Late baroque music

The baroque in European music historical significance was a period from about 1600 to around 1750. From early on, the music in the baroque turned away from Renaissance music . By replacing polyphony (multiple melodies simultaneously) in the song of homophony (a main vocal) to let the text dominate, creating operas , oratories , cantats and monodies , vocal music developed sharply. Early in the baroque, the modal scales were mostly associated with church music exchanged with tonal music . This made great differences both in sound and in the ability to compose more advanced pieces.

The music of the late bar (1700-1750)
Even it is not the same change of generations in the transition from the middle to the late bar as it is in several other sections, like in romance , there are good musical reasons to set the distinction between the two periods until 1700. Instrumental music, which had developed throughout sixteenth century, was so sophisticated around the turn of the century that it had a major influence on the future of music. Albinoni and Vivaldi developed the concert, especially the solo concert, so powerful that it took over as a dominant music style. Sonata was introduced to German-speaking countries around the turn of the century. Around the time, German vocal church music began to become increasingly similar to opera, as it had moved many years earlier in Italy.

The opera went more towards serious, often tragic themes, and with less dancing. The action came in the center of the opera. While the English opera audience lived mostly on opera written by Italians, the French opera was still most concerned with Lully and some of his heirs, mostly those who copied his style. In 1711 England gained its first opera for the English scene written by Händel, and he continued to dominate there for the next 20 years. France received its next major opera composer in the 1730s with Rameau.

Italy began with concerts and sonatas, and France had long dominated within suites, but during that period German music, both in Germany and England, became dominant in most instrumental music. One of the reasons that German music dominated the late bar was that it had had a long tradition of gaining inspiration from its neighboring countries and developing a style that was known in Italy, England, France and the Netherlands. In addition, German music also developed by creating own and new versions of Dutch and British key music, Flemish polyphony, Italian concerto, opera and madrigal and French opera, cembalomusic, motette and orchestra suite. The composers who especially influenced and later influenced the music in the neighboring country were Georg Philipp Telemann, Georg Friedrich Händel and not least Johann Sebastian Bach.

At the same time, the completed music of Händel and Bach was also the beginning of the end. With the emergence of public concerts and bourgeois cartridges, complicated polyphony was replaced by simple homophony. The best possible for both adapting to other cultures and contemporary music flavors was Georg Philipp Telemann, who preferred simpler music than Bach, and was one of the composers who helped start the transition to the galant style and classicalism.

Instruments
The musical development continued in the late bar, especially in the three-blower family. The period saw two new instruments. Chalmeauen was replaced by the clarinet . Much of the advantage of the clarinet was the possibilities with the nozzle, which helped with sound, precision and volume control. The tenorobo (later ” English horn “), which had been constantly changing, got its more final form in the 1720s. However, it was only at the end of the baroque that the tenorobo took place in the orchestra. Among existing instruments, changes also occurred. The oboe gained an expanded sound and register, which may have resulted in it being used more frequently as a solo instrument during the period. The phagote was also expanding its register at the start of this period. Also the crossroads had a major development from the 1660s to the 1720s.

There was also development in key instruments, and a precursor to the piano was created around 1700, but this was too expensive and unfinished to be put into production. The horn was a natural horn without holes and flaps, but in the early 1700s it was expanded with more beams so the sound varied more. This also meant that the horn was more often used in music, including by Händel and Bach.

The Stryker family was in a transition phase, where the game began to lose its roof. While gambe and cello still lived at the same time, the cello in 1710 was defined in size by Stradivarius, and shortly after, other instrument designers followed. This resulted in the cell gaining popularity. The only instrument in the gamfamily that survived, the double bass, took place in the orchestra around the turn of the century. The violin, on its part, had only minor adjustments, especially at Guarnieri’s violin, which was good on persistent tones.

Opera
As both the English and French opera stalled after the death of Purcell and Lully, the Italian opera again dominated. However, the Italian opera was constantly evolving, for example, the action, the characters and the conflict between the characters were emphasized to a greater extent, making it dramatically more space. Another aspect of the opera’s development in the 1700s was that the instruments played an increasingly important role. While they previously had the function of playing between the resitatives and arie, they now also participated in both, usually towards the soloist. Sometimes it led to a competition, as it fell between castrator Farinelli and a trumpet virtuos, a competition the audience threw in.

