Baroque music

• 1. Introduction

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  Baroque music stretches across one hundred and fifty years of Western history, from roughly 1600 to 1750, and it gave the world opera, the modern orchestra, and the tonal system that underlies nearly every pop song heard today. The word itself came as an insult. A French critic, reviewing the premiere of Jean-Philippe Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie in October 1733, complained that its music was "du barocque" - too dissonant, too restless, too strange. That review, later printed in the Mercure de France in May 1734, marks the first known use of the term applied to music. What began as mockery became the name of one of the most fertile periods in Western art. How did musicians working across Italy, France, Germany, and beyond transform the polite Renaissance into something so charged with feeling? And why did the era's defenders and its critics end up fighting about the same things - complexity, ornament, emotion, novelty? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. A Word Born as a Weapon

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  Jean-Jacques Rousseau took a clear position in 1768, writing in the Encyclopedie that baroque music was "that in which the harmony is confused, and loaded with modulations and dissonances. The singing is harsh and unnatural, the intonation difficult, and the movement limited." He was not alone. Other authors in the 18th and 19th centuries wielded the term as a pejorative for anything extravagant, strange, or dissonant. Noel Antoine Pluche wrote of a concert directed by Jean-Baptiste Anet that Anet would "wrest laboriously from the bottom of the sea some baroque pearls, when diamonds can be found on the surface of the earth." The word itself came from the Portuguese barroco, meaning an irregularly-shaped pearl, and it entered French as a term for the misshapen and the unruly. It was only in the 20th century that scholars systematically reclaimed the label. In 1919, Curt Sachs became the first to apply the five characteristics of Heinrich Wolfflin's theory of the Baroque - originally built for the visual arts - to music. Critics immediately questioned whether visual categories could travel so cleanly into sound. Robert Haas argued that in music the period could not have started before 1594, the year that both Palestrina and Lassus died. In the 1940s, Manfred Bukofzer pushed for autonomous, technical analysis of the music itself, rather than borrowed frameworks from painting or literature. Bukofzer proposed three approximate phases: "early Baroque" from 1580 to 1630, "middle Baroque" from 1630 to 1680, and "late Baroque" from 1680 to 1730. An alternative scheme by Clercx pushed the final phase out to 1740 or even 1765. None of these boundaries ever fully settled, and the musicologist Claude V. Palisca warned that the repertoire was too diverse for sweeping generalisations.

• 3. Florence and the First Operas

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  Count Giovanni de' Bardi hosted the Florentine Camerata in late Renaissance Florence: a gathering of humanists, musicians, poets, and intellectuals who wanted to reshape music and drama together. They rejected polyphony - multiple independent melodic lines running at once - as a distortion of ancient Greek ideals. They looked instead to monody, a solo voice accompanied by the kithara, an ancient strummed string instrument, and they believed that music should serve discourse and oration above all else. Jacopo Peri translated those ideals into practice with his works Dafne and L'Euridice, which stand as the beginning of opera. Opera became the catalyst that drew everything else forward. Claudio Monteverdi then pushed the transition further. He kept one foot in Renaissance polyphony - what he called prima pratica - and stepped the other foot into the new basso continuo technique, which he called seconda pratica. In basso continuo, a small group of musicians played the bassline and improvised harmonies above it, using keyboard players, a lutenist, and bass instruments such as viol, cello, and double bass. Monteverdi's operas L'Orfeo and L'incoronazione di Poppea drew wide attention to the new genre. Heinrich Schutz then carried that Venetian style into Germany, where his own diverse approach eventually evolved toward the next period.

• 4. Harmony as Architecture

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  Figured bass, also known as thorough bass, was a practical shorthand that changed how musicians thought about harmony. Numbers, accidentals, and symbols placed above a bassline told a harpsichordist or pipe organist which intervals to play above each bass note, and the player would then improvise a chord voicing on the spot. This notation made visible what had previously been implicit: that harmony was the structural underpinning of music, not just an ornament over a melody. Composers began thinking about harmonic progressions as forces that could guide a listener toward a sense of resolution or closure. The tritone - an interval long regarded as unstable and unsettling - was now deliberately used to create tension, especially in dominant seventh and diminished chords. Carlo Gesualdo had shown interest in harmony during the Renaissance, but the Baroque shift was specifically toward tonality: the idea that a piece belongs to a particular key, which functions as a home note. Sequences of chords, rather than just scales of notes, could provide that sense of arrival. Composers also drew on ancient writers such as Ptolemy and Aristoxenus to push chromaticism beyond the modal system of the Renaissance. A more scientific understanding of pitch led to the development of equal temperament and modulation between keys as a structural device. From the late 17th century it became common for a piece's key to appear in its title, a signal of how central that concept had become.

