Musical Fire: Literal and Figurative Moments of "Fire" As Expressed in Western Art Music from 1700 to 1750 Sean M

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2003 Musical Fire: Literal and Figurative Moments of "Fire" as Expressed in Western Art Music from 1700 to 1750 Sean M. Parr

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SCHOOL OF MUSIC

MUSICAL FIRE: LITERAL AND FIGURATIVE MOMENTS OF “FIRE” AS EXPRESSED IN WESTERN ART MUSIC FROM 1700 TO 1750

Sean M. Parr

A Thesis submitted to the School of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Music

Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2003

The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Sean M. Parr defended on August 20, 2003.

______Charles E. Brewer Professor Directing Thesis

______Jeffery Kite-Powell Committee Member

______Roy Delp Committee Member

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Musical Examples...... iv Abstract...... v

1. MUSIC, AFFECT, AND FIRE...... 1

2. KINDLING FIRE: MONTEVERDI AND THE STILE CONCITATO...... 19

3. THE FLAMES OF FRANCE AND GERMANY...... 36

4. INFLAMED WITH PASSION: ITALY AND ENGLAND...... 55

5. BEYOND THE BAROQUE TRAILBLAZERS...... 79

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 87

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH...... 90

iii LIST OF EXAMPLES

1.1 Morley “Fyer, fyer!” 1595...... 18 2.1 Monteverdi “Luci serene” 1603...... 22 2.2 Monteverdi “Quell’augellin che canta” 1603...... 23 2.3 Monteverdi from Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda 1624...... 24 2.4 Monteverdi from Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda 1624...... 25 2.5 Handel from Jephtha 1751...... 26 2.6 Schütz from Historia der Auferstehung 1623...... 29 2.7 Lully from Atys 1676...... 30 2.8 Lully from Atys 1676...... 31 2.9 H. Purcell “Let the dreadful engines of eternal will” 1696...... 34 2.10 H. Purcell “Let the dreadful engines of eternal will” 1696...... 35 2.11 H. Purcell “Let the dreadful engines of eternal will” 1696...... 35

3.1 Rameau from Scene 5 of Pygmalion 1748...... 38 3.2 Rameau from Act II, Scene 3 of Platée 1745...... 39 3.3 Rameau from Act III, Scene 1 of Platée 1745...... 40 3.4 Rameau from Act III, Scene 7 of Platée 1745...... 41 3.5 Royer Le Vertigo 1746...... 43 3.6 Rebel “Le chaos” from Les Eléments 1737-8...... 45 3.7 Rebel “Le feu” from Les Eléments 1737-8...... 46 3.8 J.S. Bach from first movement of O ewiges Feuer, Cantata No. 34 1746-7...... 47 3.9 J.S. Bach “Sind Blitze” from Matthäus-Passion 1727 ...... 49-50 3.10 Telemann No. 4 from Die Donner Ode 1756…...... 51 3.11 Telemann No. 5 from Die Donner Ode 1756...... 52 3.12 Telemann No. 6 from Die Donner Ode 1756...... 53

4.1 A. Scarlatti No. 67 from La principessa fedele 1709...... 57 4.2 A. Scarlatti No. 62 from La Statira 1690 ...... 58 4.3 D. Scarlatti “Inflammatus et accensus” from Stabat Mater 1713-1719...... 60 4.4 Pergolesi “Fac ut ardeat” from Stabat Mater 1730-1736...... 62-63 4.5 Vivaldi “Armatae face” from Juditha Triumphans 1716...... 65 4.6 Vivaldi first movement of “Summer” from Le Quattro Stagioni 1730s...... 66 4.7 Vivaldi second movement of “Summer” from Le Quattro Stagioni 1730s...... 67 4.8 Vivaldi third movement of “Summer” from Le Quattro Stagioni 1730s...... …....68 4.9 Eccles from Act III, Scene 1 of Semele 1707...... 71 4.10 Eccles from Act III, Scene 6 of Semele 1707...... 71 4.11 Eccles from Act III, Scene 4 of Semele 1707...... 72 4.12 Eccles from Act III, Scene 7 of Semele 1707...... 72 4.13 Pepusch “By great Cecilia” from The Union of the Three Sister Arts 1723...... 74 4.14 Handel “Why do the nations” from Messiah 1742...... 76 4.15 Handel “But who may abide” from Messiah 1742...... 77

5.1 Weber final section of Max’s aria from Der Freischütz 1821...... 84

ABSTRACT

This thesis will describe the quality of musical fire and how the representation of fire in music began and progressed during the Baroque period. In addition to hearing beautiful sonorities, experiencing a visceral thrill is one of the basic aesthetics that makes music such an affecting art in Western culture. For the purposes of this thesis, I will define a “musical fire moment” as a musical passage in which the composer’s language elicits the quality of some fiery context. These contexts will be defined in this thesis. In music of the Baroque period, I consider fire to be an affect which is utilized by composers to attain moments of heightened, fire-like intensity. There are certain musical works which have texts, characters, or titles including the actual word, “fire,” or related words, such as “burn,” “flame,” etc. Composers set such words in different ways in attempting to reflect the appropriate dramatic meaning or emotion musically. These techniques usually yield feelings of excitement, heightened intensity, and/or agitation in the listener. Clearly, such feelings are not limited to vocal music. Purely instrumental music can and does similarly affect listeners. However, these instrumental fiery moments are not as immediately evident without the word cues of fiery moments in vocal music. Nevertheless, one can certainly feel moments of musical “fire” in high intensity moments in pieces such as the “Summer” concerto of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. The origins of the musical expression of fire lie in the stile concitato of Monteverdi and the generally rhetorical approach to the expression of passion in music during the Baroque period. Early representations of fire represented in music show that a key fire-like word was more often painted by itself rather than presented as an affect lasting for an entire section of a piece. By the late Baroque, fire is presented more affectively, in complete sections, movements, and entire arias. This thesis will propose a framework which will serve to categorize musical examples of fiery affect.

CHAPTER 1

MUSIC, AFFECT, AND FIRE

Introduction

During particularly dramatic musical moments performers often feel their eyes widen with intensity. At the same time members of the audience feel their skin tingle with anxiety and excitement. Personally identifying such a feeling is much easier than writing about moments that cause such visceral responses. However, the study of music requires that we describe these moments in prose. Why do critics often describe performances and pieces as “fiery”? When did such intensely affective music become commonplace? This thesis will describe the quality of such musical fire and how the representation of fire in music began and progressed during the Baroque period. In addition to hearing beautiful sonorities, experiencing a visceral thrill is one of the basic aesthetics that makes music such an affecting art in Western culture. For the purposes of this thesis, I will define a “musical fire moment” as a musical passage in which the composer’s language elicits the quality of some fiery context. These contexts will be defined in this chapter. In music of the Baroque period, I consider fire to be an affect which is utilized by composers to attain moments of heightened, fire-like intensity. There are certain musical works which have texts, characters, or titles including the actual word, “fire,” or related words, such as “burn,” “flame,” etc. Composers set such words in different ways in attempting to reflect the appropriate dramatic meaning or emotion musically. These techniques usually yield feelings of excitement, heightened intensity, and/or agitation in the listener. Clearly, such feelings are not limited to vocal music. Purely instrumental music can and does similarly affect listeners. However, these instrumental fiery moments are not as immediately evident without the word cues of fiery moments in vocal music.

Nevertheless, one can certainly feel moments of musical “fire” in high intensity moments in pieces such as the “Summer” concerto of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. The idea of fire in the Baroque period should also be considered in relation to Baroque psychology. Artists and philosophers were quite interested in the “passions of the soul.”1 They were preoccupied with representing various extreme feelings, such as the ecstasy of loving and knowing God and the sorrowful depths of mourning the loss of a loved one. Just as portrait artists strove for “verisimilitude – the semblance of reality” in representing faces, so too do Baroque composers attempt to depict the passions musically as naturally and realistically as possible.2 Early representations of fire in music show that a key fire-like word was more often painted by itself rather than presented as an affect lasting for an entire section of a piece. By the late Baroque, fire is presented more affectively, in complete sections, movements, and entire arias. This chapter will first describe the musical context of the high Baroque (1700-1750), considering affect, rhetoric, and aesthetics, in addition to describing the quality and emotional affect of fire in music further. Then the concept of fire as an affect in a variety of contexts will be discussed. Finally, I will propose a framework which will serve to categorize musical examples of fiery affect in subsequent chapters. Baroque Affect, Rhetoric, and Aesthetics In determining fire as an affect, it is important to define what the role of an affect actually entails. Affects are “rationalized emotional states or passions.”3 The concept of representing a passion in music as an affect is rooted in Greek and Latin doctrines of oratory and rhetoric. Writers and orators such as Aristotle and Cicero used rhetorical devices to “control and direct the emotions of their audiences.”4 In many Baroque treatises on music, such as Jochim Burmeister’s Musica poetica (Rostock, 1606), this

1 John Rupert Martin. Baroque. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1977, 13. 2 Martin, 91. 3 George J. Buelow. “Affects, theory of the.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. New York: Macmillan, 2001, 1:181. 4 Ibid.

rhetorical concept directly applied to music, as the composer uses musical-rhetorical devices to move the listener in a manner similar to impassioned oratory.5 Indeed, rhetorical concepts serve as the basis of most compositional theory and practice during the Baroque period. Baroque music endeavored to attain a “musical expression of words comparable to impassioned rhetoric.”6 During the Baroque period composers sought to paint affects that expressed the texts being set to music. Sections of arias or movements of programmatic works most often expressed only one affect, which followed the inherent meaning of the text. The painting of words with musical figuration of one or more of the elements of music such as pitch level and interval, dynamics, rhythm, timbre, articulation, harmony, imitation, and repetition often produces an overriding affect, especially when the meaning of the text implies a particular passion. Word painting has been employed throughout the history of Western art music. One rhetorical term, Hypotopsis, is particularly applicable to the subject of fire and affect. In Burmeister’s Musica poetica, Hypotopsis is described along with many other rhetorical terms with specific relation to musical figures. The rhetorical device consists of a large group of figures which all serve “to illustrate words or poetic ideas and frequently stressing the pictorial nature of the words.”7 Burmeister defines it as: De Hypotyposi. Hypotypsis est illud ornamentum, Hypotopsis. Hypotopsis is that ornament quo textus signification ita deumbratur ut ea, whereby the sense of the text is so depicted quae textui subsunt et animam vitamque non habent, that those matters contained in the text that vita esse praedita videantur. Hoc ornamentum are inanimate or lifeless seem to be brought usitatissimum est apud authenticos artifices. to life. This ornament is very much in evidence among truly master composers.8

Affects such as anger, sadness, joy, and fire are all represented in music with figurations that fit into this rhetorical category.

5 George J. Buelow, Blake Wilson, and Peter A. Hoyt. “Rhetoric and music.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. New York: Macmillan, 2001, 21:262. 6 Ibid. 7 Buelow, “Rhetoric and music.” 267. 8 Joachim Burmeister. Musical Poetics. Translated, with Introduction and Notes, by Benito V. Rivera. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993, 174-5.

Burmeister’s treatise details musical-rhetorical terms, giving examples of each. Burmeister seems to have used classical oratorical authorities, such as Cicero, in defining affect in music. In his De Inventione, Liber I (ca. 88 B.C.), Cicero wrote: Affectio est animi aut corporis ex tempore Affect is a temporary change in body aliqua de causa commutatio, ut laetitia, or spirit due to some cause, such as joy, cupiditas, metus, molestia, morbus, debilitas desire, fear, vexation, illness, weakness, et alia quae in eodem genere reperiunter and others things which are found in the same category.9

Burmeister defines musical affect as:

Affectio musica est in melodia vel in A musical affection is a period in a harmonia periodus clausula terminata, melody or in a harmonic piece, quae animos et corda hominum movet terminated by a cadence, which et afficit. moves and stirs the hearts of men. 10

When describing his list of musical ornaments (figures or parts of speech), Burmeister qualifies his work, explaining that “their variety is known to be so wide and great among composers that it is hardly possible for us to determine their number.”11 Indeed, the beginning of the seventeenth century saw the addition of many innovations in the expression of text and affect in music, far beyond the Renaissance examples cited by Burmeister. While many German musicologists strove to create a consistent doctrine of affect, Affektenlehre, recent research has shown that Baroque theorists did not establish a single overarching theory of affect.12 Many theorists did attempt to classify affect in their treatises, examining the emotive connotations of musical figures, instrumentation, forms, and styles. Baroque theorists realized that the effort to base musical affect on impassioned rhetoric was a common element in the craft of most composers of the time. We cannot be sure that terminology was consistent in the various countries, but the fact that “musical-rhetorical emphases exist in their music cannot be questioned.”13 Regardless of nationality, most Baroque composers aimed to arouse focused emotional

9 Burmeister, xlix. 10 Ibid. 11 Burmeister, 157. 12 Buelow, “Rhetoric and music.” 267. 13 Buelow, “Rhetoric and music.” 263.

states, affects, in the listener. The musical representation of affect was “the aesthetic necessity of most Baroque composers.”14 This necessity is reflective of the state of philosophical thought during the time period. The concept of affect was greatly shaped by writings of seventeenth-century philosophers. René Descartes’s Les passions de l’âme (The passions of the soul, Amsterdam, 1649) is a work which may have most decisively influenced musical representation of the passions, because of Descartes’s rationalist, scientific notion of giving a physiological nature to the passions.15 The idea of affect pervaded all the arts as a result of this natural philosophy of the 1600s. Descartes confirmed earlier theoretical writings, such as those of Giulio Caccini, Michael Praetorius, and Charles Butler, which all referred to the moving of the affects of the soul.16 These earlier works described music’s power to arouse the passions in listeners. Descartes provided a rational, scientific explanation for the physiological nature of the passions, thereby giving philosophical reasoning for the listener’s physical response to musical sound intended to arouse an affect. Composers during the Baroque period used an intense painting of one passion to arouse that same passion in the audience. Subsequent composers continued using musical affect to express words and passions. Fire as Affect Most studied affects deal with concrete emotions or passions, such as intense sadness (a lament affect), joy, anger, and so forth. The idea of studying and labeling fire as an affect is new, and is both more broadly defined than the above passions, and also more focused as an affect deeply connected to textual indications, i.e., the word fire and its associated terms, such as “burn,” “flame,” etc. It is more broadly defined in the sense that the fire affect encompasses a variety of emotive contexts which include a mixture of passions. To avoid confusion, all examples in this document will have a clear textual relation to fire. This will focus fire as the affect because of the explicit text relation to the intense feeling elicited. Most passionate musical affects do not rely on explicit textual clues to be interpreted. One would easily deem Dido’s lament in Henry Purcell’s Dido

14 Buelow, “Rhetoric and music.” 269. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid.

and Aeneas (1689) as portraying a sad affect, even without the textual inclusion of “sorrow” in the lyrics. Why, then, is fire to be considered an affect? The answer lies in the age-old connection between fire and emotion. Particularly excited emotions have historically been compared to fiery feeling. “Heated passion,” “ardent desire,” and “burning rage,” all are single emotions without the fiery adjective. With such a descriptor, the affect becomes a fire affect, a generally intensely felt, excited or agitated passion. To see that fire can indeed be viewed as an affect during the Baroque period, we only need to look at Descartes’s work on the passions. In Descartes’s writing on the passions of the soul, he explains five of the primitive passions (Love, Hatred, Desire, Joy, and Sadness) in terms of the excitations of the soul and the physiological cause. He connects all causes to variable actions of the heart. The heart is powered by a fire that is extinguished in death. The fire fluctuates in level (heartbeat, level of warmth, valve opening, etc.), controlled by a fine wind called animal spirits. Descartes describes this fire as essential to one’s very being: Art. 8. Quel est le principe de toutes ces fonctions. What the principle of all these functions is.

. . . pendent que nous vivons il y a une . . . while we live there is a chaleur continuelle en notre coeur, continual heat in our heart, qui est une espèce de feu que le sang which is a species of fire that the venous des veines y entretient, et que ce feu est blood maintains in it, and that this fire is le principe corporel de tous les mouvements the bodily principle of all the movements de nos membres. of our members. 17

Descartes states that the primitive passions are affected by the state of the heart and blood in characteristic ways. The fire in the heart helps to cause these passions through the movements and changes in the heart. For example, with Hatred, there is an accompanying “sharp and prickling heat”; with Joy a quicker pulse and pleasant warmth; with Desire “it agitates the heart more vigorously than any of the other Passions”; and with Love it excites a strong heat.18 Descartes’s notion of affect was very much in the minds of composers and theorists, as performer, composer, teacher, and theorist Johann Mattheson writes in his Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739):

17 René Descartes. The Passions of the Soul. Translated and Annotated by Stephen Voss. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1989, 23. 18 Descartes, The Passions of the Soul. 72-74.

Die Lehre von den Temperamenten und The doctrine of the temperaments and Neigungen, von welchen lektern emotions, concerning which especially Cartesius [de passionibus animae] Descartes [the passions of the soul] absonderlich deswegen zu lessen ist, is to be read weil er in der Music viel gethan hatte, because he dealt with music a lot, leisten hier sehr gute Dienste, indem man serves very well here since it teaches one to daraus lernet, die Gemüther der Zuhörer, distinguish well between the feelings of the listeners und die klingenden Kräffte, wie sie an and how the forces of sound affect them. 19 jenen wirden, wol zu unterscheiden.

Mattheson confirms that affect is the still the overriding compositional principle during the early eighteenth century, writing that in both vocal and instrumental works “the purpose of music is to stimulate all affections solely through tones and through their rhythmum.”20 Mattheson also confirms that an awareness of fire represented musically existed during his time. He examines exclamatory texts, such as: Eröffne dich, Rache, der schmauchenden Hölle! Vengeance, open yourself, to densely Reiss mich zu deiner Glut hinein! smoking hell! Draw me to thy fire! Ich liefre dir meine verzweifelte Seele! I deliver unto thee my despairing soul! 21

While Mattheson seems to dislike such heated negative emotions in music, he states that such texts should be properly portrayed musically, with “confused intervals which have an unruly relationship with one another” or “a frenzied tumult, fiddling and whistling for accompaniment . . . for which a Pyrrhic meter is well suited.”22 Mattheson refers to Pyrrhic meter, which is a reference to a poetic meter in which the foot consists of two unstressed syllables. In music, this refers to a war-like meter that tends to be quite quick or speed up.23 Mattheson clearly refers to string tremolo and quick figuration and tempo as being key textures in expressing such a fiery affect. His mention of a standard compositional technique to express intense feeling and Descartes’s ideas of affect and fire in the heart supports the interpretation of fire represented in music as an intensifying

19 German from Johann Mattheson. Der vollkommene Capellmeister. Edited by Margarete Reimann. Kassel and Basel: Bärenreiter-Verlag, 1954, 15. English from Der vollkommene Capellmeister A Revised Translation with Critical Commentary by Ernest C. Harriss. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981, 104. 20 Mattheson, 291. 21 Mattheson, 401. 22 Ibid. 23 Thomas J. Mathiesen. “Pyrrhic.” The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed [18 June, 2003]), http://www.grovemusic.com

affect. The idea of fire as essential to the feeling of intense emotion substantiates the idea that fire itself is a powerful affect, evident in a variety of contexts. The Term “Fire” What does the term “fire” encompass? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word has many meanings. To present a basic idea of the breadth of these meanings, some definitions, contexts, and etymologies are listed below:24 1. a. The natural agency or active principle operative in combustion; popularly conceived as a substance visible in the form of flame or of ruddy glow or incandescence. 1622 MABBE tr. Aleman's Guzman d'Alf. I. 49 With a face as red as fire. 1781 GIBBON Decl. & F. III. lxxi. 802 Fire is the most powerful agent of life and death.

b. as one of the four ‘elements’. 1576 BAKER Jewell of Health 170a, Mans blood…out of which draw, according to Art, the fowre Elements… But the fyre purchased of it is more precious…This fyre is named the Elixir vitæ. 1700 DRYDEN Fables, Pythag. Philos. 517 The force of fire ascended first..Then air succeeds.

c. with reference to hell or purgatory; sometimes in pl. Also in Alchemy, Fire of Hell = ALKAHEST. 1667 MILTON P.L. I. 48 In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire.

d. Volcanic heat, flame, or glowing lava; a volcanic eruption. 1734 POPE Ess. Man IV. 124 Shall burning Ætna..Forget to thunder and recall her fires? . . .

2. a. State of ignition or combustion. In phrases: on fire (also of a fire, in (a) fire): ignited, burning; fig. inflamed with passion, anger, zeal, etc. to set (or put) on fire (also in (a) fire, on a fire): to ignite, set burning; also fig. to inflame, excite intensely. To set the Thames on fire: to make a brilliant reputation. 1697 W. DAMPIER Voy. I. xv. 414 The Sea seemed all of a Fire about us.

b. transf. and fig.; also in phr. near the fire. Phr. fire in the (or one's) belly: ambition, driving force, initiative. 1611 BIBLE Jas. iii. 6 The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquitie. 1633 P. FLETCHER Purple Isl. V. iii, So shall my flagging Muse to heav'n aspire…And warm her pineons at that heav'nly fire.

24 J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, ed. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, www.oed.com [Accessed 28 May, 2003]

1709 POPE Ess. Crit. 195 Some spark of your celestial fire. c. fire of joy: a bonfire; = FEU DE JOIE 1. c1674 CLARENDON Relig. & Policy (1711) I. vi. 314 Preparations...by the magistrates for making fires of joy.

. . .

7. Lightning; a flash of lightning; a thunderbolt. More fully, levenes fire, fire of heaven. Electrical fire: the electric fluid, electricity. 1747 FRANKLIN Lett. Wks. 1840 V. 186 He imagined that the electrical fire came down the wire from the ceiling to the gun-barrel. 1748 Ibid. 215 Vapors, which have both common and electrical fire in them. 1820 SHELLEY Ode W. Wind ii. 14 From whose solid atmosphere Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst.

. . .

10. a. Luminosity or glowing appearance resembling that of fire.

1591 SHAKES. 1 Hen. VI, I. i. 12 His sparkling Eyes, repleat with wrathfull fire. 1605 Macb. I. iv. 51 Starres, hide your fires, Let not Light see my black and deepe desires! 1735 POPE Prol. Sat. 5 Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand.

b. fires of heaven, heavenly fires: (poet.) the stars; fires of St. Elmo: 1607 SHAKES. Cor. I. iv. 39 Or by the fires of heauen, Ile leaue the Foe. 1667 MILTON P.L. XII. 256 Before him burn Seaven Lamps as in a Zodiac representing The Heav'nly fires.

11. Heating quality (in liquors, etc.); concr. in jocular use, ‘something to warm one’, ardent spirit. 1737 FIELDING Hist. Reg. II. Wks. 1882 X. 223 We'll go take a little fire for 'tis confounded cold upon the stage.

. . .

13. In certain figurative applications of sense. a. A burning passion or feeling, esp. of love or rage. 1598 SHAKES. Merry W. II. i. 68 The wicked fire of lust. 1694 F. BRAGGE Disc. Parables xii. 408 Rage, and fury, and impatience…are frequently attended with the epithet of fire.

b. Ardour of temperament; ardent courage or zeal; fervour, enthusiasm, spirit. 1601 SHAKES. Jul. C. I. ii. 177, I am glad that my weake words Haue strucke but thus much shew of fire from Brutus.

1709 STEELE Tatler No. 61 1 Among many Phrases which have crept into Conversation...[is] that of a Fellow of a great deal of Fire.

c. Liveliness and warmth of imagination, brightness of fancy; power of genius, vivacity; poetic inspiration. 1680-90 TEMPLE Ess. Poetry Wks. 1731 I. 237 The Poetical Fire was more raging in one, but clearer in the other. 1737 POPE Hor. Ep. II. i. 274 Corneille's noble fire. 1847 Illust. Lond. News 10 July 27/1 As an actress, she has fire and intelligence.

The common definition of fire as the “natural agency or active principle operative in combustion” is useful as a starting point, because this idea of activating or inflaming may be extrapolated to many other contexts.25 Beyond language – “feuer,” “le feu,” “fuoco,” or “fire,” among other variations (burn, flame, rage, incensed, ignite, etc.) – fire in music can be taken in literal and often figurative contexts. Following is a table of terms associated with fire in the languages of the countries discussed in this thesis: Table 1.1. Terms associated with fire.

English Latin Italian French German Fire ignis (lit.); fax Fuoco (foco); feu; incendie Feuer; Brand; Glut (facis); ardor (fig.); incendio Flame flamma fiamma flamme Flamme Fiery igneus (lit.); ardens ardente; infocato de feu (passion); feurig (fig.) plein (blazing sun) To fire accendere infiammare enflammer (fig.) brennen; feuern To flame scintillare andare in fiamma; s'enflammer; flammen infiammarsi di rabbia s'embraser; (fig.) To ignite accendere; accendere enflammer zünden flammam concipere (fig.) To burn urere; cremare; bruciare; in fiamma incendier; bruler; brennen; verbrennen flagrare; ardere (burning) ardent (burning faith) To be on fire ardere in fiamma être en feu in Brand To set on fire incendere dare fuoco incinére; incendier anfeuern

To light up (fig.) hilaris fieri illuminarsi s'éclairer; briller de entzünden; joie aufleuchten To inflame inflammare; infiammare enflammer; entzünden incendere (fig.) exacerber; aggraver Ardor ardor ardore; fervore ardeur Eifer; Inbrust; Glut Ardent ardens ardente passioné; fervent feurig; eifrig

25 Simpson, 942.

English Latin Italian French German To excite excitare; incendere eccitare; agitare exciter; erregen; aufregen (fig.) enthousiasmer; animé (excited) To agitate agitare; perturbare agitare; turbare faire compagne agitieren; beunruhigen Agitated tumultuos; agitazione agité; inquiet agitatorisch turbulentus (fig.) (inflammatory) Heat calor; ardor; fervor; calore; intenso chaleur; feu; animé Hitze; Wärme; aestus (fierce); (fig.) - fuoco; (heated) Heizung (heating); ardore Brunst (sexual); Eifer (battle); brunsten (to be in heat) Hot calidus; fervens; caldo; fig. - accanito; chaud; fièvreux heiss; stechen (sun); aestuos; acer; ardente; violento; (fever) ardens focoso Lightning fulgur; fulmen lampo, fulmine éclairs; fulgurant Blitz (destructive effects) Thunder tonitrus tuono; fulmine tonnerre; foudre Donner; Gewitter (thunderbolt) (thunderbolt); (thunderstorm) To thunder tonare tuonare tonner donnern Rage furor collera; furia rage; colère Wut To rage furere; saevire infuriare (storm) faire rage; tempêter wüten; toben; in Wut geraten; wütend machen (to enrage) To incense (to incendere infuriare outré (incensed) erzürnen; aufhetzend anger) (incendiary) Mad furios matto; pazzo; furioso fou/folle; furieux verrückt; böse Anger ira rabbia colère Zorn To anger irritare arrabbiare en colère erzürnen Angry iratus arrabiato; furioso; furieux; de colère zornig; böse; infiammato entzündet Hatred odium odio haine; aversion Hass To hate odisse odiare; detestare détester; haïr hassen Rapture exsultatio esaltato ravissement Entzückung To enrapture rapere rapire s'extasier hinreissen Ecstasy ecstasis; elatio estasi extase Verzückung Fervor fervor fervore ferveur Inbrust Fervent ardens fervido fervent inbrüstig Proud (roots related) Superbus Fiero Fièrement stolz Love amor amore amour; le coup de Liebe foudre (love at first sight) To fall in love with amorem incendere essere innamorato être tomber sich heftig verlieben amoureux in Heart (fig.) Animus cuore (core) coeur Herz; Mut fassen (take heart)

From the various sources consulted, these applicable contexts will be grouped into the six basic qualitative categories which follow.

