Music

Baroque music, like Baroque art and Baroque scholarship, took the classical tradition in unexpected new directions during the seventeenth century. Ancient poets, both Greek and Latin, had described their activity explicitly as singing: thus Homer began his Iliad by asking the Muse to ‘‘sing the wrath of Achilles,’’ and Vergil his Aeneid by claiming to ‘‘sing’’ of‘‘arms and the man.’’ Propertius claimed that the poet was a ‘‘priest’’ who ‘‘sings sacred things’’ (sacra canit vates). Hence when groups like the Camerata of Florence or individuals like the composer Claudio Monteverdi (15671643) resolved to recreate ancient Greek tragedy at the very beginning of the seventeenth century, they assumed that dramatic poetry, too, was sung. Monteverdi's Orfeo of 1607 introduced solo arias and half-spoken recitatives amid passages of choral music to present the story of Orpheus and Eurydice to the Duke of Mantua and his court - but rather than recreating Greek tragedy as he had intended, Monteverdi had invented something entirely new: opera.

With his ravishing orchestral writing and his arias’ masterful use of harmony and dissonance to convey emotional states (all based on his idiosyncratic understanding of the ancient Greek musical modes), Monteverdi proved irresistible to Baroque audiences; so did opera, and arias, which became increasingly ornamental to match the visual opulence of most performances. Composers like Giulio Caccini of Rome (ca. 1545-1618) used vocal acrobatics as well as chromatic passages to express the throes of love, rage, joy, and despair, writing for women singers as well as men and castrati. The Roman painter Andrea Sacchi (1599-1661) produced a particularly mordant portrait of the famous castrato Marcantonio Pasqualini (1614-91; the portrait, dated 1641, is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art), who entered the Sistine Chapel choir in 1630 and made his solo debut two years later: the short, dark singer, in elaborate formal dress - including some striking red socks - stands next to a tall, blonde, stark naked Apollo (modeled, as usual, on the Apollo Belvedere) who flaunts his own intact manhood; the finial on the castrato’s portable pipe organ shows another of Apollo’s victims, Daphne, turning into a tree. Behind Apollo, his onetime rival in music, the satyr Marsyas, lies bound and ready to be flayed in punishment for daring to challenge Apollo to a contest between his pipes and Apollo’s lyre; the beautiful god will go to any lengths to enforce the purity, and superiority, of his art, which in the 1640s implied the kind ofsolo singing at which Pasqualini excelled. This image of the castrato must have been popular, for Sacchi painted another version, although this time with Apollo clothed in a strategically fluttering drape.

In the religious sphere, the Council of Trent had made recommendations for music as well as art, urging Catholic composers, like Catholic artists, to emphasize clarity - their Protestant competitors had found a formidable weapon in the rousing hymns of Martin Luther and Hans Sachs. Under this pressure to communicate, the elaborate polyphonic church music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries gave way in the midsixteenth century to the pointed simplicity of composers like Giovanni di Pierluigi da Palestrina (ca. 1526-94), whose ability to invent limpid polyphonic masses effectively saved the medium from extinction. Baroque composers continued to emphasize clarity, but enriched their music with elaborate ornamentation. Gregorio Allegri’s (1582-1652) Miserere (1638), written for Pope Urban YIII, combined the repetitive litany of Psalm 51 with a stratospheric soprano line to create a haunting, ethereal effect without sacrificing the intelligibility of a single word in the sacred text. Opera’s combination of solo and choral singing worked as memorably for Bible stories and saints’ lives as for ancient myth: Stefano Landi’s (ca. 1586-1609) II Sant’Alessio (Saint Alexis, 1634), with stage sets by the versatile Pietro da Cortona, was an early, and successful, example, entirely modeled on Baroque ideas of ancient drama. True Religion descends on a cloud like a classical deus ex machina, and St. Alexis, scored for a castrato, produces the same vocal fireworks that any mythological hero might, although his heroic achievement was to live in Christian poverty under the stairs in his family home, unrecognized even by his parents.

In music, as in the arts, the developments of the Baroque era demonstrate not only the power of the classical tradition, but also, pointedly, its infinite flexibility;

Antiquity’s most careful students, like Borromini, Monteverdi, or Isaac Newton, sometimes became its most radical reinterpreters. Ironically, even in empirical science, the area where the ancients proved most fallible as models for their seventeenth-century followers, classical principles continued to guide intellectual endeavor, and guide it still: contemporary scientists, no less than Aristotle or Galileo, prize ‘‘elegant’’ solutions, ‘‘robust’’ proofs, and a harmonious universe. Like Baroque artists, they have found their greatest freedom in discipline.

FURTHER READING

Excellent overviews of the Baroque period, especially in Rome, can be found in Haskell (1980) and Magnuson (1981), which concentrate on social as well as artistic life; for more strictly artistic information, see Wittkower (1999). For life inside a Baroque palazzo, Waddy (1990) and Scott (1991) provide information on everything from hygiene to etiquette and patronage. Two remarkable views of Baroque architecture are provided from two different perspectives by Connors: the use of facades to communicate social relationships in Connors (1989), and the connection between Baroque architecture and the gentleman’s hobby of turning on the lathe (Connors 1990).

For Caravaggio, see Langdon (2000). For Bernini, see Magnuson (1981) and Marder (1998). For Borromini, Blunt (2005) is eminently readable, if opinionated; for the competition between Bernini and Borromini, see Morrissey (2005). Montagu (1993) provides a witty introduction to Baroque sculpture. For Rubens, several recent exhibition catalogues provide excellent illustrations and essays: Brejon de Lavergnee et al. (2004), Logan and Plomp (2005), Piotrovsky et al. (2005). For Velazquez, see Brown (1986); and look for the catalogue of an exhibition at the National Gallery, London, from October 2006.

For the intellectual setting of Baroque Italy and an introduction to the ‘‘Paper Museum’’ of Cassiano dal Pozzo, see Freedberg (2003); see also Miller (2000). The articles in Findlen (2004) provide a look at the wide interests of Athanasius Kircher. For Egypt in Rome, see Curran (2004). For Etruscan themes, the forgeries of Curzio Inghirami and forgery in general, see Rowland (2004). For the ‘‘Nestorian Stone,’’ see Hsia (2004) in Findlen (2004). For Olof Rudbeck’s Swedish Atlantis, King (2005) is a vivid storyteller.

Hammond (1994) provides a vivid picture of Baroque music and its performance; see also Murata (1997). Stefano Landi’s Il Sant’Alessio has been recorded by Les Arts Florissants (Landi 1996), but hear also his Homo fugit velut umbra (Man is as fleeting as a shadow) (Landi 2003), performed by the phenomenal Marco Beasley.

A Companion to the Classical Tradition Edited by Craig W. Kallendorf Copyright © 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd