Arcangelo Corelli Cardinal Pietro (1653-1713) Ottoboni (1667-1740) a founding influence librettist, important in baroque music St Peter’s, Rome music patron, Rome Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741), major Concert in a typical Venetian Ospedale, Francesco Geminiani baroque composer or Orphanage, where Vivaldi was employed (1687-1762) composer based in Venice as tutor, composer and conductor pupil of Corelli George Friderick Henry Purcell HANDEL (1659-1695) (1685-1755) German- Concert in the major English born, English-adopted Bach-Haus, Eisenach composer A baroque cantata rehearsal Clavichord Baroque German Hunting Lodge Silbermann Organ, High baroque Burgk Castle Church interior Silbermann Organ J.S Bach, portrait Interior of above Pedal-harpsichord Freiberg Cathedral in old age, late 1740s CONTENTS WHAT IS BAROQUE? 1 THE GRAND TOUR OF EUROPE 6 MUSIC PUBLISHING IN EUROPE 14 Antonio STRADIVARI - Violin maker - Cremona 17 Tomaso ALBINONI - Italy 18 Arcangelo CORELLI - Rome 20 Francois COUPERIN ("the Great") - France 24 Johann Joseph FUX - Austria 25 Francesco GEMINIANI - Italy, England 26 George Frideric HANDEL - Germany, Engla28 24 Henry PURCELL - England 34 Jean Philippe RAMEAU - France 36 Alessandro SCARLATTI (father) - Italy 38 Domenico SCARLATTI (son) - Italy, Spain 41 John STANLEY - England 43 Georg Philipp TELEMANN - Germany 45 Antonio VIVALDI - Venice 49 Unico Willem van WASSENAER - Holland 53 Jan Dismas ZELENKA - Prague, Dresden 56 Johann Sebastian BACH: EISENACH - MÜHLHAUSEN 58 WEIMAR (second term) 64 CÖTHEN 66 LEIPZIG 1 - Cantor and Director of Music 70 LEIPZIG 2 - The Collegium Musicum 77 LEIPZIG 3 - The Introspective Years 82 BAROQUE KEYBOARD INSTRUMENTS 84 GOTTFRIED SILBERMANN: Master organ builder 88 BAROQUE MUSIC PERFORMANCE: 92 Produced by the editors at www.BaroqueMusic.org where further detail on baroque music can be found. Additional material from www.Baroque-Music-Club.com offering a catalogue of 100+ baroque music titles available as CDs or downloads. Two double-album samplers are also available, one covering the major baroque composers, the other, the works of J.S. Bach. Editor and copyright 2009: [email protected] 1 WHAT IS BAROQUE? Baroque music expresses order, the fundamental order of the universe. Yet it is always lively and tuneful. Follow the development of music through this brief outline, from the earliest times to the present day, with baroque music set in historical context. The English word baroque is derived from the Italian barocco, meaning bizarre, though probably exuberant would be a better translation more accurately reflecting the sense. The usage of this term originated in the 1860s to describe the highly decorated style of 17th and 18th century religious and public buildings in Italy, Germany and Austria. No church-organ builder today would dare to grace his instrument with the scantily-clad damsel banging away on her drums which decorates the Gottfried Silbermann organ completed in 1714 for the Cathedral in Freiberg, Saxony. And King Frederick’s summer palace of Sans Souci in Potsdam, completed in 1747 and shown on our back cover, is representative of ornate, high-baroque decoration. Later, during the early-to-mid 1900s, the term baroque was applied by association to music of the 17th and early 18th century, and today the term baroque has come to refer to a very clearly definable type or genre of music which originated, broadly speaking, around 1600 and came to fruition between 1700 and 1750. Strangely however, while exterior and interior baroque architecture was surely flamboyant, baroque music was almost the opposite, for its focus was on symmetry, order and form, expressing what eighteenth- century writers, artists and musicians saw as the fundamental order of the universe. The story begins, however, with the earliest origins of music as we know it in the West today. Music of the 1200s and 1300s sounds relatively primitive in terms of melody and harmony. If we move to the 1500s we find a great difference, as Italian music began to blossom and English composers like Dowland, Morley and Tomkins produced the wonderful melodies and surprisingly sensitive poetry which accompanied them - or vice versa. A major theme underlying music at that time however was the exploration of form. There was still so much new to discover - new melodic lines and harmonic progressions to be explored, new combinations of instruments, and new forms in music such as the fugue, canon, and variations on a bass line, a popular tune or a chorale. 