Literal Fire - The Four Elements Aside from the definition above, fire literally constitutes one of the four elements, along with earth, water, and air.26 During the Baroque period, the successful imitation of nature was one of the highest artistic aims. With their origins in Greek philosophy and science, the four elements serve as aspects of nature from classical antiquity that have often been represented artistically. The ancient Greeks viewed fire as the single primal element which made up the whole of matter. Fire to them was both rational and divine, “with no distinction between its spiritual and material aspects.”27 Aristotelian physics held that fire was hot and dry, air, hot and moist, water, cold and moist, and earth, cold and dry. By the Baroque period, the four elements still functioned as basic divisions of matter. Descartes refers to the four elements as basic to nature, and to a species of fire as essential to the life of the human heart.28 While fire began to be considered a process by which elements and materials transform in science and alchemy, many seventeenth- century scientists and philosophers still perceived fire as the basic natural element. In nature, fire is a physical phenomenon associated with the burning sun, heat, volcanoes, lightning, and other intense lights.29 Common synonyms in this context include “combustion,” “flame,” “incandescence,” “ignition,” “conflagration,” and “radiance.”30 Texts of pieces musically depicting this type of fire include the corresponding language’s word or related word for “fire.” The power of fire to destroy, to provide light, to burn, and to flame provided composers with ample imagery to paint in music. Fire as Rage As already mentioned, fire is also associated with many emotive qualities. Most people can easily relate to feelings of intense, burning anger, and this aspect of fire is also reflected in many pieces of music. Descartes describes Anger as a type of Hatred that is often mixed with Desire to avenge, and with Love for oneself, yielding a vengeful rage.

26 Ibid. 27 Robert B. Todd. “Stoicism.” In The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia. Edited by Gary B. Ferngren. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 2000, 132. 28 Descartes, The Passions of the Soul. 12. 29 Hans Kurath, ed. Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1952, 579- 581. 30 Addison Wesley Longman, ed. Longman Synonym Dictionary. New York: Rodale Press, 1979, 411.

Rage creates an agitation which enters the heart and “excites a heat more sharp and burning than that which can be excited there by Love or by Joy.”31 Baroque rage arias often contain this type of musical fire, where the heat of vehemence, hate, wrath, jealousy, or vengeance is clearly evident in the music.32 Very often, the texts of such pieces, when in Italian, contain the word vendetta, which indicates vengeful action. Composers during the Baroque period frequently use sweeping motivic gestures and driving pulses to set up such agitated feelings. Fire as Love Love is sometimes associated with sweet melodies in music, but the type of fiery love applicable to this topic is a passionate, burning emotion. In fact, the Latin idiomatic expression for “to fall in love” is amorem incendere, which literally translates as “to burn with love.” The type of love varies, depending on the context. It may be a lusty, desirous love, which “agitates the heart more vigorously than all the other Passions” according to Descartes.33 It may be a deep ardent love, exciting a strong heat in the heart agitating the brain.34 In song, it is sometimes the god Cupid who fires an arrow to incite characters to feel such ardent love. In other texts, the feeling is simply an intense passionate feeling (e.g., the Italian amore) between lovers. Other phrases which are roughly equivalent to this feeling of fiery love in this context include “burning passion,” and “full of ardour.”35 Spiritual Fire Possibly one of the most powerful of fires is the spiritual kind, in which people are changed by the power of God. Christianity heavily influenced the musical culture of the Baroque period. Many composers made their livelihood by working as church musicians in various capacities. Consequently, powerful spiritual transformations such as those performed by the grace of the Holy Spirit were often depicted musically. According to Christian doctrine, the liturgical color of Pentecost is red, the color of the Holy Spirit. This is because Pentecost commemorates the descent of the Holy

31 Descartes, The Passions of the Soul. 126. 32 Kurath, 582. 33 Descartes, The Passions of the Soul. 73. 34 Descartes, The Passions of the Soul. 74. 35 Longman, 411.

Spirit in the form of tongues of red fire over the heads of the Apostles gathered together in a space safe from hostile street crowds.36 After being infused and inflamed by those flaming tongues, the Apostles left their refuge and boldly preached the risen Christ to any people they would encounter.37 The inspired, aroused, and exalted state that the apostles exhibited showed such a great external lack of contact with reality that they were judged to be in a drunken, otherworldly condition.38 Fervent religious attitudes are often associated with this type of passionate fire. Fiery religious devotion can create an ardent desire to convert others as the Holy Spirit has transformed the minds and hearts of believers in Christianity. Divine love can cause spiritual fire through influence and inspiration, especially in the case of the arts. St. Cecilia, patron saint of music, has been the object of many artistic works, often inspiring artistic creativity as an intermediary with fiery influence. The complex Greek mythological character, Orpheus, has also been an inspiration for the arts. The subject of at least three pioneering operas at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Orpheus is the voice of Music, and “presides over the transformations and interaction of poetry and science in the period 1600-1800.”39 Orpheus as a myth metamorphosed through the centuries into a figure with Christian and pagan implications. As a singer who moved animate and inanimate creatures with his music, Clement of Alexandria interpreted Orpheus to be a character who aides in the understanding of Christ and His power.40 During the Renaissance, the Orpheus myth took on a fiery affect which influenced subsequent artistic works. The writer Marcilio Ficino compares the power of the sun to the power of God, and thereby burns divine inspiration into the eyes of Orpheus: The singer (or artist) performs in an inspired state ‘aroused by the Muses’ frenzy.’ ‘Then his eyes burn, and he rises up on both feet and he knows how to sing tunes that he has never learnt….’ It is this state of God-given frenzy, this furor divinus, that enables the mind to perceive and understand the symbolic structure of the universe. It is divinus because it comes from God and raises to God. The artist under the influence of this madness is free to range beyond his normal limits, he is lifted

36 G. Paul Parr, ed. St. John the Baptist Book for Catholic Worship. Reading, PA: St. John’s Press, 1974, 260-261. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 John Warden, ed. Orpheus: The Metamorphoses of a Myth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982, 4. 40 Warden, 51.

to the height of heaven like Ganymede on the back of the divine eagle. The state of inspiration is visible in the rapt expression on the face and the ‘Orphic’ pose. 41

Orpheus is said to possess the four phases of furor: the poetic, which calms the agitation of the soul, the sacerdotal, which prepares the soul for exaltation, the prophetic, which raises the soul to the level of the angels, and the erotic, which unites the soul with God.42 The Holy Spirit, Orpheus, and St. Cecilia are exemplars of the type of spiritual love which can burn, change us like a fire, or inspire us to create. During the Baroque period, the power of Christianity mixed with the spiritual overtones of well-known myths provided a source of deeply affective concepts for artistic expression. Fire of Hell These last two emotive categories are combinations of the above fire qualities. Fiery rage combined with religious fire leads us to the fiery pits of Hell, where sinners are punished eternally for their evil actions.43 Artists were certainly aware of the Biblical implications of Hell. Texts which reference this fiery place often contain the word “Hell.” The fires of Hell are depicted as extremely intense, as are musical settings of such ideas. Fiery Love for God The final category of fire used here is a combination of the ardent passionate love for God by the religiously fervent. Deep, burning love for God, showing ardent devotion and Christian ideals, is characterized as having the capacity to purify one’s soul.44 In a book on the Catholic liturgy, William Zumbar further describes this fire: “The Holy Spirit helps to move our hearts to feel the love of Christ and to realize that this fire is communicated not only from the Holy Spirit to the person, but also between the person and his neighbors.”45 Many liturgical texts, especially the Stabat Mater, include words such as inflammatus, accensus, and ardeat that have often been interpreted as this type of fire and set to music in an appropriately corresponding manner. In Baroque terms,

41 Warden, 98. 42 Ibid. 43 Simpson, 942. 44 Kurath, 582. 45 Parr, 260-261.

understanding the greatness and glory of God led to spiritual ecstasy, such as when St. Theresa described herself as “all on fire with a great love of God” after an angel thrust a golden spear into her heart.46 The fire-like ecstasy of comprehending the glory of God is very often represented by a profound intensity in music. A Framework for the Fire Affect From the time of Plato, music has impelled the human heart to momentary emotional states and to permanent shaping of character. The power of music to express passion became known as a device of musical affect during the Baroque period. The connection between passion and bodily causation led composers to attempt to elicit emotional and bodily response through music in a single, focused affect. The philosophical writings of the Baroque point to fire as a key concept in the causation of such affect. The heat and agitation caused by the excitation of fire changes the quality of the passion felt. Fire is an affect on its own in pure form, or as an intensifier of a passion or mixture of passions. Composers and musical theorists of the Baroque period were well aware of Descartes’s writings, as well as the idea of using music to depict an affect vividly in a manner similar to an impassioned rhetorical delivery. The French composer and theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau affirms this idea of music and affect stirring the audience in his Observations sur notre instinct pour la musique, et sur son principe (1754): Pour joüir pleinement des effets de la Musique, The full enjoyment of the effects of music il faut être dans un pur abandon de soi-même, calls for a sheer abandonment of oneself, & pour en juger, c’est au Principe par lequel and the judgment of it calls for a reference on est affecté qu’il faut s’en rapporter. to the principle by which one is affected. Ce principe est la Nature même, That principle is Nature itself; c’est d’elle que nous tenons ce sentiment qui it is through Nature that we possess that nous meut dans toutes nos Opératons musicales, feeling which stirs us in all our musical elle nous en a fait un don qu’on peut appeller instinct. 47 Instinct.

46 Martin, 103. 47 French from Jean-Philippe Rameau, Observations sur notre instinct pour la musique, et sur son principe. From Facsimile of 1754 Paris edition. New York: Broude Brothers, 1967, aij. English from Edward A, Lippman, The Philosophy and Aesthetics of Music. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999, 111.

A Transitionary Example Before delving into Baroque examples of fire and affect, it is important to note that Renaissance composers were already concerned with expressing ideas of fire in their compositions. Thomas Morley (1557/8-1602) “Fyer, Fyer!” (1595) This musical example from the Renaissance period serves as a bridge to the Baroque. The text is fairly explicit in describing burning love and desire, including cries for help (“Ay me”). Morley uses polyphonic imitative technique to achieve a sense of this burning desire. One voice consistently enters just a bit earlier than the rest to drive the madrigal forward. The “my heart” entrances are also staggered and the placement paints an anxiously beating heart. Instead of using typical polyphonic technique with voices entering at even rhythmic intervals, Morley chooses to offset just one voice for the “fyer” entrances, and then offset more of the voices, but in quick succession for the beating heart entrances. The unpredictability of these imitative entrances and their close proximity to each successive entrance give this piece its fiery quality of love desperate for fulfillment. Composers during the Baroque continued to paint words in manners similar to Renaissance style and in more innovative ways. The framework of categories of fiery affect described above will serve as an aesthetic framework for the following chapters. It is important to qualify carefully what constitutes an idea that has not been defined previously, especially when that idea has such affective/emotive qualities. The idea of music and affect combining into a concept of intense, exciting musical fire has been presented in this chapter. The following chapter will focus on the musical, cultural, and social background of the Baroque period leading up to 1700. It will begin by examining some musical examples, both literal (when the text contains “fire” or related words) and figurative (implied fire). Use of the framework to establish clear cases of the fire affect leading up to the early eighteenth century will commence with this chapter.

Example 1.1. Morley “Fyer, Fyer!” 1595. Source: Oxford Book of English Madrigals. Ed. by Phillip Ledger. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.

CHAPTER 2

KINDLING FIRE: MONTEVERDI AND THE STILE CONCITATO

Before examining the late Baroque, it is important to provide a historical background of the preceding century in Europe. This chapter will present an overview of the history and musical styles of Italy, France, Germany, and England focusing on the musical expression of fire leading up to the eighteenth century. The musical examples will provide a basis for showing types of musical fire in various contexts. The examples in this chapter will show how a key fire-like word was more often painted by itself rather than presented as an affect lasting for an entire section of a piece. Europe in 1600 It is important to note that Europe in 1600 was in the midst of a number of changes in political, religious, and artistic practice. The Protestant Reformation had a significant impact on the previous century that continued into the seventeenth century. The Renaissance mentality of reclaiming classical ideas and widening intellectual horizons led to certain radical notions which would greatly shape Western thought. In addition to Martin Luther’s religious ideas, Galileo’s publications in the early 1600s questioned earlier scientific beliefs as to the nature of the cosmos. The beginning of the Baroque brought about a progressive mentality. This mentality was not widespread in 1600, but pioneers in science, religion, politics, and the arts began to pave the way for change. Music in the 1600s began to diversify and distinct national musical styles began to take shape. In the sixteenth century, musical style and performance was more homogenous; roughly the same type of music was being performed from England to Italy.1 The aesthetic of musical rhetoric–placing emphasis on the dramatic setting of text, or word-painting–greatly influenced this change. Because of the emphasis on a clear evocation of text in music, words became a foremost consideration to composers. As discussed in the previous chapter, rhetoric in music became a prevailing concern during

1 David Schulenberg. Music of the Baroque. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, 2.

the Baroque period. The inherent linguistic differences of accent, inflection, and vowel and consonant sounds led to music that reflected nationality. Music migrated southward from northwest Europe during the Middle Ages, but this trend reversed by the beginning of the Baroque.2 Italy became a key instigator in changing musical style. Italian artists and musicians traveled to Germany, England, and France, while German, English, and French musicians also traveled to Italy to learn from the creators of opera.3 While this thesis focuses on Western art music, it should be noted that the omission of discussion on Spanish and Portuguese music has to do with its limited influence on the rest of Europe. This chapter will set up the years 1700-1750 by discussing the new compositional styles and representative examples of growing musical fire in Italy, Germany, France, and England. Italy, Monteverdi, and the seconda pratica The rise of new genres, strikingly distinct national musical styles, the use of specific instruments with correspondingly idiomatically composed parts, ornamentation, and improvisation all contributed to the changing practice of musical composition beginning around 1600. Opera was just one of many new genres (oratorio, cantata, concerto, etc.) that emerged during the Baroque period. The importance of affect and rhetoric in musical composition also became more prominent. Along with Giulio Caccini (1551-1618) and Jacopo Peri (1561-1621) of the Florentine Camerata, Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) prioritized affect and musical rhetoric in helping to establish opera as a new musical genre. The musical style of Monteverdi, Peri, and Caccini focused on a clear elucidation of the text. Such an emphasis led Monteverdi to use traditional Renaissance techniques of musical rhetoric, but also led him to the creation of new devices to present the text more vividly and dramatically in music. Because of his new techniques, music theorist Giovanni Maria Artusi (1546-1613) accused him of deviating from traditional methods of composition.4 Monteverdi defended himself by saying that his method, the seconda pratica, was justified as a means to the clear