Also in Germany there was a development based on the Italian opera. In particular, composers in Hamburg and Leipzig were active in creating operas, and even more of these were probably inspired by the Italian opera, they had put their own feelings on the genre early. Some, and especially those of Telemann, had a humorous feel, and several of them were sung in German, inspired by the singing game .

Italian opera
Italian opera dominated not only Italy, but also in many more countries. Both Vienna and London had been inspired strongly by the Italian opera, especially from Naples.

After the Neapolitan school had taken over, Naples was also on the way dominant in the production of opera. The city also had clear class-based operas. For the nobility, opera was associated with celebrations, such as name days, weddings or other circumstances. The opera was often used by Venetian librettos. The librettos had in the past often had a mixture of romance, drama and comedy, but by the turn of the century the comedy part was removed and placed as a number between the acts of the more tragic opera series. The Napolitan opera series was defined by Apostolo Zeno and Pietro Metastasio (see Vienna ), and the emphasis on the dramatic narrative became more important. Musically there were major variations in instrumentation, among other things, the general bass could be played by erkelutt , lutt, double bass and gambe in addition to cembalo. At times, wind instruments like trumpet, obo and horn, usually two of each, got together with strings. In addition, the musical style was also different from traditional baroque music, instead of repeating small motives, Neapolitan music was keen on not repeating them, but rather stretching out repeated motives for strobes. Using breaks as a dramatic effect helped create lighter and more moving melodies. In addition, there were often very virtuoso vocal parts.

More popular opera had grabbed the comic opera reduced to pause music at the nobility and focused on it. There had been a long tradition in Naples for humor in the music, and several operas were listed both in Neapolitan dialect and with humor. Where the serious opera chose to choose supernatural and complex worlds, the comic operas were usually added to everyday themes and historically-related events, and joking at the expense of the serious opera. From the 1710’s, serious composers were more keen on delivering good comic operas, partly because of artistic freedom. The comic operas were made for most people as well as intermezzo for the nobility. In addition to using everyday themes, Latin comedies were replaced withcommedia dell’arte comedies with the related predictable figures and contradictions: young to old, male to female, wealth to poverty and gay to savvy. The popularity increased, and in 1733, Giovanni Battista Pergolesis La Serva Padrona reached international attention.

After Naples, probably Vienna was one of the largest centers of Italian opera. Many of the operas were composed by chapel master Antonio Caldara and with libretto by Pietro Metastasio, albeit both with others. In Vienna, the librarists Metastasio and his predecessor Apostolo Zeno were responsible for a reform of the opera so that the story, the plot and the characters sharpened more. Thus the drama gained a better effect, and in addition, the arias became the emotional focus while the resitatives told the action. Another feature of Vienna’s opera was the focus on instrumental music, and especially the sound, which meant that instrumental solos were written in both overturns, ballets and occasionally also in the arias. All this alone was common in operas elsewhere, especially the use of counterpoint in the melody song, in line with the taste of the Austrian emperors, and because they were strongly inspired by Händel.

In Rome , the opera tradition was crooked as a result of the views of the sitting pavilion and whim. In addition, conflicts such as the Spanish heritage war set restrictions on the opera so that Rome was without opera between 1698 and 1711. In turn, operas from Alessandro Scarlatti, Antonio Caldara and Antonio Vivaldi came among others. It was also here that the libraries of Metastasio debuted in 1724. This was the year before Scarlatti died, which initially meant that Leonardo Vinci collaborated with Metastasio until Vinci died in 1730. Vinci was from Naples, and the Neapolitan school was also well received at the opera in Rome – when it was allowed. In Venicethere was less local innovation during the period. First there were established operas composers like Francesco Gasparini and Carlo Francesco Pollarolo , and later there were neo-political composers like Leonardo Vinci. The exception to this rule was Antonio Vivaldi, who wrote several operas and oratories, and probably was the city’s most popular opera composer.

German opera
Opera had hit Germany, and in the last part of the baroque, more operas were performed in various opera houses around the country. In Leipzig there was already an established opera house, and there were more contributions. German opera often had comic moves, so also here. Except that Telemann had written and sent together 20 operas, none of the composers were set up who have become known for posterity.

There was also an opera in Hamurg, mainly composed by Emperor. Emperor’s ability to write beautiful melodies and to understand the voice and its abilities was a direct inspiration for Händel. In his time, Emperor was also considered as the leading composer at the beginning of the century. Händel came to town in 1704, and even he stayed there for a short while, learning more things about opera composition in the city. Emperor dominated until 1721 when Telemann came to town. His opera was still comic and serious. Telemann’s comic opera was thus written many years before the opera buffa hit through La Serva Padrona .

French opera
The French opera had trouble getting out of the shadow of Lully. The first major candidate – Pascal Collasse – wrote operas that resembled too much at Lullys, and had the greatest success when writing out incomplete, often rejected works. The Lully family sued him, and his reputation was already weakened around the turn of the century. Henri Desmarets was linked to a reverse scandal, he wrote a series of motors released by the star of the choir Nicolas Goupillet. Then he escaped with a young woman to Brussels and was sentenced to death in absentia. He then went to Spain but returned when the death sentence was lifted. His operas only had modest success. André Cardinal Destouches had some success with the opera, but it became too modest after he received the newly named title as General Inspector forAcadémie Royale de Musique .

The great revolution in the French opera came only towards the end of the baroque, with Jean-Philippe Rameau . Despite being a very talented organ player, Rameau became known as music theorist when he was 39. His ideas about music acted, among other things, about acoustics and chords, where he preferred treble and septime chords , introduced the basestones and was concerned with dissonance that propagates of music and of the effects of chords. It was also Rameau as defined the terms tonic (fundamental tone), dominant (the tone and the chord – a quintet of tonics) and the subdominant (the tone and the chord – a quintet under tonics).

As a composer, Rameau was first discovered in the 1730s when he was in the fifties. His first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie , was recorded in 1733 when he was 50 years old. Rameau moved between Lully’s tragédies a musique opera to the Opéra ballet , for example Les Indes galantes , who was more free in the form. Then he moved to more traditional operas, and had special success with Castor et Pollux, which was far more free from Lully’s style. Rameau’s new music style, based on his music theory, provoked the followers of Lully so much that it became a form of battle within Paris’ intelligence between the Lullis and the Ramis. Regardless of the struggle and accusation that Rameau’s music was difficult, grotesque, mechanical and unnatural, Rameau became popular and got French opera again. He was also the first French-born composer who had greater success with the opera.

England and Händel
In the absence of his own opera composers after Purcell died, England became most concerned with Italian opera. The opera was largely public, and already in 1705, the first example of Italian-inspired opera, albeit in English. Arsinoe, Queen of Cyprus , was an update of an older Italian piece. Just the tendency to lend the Italian opera, gladly by Alessandro Scarlatti, and translating into English, struck and several operas of varying quality were set up. It was also in that time castrators were launched for a British audience. A short-lived experiment with parts in English and parts in Italian was terminated when the audience became tired of understanding only half the opera, and most were then sung in Italian. In particular, Hydaspes became ofFrancesco Mancini a relatively big success in 1710.

1710 was also the time Händel began his music career in Halle , but moved in German, Italian and English-speaking cities and picked up a lot from the different cultures. His first opera, Almira, Königin von Castilien came in 1705, when he was in Hamburg, and was clearly inspired by Reinhard Emperor, and with dance melodies after French manners, arians after Italian and German counterpoints and orchestration. His sixth, Agrippina , from 1709, was inspired by Alessandro Scarlatti, and showed the ability to have elegant melodies with long parts without breathing break and with rhythmic variation in melodies. His first opera listed in London , Rinaldo, was a big success and he was listed almost every operasong that decade.

After Händel got a permanent position and money to find talented singers like Faustina Bordoni , his operas became more heroic and more challenging. Especially Giulio Cesare in Egitto (1724), but also Tamerlano (same year) and Rodelinda (1725) are good examples of the new opera. Händel took advantage of transferred importance, for example, that he created the feeling of sneaking and hunting to emphasize Ptolemy’s treachery. At this time, there were usually two main types of resitatives, the “dry” with almost only general bass and conversational song, and “accompanied” resitatives with far more instruments. Händel took advantage of the latter. Also the arias were special for Händel. He wrote them to the individual singers, and therefore some aries could be ornamental and go high while others could be slow and emphasize feelings. At the same time, Händel was keen to use the arias to a greater degree than previously communicated to the act, and thus broke something with the Neapolitan school. Contrast point and majestic music could be weighed up with simple pastoral hymns. Händel used more of orchestra, and he also used more actively of wind instruments than more of his contemporary.