2 As the 1600s progressed, so these different musical forms took on definite shape, and the period from 1700 to 1750 can clearly be seen as the "high baroque", as well as the culmination of the development of the musical forms we know today. Two geographical influences were at work here. In north Germany and Holland, composers such as Froberger, Kerll, and particularly Dietrich Buxtehude were concentrating mainly on the art of counterpoint, especially the fugue. Here, organ and voice were the major elements. At the other end of Europe, in Rome, the instrumental forms of the sonata and concerto were formalized. Every period in music has certain recognizable clichés, and much of what is typical in baroque music, specific cadences and snatches of melody, can be traced back to one Arcangelo Corelli, who seems to have influenced just about everybody, from his Italian contemporaries and students to Handel who sojourned in Rome from 1704 to 1710. From Rome, the "Italian" influences spread northwards while the stricter north German forms flowed southwards, intermingling to produce a common baroque vocabulary. Indeed, the inter-mingling of musical trends from different parts of Europe was surprisingly extensive, considering the relatively primitive methods of travel and communication. Vivaldi, Geminiani, Corelli, Scarlatti, Handel and many others all met one another or were thoroughly conversant with one another's music. Bach journeyed north from his "base" in Thuringia and Saxony, southern Germany, to hear Buxtehude, and his later travels included Dresden and Berlin. Bach owned and/or copied the music of many of his contemporary composers, often re-writing them for different instruments. Indeed this was a recognized method of study widely practised in baroque times. It is also important, when studying the composers and their music of the baroque or indeed any age, to review the circumstances in which composers worked. Take Vivaldi for example. Though he wrote many fine concertos (like the Four Seasons and the Opus 3) he also wrote many works which sound like five-finger exercises for students. And this is precisely what they were. Vivaldi was employed for most of his working life by the Ospedale della Pietà. Often termed an "orphanage", this Ospedale was in fact a home for the female offspring of noblemen and their numerous dalliances with their mistresses. The Ospedale was thus well endowed by the "anonymous" fathers; its furnishings bordered on the opulent, the young ladies were well looked-after, and the musical standards among the highest in Venice. Many of Vivaldi's concerti were indeed exercises which he would play with his many talented pupils. 3 Two major influences in Germany were the Church and the State, or rather, States. Neither Italy nor Germany existed then as we know them today. Germany was a complex mass of small princely states, each with its own Court and, with any luck, Court Musicians. Alliances came and went as princely families inter-married thus uniting, for a time anyway, their respective territories. That is why so many princely titles of those days were hyphenated, as for example, Anhalt-Cöthen or Saxe-Coburg. Many a composer's fortunes rose or fell with the status accorded to music at the court in which he was serving, and composer-musicians would try to seek a position in a city or court where music was known, for the time being anyway, to be thriving under the patronage of an enthusiastic king or prince. The direction of Bach's music was influenced in his early years by several courts at which he was employed; the greater part of his working life however was spent in Leipzig where his position as Cantor of St Thomas' Church required church cantatas in abundance (200 have come down to us, some 100 more are supposed lost). And here of course was the other factor influencing music composition - the demands of the Church for devotional organ and choral music, from short cantatas to major Masses and Magnificats. A brief look at the life of Handel illustrates both the mobility, and the influence of royal patronage on a composer typical of the baroque age. Georg Friederich Händel was born in Halle (Germany), on February 23rd, 1685, just a month before JS Bach was born in Eisenach, not so far to the south. At the age of 18, in 1703, he traveled to Hamburg, where he took a job as violinist at the Hamburg Opera and gave private lessons to support himself. Whilst in Hamburg, Handel made the acquaintance of Prince Ferdinando de' Medici, son and heir of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who invited Handel to visit Italy where he spent more than three years, in Florence, Rome, Naples and Venice. By 1704 he had reached Rome, where Marquis (later Prince) Francesco Ruspoli employed him as a household musician and where he also studied with Corelli. Leaving Italy early in 1710 Handel went to Hanover, where he was appointed Capellmeister to the Elector, George Louis, soon through succession to become King George I of England. Moving to England and maintaining the royal connection, Handel thus became, as he was to remain, one of England’s most celebrated composers. In the music of JS Bach, the different forms and styles of the baroque came together and were brought to perfection. Johann Sebastian Bach came from a musical family stretching back through many generations, and the Bachs were well-known throughout their "home ground" of Thuringia in what is now southeast Germany.