2 Schulenberg, Music of the Baroque. 8. 3 Ibid. 4 Margaret Murata, ed. Source Readings in Music History, Vol. 4, The Baroque Era. Leo Treitler, general editor. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998, 18.

expression of the meaning and emotion in the text.5 This debate is emblematic of the controversy over artistic expression going on at the beginning of the seventeenth century as musical conventions were undergoing a transition. Prima pratica composers, such as Palestrina, used strict compositional techniques of counterpoint, voice leading, and harmony. The more adventurous (harmonically and otherwise) seconda pratica was used by Monteverdi and his followers. Monteverdi explored new compositional techniques, such as unprepared dissonances in accordance with the meaning of the text, in search of similitudine del affetto, “resemblance of emotion.”6 In this goal, he shows a clear stress on text and affect, and his compositions reflect such concerns. His contemporary, Caccini, also stresses the importance of affect, saying that it is: …nothing other than the expression of the words chosen to be sung and their ideas, by means of the power of different notes and their varied stresses, tempered by softness and loudness, a power capable of moving the affection of the listener. 7 Monteverdi’s early approach to the expression of fiery text is reminiscent of Renaissance word painting techniques. His Quattro libro de madrigali (Venice, 1603), displays a mixture of old and new techniques. The dissonance treatment reflects his new seconda pratica, but some of the word painting reflects traditional techniques from Renaissance music. For example, word painting occurs in “Luci serene,” as the words foco and strugge are set by a vivid, quick twisting figure and syncopated rhythm (in the tenor line m. 42 and 44).8 The text below provides the context behind painting a fiery affect. The fiery imagery throughout the text clearly indicates a fiery desire and love. Luci serene e chiare, Eyes serene and clear, Voi m’incendete, voi, ma prov’il core You inflame me, you, but my heart feels Nell’incedio diletto, non dolore. In burning delight, not pain. Dolci parole e care, Sweet words and dear, Voi mi ferite, voi, ma prov’il petto You pierce me, you, but my breast feels Non dolor ne la piaga, ma diletto. Not pain in the wound, but delight. O miracol d’amore: Oh, miracle of love: Alma ch’è tutta foco e tutta sangue That a spirit that is all fire and all blood Si strugg’e non si duol, muor e non langue. Is consumed but does not suffer, dies but does not languish.

5 Murata, 27. 6 Murata, 157. 7 Murata, 223-224. 8 Schulenberg, Music of the Baroque. 36.

In “Quell’ augellin che canta,” the word ardo is set in a melismatic scalar ascending line. The figure is first sung by the first soprano and is quickly imitated by the second soprano. Such quick imitation between the two upper voices reflects the ardency of both the word and the overall affect.

Example 2.1. Monteverdi “Luci serene” 1603. Source: Music of the Baroque: An Anthology of Scores. Ed. by David Schulenberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Quell’ augellin che canta That little bird which sings Si dolcemente e lascivetto vola So sweetly and flies merrily Or da l’abete al faggio Now from the fir to the beech Ed or dal faggio al mirto, And now from the beech to the myrtle, S’avresse umano spirto, If it had human understanding, Direbbe: “Ardo d’amore,” It would say: “I burn with love.” E chiam’ il suo desio che li rispomd’: And his love would say “Ardo d’amor anch’io.” “I also am burning with love.” Che sii tu benedetto Blessings on you, Amoroso, gentil, vago augelletto loving, gentle, charming little bird.

Example 2.2. Monteverdi “Quell’ augellin che canta” Monteverdi 1603. Source: Music of the Baroque: An Anthology of Scores. Ed. by David Schulenberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Monteverdi went on to pioneer new ways of achieving figurative fire in music. He narrowed the passions or affections down to three (as opposed to the five listed by Descartes): anger, moderation, and humility.9 He equated these passions with corresponding musical terms of “agitated, soft, and moderate,” with agitated being a new kind of musical expression.10 The Italian word for agitated is concitato, which can also be translated as “excited” or “emotional.” Monteverdi refers to Plato as a source for his reasoning that there should be such an affect, especially to express war. Monteverdi pioneered an extremely important compositional technique of achieving agitation in music, the stile concitato or agitated style.11 He accomplished this affect through the use of tremolo and pizzicato.12 He used contrasting figurations to heighten the affect–by juxtaposing a fast tempo, repeated sixteenth notes, and agitated leaps with a slower tempo and a calmer texture.

9 Murata, 157. 10 Murata, 158. 11 Schulenberg, Music of the Baroque. 76. 12 Ibid.

The combination of Monteverdi’s expertise as a violinist along with the instrument’s nature as an articulator of pitch at a pace faster than most instruments led to the violin’s crucial role in the achievement of agitated textures in music. We cannot be certain whether it was an occasional improvisatory practice to use string tremolo at appropriate dramatic moments before Monteverdi’s writings. However, his 1638 preface to his eighth book of madrigals, Madrigali guerrieri, et amorosi, actually implies that Monteverdi believes that his creation of this affect was “the first essay in this genus.”13 Monteverdi emphasized the dramatic setting of text in music with his adventurous use of various styles, dissonances, and rhythmic gestures. He used instruments both to prompt and reflect changes in characters’ moods and emotions as well as changes in the setting. In his Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda Monteverdi uses the stile concitato to effect a warlike scene–galloping horses, heated emotion, and actual battling. The result is quite effective. The narrator’s rapid declamation of the text and the strings’ quick, short rhythmic figures set the tone of the scene and the fiery anger and battle-ready attitude of the characters. The first instance of the strings’ tremolo occurs when the Testo is describing the two battlers as Quai due tori gelosi e d’ira ardenti (“Like two bulls jealous and with anger burning”).14

13 Murata, 158. 14 Schulenberg, Music of the Baroque: An Anthology of Scores. 56.

Example 2.3. Monteverdi from Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda 1624. Source: Music of the Baroque: An Anthology of Scores. Ed. by David Schulenberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Later in the scene the actual battle is described in the agitated style, when the narrator sings of the violence, rage, and the warriors’ quest for revenge. As he describes the two warriors closing in on each other and the fight growing (D’hor in hor più si mesce e più ristretta Si fa la pugna e spada oprar non giova; “Closer and closer they move, and closer grows the fight, so that swords are useless”), the tessitura of the Testo’s vocal line jumps a third higher. The strings tremolo also leaps in pitch twice and crescendos to forte to heighten the battle intensity further, thereby creating a fiery rage affect. Monteverdi’s foreword to this piece directs that the singer and instruments “reflect the changing emotional character of the text, implying changes of tempo and dynamics beyond those indicated in the score.”15

15 Schulenberg, Music of the Baroque: An Anthology of Scores. 62.

Example 2.4. Monteverdi from Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda 1624. Source: Music of the Baroque: An Anthology of Scores. Ed. by David Schulenberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001

Monteverdi’s seemingly unprecedented use of these compositional techniques paved the way for later Baroque composers to use this agitated style in their musical writing of fiery moments. Handel actually labeled a musical passage in Jephtha “concitato” over 100 years after Monteverdi first used this style.16

Example 2.5. Handel from Jephtha 1751. Source: Music of the Baroque. By David Schulenberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Rhetoric, affect, and the influence of Monteverdi northward Monteverdi’s radical innovations in musical composition greatly influenced the future of Western art music. However, even though Italian musical influence traveled northward during the 1600s, the boldness of the Italian style did not take hold

16 Schulenberg, Music of the Baroque. 202-203.

immediately in other countries. Distinctive national attitudes toward music and its function were forming in France, Germany, and England. In eventually absorbing Italian musical styles, each country adapted the new techniques to the vernacular language of the people there. Countries became identified with national temperaments, which then corresponded to national musical styles. Athanasius Kircher (1601/2-1680) was a teacher and writer well-versed in national styles of music-making, particularly in Germany, France, and Italy. In his treatise, Musurgia universalis (Rome, 1650), he stressed that “there is an appropriate style according to the customs of the nation.”17 Kircher also emphasizes the musical leadership and boldness of the Italians, saying that: Italy justly appointed to itself the first place in music from the beginning, for there has not been a single age when all the principal composers did not produce music out of Italy, to the continual wonderment of all, with the most precious works. . . They used all styles appropriately and with the best judgment, and were truly born for music. . . They do not affect just the ears with this variety, but they also draw out both the torments and the passions of the soul, arousing them in every possible way with great power. 18 This distinction between musical styles manifested itself in the musical treatment of agitated feelings. Italians were quick to be excited by emotion, but other countries were more accustomed to restraint, preferring a studied dignity to free, natural expression of affect.19 This does not mean there was never an occasion for a fiery passion to be portrayed in the music of other regions, but it does indicate why such bold gestures were rarer. In German-speaking regions, the favored musical style according to Athanasius Kircher was “serious, moderate, sober, and choral,” corresponding to the national temperament that was “serious, strong, constant, solid, and toilsome.”20 Heinrich Schütz’s career and compositional output as the leading German composer of the mid- seventeenth century is representative of the emerging German musical style of the Baroque. Schütz (1585-1672) served as Capellmeister in Dresden through the Thirty

17 Murata, 200. 18 Murata, 202-203. 19 Ibid. 20 Murata, 201.

Years’ War. He took trips to Venice in 1609 and 1629 and studied with both Giovanni Gabrieli (c1554-7-1612) and Monteverdi. His compositional style reflects these influences. Much of Schütz’s music consists of polychoral textures in a style reminiscent of Gabrieli. While his compositions do indicate an emphasis on spatial relations between sounds and the harmonic language of his early works reflects Gabrieli’s style, Schütz was clearly influenced by Monteverdi’s emphasis on clear declamation of text. Schütz did not use many of the new devices Monteverdi pioneered, but he did use word painting techniques to elicit the meaning of the text in music. His music shows the integration of musical figuration with the stresses and texture of the German language. Schütz did not use an agitated style, per se, but he certainly was aware of fire as a stirring intensity. The following example from his Historia der Auferstehung Jesu Christi, SWV 50 (1623) depicts the reaction of two disciples after speaking with the risen Christ. They are surprised and spiritually inflamed as they say Brannte nicht unser Herz in uns (“Did not our heart burn within us”). Schütz sets the word brannte (“burn”) on a quick ascending gesture which is closely imitated by the second voice. The figuration is repeated three times, climaxing the third time on the highest pitches of the section (the G in the first tenor part). The effect paints the idea being aroused by Jesus’ presence and excited by the fire inspired in their hearts which causes them to exclaim their passionate response. According to Kircher, the French are “more changeable” than the Germans, possessing a style that is “cheerful and lively.”21 The French heavily integrated dance rhythms into their music and emphasized a fluidity through sections, evident in the lack of clear section demarcations between recitative and aria in French opera. In France, the music of the seventeenth century was dominated by Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687) who served in the court of Louis XIV for most of his career. Lully established the genre of French opera with its court airs and ballets. French language is inherently without accent and French music of the period often reflects this with the absence of regular meter. Meter shifts fluidly and stress is achieved through trills, duration, and melismatic embellishments.

21 Murata, 201.

Example 2.6. Schütz from Historia der Auferstehung 1623. Source: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke: Herausgegeben im Auftrag der Neuen Schütz-Gesellschaft. Ed. Walter Simon Huber. Basel: Bärenreiter-Verlag, 1956.

Extreme moments of passion do occur in French opera, but the agitated affect was not prominent in the court music of the seventeenth century. It seems that such musical intensity is displayed only in moments of divinely inspired madness. In Lully’s Atys (1676), the title character is cursed by Cybele and driven so mad that he kills his beloved Sangaride thinking she is a monster. A messenger from Hell comes with a flaming torch with which to cast an evil spell on Atys. Lully uses wild string figures to paint the flame cursing Atys. The intense violin texture presages the fire of Hell that condemns Atys at the beginning of the next scene when he kills Sangaride in a fit of insanity. The agitated quality reflects the agitation of both the cursed and the cursers, the trembling fear and vengeful anger.

Example 2.7. Lully from Atys 1676. Source: Les Chefs-d’oeuvre classiques de l’opéra français. Volume 16. [microfilm] Ed. by Theodore Michaelis. Piano/Vocal reduction. Washington D.C., 1880?-1883?

Near the end of the final act an instrumental passage concludes with the quaking of the earth and flashes of lightning, representing nature’s violent response to the horror of Atys’s act. The thunder and lightning are painted with agitated string figurations (see second system of Example 2.8).

Example 2.8. Lully from Atys 1676. Source: Ibid.

