Organización y beneficiarios de los programas de acogida temporal

Theories of musical expression in the Baroque era were touched on in Chapter 9 (page 118). It was believed at the time that emotions could be isolated, cate-gorized, and listed in a fairly simple way, and that music could enhance or even arouse each emotion by means of certain musical devices applied consis-tently throughout a piece. Theorists developed checklists of musical devices corresponding to each of the “affects,” as they called emotions conceived in this way.

It was particularly in vocal music — where the words that are sung defi ne or suggest a specifi c emotion — that this musical vocabulary of the emotions was developed and exploited. If a text refers to “rejoicing,” for example, a Baroque composer would match this with fast, lively runs; a mention of “victory” would probably require trumpets and drums to evoke battle music — or at least fanfare motives in the violins. “Sorrow” would call forth sighing melodic gestures and intense, dissonant harmonies, and so on.

1 Opera

The principal genre of secular vocal music of the Baroque era was opera.

Introduced around the year 1600, opera soon fl ourished mightily all over Europe, and became the most glamorous and probably the most adventurous and infl uential artistic genre of the Baroque era.

Any general description of the emotional world of Baroque art must fea-ture its theatrical quality (see page 118). The Baroque was fascinated by the theater, and especially by opera — the ultimate multimedia experience of its

day, combining poetry, drama, music, vocal virtuosity, scenic splendor, dance, and more. Spectacle was of the essence in Baroque opera — spectacular sing-ing, to be sure, but also spectacular stage architecture, featuring amazing transformation scenes and the like. Systems of pulleys and counterweights could rapidly change the set from a palace to a magic garden, with gods and goddesses descending from the heavens in a fi ery chariot. Opera offered a wealth of satisfactions, then — most obviously, no doubt, for the vocal con-noisseurs of the day, the fans of great singers. They are said to have gossiped, gambled, and fl irted in the boxes while waiting for the special moments when their favorites sang.

But opera’s ability to project emotion was the real basis of its appeal. First and foremost, opera offered a stage on which individual singers could step forward to express feelings in the most direct and powerful fashion. Since the singers were portraying characters in a drama, they were repeatedly thrown into situations that made it seem natural for them to experience (and express) intense emotions.

Such emotions were made all the more intense by music. Emotion could be intensifi ed by great vocal virtuosity, too. The most obvious kind of vocal virtuosity is coloratura singing — fast brilliant runs, scales, high notes, vocal cadenzas, and so on, stressing technique for its own sake. But the legendary singers of old moved their audiences not only by singing faster than anyone else but also by singing more beautifully, more delicately, and more emotionally.

In contrast to the painting on page 111, this is a much more informal picture of a Baroque opera performance — evidently during a recitative, to judge from the interaction of the characters on stage and the inattention of the audience.

(The painting is perhaps by Antonio Longhi, 1702 –1785.)

The principal type of Italian Baroque opera was opera seria, or serious opera.

The plots — mostly derived from ancient history, with all kinds of alterations and additions — were designed to stir up powerful emotions, such as passion, rage, grief, and triumph. Such plots gave the singers many opportunities to excel in one kind of expression or another. Opera seria consisted mainly of solo singing by sopranos and mezzo-sopranos, including castrati (see page 142).

Brilliant high voices were prized above all. Tenors and basses played subordinate roles, and there were few duets or choruses.

The words of an opera are called the libretto (“little book”), and their author is the librettist. Librettists had to build up the drama as a whole from a series of brief texts, alternating with one another, for recitatives and arias.

Recitative

Recitative (reh-sih-ta-téev), from the Italian word for “recite,” is a technique of declaiming words musically in a heightened, theatrical manner. There is always an instrumental accompaniment. The singing voice closely follows the free rhythm of emotional speech; it mirrors and indeed exaggerates the natural ups and downs that occur as an actor raises his or her voice at a question, lowers it in “asides,” or cries out angrily. The composer makes no effort to organize these speechlike utterances into real melodies; the point is speechlike song.

Recitative was used for plot action, dialogue, and other places in the drama where it is particularly important for the words to be brought out. Text phrases and individual words are not ordinarily repeated any more than they would be in speech.

Most of the time, recitative accompaniment was kept to a minimum — basso continuo (typically cello and harpsichord) alone — so that the singer could interpret the dialogue or the action as spontaneously as possible. Italians at the time called recitative with continuo accompaniment secco recitative, from the Italian meaning “dry” (think of the sound of the harpsichord).

In every opera seria, however, one or two of the most excited, emotion-fi lled recitatives were provided with orchestral accompaniment of one kind or another. This type is called accompanied recitative.

Aria

An aria is a set piece for solo singer that has much more musical elaboration and coherence than recitative. The vocal part is more melodic, and ordinarily the accompaniment includes the orchestra, not just the continuo, as in secco recitative. Here the singer-actor is mulling over his or her emotions at some leisure, “getting his feelings out,” instead of reacting moment by moment, as in recitative. Consequently in arias the repetition of poetic phrases or words is common and, in principle, appropriate.

The standard form for the Baroque Italian opera aria is da capo form, A B A (less usual is free da capo form, A B A⬘). Both the words and music of A are repeated after B; da capo (“from the head”) is a direction on scores meaning repeat from the beginning. The composer wrote the music for A and B only, leaving the performers to do the rest. Indeed, the singer would do more than just repeat A. He or she would also ornament the music with improvised runs, cadenzas, and so on, so as to create an exciting enhanced effect the second time around.

“

Senesino, nor Carestini, then Mr. Handel desires to have a man soprano and a woman contralto, and the price (for both) must not exceed 1100 guineas, and that the persons must set out for London the latter end of August, and that no engagement must be made with one without a certainty of getting the other.”

Letter from one of Handel’s agents, 1730

Intimately tied up with Italian opera seria was the castrato singer (plural: castrati). The starring male roles in opera were hardly ever sung by tenors or basses but rather by men who had submitted to castration at puberty in order to preserve their voices in the soprano or alto range. At its best, the castrato voice was a prized virtuoso instrument, more powerful and brilliant than a woman’s soprano.

This practice seems an outrage to us today, as it did to everybody outside Italy at the time (and to many in Italy itself). Nevertheless, in Italy and across most of Europe — France was a notable exception — castrati were gladly accepted because of their spectacular singing and given top billing, along with women prima donnas. But the presence of frankly unnatural men in the main opera roles, which were of course usually romantic roles, made it hard to believe in the ideal of opera as serious drama in music. Contributing to the side-show quality, it was com-mon in opera seria plots for male characters to disguise themselves as women (and vice versa). Then the male soprano voice was used for female impersonation.

The most famous castrati were international stage fi gures. Some were pampered stars and objects of ridicule at the same time, such as Caffarelli, who was once jailed for indecent gestures during a performance. Others led

more dignifi ed ca-reers. Carlo Bros-chi, whose stage name was Farinelli, the most famous of all, was also a com-poser and later in life an infl uential fi gure at the royal trato, Alessandro Moreschi, a mem-ber of the Sistine

Choir in Rome who was born as late as 1858, made re-cordings in 1902 – 03; you can listen to some of them on YouTube.

You can also rent the 1994 fi lm Farinelli, for which a virtual castrato voice was invented by digital wizardry.