Religious vocal music
Around the turn of the century, the Lutheran vocal church music became more and more like opera. Part of this was due to Erdmann Neumeister, a poet and theologian who combined opera and Lutheran church music. Inspired by him, Bach also began to use techniques from opera, such as resitative and arian, but also choir, coral music and orchestra accompaniment. From his appointment to Thomaskantor , more or less musically responsible for all the churches, until he lost interest in church music, Bach developed the church music greatly. This was particularly noted in his two pations. Bach had no experience as an opera composer in addition to a few coffee houses drama per musica without any notable success, but especially the Johannespacelike the opera, including dramatic features between Pontus Pilate and the choir insisting that Jesus should be crucified. In addition, Bach also used the choir as comments on the act as in Greek drama. Matthew Path is more complete, and the chords play a greater role in the performance.

Bach lost interest in church music around 1730, but during his last year he completed Messe in H-Moll , which was anthology of the development of church music. The work became more than 20 years old and assumed reuse (called parodies ) of past works or incomplete works. The mix makes the fair varies from old bar to galant in progress. Bach had borrowed from opera, but there was also a great variation between them. The cantatas were, as Matthew , reflective and complete, and therefore performed with voices without the occurrence of any drama, and can also be understood as a musical sermon. The cantatas also spread beyond 1730, but decreased sharply.

Around Bach left vocal church music, Händel really began to care for them. Around 1730 he also began to write oratories. However, he changed the traditional Italian oratories by entering large choirs, inspired by both German and English choir music. He gave them different roles, from telling the story to comment on it, also inspired by Greek drama. Also the German Pope and the English Masque played a role in Händel’s new oratories. This supported that the church was a common experience and not an individual one. Händel was highly utilized by the operating technique, and therefore could borrow recitative techniques from opera and follow them up, not by an arie, but by a choir. Nevertheless, arias and dramatic scenes in the oratories also appear. In addition, Händel also made oratories that were not Christians, but belonged to Greek mythology, including Semele and Hercules .

Concertos and suites
The concert was a genuine Italian affair before the turn of the century, and it continued for a while. Tomaso Albinoni released his first concerts already in the year 1700. As Albinoni was a mediator, he was free from advocates from benefactors. He quickly defined his concertoes as three sets, and he used diligently for counterpoint. In addition, he experimented with the shape of the slow second rate. It was also Albinoni who introduced obo as solo instrument to an Italian audience.

In 1702, two years after Albinoni released his first concert, Antonio Vivaldi became the defined concerto. He was a teacher at the Christian School of Orphans, Hot Children, and Incredible Daughters, and taught them to music games with great success. Both his and the girls’ games received enough attention to become an attraction in Venice. Of the 500 of Vivaldi’s concertos that have survived were 350, about three quarters, for solo instruments, and 230 of them for violin. The violin was not only Vivaldi’s instrument, but also the instrument most of the female students learned. In addition, he wrote 37 for bassoon, and for flute, obo, blockwriter, viola d’amore, cello and mandolin.

Vivaldi concert concerts resounded because of fresh melodies, a lively rhythm, proficient solo care and formality. In addition, Vivaldi had talented musicians in the schoolmen, and he was given the opportunity to experiment with the concert. Just because he had a simple basic recipe that he could be flexible with, he had great success with the development of the concerto. Among other things, Vivaldi had pieces where several soloists played against the rest of the orchestra, but unlike Corelli’s concerto grosso, the big orchestra did not copy the small, but played against them just like in a solo concert. Vivaldi also deliberately used both pizza and sordin for effect. Vivaldi used almost consistent three-rate concert in the form fast-slow-introduced by Tomaso Albononi. Among the most famous are you four seasons . Here, like most other concertoes, Vivaldi chose a more gay style, ie with a leading melody voice, while the other voices support this.