While England maintained a strong musical heritage of madrigals and lute songs during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the rich tradition was virtually gone by the mid 1600s. This was caused by war and the Commonwealth government’s ban on elaborate sacred and theatrical music.22

22 Schulenberg, Music of the Baroque. 126.

English musical style during the sixteenth century was influenced by Italian and French styles. During the Restoration, composers such as John Blow (1649-1708) and Henry Purcell (1659-1695) began composing more dramatic works in the form of masques. Before the growing wealth and prosperity brought an influx of Italian composers and musicians to England at the beginning of the eighteenth century, English passion was reflected in the affect of airs in these semi-operas. The lament affect was most prominent in these works, displayed in airs such as Dido’s lament “When I am laid in earth” from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1689). Agitated passion in English Baroque music of the seventeenth century is not clearly discernible until late in the century with the emergence of the mad song genre. “Let the dreadful engines” (c. 1696) is an example of such a Purcell aria. It is nearly a showpiece mad song that was used as incidental music for a theatrical setting of “The Comical History of Don Quixote” by Thomas D’Urfey. In a style reminiscent of Monteverdi, Purcell uses quick declamatory text to express such heated anger, in many quasi-recitative sections of the piece. Rapid rhythms and angular vocal lines climaxing on high pitches express the driven, burning tone of the text. The mad song begins with a vivid depiction of fiery lightning and thunder roaring in melismatic phrases in the voice. The heat of anger is then expressed with repeated text growing in intensity and increasing in pitch (“my rage is hot, is hot, is hot”). The fire of Hell is represented by mounting flames on a mounting dotted run reaching its height at the high pitch on “skies” (E flat). Rapid declamation of fiery text is also evident in recitativo passages of the song, indicating the incensed passion and mad fury of the singer though quickly articulated text. While not explicitly indicated in the continuo part, quick pulsing and rapid tremolo figurations would certainly fall within the norms of performance practice, thereby aiding the painting of the fire of the character’s madness, during and between sections. Let the dreadful engines of eternal will, The thunder roar and crooked lightning kill, My rage is hot as theirs, as fatal too, And dares as horrid executions do.

Or let the frozen North its rancour show, Within my breast far greater tempests grow; Despair’s more cold than all the winds can blow.

Can nothing warm me? Yes, Lucinda’s eyes. There Etna, there Vesuvio lies To furnish Hell with flames that mounting reach the skies.

Ye pow’rs, I did but use her name And see how all the meteors flame! Blue lightning flashes round the court of Sol And now the globe more fiercely burns than once at Phaeton’s fall.

Ah! Where are now those flow’ry groves Where Zephir’s fragrant winds did play? Where guarded by a troop of loves, The fair Lucinda sleeping lay. There sung the nightingale and lark, Around us all was sweet and gay, We ne’er grew sad till it grew dark, Nor nothing fear’d but short’ning day.

I glow, but ‘tis with hate. Why must I burn for this ingrate?

Cool it then, and rail, Since nothing can prevail.

When a woman love pretends, ‘Tis but till she gains her ends, And for better and for worse Is for marrow of the purse. Where she jilts you o’er and o’er. Proves a slattern or a whore. This hour will tease and vex, And will cuckold ye the next. They were all contriv’d in spite, To torment us, not delight, But to scold and scratch and bite And not one of them proves right But all are witches by this light.

And so I fairly bid ‘em, and the world goodnight.

This chapter has examined the beginnings of new compositional techniques for the expression of agitated passion in music. Monteverdi’s new devices and seconda pratica techniques led to the incorporation of this affect in music of Italy and later in the music of Germany, France, and England, albeit in national musical styles representative of the respective temperament and language of the respective countries.

The end of the seventeenth century leads us to the height of the Baroque period. In the following chapters we will see how composers express fire even more vividly during the high Baroque era from 1700-1750.

Example 2.9

Example 2.10

Example 2.11

Examples 2.9-2.11 H. Purcell “Let the dreadful engines of eternal will” 1696. Source: Henry Purcell Songs, Volume 5. Ed. by Tippett and Bergmann. London: Schott and Company, Limited, 1996.

CHAPTER 3

THE FLAMES OF FRANCE AND GERMANY

France

In the early eighteenth century French music was still very court centered. Louis XIV was king until his death in 1715, and the shadow of Lully extended well into the 1700s. Paris was the center of political, social, and musical life. Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764), composer, harpsichordist, and theorist greatly contributed to many musical genres, including the cantata, motet, keyboard music, and opera. He dominated the French music scene once he established himself as a composer of opera with Hippolyte et Aricie (1733). Early eighteenth-century French composers such as Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643-1704) continued the Lullian tradition of composing tragedies, embracing the idea of depicting physical phenomena in music.1 Rameau traveled to Italy for a brief period around the turn of the eighteenth century, and the premiere of his first opera (in France) met with mixed reviews because of the apparent Italian influence.2 He adopted the basic forms that Lully established in his operatic works, but he intensified the emotional outbursts, declamation of text, and agitated scenes with tremolo, scalar melismatic phrases, and generally agile orchestral textures.3 Italian influence is further evident in the more virtuosic vocal lines and emotionally-charged monologue arias full of pathos. Diderot claimed that before Rameau "no-one had distinguished the delicate shades of expression that separate the tender from the voluptuous, the voluptuous from the impassioned, the impassioned from the lascivious."4

1 François Lesure. “France.” The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online. ed. L. Macy. (Accessed [23 May, 2003]), 2 Graham Sadler. “Rameau, Jean-Philippe.” The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online. ed. L. Macy. (Accessed [23 May, 2003]), 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid.

Rameau expressed fire in music as a word to paint and as an overriding affect. The following is an example of the former use, showing a vivid depiction of fire with melismatic vocal writing. Jean-Philippe Rameau Scene 5 from Pygmalion 1748 In this scene Pygmalion sings praise to Amour, god of Love, for infusing him with his fire. Rameau uses a joyfully buoyant musical setting to show the intense happiness spurred by the love arrow fired by Amour. Coloratura and a quick entrance that darts to the forefront on the word Lance (the verb “to fire”) characterize his compositional approach in representing the fire of love. Pygmalion urges Amour to fire arrows and set his fire burning bright. The brilliant melismatic phrasing, sparkling string gestures, and flaring onsets on the word Lance set the fire affect clearly. Regne, Amour, fais briller tes flammes, Reign Love, make your flames shine, Lance tes traits dans nos âmes. Fire your power into our hearts. Sur des cœurs soumis à tes lois Our hearts subjected to your laws Epuise ton carquois. Exhausted by your quiver. Tu nous fais, dieu charmant, You make for us, charming god, le plus heureux destin. the happiest destiny. Je tiens de toi l’objet dont mon âme est ravie, I show you the object who has delighted my heart, Et cet objet si cher respire, tient la vie And this precious object breathes, sustaining the life Des feux de ton flambeau divin. Of my fires and your divine torch.

Rameau used various orchestral and vocal gestures to express particularly fiery moments in his dramatic works. He used such writing in moments of extreme fury, natural disasters or lightning storms, and ardent desire. In his Platée (1745), Jupiter appears accompanied by une pluie de feu tombe du ciel (“a rain of fire falling from the sky”) demonstrating his power. The god’s thunderbolts continue as Platée cries out Ciel! Qu’elle terrible rosée! (“Heavens! What a terrible visitation!”). Rameau uses string tremolo and scalar melismatic gestures in the violins punctuated by the continuo and probably non-notated manufactured sounds of thunder to depict lightning and Jupiter’s sudden arrival musically. The harmony is fairly static as the instrumental texture is the primary means of expressing fire. Musical fire is used as an atmospheric affect to set the image of lightning as a “rain of fire.”

Example 3.1. Rameau from Scene 5 of Pygmalion 1748. Source: Oeuvres Complètes. Tome XVII Première Partie. Published under the direction of C. Saint-Saëns. Ed. by Henri Büsser New York: Broude Brothers, 1968.

Example 3.2. Rameau from Act II, Scene 3 of Platée 1745. Source: Oeuvres Complètes Tome XII. Ed. by Georges Marty. 1968.

Later in the opera Jupiter’s jealous wife Juno arrives on stage in a rage. Her jealous rage is often the disposition that is emphasized in mythologically-based dramatic

works. While not a rage aria in the Italian tradition (see the following chapter), this scene paints the word rage, with an agitated string gesture reminiscent of the stile concitato. Descartes connected jealousy, anger, and rage together under the general Hate passion. This use of an agitated string figure is an example of fire expressed as rage.

Example 3.3. Rameau from Act III, Scene 1 of Platée 1745. Source: Oeuvres Complètes Tome XII. Ed. by Georges Marty. 1968.

Juno arrives later in the act even angrier, as she attempts to stop Jupiter from marrying Platée. Juno arrive en fureur (“arrives in a fury”) accompanied by a constant stream of string tremolo through her entire display of blazing anger. The fire affect is

more pronounced than her first outburst with more active harmonic and melismatic figurations.

Example 3.4. Rameau from Act III, Scene 7 of Platée 1745. Source: Oeuvres Complètes Tome XII. Ed. by Georges Marty. 1968.

It is interesting to note that when Platée herself becomes angry and rages the music reflects her lesser power. Rameau’s music lightly portrays her anger seemingly making fun of her lack of godlike powers and her laughable looks (grotesque and ugly). Beyond Rameau Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer (1700-1755) was one of the many overshadowed French contemporaries of Rameau. He was a prolific composer and an excellent harpsichordist. Royer’s operatic output (he wrote at least six operas) is reflected in one of his most dramatic keyboard pieces, Le Vertigo, from his Pieces de Clavecin, Premier Livre (1746). While the title does not directly connote fire, it does suggest a disposition which would certainly have been thought of as a stirring of blood rushing to the brain causing dizziness. As a physicist looking to the passions to explain physiological states, Descartes compared the spirits that move the mind to states of trembling, fear, and general excitation to “the parts of a flame that emanates from a torch.”5 This heated, excited blood would be caused by an active fire in the heart that stirs those animal spirits to the point of dizziness. The varied musical passages in this piece can easily be imagined to be different emotional states brought on by a general state of vertigo, which during the 1700s was thought of as “a disordered state of mind, . . . comparable to giddiness” and as accompanied by a “throbbing in the forehead” reflecting nervous affections.6 The fire in the brain is also reflected by Royer’s expression marking of Vif, which means “excited” or “sharp” and during the eighteenth century was associated with les passiones violentes (“violent passions”), being brillans et pleins de feu (“brilliant and full of fire”), and extrêment enflamée (“extremely fiery”).7 Royer uses very thick chordal sonorities, quickly repeated sixteenth notes, tremolo figurations, and colorful ascending scalar gestures to depict this fiery affect.

5 Descartes, The Passions of the Soul. 134. 6 Simpson, www.oed.com. 7 Dictionnaire de L’Académie française, fifth edition. 1798. University of Chicago - Database of Historical French dictionaries. Accessed [23 May, 2003].

Example 3.5. Royer Le Vertigo1746. Source: Pièces de Clavecin. Ed. by Lisa Goode Crawford. Paris: Heugel and Company, 1990.

Jean-Fery Rebel Les Elèments 1737-1738 In this example from the French Baroque, Rebel treats fire as one of the four pure elements, along with earth, water, and air. In Le cahos, Rebel uses harmonic confusion through a near cluster chord which is used as a rhythmic chord motive throughout the movement. The elements battle each other, leading to this chaos in nature. The bulk of the chord is voiced in the strings, which are the instruments used to represent fire. In his Avertissement to this work, Rebel writes: Enfin les violins par des traits vifs Finally the violins, by means of lively et brillans représentent l’activité du feu. and brilliant music, represent the activity of Fire.8

In the above quote, Rebel indicated that fire is represented by the violins. In Le chaos the prominence of the violins in the opening reflects the great importance of fire in creating the dramatic confusion of the first movement. Rebel starts the pattern with a measure of quarter notes, followed by a measure of eighth notes, and then three measures of sixteenth notes. This gradual rhythmic acceleration is reminiscent of the agitated style of Monteverdi. The pedal point D in the bass and the sustained A natural played by the flute heighten the tension already created by the pulsing of the other instruments. In fact, the repetition of this chord actually prolongs the tension by functioning as a diminished C<7 chord leading to d minor, hence Rebel’s use of the D and A. The resulting sonority sounds like a confusion of harmony, but the tension suddenly resolves after the fiery and agitated chord repetitions, i.e., poetic chaos before order. The combination of the elements results in a blazing whirlwind of chaotic sound remarkably innovative for its time. After the opening, le feu is labeled in the score as the violins play a quick, agitated figure and is later given its own movement. Le feu musically portrays fire in a chaconne. Rebel represents fire in brilliant string figurations. The sweeping motivic gestures, often in ascending scalar motion, illustrate a playful fire with darting flames. While Rameau's dramatic works provide the clearest and most numerous examples of French musical fire from the first half of the eighteenth century, other French composers definitely felt compelled to express extremely intense emotional and

8 Jean Fery Rebel. Les Elèments. Ed. by Catherine Cessac. Responsible scientifique, Sylvie Bouisson. Paris: Musica Gallica, 1993. XIV.

elemental images in music. The boldness of Italian gesture greatly influenced the free expression of such agitated moments, heard in string tremolo and melismatic phrases.

Example 3.6. Rebel “Le cahos” from Les Elèment 1737-8. Source: Les Elèments. Ed. by Catherine Cessac. Responsible scientifique, Sylvie Bouisson. Paris: Musica Gallica, 1993.

Example 3.7. Rebel “Le feu” from Les Elèments 1737-8. Source: Ibid.

Germany During the early eighteenth century, music in Germany was centered in a few courts, such as Dresden (heavily influenced by Italian composers) and Berlin. While Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) did not directly influence musical composition until much later in the 1700s, his music stands as the pinnacle of German music during the late Baroque. Bach's prolific compositional output in a variety of genres reflects his self- sufficiency as a composer. Known during his time as a virtuoso keyboardist, his compositional style was influenced mainly by other keyboard composers, such as Buxtehude, Pachelbel, Frescobaldi, and various French composers.9 In composing a

9 Ludwig Finscher. “Germany.” The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online. ed. L. Macy. (Accessed [23 May, 2003]),

cantata every week during his appointment in Leipzig, Bach encountered great textual variety that led to the musical expression of a variety of affects, including fire. J.S. Bach Cantata No. 34, O ewiges Feuer O ewiges Feuer, o Ursprung der Liebe, O eternal fire, o wellspring of love, Entzünde die Herzen und wehen sie Inflame our hearts and kindle Lass himmlische Flammen In us a heavenly flame Durch dringen und wallen, Penetrating us and boiling within us, Wir wünschen, o Höchster, We wish this, o heavenly Father, Dein Tempel zu sein. To be your temple. Ach! Lass dir die Seelen im Glauben gefallen. Ah, let our souls please you with our faith.

