The words which best describe Baroque music, in our opinion, are elegant and graceful. The music is florid and complex but it exists in a state of grace. Baroque music always carries with it a sense of occasion and the occasion is elegant. When we listen to Baroque music, we can’t help but feel as though we’ve been ennobled.

During this era, musical styles such as opera, oratorio, and concerto were fully developed and became foundational for the classical, romantic, and 20th Century periods which followed. The evolution of print technology made music which was composed in Italy available in England or Germany and vice versa thereby facilitating the spread of musical ideas across Europe.

The Baroque era of music, architecture, interior design, and physical arts mirror each other quite well, maybe better than any other period. That is not to say that the Baroque is a superior era but only that there was something approximating a unification across different mediums of expression. The age is defined by profuse decoration.

Photo: Baroque Statue in Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano, Rome

This was the Age of Reason which followed hard on the heels of the Scientific Revolution and was the precursor for the Age of Enlightenment. During the Baroque, both the church and the state became hyperactive in commissioning music to suit their sometimes opposing agendas.

The term Baroque was first applied to this era of history in 1919 but didn’t become a functional term in English until the 1940s. While scholars might enjoy nitpicking the dates and attributes of different regions from the Baroque, we’re going to go with the idea of one Baroque Period divided into overlapping categories of Early Baroque (1580-1650), Middle Baroque (1630-1700), and Late Baroque (1680-1750). The geographical region is Europe.

Most of the composers we consider to be “Baroque” such as Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi, hail from the Late Baroque. Henry Purcell, Arcangelo Corelli, and Alessandro Scarlatti are representative of the Middle Baroque. Early Baroque composers include Giovanni Gabrieli, Claudio Monteverdi, and Heinrich Schütz. However, it’s more than ok to refer to all of these composers as “Baroque.”

Photo: Karlskirche, Vienna

We have done our best to include composers which represent each period of The Baroque. In doing so we have excluded several notable composers from the French Baroque...Je suis désolé.

The Baroque Listening Challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to complete all three sections below. Beware, we have back loaded the listening with a ton of Handel and Bach. These listening challenges are based on the idea of covering a lot of ground.

It is more than ok to have this music playing in the background while you attend to other tasks. Taking the time to focus solely on the music is a noble pursuit but with this much music to listen to it’s nigh impossible. It is more important, in our opinion, to spend several hours with the music as a passive activity as opposed to a few hours of active listening. Although, finding your own balance is recommended.

The goal of Classical Rebellion is to immerse ourselves in this music and through the immersion affect our subconscious with an infusion of truth, beauty, and freedom thereby helping us to master our inner selves. This music changes us for the better even without our full attention. In some ways, it might be more effective to listen passively as our judgment of ourselves as attentive audience members doesn’t enter the equation.

Total Listening Time Aproximately 14-and-a-half hours.

Photo: Lion Hunt (1621) by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640)

Early Baroque (1580-1650)

Photo: St. Mark's Basilica, Venice

Giovanni Gabrieli ((1557-1612)) was born in Carnia, near Venice but studied composition in Munich with the Late Rennaisannce master Orlando de Lassus. By 1584 Gabrieli had returned to Venice and became the organist and then composer for the world-famous St. Mark’s Basilica.

As we might imagine, Gabrieli is a transitional composer. He studied with a Renaissance composer but he himself is considered to be a Baroque composer. Gabrieli established what became known as the Venetian Style. His student Heinrich Schütz would take that style to Germany.

For the listening challenge, we have selected some of Gabrieli's Sinfonia Sacrae.

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) followed Gabrieli as a transitional composer between the Renaissance and Baroque. Technically they were contemporaries but Monteverdi happened to live longer than Gabrieli.

Monteverdi’s musical life started in Mantua in the patronage of Duke Vincenzo I Gonzaga. Monteverdi began to resent the poor financial treatment he was receiving at Mantua. He asked for permission to be released but was refused and given a slight increase in his wages. After Vincenozo’s death, Monteverdi was, for all intents and purposes, laid-off by the Gonzaga heir due to court intrigues which led to cost-cutting measures. Monteverdi returned, penniless, to his hometown of Cremona.