He also used almost consistent ritornello, that is, a refreng, and also designed its own ritornello form. Refined comes already in the beginning, in part to confirm the tone structure, which tone is used. The whole orchestra is included, with parts for the solo instrument. This usually consists of small parts that are repeated or varied. When the refrain is repeated, it is usually only partial. The reengengene is divided by solo episodes, mostly virtuoso and characteristic. Parts of the refrain can be repeated and varied with, but Vivaldi used more scales, arpeggio’s and other musical expressions. The tones could be exchanged via modulation. This created a ritornello form that was very varied from standard ritornello. In addition, Vivaldi was crucial in lifting the slow part to be as important as the fastest, including by expressive and singable melodies (listening example).In addition, the virtuosis would like to add some extra ornaments. Vivaldi’s ability to give the soloist his own voice and his own personality became crucial to the concert.

Bach was inspired by Vivaldi both in the concerto and in piano music. He learned from making the themes and the harmonic plan clearer, and working on formal structures based on ritornello effect. In concert, Bach, like everything else, was varied and influenced by other music. This is seen in the Brandenburg concerts, which vary widely, from the concerto grosso (1, 2, 4) to concert tours (3, 6) and 5, most reminiscent of a solo concert for the cembalo and orchestra. Possibly inspired by Vivaldi, he had several solo instruments in the concerto. He also wrote two pure solo concerto for violin and a total of 13 for one and up to four key instruments – mostly cembalo in the present time. Bach often placed joints in the concertoes. Händel also wrote concert tours, but far fewer. He wrote obo concerts and twelve concerts grossi in addition to 14 organ concerts.

Orchestra suits had been in increasing popularity since the mid-1600s. From 1690 to 1740, however, the suitcases in Germany were different from the traditional French, partly because they broke the idea of a fixed order, thus the dances could come when it suited the composer. Händel’s two most famous pieces – Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks – were both German orchestra suits, composed of about 30 years apart. François Couperin also wrote orchestra suits – he called the royaux royaux , but it appears more like a collection of soluble bonded dances played by a relatively small ensemble. His suit was also heavily inspired by Italian music.

Piano music and sonata
The piano music, then mostly organ or cembalomusic, consisted mainly of suites, toccata or preludes with fows or sonates. Toccata or Preludium with subsequent fighters were used by several composers, but Johann Sebastian Bach dominated the category. In the sonata the keyboard played either the main role as solo instrument or a more retracted role as a general bass instrument. Those who followed Corelli’s style, especially characterized by violin sonata, used the piano music mostly as general bass instruments, while those who detached themselves – and especially Johann Sebastian Bach – placed the keyboard in a far more dominant role.

In addition to orchestra suits, there were also several composers who wrote suites for more modest crew, which would then be placed along with the sonatas. Of these, especially the cembalos were popular. François Couperin wrote special cembalosuites intended for nobility he was the teacher of. These were French in construction, and thus they held more on traditional division of songs. Bach’s cembalosuiter was not only inspired by Italian but also by French and German music. Bach chose to follow the tradition of allemande, courante, sarabande and gigue, and with a prelude where he arranged an Italian ensemble orchestra to cembalo. Händel, in turn, made use of a more direct Italian influence on his cembalosuites.

More loose piano pieces were usually typical preluder or twoccata followed by joints. This was especially Bach’s area. An example of Bach’s variation is Toccata & Fuge d-Moll BWV 565 , where the two cats start and end and end up and appear. Hans Preludium and Fuge in A-mole BWV 543 has a great variety of music styles, sequences, dominant progressions, a clear tone structure and a form of ritornello, all reminiscent of Vivaldi’s concerto ideas. Both examples are also typical because they are virtuoso and that the pace is about the fastest part of a concerto – ie the first or third bet. One of Bach’s most famous collections was Das Wohltemperierte Klavier, a collection of preludies and joints of all tones intended for children or beginners on keyboards. One of the purposes was to show the range of cembalo in relation to playing both the new notes – that is, big and small – and the old modal scale. The first volume came in 1724, the other 20 years later.

The sonata in Italy was long characterized by Corelli. The first composer who broke out of Corelli’s style was Tomaso Albinoni, who himself was rich enough to travel around, inspired, among other things, by Naples, using the chromatic scale and great jumps, plus very ornamental style. Unlike Albinoni’s concert tours, which were more progressive, his sonats were more conservative, despite corruption with Corelli. Vivaldi wrote 73 sonatas, of which almost three quarters were solosonates, most others are triosonates and a couple are too many voices. Vivaldi broke away from Corelli’s and Albinoni’s focus on violin and strings, and, for example, wrote for flutes and other wind instruments as well. Where Albinoni was more traditional, Vivaldi experimented as much in sonas as in the concertoes, including in rhythmic drive and unity in shape, in addition to the good melodies that were his trademark. Vivaldi had a similar mind in his countryman Domenico Scarlatti , son of Alessandro. Scarlatti sonates, mostly for cembalo, were rarely so similar that it could at all appear to a “typical” Scarlatti sonate. He played with tone hinges, with variation in the cadence, a variety of arpeggio’s, chromatic scaling, difficult hand movements, sync, dissonance and a rich variety of more. However, Scarlatti was mostly in Madrid and was largely discovered after the end of the baroque.

Among the German-speaking countries, it was first Johann Joseph Fux who introduced sonatas at the turn of the century, then to Vienna. As a chapel master of the Stephansdom , Fux was active in a variety of genres, including sonates. His sonates, however, were more polyphonic than the typical Italian sonates, but in return, the fuge form was well represented. There were also several other German composers who took the sonate form. However, the Sonatians did not represent a large selection of compositions for either Händel or Bach. From Corelli’s time to Bach and Händel began to write sonata, the piano sonata came in as a third sonate form in addition to the solo and triosonate. This also indicated that the violin no longer had the same dominance in the sonatas.

Just like Albinoni, Bach’s sonates were mainly church sons, and, like Albinoni, Bach was relatively conservative in music development within these numbers. He arranged, of what is available, only three flute sons and three gambesonates in addition to sonar for piano or violin, the latter of very high difficulty. The sonates of Event, however, are so varied and inventive that they often moved far away from the more traditional sonate development, including experimenting with the order and the content. Georg Philipp Telemann also wrote a number of sonatas and for a number of instruments. His work is far closer to Bach and Corelli in that he largely followed the rules of sonate without renaming this event, but Telemann’s skill in composing catchy melodies and performing well-written, if not original works, were especially evident in the sonata .

Transition to galant style
The baroque was not suddenly replaced by a new style, as it itself had replaced the Renaissance music relatively quickly. One can see the 18th century as a long debate about music style and music flavor.

There were essentially two reasons why the galant style and later classicalism took over the baroque. Firstly, both the audience and the premises were changed. As early as the 1720s, public concert venues were increasingly being built in London and Paris, and spread throughout Europe in the 1700s. Thus, the music became increasingly accessible to the bourgeoisie. This had already happened to the opera, and it had been in great development in the early 1700s. In particular, it was the comic, and often satirical, opera that tore legs on the opera series. In the case of Henderson and London, especially the Beer Opera was an attack on the refined opera, and helped bring Händel to oratories.

Unfortunately for him and for Bach, who also wrote a lot of church music, the emerging middle class became dominant in the mid-18th century. Their vision, characterized by enlightenment , challenged the church’s political and cultural power position. This helped to “make up the music” to a greater extent. Church music became conservative and backward in this context. At the same time, optimism was great given that human intellect could master all challenges.

Another problem was that a number of established composers died over the mid-18th century. Couperin died in 1733, Pergolesi in 1736, Vivaldi and Fux in 1741, Bach in 1750, Albinoni in 1751, Domenico Scarlatti in 1757 and Händel in 1759. Of these, Scarlatti, Couperin and Pergolesi had already moved the music away strictly baroque. And while Bach remained a peripheral figure towards the end of his life, Telemann managed the transition better. He left the counterpoint and polyphonic style relatively early, and became increasingly homophonic and galant. Classism is often regarded as a correspondence to the heavier and more complex baroque music, which simplified music expressions took over. New composers clearly distinguished between the baroque polyphonic style with counterpoints and the galant more singable homophonic style. The general bass was replaced by other solutions, such as the alberti bass .

Even the galant style was preferable to the upcoming composers, the art of writing fuge was far from forgotten, which becomes clear in both Haydns, Mozart’s and Beethoven’s later compositions.

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