In this fiery cantata, Bach paints a picture of fervent faith in God. Angular, quick violin passagework and melismatic phrases in high vocal tessituras depict this ardent yearning prayer. The ritornello before the voices enter introduces the fiery figures in the violin line as well as the flickering gestures by the trumpet. Fiery words such as Feuer, Entzünde, and Flammen are all painted musically with melismatic figures along with Liebe to reflect the ardent rapture of love for God. The frenetic activity of the violins is constant throughout this movement, emphasizing the eternity of the fire, representing God, and the undying faith in Him.

Example 3.8. J.S. Bach from first movement of O ewiges Feuer, Cantata No. 34, 1746-7 Source: Bach Cantata No. 34: “O Ewiges Feuer.” Ed. by Arnold Schering. Based on the Bach- Gesellschaft Edition. New York: Broude Brothers, 1950.

This violin fire is also represented in the last choral movement along with a scalar ascending figure on dankt, which paints the earnest gratitude and constant fire felt in eternal devotion to God. This cantata was written for Pentecost, a strong indication that Bach was well aware of the fiery implications of the Holy Spirit during this time in Christian liturgy. J.S. Bach “Sind Blitze, sind Donner” from Matthäus-Passion 1727 In this chorus from J.S. Bach’s Matthäus-Passion, the fire of Hell is musically depicted by a demanding motive underscored by quick string figurations and sequencing. The striking lightning, thunder, and heated desire for destruction and punishment in Hell is described in the text are heard in the music of this furious chorus, where certain words are accentuated, such as Blitze, Donner, and Hölle giving the music a striking, destructive, fiery affect. Sind Blitze, sind Donner in Wolken verschwunden? Has lightning, has thunder vanished in the clouds? Eröffne den feurigen Abgrund, o Hölle; Open your fiery pit, o Hell; Zertrümmre, verderbe, verschlinge, zerschelle Wreck, ruin, engulf, shatter Mit plötzlicher Wut With sudden force Den falschen Verräter, das mördrische Blut! The false betrayer, the murderous blood.

Telemann Die Donner Ode 1756 Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767), while actually a contemporary of Handel and J.S. Bach, is more often referred to as a pre-Classical composer than a Baroque composer. His mixed galant and affective styles are apparent in his music, which often uses more homophonic textures, diatonic harmonies, and less strict counterpoint and chromaticism. His music also reflects a strong commitment to the evocation of text. Telemann was one of the most respected and influential composers of his time. His music is less demanding and less virtuosic than that of Handel and Bach, but its accessibility probably contributed to his reputation.

Example 3.9 J.S. Bach “Sind Blitze, sind Donner” from Matthäus-Passion 1727. Source: Matthäus- Passion, BWV 244. Ed. by Közreadja Máriássy István. Budapest: Editio Musica, 1988.

In these examples from Telemann’s Die Donner Ode, the fire affect is expressed in three consecutive arias, portraying the voice of God as thunderous and flaming. The first aria, for tenor, is actually marked Feurig (“fiery”). Telemann was one of the first composers to use extensive and varied expressive tempo markings in German. A fairly constant sixteenth-note pulse in the strings sets the fiery tone of this aria. The second half contains thirty-second note gestures in the voice and strings, depicting the flashes of lightning and thunder. The final swirling vocal melisma on donnert (“thunders”) paints the frenzied nature of the power of God’s voice.

Part 1 No. 4 – Aria (Tenor) Die Stimme Gottes erschüttert die Meere. The voice of God rocks the seas. Gewitter wandeln vor ihm her. Storms go before Him. Der Höchste donnert, gekleidet in Ehre, The Highest thunders, clothed in glory, Auf grossen Wassern donnert er. He thunders on great waters.

Example 3.10. Telemann No. 4 from Die Donner Ode1756. Source: from Musikalische Werke, Band XXII. Ed. by Wolf Hobohm. Basel: Bärenreiter, 1971.

In the next aria, the bass voice continues to describe the fierce power of God’s voice, as the violins express the idea of shattering with quick descending scalar gestures between vocal statements and constant tremolo pulsing over the word zerschmettert (“shatters” or “smashes”). While there are no actual fiery words in this aria, the overriding affect of the piece is very similar to the previous and the subsequent arias, all describing the power and ferocity of God’s voice. The marking Nachdrücklich (“emphatic”) also underscores the destructive tone of the aria. No. 5 Aria (Bass I) Die Stimme Gottes zerschmettert die Zedern, The voice of God shatters the cedars, Den Ruhm, den er den Bergen gab, The glory He gave to the mountains, Die Stimme Gottes zerschmettert die Zedern The voice of God shatters the cedars Vom hohen Libanon herab. Of high Lebanon.

Example 3.11. Telemann No. 5 from Die Donner Ode 1756. Source: Ibid.

Telemann continues the fiery, thunderous character in a third aria, again for bass voice. The expressive marking of Kräftig (“powerful”) again informs the overall character of the aria. String tremolo is again the chosen musical device by which Telemann emphasizes the fire of the God’s thunderous voice as it punctuates the beats with melismatic phrases on Donners. The strong pulse prepares the word Flammen. Frequent rests in both the instruments and the voice parts break up the already piecemeal texture and add to the accented, punctuated tone of the aria.

No. 6 Aria (Bass II) Sie stürzt die stolzen Gebirge zusammen; It makes the proud mountains collapse; Der Erdkreis wankt, wenn er sie hört: The whole world rocks, when it hears: Er hört des Donners Stimme, die Flammen The world hears the voice of the thunder, Rund um sich sprüht, zerschlägt, zerstört. Which sends forth flames, shatters, and destroys.

Example 3.12. Telemann No. 6 from Die Donner Ode 1756. Source: Ibid.

In these arias, Telemann uses string figurations in depicting musical fire, but the static tremolo and lack of harmonic drive make the affect less intense than some of the previous examples. Fire becomes more a character than an outburst of passion. Telemann’s use of the expressive marking Feurig is, however, pioneering. Later composers, especially in Germany, would make extensive use of fiery tempo and expression marks, such as Allegro con fuoco, e.g., in Weber’s Der Freischütz. The German expression of fire in music centered greatly on the expression of intense love and devotion to God, and God's fiery power. The Protestant (specifically Lutheran) idea of profound expression in sacred music contrasts with the French tradition of dramatic expression in secular writing, i.e., opera. German composers pioneered compositional genres and styles in sacred music, while French composers pursued musical pathos in secular genres, staying in a more traditional stile antico (like France) for sacred compositions. The next chapter, will examine how Italy continued to express affect more often in secular works and that prosperous eighteenth-century England sought intense expressive modes in both sacred and secular genres, in opera and oratorio.

54 CHAPTER 4

INFLAMED WITH PASSION: ITALY AND ENGLAND

Italy During the eighteenth century, Italy’s music differed according to its intended audience. Opera originated in Italy and the genre’s popularity in the public sphere grew immensely in the 1700s. Instrumental and chamber music was intended more for a private audience, but it too expanded as a genre, with the rise of the instrumental concertos of Corelli and Vivaldi. While the power of Catholicism continued to dominate sacred musical genres, the conservative stile antico of Palestrina was not the only style of music heard in cathedrals. Because performers often worked in both opera houses and churches, liturgical musical idioms grew increasingly similar to those of opera.1 Italian composers set the operatic standard for recitative and da capo aria form, the use of ritornelli, establishing affect, and character types. The virtuosity, vocal power, and charisma of castrati no doubt influenced the voicing of characters and the florid style of arias. Composers from all over Europe, most notably George Frideric Handel (1685- 1759), were profoundly influenced by the Italian opera seria style. Plot in Italian opera was advanced through recitative, both solo and in dialogue. Arias were moments of reflective and expressive reaction to the preceding action. Arias usually contained a single affect, although it was also common for the A section affect to be contrasted by a more or less extreme emotion characterizing the B section. By this time of the high Baroque, Italian opera had incorporated many of Monteverdi’s seconda pratica techniques and depicted the idea of the aria text as a single musical affect. Individual words were still painted, but the overall passion of the moment took precedence. The opening and intervening ritornelli of the aria often set up these affects. With the stile concitato, Monteverdi introduced musical elements to depict moments of agitation, such as war. These brief moments became extended arias by the time of Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725).

1 Antonio Rostagno. “Italy.” The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online ed. L. Macy. (Accessed [28 May, 2003]),

55 Alessandro Scarlatti No. 67 “Sull’altar della vendetta” from La principessa fedele 1709 Discolpe con ammette una fiamma A loving flame which has been despised d'amor ch'è fatta sdegno. admits no excuses.

Sull’altar della vendetta On the altar of vengeance Svenerò l’infausto amor. I shall sacrifice this unfavorable love; Lampo, fulmine e sacette Flashes of lightning, thunderbolts, and arrows Caderan sul traditor. Shall fall upon the traitor.

In this scene Rosana sets up her vengeance aria by discussing the burning love she has for Ersindo. This “loving flame” is not reciprocated and this realization drives Rosana to exclaim that she shall sacrifice that love for vengeance. She likens this revenge to lightning, thunder, and arrows, transferring the flame of love into the flame of hate, into the fire of lightning. Scarlatti musically expresses the fire-as-hate idea with the active string parts in the ritornello setting the scene. The vocal line continues this affect with the flame of love, which is now infausto or “unfavorable,” with lengthy melsimas. The B section depicts the consequences of Rosana’s vengeful oath, i.e., lampo, fulmine, e sacette (“flashes of lightning, thunderbolts, and arrows”). Scarlatti uses ascending and descending melismatic phrases in both the voice and the strings to paint the idea of a rain of lightning and thunder falling on her object of revenge. The instrumental gestures puncture the vocal line, driving the music forward with the quick, scalar motion taking over just before the end of the vocal phrase. A. Scarlatti No. 62 “Sdegnato mio core” from La Statira 1690

Ed io t'attendo, O caro, And I await you, my dear, tutta accesa nel sen di dolce amore, My breast burning with my love. se consegno a te solo il mio furore. If I can only deliver my fury.

Sdegnato mio core preparati all’armi. My disdained heart, prepare to arms. Voi furie d’Averno unitivi a me, You furies of Hell, join me, E già che discerno tradita mia fé, and now that I see my faith betrayed, Il vostro veleno venite a prestarmi. Come lend your poison to me. The affect for this aria reveals its fire in the preceding recitative. Campaspe’s burning love is so strong that she wishes revenge on those preventing her from expressing that love. She calls on the powers of Hell to help her in this aria. The fires of Hell serve as the image portrayed by the strings in this section. Scarlatti uses a short furious ritornello to set up her entreaty to Hell. The strings paint the Hellish furies with repeated sixteenth-notes overlapping the declamatory vocal lines.

Example 4.1. A. Scarlatti No. 67 from La principessa fedele “Sull’altar della vendetta” 1709. Source: from The Operas of Alessandro Scarlatti, Volume IV. Ed. by Donald Jay Grout. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1977.

57 Example 4.2. A. Scarlatti No. 62 from La Statira “Sdegnato mio core” 1690. Source: from The Operas of Alessandro Scarlatti, Volume IX. Ed. by William C. Holmes, 1985

58 Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757) “Inflammatus et accensus” from Stabat Mater, Date of composition uncertain 1713-1719 Alessandro Scarlatti’s son is mostly known for the sonatas he wrote while in Spain. He also wrote choral works, which display the Italian influence of his heritage. Domenico Scarlatti’s Stabat Mater, though less popular now than the Pergolesi setting, has nonetheless many moments of brilliance. The text of this movement directly points to fiery love and empathetic pain for God. It is a prayer to the Virgin Mary to feel an intense love for Christ and some of the burning torment He suffered. Inflammatus et accensus per te, Inflamed and burning, may I be defended Virgo sim defensus in die judicii. By thee, O Virgin, at the day of judgement. Scarlatti sets the words inflammatus (“inflamed”) and accensus (“burning”) in a fiery vocal coloratura passage which is elaborated at each reiteration, becoming longer, more complex, more angular, and more quickly imitated. The melismatic phrases are mostly sweeping in ascending scalar gestures, a common technique in portraying fire musically. Each time a voice enters on the word inflammatus, the musical energy is thrust forward because of the rhythmic and melodic writing. The coloratura drives towards the word accensus, arriving on the accented second syllable of the Latin word. Scarlatti uses that syllable as the goal of the vocal line. The created sense of urgency and final arrival point emphasize the burning affect of the text. The first entrance uses upward leaps in pitch to a dotted note followed by a quick scalar descent driving the line forward. The echo occurs after the completion of that theme. The next entrance and imitation overlap, intensifying the melismatic thrust forward. The final entrances are elaborated versions that use more upward and downward swirling scalar movement and trills to heighten this feeling of being inflamed and burning with love for God. This desire to feel the burning suffering of Christ directly connects to the Baroque psychological notion that learning and experiencing some of that pain imbues one with a “new pathos and a new comprehension of suffering, cruelty, and steadfastness.”2

2 Martin, 13.

60 Example 4.3. D. Scarlatti “Inflammatus et accensus” from Stabat Mater 1713-1719 Source: Musica Sacra Gesamtausgabe Band 3. Ed. by Robert Scandrett. Carus-Verlag, 1986.

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736) “Fac ut ardeat” from Stabat Mater, Date of composition uncertain 1730-1736

Pergolesi is often studied not as a Baroque but as a pre-Classical composer. Indeed, his style of writing uses a mix of affect within movements, and his harmonic language is often more straightforward than the quick-moving harmonies of most Baroque composers. He does however paint single affects for some musical movements. In Pergolesi’s setting of the Stabat Mater text, he uses two-part fugal writing to impart the “Fac ut ardeat” section. This text is a plea to Mary for a burning love of Christ.