• 5. Courts, Churches, and Concerts

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  Jean-Baptiste Lully purchased patents from the French monarchy to become the sole composer of operas for King Louis XIV, and he used that monopoly to complete 15 lyric tragedies. He left one work, Achille et Polyxene, unfinished at his death. Lully kept his ensembles together by beating time with a large staff, making him an early model of what a conductor would become. The court culture he embodied, shaped by Louis XIV's palace at Versailles, set the tone for European aristocratic patronage across the middle Baroque. Dieterich Buxtehude worked from an entirely different position. He held the posts of organist and Werkmeister at the Marienkirche in Lubeck. As Werkmeister he served as secretary, treasurer, and business manager for the church. As organist he played for all main services, sometimes alongside other instrumentalists or vocalists. Entirely outside those duties, he organised and directed a concert series called the Abendmusiken, featuring sacred dramatic works that his contemporaries rated as the equivalent of operas. The rise of the middle class in trading centres created a third kind of demand: subscription-based opera houses, and an audience that preferred more realistic or historical operas over purely mythological subjects. Public music, court music, and church music each pulled Baroque composers in different directions, and the period produced major figures in all three arenas.

• 6. The Concerto and the Violin

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  Alessandro Stradella originated the concerto grosso style in his Sonate di viole. Arcangelo Corelli then developed it into a defining Baroque form. The concerto grosso is built on contrast: sections performed by the full orchestra alternate with sections played by a smaller group, and fast passages are set against slow ones. Corelli also organised violin technique and pedagogy in a way that had not been done before. Unlike Lully, who was embedded at the French court, Corelli was one of the first composers to publish his music widely and have it performed across Europe. Antonio Vivaldi was among his students and later composed hundreds of works based on the principles in Corelli's trio sonatas and concerti. Opera seria, the dominant operatic form for most of the 18th century, called for larger string sections - often two dozen or more performers - and that demand drove the creation of the modern orchestra. By 1750, the natural horn had become a standard part of the Italian string orchestra, after developments in playing technique allowed performers to reach most of the chromatic scale. The oboe had replaced the shawm as the main woodwind instrument in ensembles by around 1700, because composers needed a more elegant sound for opera and ballet. The harpsichord held its position as the primary keyboard instrument for domestic music-making through the late Baroque, but the fortepiano, perfected by Bartolomeo Cristofori around 1700, began its gradual rise after 1750.

• 7. The Dance Suite in Motion

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  Bach's dance suites were sometimes called partitas, though that term also described other collections. The suite was written for listening, not for accompanying actual dancers, even though every movement drew its character from real dance forms. A Baroque suite typically opened with a French overture, a slow movement followed by a succession of four core dances. The allemande came first: a moderate-tempo piece with origins in the German Renaissance era, able to start on any beat of the bar. The courante followed, in triple meter, and could be either fast and lively in the Italian corrente style or slow and stately in the French manner. The sarabande, a Spanish dance in triple meter, occupied the third position and was among the slowest of all Baroque dances. Its characteristic halting rhythm came from an emphasis on the second beat of the bar. The gigue closed the suite: an upbeat piece in compound meter with a rhythmic feel easily recognised by listeners, and with roots in the British Isles, where its folk counterpart was the jig. Later suites inserted additional dances between the sarabande and the gigue. The gavotte moved in duple meter with phrases starting on an offbeat. The bourrée started on the second half of the last beat of the bar, creating a feel distinct from the gavotte despite a similar tempo. The passepied was a fast dance in binary form and triple meter that began as a court dance in Brittany. The rigaudon, a lively French dance in duple meter, traced its origins to the southern French provinces of Vavarais, Languedoc, Dauphine, and Provence.

• 8. The End of an Era

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  Italian composers moved toward the galant style around 1730, while German composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach largely continued writing in the Baroque manner up to 1750. That twenty-year lag was not unusual: throughout the period, new developments originated in Italy and took up to two decades before broader adoption across the rest of Western classical music. Domenico Scarlatti, famous for his 555 sonatas, showed a tendency toward the simpler textures of what would become the galant style. Carlos Seixas, described as the most prominent musician of his generation in Portugal, stood at a similar crossing point, transitioning between late Baroque and the galant in his Harpsichord Concerto in A Major. A gradual simplification of harmony and musical texture was taking hold, with a stronger emphasis on melody and a reduction in counterpoint. The distinction between French and Italian musical styles, once a sharp cultural divide, grew much weaker. The harpsichord's inability to control dynamics made it vulnerable to the fortepiano's advantages, though Classical composers still used it in concert for decades because of its carrying power in large halls. Organs, meanwhile, had grown in complexity and size throughout the late Baroque, especially in France, Spain, and northern Germany, expanding the available range of pitches and timbres in ways that would carry forward into the next century.