In 1613 Monteverdi traveled to Venice to audition for the position of maestro di cappella at St. Mark's. He won the position and was awarded 50 ducats but was robbed on his return trip to Cremona by highwaymen, returning penniless once again.

In Venice Monteverdi enjoyed the relative freedom available under the Venetian Republic. Compared to the intrigues of the Court at Mantua, Venice must have felt like a haven of peaceful repose but it wouldn’t last.

The Plague hit Venice in the early 1630s resulting in 45,000 deaths in 16 months and a city with only 100,000 inhabitants, its lowest in 150 years. This event effectively paused Monteverdi’s career from 1630-1637.

In 1637 the first public opera house in Europe, San Cassiano, opened in Venice and reinvigorated the city’s musical life. Monteverdi, then in his 60’s contributed two masterpieces, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland) and L'incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea), which are both performed to this day.

We are including his opera L’Orfeo, written in 1607 at Mantua. It is the oldest opera still in the standard repertoire for opera houses around the world.

Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672) is considered to be the most important German composer until J. S. Bach. After studying with Gabrieli in Venice, Schütz went on to become the court composer to the Elector of Saxony in Dresden. In 1628 he returned to Venice where he met and studied with Monteverdi.

After returning to Dresden, Schütz spent two years composing in Copenhagen and again returned to Dresden in 1635. In 1641 the Dresden Court was devastated by the 30 Years’ War and Schütz went back to Denmark until the end of the war in 1648. His compositions during this time were on a small scale due to the war’s strain on resources.

While in Dresden Schütz laid the groundwork for what has since become the Staatskapelle Dresden, one of the great orchestras of the world. For the listening challenge, we have included his Historia der Auferstehung Jesu Christi, from 1623, as indicative of his early compositional style.

Middle Baroque (1630-1700)

Image: The Taking of Christ Caravaggio

Henry Purcell (1659-1695) was the undisputed “Greatest English Composer” for 200 years at which point composers such as Edward Elgar and Ralph Vaughan Williams gave him some competition for the British Composer’s Crown. That’s not a real thing but it could be a fun exercise in opinion!

Charles II was restored as King of England just after Purcell’s birth, providing 25 years of relative stability in the political system. Purcell composed I Was Glad and My heart is Inditing, for the coronation of King James II in 1685 after Charles II’s death. Three years later James II was deposed in The Glorious Revolution which ended 100 years of political struggle between The Crown and Parliament. The revolution was a bloodless affair and resulted in Parliament taking primacy over The Crown.

It is easy to forget how unstable the politics of The Baroque Era were. Purcell composed under three different regimes.

Purcell’s earliest confirmed composition was completed when he was 11-years-old. Legend has it that he started composing at the age of nine. For the listening challenge, we have included his opera Dido and Aeneas composed in 1688, the year of The Glorious Revolution. The opera is most famous for Dido’s lament “When I am Laid in Earth.”

Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713) was key in the development of the concerto style. His most well-known compositions are the Concerti Grossi, composed in the 1680s but not published until 1714—after his death.

By the time Corelli’s Concerti Grossi became famous, Vivaldi’s three-movement concerto had risen in popularity. Yet Corelli’s concertos were so influential that in 1739 Georg Friedrich Händel honored Corelli directly with his own “Opus 6” collection of twelve Concerti Grossi. Handel followed Corelli’s structure of four and five movements, eschewing the soon to be dominant three-movement concerto. J.S. Bach also studied Corelli’s instrumental music and based some of his organ music from 1707-1708 on Corelli’s compositions of 1689.

For the listening challenge, we have included the first six of Corelli's Concerti Grossi along with one of his most famous pieces from the Christmas Concerto

Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725) had a career that spanned the whole of modern-day Italy from South to North. As with Purcell, Scarlatti composed under numerous political regimes.

Born in Sicily, Scarlatti took a position in Rome as maestro di cappella to Christina Queen of Sweeden. He then moved to Naples and established the Neopolitan school of opera. When the Spanish took control of Naples in 1702, Scarlatti went to Florence and composed operas for Ferdinando de' Medici’s private theater.

In 1703 he accepted another position in Rome as maestro di cappella at the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore. In 1707 he visited Venice and returned to Naples, then under Austrian rule, in 1708. He died there in 1725. Two of his sons, Domenico Scarlatti and Pietro Filippo Scarlatti, were composers. Domenico (1685-1757) was an influential composer in the late Baroque who transitioned his style into the early Classical or Gallant Style.