Fac ut ardeat cor meum Make my heart burn In amando Christum Deum with love for Christ my God Ut sibi complaceam. so that I may please Him.

Pergolesi seems to interpret the text musically as a desperate plea, with a driven, angular subject along with tense ascending imitative sequencing and suspensions. The two voices build off one another, gaining intensity as the movement progresses, yielding an extremely expressive and contrapuntally clean setting of the text. The urgent desire to please God with burning love is expressed by steadily ascending pitch, with notes on the strong pulses for one voice being accentuated by offbeat sets of three tones in the other voice, the first two on the same pitch and the third a step higher, pushing the musical line forward and yielding an intense yearning affect (Example 4.4 measure 25). These progressively ascending, intensifying passages are further enhanced by trills which increase the tonal uncertainty, building more tension and expectation of a musical and dramatic resolution or answer. Pergolesi also uses repeated fugal subject entrances and sequences of suspensions alternating with descending scalar passages to further delay resolution and prolong this fiery plea.

Example 4.4. Pergolesi “Fac ut ardeat” from Stabat Mater 1730-1736. Source: Stabat Mater, for Soprano, Alto, Strings, and Basso continuo. Ed. by Jürgen Neubacher. London: Ernst Eulenberg, 1992.

63 Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) “Armatae face” from Second Part of Juditha Triumphans 1716 Armatae face, et anguibus Armed with fire and serpents A caeco regno squallido From the dark and dreadful kingdom Furoris sociae barbari You mad, savage companions, Furiae venite ad nos. Furies come to us. Morte, flagello, stragibus With death, the lash, and havoc Vindictam tanti funeris Teach us to avenge Irata nostra pectora The death of our leader Duces docete vos. With our enraged feelings. Vivaldi portrays the fire of rage in this aria from one of his oratorios. Rage arias, common in many of the large-scale, Italianate dramatic works, are generally depicted by fiery music, and this aria is no exception. He uses quick descending scalar motion in the strings to set up the rageful scene in the ritornello. The vocal line is quite active and lies in a high tessitura for much of the enraged coloratura. The affect paints the fire of hate and the urgency of the oath to unleash the dark rage in the heart. The armament of fire indicates that the warlike passion is associated with an intense burning. The word fax (here in the ablative case–face) has many fiery connotations–fiery torment, love, and fire weapons. The poetic use of the word in the text reflects a general burning urgency to prepare for a vengeful attack. Vivaldi's heightened string intensity and driving vocal line (complete with three repetitions of the word furiae at successively higher pitches) paint the rage and fire of the affect. Vivaldi “Summer” (“L'Estate”) from Le Quattro Stagioni 1730s

Allegro non molto Sotto dura Staggion dal Sole accesa Beneath the blazing sun's relentless heat Langue l' huom, langue 'l gregge, Men and flocks are sweltering, ed arde il Pino; pines are scorched. Scioglie il Cucco la Voce, e tosto intesa We hear the cuckoo's voice; then sweet Canta la Tortorella e 'l gardelino. Songs of the turtledove and finch are heard. Zeffiro dolce spira, mà contesa Soft breezes stir the air, but threatening Muove Borea improviso al Suo vicino; North wind sweeps them suddenly aside. E piange il Pastorel, perché sospesa The shepherd trembles, fearful of Teme fiera borasca, e 'l suo destino; Violent storm and what may lie ahead.

Adagio e piano - Presto e forte Toglie alle membra lasse il Suo riposo His limbs are now awakened from their repose Il timore de' Lampi, e tuoni fieri By fear of lightning's flash and thunder's roar, E de mosche, e mossoni il Stuol furioso! as gnats and flies buzz furiously around.

Presto Ah che pur troppo i Suo timor Son veri Alas, his worst fears were justified, Tuona e fulmina il Ciel e grandioso As the heavens roar and great hailstones Tronca il capo alle Spiche e a' grani alteri. Beat down upon the proudly standing corn.

Example 4.5. Vivaldi “Armatae face” from Second Part of Juditha Triumphans 1716 Source: Juditha Triumphans: Sacrum Militare Oratorium. Ed. by Alberto Zedda. Milan: Ricordi, 1971.

65 Vivaldi uses the fire affect quite often in his set of musical seasons. The piece is full of many different affects, which seem to follow closely some accompanying sonnets outlining the nearly programmatic work. The summer movement's sections each contain clear examples of musical fire. The first section of this movement begins with languorous motives and birds singing, followed by a flowing dotted rhythm in the strings signifying a gentle breeze (Zeffira dolce spira, “sweet breezes moving the air”). This breezy motive descends gradually in anticipation of the sudden whirlwind burst as the strings lead the frenetic motion which follows. The quick onset of the fiery music presages the impending storm (terne fiera borasca, “fearful of a fierce storm”) of the third section of summer. The second movement contains a repeated agitated motive which seems straight out of a stile concitato moment in a Monteverdi opera. The string tremolos continue to foreshadow the coming storm (e tuoni fieri, “and thunder’s fierceness”).

Example 4.6. Vivaldi “Summer” Movement 1 (“L'Estate”) from Le Quattro Stagioni 1730s. Source: Le Quattro Stagioni (The Four Seasons): “Il Cimento dell’ Armonia e dell’ Inventione,” Op. 8, Nos. 1-4. Ed. by Newell Jenkins. London: Ernst Eulenberg, 1958.

Finally, the fiery storm is unleashed in the third section. Vivaldi uses many of the techniques already mentioned to achieve this stormy, fiery affect–rapid string figurations and sequencing, brilliant coloratura, and tremolo.

Example 4.7. Movement 2 Source: Ibid.

Example 4.8. Movement 3 Source: Ibid.

68 England Early eighteenth-century London experienced unprecedented prosperity. London was a center for trade and the manufacturing of goods. It was also becoming an international center for musicians to live and visit. Composers from Italy, France, and Germany moved to London to make their living because of London’s reputation as a musical center. During the 1700s, Britain maintained a reputation in Europe as “a liberal creative environment where it was possible for a man of talent to make his way without losing his creative liberty.”3 Many German-born composers settled in London, including Johann Christoph Pepusch (1667-1752), John Galliard (1687?-1747), and Handel. Audiences at music concerts were growing, as the middle class became more able to afford leisure activities such as music. During the reign of George I, England supported a “vast increase of concerts and other public musical occasions.”4 Early on, Italian opera was the preferred musical genre of English audiences. By 1728, the year of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, Italian opera in London was in the midst of its demise. Italian opera arrived in England in 1705, where Giovanni Bononcini’s (1670-1747) operas were some of the first to triumph.5 There had indeed been objections to Italian opera in London as early as 1706,6 but it took at least twenty years for English frustration to culminate in a large-scale mocking of the genre. Growing dissatisfaction with Italian opera also evidenced itself with a new regard for ancient music. The rise of musical classes and the desire to celebrate older works led to the creation of the Academy of Ancient Music in 1726. Pepusch co-founded this organization, which was the first of its kind “to perform old works regularly and deliberately.”7 The societal context of early eighteenth-century England reveals an increasing musical audience, growing more dissatisfied with Italian opera. English composers

3 Matthew Craske. Art in Europe 1700-1830: A History of the Visual Arts in an Era of Unprecedented Urban Economic Growth. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. 83. 4 Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts, ed. Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century. Washington Square, New York: New York University Press, 1996. 30. 5 Lorenzo Bianconi. “Italy.” The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online ed. L. Macy. (Accessed [2 July, 2003]), 6 Porter, 143. 7 William Weber. The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual, and Ideology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. 56.

69 became more grounded in musical styles of France and Italy, often mixing elements of each with their own tastes, sometimes creating a distinctively English style. Italian opera seria flourished at the beginning of the 1700s, but English oratorio and public concerts took its place soon after the appearance of The Beggar’s Opera. John Eccles (c1668-1735) Semele 1707 While Handel’s music certainly dominated much of England’s musical life after his arrival in 1710, English composers did attempt to create their own amalgamations of English and Italian musical traditions in their works. John Eccles’s Semele, though never produced during his lifetime, serves as an exemplar of English compositions exhibiting both English and Italian styles at the beginning of the eighteenth century. While an Italian emphasis on affect is quite apparent in this opera, the language is English and the aria structures are not as often da capo as in opera seria. As seems to be often the case in Baroque opera, musical fire is present when jealous Juno appears, swearing vengeance because of Jupiter’s indiscretions. The fire is one of rage and anger. She swears by Hell, implying all the fires and furies of that infernal place, and the music is characterized by quick, pulsing strings and dotted, declamatory, warlike rhythms, and melodic motion in the vocal line. When Juno appears in Act III, a similarly bold, agitated string ritornello entrance signifies her return even before she sings and her song of the pleasure of revenge is punctuated by fiery violin interludes. When Jupiter tries to seduce Semele into consummating their love, he urges her to “speak your Desire” because “I’m all over Fire.” “Desire” and “Fire” are marked by quick string figurations, painting the image of Jupiter’s fiery desire, as he sustains the words. Finally, after Juno tricks Semele into making Jupiter swear to show his true self to her, Semele’s death by his lightning and thunder is musically depicted by an instrumental interlude in a fire affect.

Example 4.9. Eccles from Act III, Scene 1, Semele 1707. Source: from Musica Britannica: A National Collection of Music, LXXVI. Ed. by Richard Platt. London, Stainer and Bell, 2000.

Example 4.10. Act III Scene 6. Source: Ibid.

Example 4.11. Act III Scene 4. Source: Ibid.

Example 4.12. Act III Scene 7. Source: Ibid.

72 Semele’s preceding recitative explains the relation between fire and lightning quite well: Ah me! Too late I now repent My Pride and impious Vanity. He comes! Far off his Lightnings scorch me. I feel my Life consuming: I burn, I faint, For Pity I implore- O help, I can no more. The fiery instrumental scene is achieved with chromatically ascending string tremolo with quickly changing harmonies. The intensity of the scene depicts the power and fire of Jupiter’s lightning and thunder. Johann Pepusch “By great Cecilia’s Influ’nce Fir’d” from The Union of the Three Sister Arts 1723 Pepusch was clearly aware of and enamoured with older styles and musical traditions. Although he was not a native Englishman, his dramatic compositions showed a decided attempt to accept English traditions in musical compositional style. He wrote many English secular cantatas, which although sometimes in an Italianate style, had English texts. Pepusch’s works show that he was aware of the English tradition of setting text to music in honor of St. Cecilia. The Union of the Three Sister Arts was written in honor of St. Cecilia and follows a line of such works by English composers which began in the late seventeenth century, with John Blow (1648/9-1708) and Henry Purcell. St. Cecilia’s connection to music and divine inspiration served as an appealing duality to English poets and composers. Composers from Blow to Purcell to Eccles to Handel and Pepusch set texts honoring Cecilia with great textual and musical freedom–a mixture of ecstasy and sanctity, because of her connection to such a passionate art as music and her identity as a virgin. In many of the works there are elements of both the comic and the serious. By great Cecilia’s Influ’nce Fir’d The Pen and Pencil never tir’d Are still with Nobler Thoughts inspir’d Both Vot’ries at her Sacred Shrine, The Poet and the Painter joyn, And all their Honour here resign.

The duet for Apelles and Homer expresses the idea that both Poetry and Painting are inspired by Cecilia’s fire and that they join together at her shrine. This duet focuses on Cecilia’s ability to inspire artistic fire and Pepusch’s writing establishes a fiery affect

73 for the piece. The active, melismatic, and scalar writing for strings and oboe sets the fiery tone in a lengthy ritornello. Motives of this ritornello (the longest in the entire work) separate the sung phrases and drive the music forward throughout the duet. The word “inspir’d” is often set on long, sustained tones above which the instruments sequence, building harmonic expectation and driving the musical thought forward. In the B section of the duet, descending scalar melismatic lines in the violins between fairly smooth vocal phrases reiterate the fire inspired by Cecilia, driving the music back to the A section. The constant barrage of exciting violin lines and forward motion in this duet are reflective of the ecstatic, inspired passion that dominates the piece.

Example 4.13. “By great Cecilia’s Influ’nce Fir’d” from The Union of the Three Sister Arts. Pepusch, 1723. Source: Facsimile of copy of first edition, published 1723 in London by John Walsh.

George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) “Why do the nations so furiously rage together?” from Messiah 1742

Why do the nations so furiously rage together? And why do the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth rise up And the rulers take counsel together Against the Lord and his anointed.

Among the many rage arias Handel composed is the familiar example from his Messiah–“Why do the nations so furiously rage together?” The furious instrumental introduction is led by the swirling strings and their sweeping ascending motives, which create a clear sense of forward motion leading to the entrance of the voice, which continues with various coloratura passages on the word “rage.” This is another example of fire as hate or anger in music. The word “rage” is the key to Handel’s musical interpretation of this text. While the agitation of the music does suggest the singer’s frustration with and questioning of that rage, it is the fury of the rage itself that Handel sets as the fiery affect. As is often the case with Handel, the emotive affect of the text is painted quite clearly by the music. There is usually at least one rage aria such as this one in Handel’s many operas and oratorios. Jealous rage, vengeful wishes, and hatred all compel the corresponding character to sing such an aria, complete with a fire-as-rage affect. Handel “But who may abide” from Messiah But who may abide the day of his coming? And who shall stand when he appeareth? For he is like a Refiner’s fire.

In this aria from Messiah, Handel is ingenious in his clear and exciting representation of the fire of the Christ. The opening Larghetto section sets up and actually prepares the listener for the sudden onset of the fire section. The opening questions – “But who may abide the day of His coming and who shall stand when He appeareth?” – lead right into the Prestissimo where tremolo strings and the rapid coloratura of the vocal line paint the words “For He is like a Refiner’s Fire.”

Example 4.14. Handel “Why do the nations so furiously rage together?” from Part II of Messiah 1742. Source: Der Messias: Oratorium in drei Teilen. Ed. by John Tobin. Basel: Bärenreiter Kassel, 1965.

