradition of French keyboard music.
Chamber Music
In the later part of his career Rameau also wrote a series of suites, the Pièces de clavecin en concerts, for harpsichord, flute or violin and second violin or tenor viol.
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