We have selected Alessandro Scarlatti’s Messa di Santa Cecilia (1720) for the listening challenge. The style is pushing forward to the Late Baroque or even early Classical style, particularly in the orchestral accompaniment.

Late Baroque (1680-1750)

Image: The Fall of Phaeton Peter Paul Reubens

Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) was born in Venice, held positions in Mantua and Rome and late in life moved to Vienna based on the patronage of Austrian Emperor Charles VI. Charles died soon after Vivaldi arrived leaving him with no royal support.

At that point, Vivaldi was 63-years-old and his compositions had fallen out of style. He soon became destitute and died in the night, alone, of an internal infection. He is buried next to the Karlskirche, one of the most famous examples of Baroque architecture.

While a sad story, it is fitting that Vivaldi, the composer of the most famous Baroque concertos, The Four Seasons, be buried next to a paradigm of Baroque architecture. Besides The Four Seasons, Vivaldi wrote more than 500 concertos and 40 operas along with sacred music.

For the listening challenge, we have chosen two of Vivaldi’s more well-known concertos, besides The Four Season, The Concerto for Two Trumpets in C and The Concerto for Lute (Guitar) in D Major. We’ve also included his Gloria. The Gloria is a favorite composition for church choirs around the world as it is approachable and appropriate for a Christmas concert.

George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) was one of the most successful composers in history. Born German, he lived in England for 50 years and died a rich man at the age of 74. His funeral was given full state honors and he is buried in Westminster Cathedral in London.

His initial success in England was as a composer and impresario of opera in the Italian Style. Handel founded and ran no fewer than three opera companies. With the success of The Messiah (1741) Handel became a household name in perpetuity. His coronation anthem, Zadok the Priest (1727), composed for the coronation of George II, has been performed at every subsequent British coronation.

In 1749 more than 12,000 paying spectators witnessed the premiere of The Royal Fireworks Music. During the course of the rehearsals and performances, a pavilion burned to the ground, a woman’s dress was set on fire by a stray rocket, a soldier was blinded and another had his hand blown off.

For the listening challenge, we have selected numbers 1-6 of his 12 Concerti Grossi dedicated to Corelli, the Sacred Anthem Dank sei dir Herr (Thanks be to Thee), Zadok the Priest, and The Royal Fireworks Music. We have left out a legion of masterpieces by Handel because this challenge is only supposed to last seven days.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was the most prolific composer in history—when it comes to children. He had seven children with his first wife and 13 with his second. 11 of the children survived into adulthood. Three of them, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788), Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach (1732–1795), and Johann Christian Bach (1735–1782) went on to become well-known composers. Bach’s grandson, Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach (1759–1845) was the court composer for Frederick William II of Prussia.

However, Sebastian Bach himself was the great-grandson of the first musical Bach, Johann "der Spielmann" (the player). Johann’s second son was a musician as was Sebastian Bach’s father. All told, the Bach family was influential in German music for about 200 years, but none more so than Sebastian Bach.

It would take a solid year to listen to all of Bach’s masterpieces. Over 200 of his cantatas survive. They have been recorded into a complete set of 67 CDs. There is a complete collection of his Organ compositions. It fills 17 CDs. The St. Matthew and St. John Passions would take over five hours to listen to back to back. The Six Cello Suites take two hours to perform. Then there are the partitas for keyboard, The Goldberg Variations, the Well-Tempered Klavier and list goes on and on.

For the listening challenge, we have selected the unbelievably famous Toccata and Fugue in D Minor for Organ, the first of the 6 Cello Suites, the Cantata Wachet Auf (Sleepers Wake), the complete Brandenburg Concertos and The Mass in B Minor.

It should be noted that the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor is attributed to Bach but no autographed score has been verified.

You did it! Anyone who finished this challenge is in the top 1% of Baroque listeners. That seems reasonable, doesn't it? There are 330 million people in The United States. Have 3.3 million of them listened to 14-and-a-half hours of Baroque music?

Email us with what you have gained from this challenge and we will publish it, anonymously if desired, on the website and on our social media!

garrett@classicalrebellion.com