A refiner’s fire softens metal so that is may be shaped. To say that God is like such a fire is to say that the Holy Spirit breaks down human walls and allows people to be shaped by God, changed profoundly as Christians. Handel musically interpreted this as quite a fiery change, using a shift to a faster tempo, dramatic tremolo in the strings, and rapid coloratura. These techniques are quite effective in building excitement, intensity,

76 and in a sense kindling the fire which is metaphorically supposed to burn in the hearts of Christians, as God works to mold them.

Example 4.15. from Part I of Messiah. Source: Ibid.

It should be noted that this is not the first of Handel’s versions of this aria. The first text setting contained no tempo changes, and although it contained melismatic passages, it did not use them to elicit a sense of fire. Handel may have been inspired by the words or perhaps a different singer to create the second setting, which gives quite a musical spark to the text.

77 From these examples, it is clear that the Italian tradition of bold expression of passion in music heavily influenced other countries, especially England. Musical fire at the height of the Baroque period is often expressed in moments of extreme anger, rage, jealousy, sexual desire, and love of God. The freneticism of the string texture seems to be a constant in these examples. The violin and vocal coloratura are quite connected to the expression of fiery feelings. While composers such as Monteverdi, Caccini, Schütz, Lully, and Purcell all used such devices to paint quick fiery scenes, their depiction of fire was often limited to the painting of a single word. During the first half of the eighteenth century, musical fire was often depicted as an affect, continuing for an entire movement or section of a piece. Rage arias maintain that fire-as-rage affect for the entire piece. Scenes of thunder and lightning are extended to entire instrumental interludes (e.g., Rameau and Eccles). Love of God becomes an ecstatic fire brimming with intensity in works such as Bach’s Cantata No. 34 and Handel’s aria “But who may abide.” By the late Baroque period, fire is an established affect that occurs often in moments of high dramatic intensity.

CHAPTER 5

BEYOND THE BAROQUE TRAILBLAZERS

Composers and listeners alike often testify to a belief in the emotional power of music. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, composers sought to use musical rhetorical manipulation to provoke passionate responses in listeners. A fundamental notion of the power of music is that music can mean something, that it can signify by sounding happy, sad, frantic, or “Italian,” etc., and thereby translate into a physical response in the listener. In musicology, there is often the temptation to base theory on a personal emotional response to music. One would hope that most people who study music have been and are greatly moved by its power. This response to music may indeed be one of the main reasons people decide to pursue further musical studies. However, basing theory on these responses risks the stigma of the pathetic fallacy, where the theory has no scholarly grounding and is wholly based on personal response. Any paper dealing with emotions and affect in music runs this risk because the music causes such a singular emotive response. It is important to note that the composer’s intention to evoke such a response makes the subject of affect an emotive and scholarly one. Composers of vocal and dramatic music during the Baroque era strove foremost to arouse an intense response in the listener based on the scene and the meaning of the text. The main Baroque aesthetic was to elicit a passionate response through the use of rhetorical musical devices. Before Monteverdi, the expression of extreme agitation in music was not commonplace. Even after Monteverdi’s groundbreaking seconda pratica and stile concitato, composers reserved expressions of extreme excitation for rare instances where the text or dramatic situation called for such a display. During the Renaissance, words of heightened, fiery intensity were painted as individual words, the hypotopsis rhetorical device mentioned in Chapter 1. During the early Baroque, composers such as Lully and Schütz continued to represent individual fiery words to create impressions of musical fire. By the high Baroque period, composers such as Rameau, Bach, and Handel used

entire sections of charged musical fire to depict the corresponding image of elemental fire (fire itself, or lightning and thunder), fiery desire, fiery rage, or fiery love of God. In addition to rendering individual words, these composers painted the fiery idea as a scenic intensified affect. Fire not as an emotion, per se, but as an affective intensifier. Through all the examples in this thesis, the variety of contexts that inspired composers to write appropriately fiery musical settings is vast. Fire has many synonyms, related adjectival and verb forms, Latin derivatives, and related concepts in the main Western European languages used in Baroque vocal music (Latin, Italian, French, German, and English). This may seem to weaken the idea that there is something special to the idea of fire represented in music. However, the fact that fire applies to so many contexts in so many intensifying ways demonstrates its uniqueness as a musical concept growing out of rhetorical aesthetic principles and points to its far-reaching implications past the Baroque period. While a systematic examination of Classic music is beyond the scope of this thesis, the stylistic and chronological overlap of composers from this period and the Baroque is evident in composers such as Pergolesi and Telemann. This overlap and later philosophical thought about the artists and fire suggest the importance of thinking about musical fire as a concept and identifying the implications beyond the Baroque. When music appreciators think of musical fire today, Beethoven's music is often the first to come to mind. Beethoven clearly thought of musical fire as an essential aspect of music, saying that "music ought to strike fire from the soul of a man."1 However, as has been shown in this thesis, the idea of making a fiery musical moment did not begin with Beethoven. Baroque composers used tremolo, vocal coloratura, harmonic sequences, and brilliant string gestures to heighten the fire affect, in pieces such as "But who may abide" from Handel's Messiah, Rebel's Les Eléments, and Vivaldi's Le Quattro Stagioni. Towards the middle of the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment movement affected the way composers approached making music. Instead of using Baroque affect to elicit particular audience reactions, Enlightenment composers ("Classic" composers)

1 Virginia Beahrs. “’Artists Are Made of Fire’: An Exploration of the Role of Fire in the Music of Beethoven.” The Beethoven Newsletter 7/2: 43.

began to use more human characterizations rather than exaggerated states of heightened emotions. Feeling, or Empfindsamkeit, aimed at achieving "intimate, sensitive, and subjective expression," became one of the musical aesthetics associated with this period.2 This stylistic change did not eliminate fire from composers' musical vocabulary. During the so-called "Classic" period, fire music manifested in a variety of pieces, some of which harkened back to Baroque affect, while others reflected contemporary philosophical thought. Why Do Composers Write Fire Music? In Baroque music, signifying emotive meaning was achieved using affect. The goal was to move the listener by means of clearly painted passions. Composers wished to sustain the sense of the emotion for an entire section, aria, or movement. Fire served as an affect on its own and as an intensifier of particularly excited feelings, such as love and anger. In Classic music, musical signification shifts more rapidly. Moods and dramatic directions may change within a movement or aria rather than remaining constant throughout the piece as in a Baroque lament or rage aria. There are of course exceptions, but the idea of fluctuating emotions in a more human manner is reflected in the compositional styles. Ritornelli may set the tone, but it is not necessarily the tone of the entire piece. Binary form and other conventional musical gestures, such as Mannheim rockets and steamrollers serve as compositional tools to aid in eliciting these emotions. As has been demonstrated in fiery pieces by Vivaldi and Rebel, fiery feelings are not limited to vocal music. Purely instrumental music can and does similarly affect listeners. However, these instrumental fiery moments are not as immediately evident without the word cues of fiery moments in vocal music. Nevertheless, one can certainly feel moments of musical fire in high intensity moments in Classic pieces such as Mozart’s “Haffner” Symphony, no. 35, K. 385; fire is certainly evident in the Allegro con spirito first movement. While in Vienna, Mozart even wrote a letter to his father, dated August 7, 1782, explaining that the “first Allegro must be played with great fire.”3

2 Daniel Heartz and Bruce Alan Brown. “Empfindsamkeit.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan, 2001. 8:190. 3 Emily Anderson, ed. The Letters of Mozart and his Family. London: Macmillan, 1938. 3:1212.

The idea of fire in the Classic period should also be considered in relation to Enlightenment psychology. Artists and philosophers were quite interested in moral sentiment and believed that the arts should awaken feelings within the listener.4 They were preoccupied with not simply representing various feelings, but also eliciting them in others. The Swiss aesthetic theorist Johann Georg Sulzer wrote that the composer must “remember that music is written not for the mind or imagination, but for the heart.”5 He thought that the composer should seek simply to arouse feelings, without imposing his own ideas.6 According to Sulzer, “musical sounds originated as passionate emotions and have the power to ‘depict, arouse, and strengthen such emotions.’”7 The German theorist Heinrich Christoph Koch also believed that music could and should arouse emotions and passions.8 He felt this ability was unique to the fine arts and that music could affect listeners in this manner through a variety of compositional choices, including modulation and form.9 This is not to say, however, that the Classic period ignored the very extremes of emotion though. The German Sturm und Drang artistic movement aimed “to frighten, to stun, to overcome with emotion.”10 Classic composers achieved this storm and stress by using musical contrasts which alternate quickly and extremely. The attitude headed towards dramatic realism in expressing a plot. Actual literary circumstances such as otherworldly forces (spirits, God, Hell, etc.), natural terrors (storms, fire, etc.), and extreme human emotions prompted composers to use a bold vocabulary of “syncopations, wild leaps, and tremolo passages” in addition to certain keys (often minor), driving rhythms, and otherworldly instruments such as the trombone.11 This aesthetic of contrast led to the composition of many pieces with fiery moments. A clear example is found and implied by the subtitle of Haydn’s Symphony No. 59, his Fire Symphony.

4 Nancy Kovaleff Baker and Thomas Christensen. Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 28-29. 5 Baker, 90. 6 Ibid. 7 Baker, 118. 8 Ibid. 9 Baker, 192. 10 Daniel Heartz and Bruce Alan Brown. “Sturm und Drang.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan, 2001. 18:631. 11 Heartz, “Sturm und Drang.” 632.

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) Symphony no. 59 in A major, Hob I:59, 1767-68 (his Fire Symphony)

This Haydn symphony displays the Sturm und Drang aesthetic with many and extreme dynamic contrasts and extreme mood swings. Haydn’s “Fire” Symphony (no. 59) was so named in a later manuscript because of its possibly programmatic character and obviously fiery opening Presto movement. The repeated note theme propels the movement forward along with the punctuated rhythms and regular forte/piano contrasts which become more violent during the transition section. The obsessive drive of the repeated note theme is accompanied by a monotone pedal by the horn, which further builds the fiery momentum, and increases the wish for release from the driving-but- going-nowhere melodic motion. The nervous energy of this movement does not become overpowering though, because of the regularity of the fp contrasts during the more intense passages.12 The energy does support the symphony’s eventual fiery appellation. This late eighteenth-century style of storm and stress leads to the Romantic aesthetics of the nineteenth century. By this time, the idea of fire became more of a concept rather than an affect. The above-mentioned Mozart letter discusses playing a movement with fire. This idea of performing in a generally fiery manner carried over into compositional expression markings by the early 1800s. Telemann’s marks of expressions such as Feurig were certainly ahead of their time. In the early nineteenth century, composers commonly began to use direct Italian tempo markings to indicate that a movement or section should be performed with fire. Such a marking usually appeared as Allegro con fuoco, as can been seen in the following example from Weber’s Der Freischütz. The lengthy scene and aria from which this example is taken builds to this last fiery section. The intense climax at a fff dynamic and at a fiery tempo shows just the beginnings of the extremes of Romantic expression.

12 Landon, H.C. Robbins. The Symphonies of Joseph Haydn. London: Universal Edition, 1955. 280.

Example 5.1. Max’s aria from Act I of Der Freischütz. Carl Maria von Weber, 1821. Source: Der Freischütz. Complete Vocal/Orchestral Score. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1977.

Fire during this century became the trademark association of the Romantic artist, who was seen as a Promethean figure in society, bringing fire from the gods to man.13 It is not within the scope of this paper to examine fire thoroughly in music beyond the Baroque period, but it is important to point out how far the idea is carried in later artistic aesthetics. Conclusion From its origins in the music of Monteverdi and his stile concitato, composers have continued to use the fire affect to elicit a sense of agitation in the listener. Stylistic techniques such as vocal and instrumental coloratura, rapid motivic string figurations, quick, successive imitations, contrapuntal writing, tremolo, harmonic sequencing, and modulation may combine in any number of permutations to effect this fire. This is not to say that any musical work utilizing these techniques will achieve a fire moment. First and foremost, fire music must affect the listener, causing a sense of anxiety, excitement, vitality, anger, or general intense feeling. The musical gestures described above aid in the creation of fire moments. Composers made choices based upon the overriding affect of the text or dramatic scene. If the fire of love, nature (lightning), God’s love and power, or of rage is the main affect of the moment, then an appropriately fiery musical setting is often the expression of such an intensified feeling. Musical moments of fire from this period reflect the Baroque philosophical emphasis on the arousal of heartfelt feeling within the listener through musical-rhetorical devices. This thesis has shown that musical depictions of fire grew from Monteverdi’s innovative compositional techniques to achieve agitation in music. Painting a fiery word became painting a fiery scene or feeling for an entire movement, section, or aria. Certainly, later composers developed other stylistic techniques to achieve their own version of musical fire. Mozart’s “Haffner” Symphony, Haydn’s “Fire” Symphony, Weber’s Der Freischütz (with tempo indications including Allegro con fuoco), Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and Firebird Suite, Mendelssohn's "Is not his word like a fire?" from Elijah, and much of Beethoven’s music are just a few of the many possible

13 Plantinga, Leon. Romantic Music: A History of Musical Style in Nineteenth-Century Europe. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1984. 16.

examples of fire in later periods of music history. This idea of wanting to be thrilled, excited and aroused by music transcends historical periods. Fire is an essential musical concept, not just in moments where fire is explicitly described in any of the forms described in this paper. An overall image of music's essential qualities would not be complete without mention of such vivid fire-like moments.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Sean M. Parr

Education

Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL Fall 2004 M.M. in Historical Musicology Awarded a University Fellowship for the 2002-2003 academic year Paper presentation for Society for Musicology “A Tremulous Distinction: The Case of a Vibrant Voice” Fall 2002 President of Society for Musicology 2003-2004

Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH June 1999 B.A. with a Double Major in Music and Mathematics modified with Computer Science Graduated cum laude overall and with High Honors in Music. Handel Society Award, Marcus Heiman-Rosenthal award for music. Teaching Assistant for introductory music theory and opera history courses.

Royal College of Music, London Music Foreign Study Program Spring 1998