Baroque Masters

As I had the pleasure a couple of years ago of being heard by Your Royal Highness, in accordance with your commands, and of observing that you took some delight in the small musical talent that Heaven has granted me, and as, when I took my leave of Your Royal Highness, you did me the honor of requesting that I send you some of my compositions, I have therefore followed your most gracious commands and taken the liberty of discharging my humble obligations to Your Royal Highness with the present concertos which I have adapted to several instruments, begging you most humbly not to judge their imperfections by the standards of that refined and delicate taste in music that everyone knows you to possess . . .

If Bach was looking for employment from the Margrave, he never got it. What the world got is what we now call the six Brandenburg Concertos. Bach probably did not write them specifically for Brandenburg. Instead, being an efficient and resourceful composer, he rearranged earlier compositions to fit what the Margrave had in his orchestra.

The six concertos are a diverse bunch; no two call for the same solo instruments. The First Brandenburg Concerto calls for two horns, three oboes, a bassoon, and a violin as soloists. The first and third movements feature the soloists alternating with the orchestra. The second movement is a beautiful duet between the oboe and violin. The fourth movement—unusual for a baroque concerto—is a succession of alternating dances allowing for smaller groups of soloists to team up.

Chances are the Margrave’s orchestra never performed any of the Brandenburg Concertos. After Bach’s death, most of them remained in obscurity for more than one hundred years until a musicologist rediscovered them. Today the Brandenburg Concertos are the crown jewels of the Baroque era.

©2017 John P. Varineau

Gloria in D Major, RV 589

Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)

Written: circa 1715

Movements: Twelve

Style: Baroque

Duration: 30 minutes

A contemporary of Antonio Vivaldi once described him as “An excellent violinist and a mediocre composer.” Charles Burney, the eighteenth century music historian wrote, “If acute and rapid tones are evil, Vivaldi has much of the sin to answer for.” Another historian from the same period described Vivaldi’s music as “wild and irregular.” The great 20^th century composer Igor Stravinsky felt that Vivaldi was “greatly overrated—a dull fellow who could compose the same form over and so many times over.” Regardless of his contemporary’s views (or Stravinsky’s sour grapes), Vivaldi is a composer whose best music has stood the test of time and who would fit comfortably into the 21^st century fascination with celebrity musicians of prodigious talent. His Four Seasons are on any list of the top ten most popular classical compositions.

Vivaldi learned violin from his father who was a professional violinist in Venice. He may have studied composition with the maestro di cappella (choirmaster) at St. Mark’s Basilica and he began preparing for the priesthood when he was fifteen. He was ordained in 1703 but was soon exempted from saying mass because of ill-health. (That didn’t seem to preclude him from playing the violin and touring.) In the same year as his ordination, Vivaldi was appointed “Master of Violin” at Pio Ospedale della Pietà (Devout Hospital of Mercy), an orphanage—with an amazing music program—for girls in Venice. His responsibilities there included teaching the girls and writing music for them to play for their Sunday performances.

During his lifetime, he composed nearly one thousand works. Over five hundred were concertos—many of them were for the girls. Thirty-nine were for bassoon, twenty for oboe, sixteen for flute, and twenty-seven for cello. Vivaldi wrote more than two hundred fifty concertos for his own instrument! He also wrote 45 operas—obviously not for the girls.

For nearly two centuries, the world thought that the only things Vivaldi wrote were those concertos and operas. Then, in the late 1920s, somebody started a massive cataloguing of the holdings at the Turin National Library. Lo and behold, some sixty pieces of sacred music, including psalms, antiphons, hymns, motets and parts of the mass by Vivaldi appeared! It was music that he had written for the girls at the Ospedale. In 1939, for the first time in two hundred years, Vivaldi’s Gloria was performed in Siena, Italy.

The Gloria is a sparkling piece. Vivaldi treats the chorus carefully while giving the instrumentalists some flash. Each of the twelve short movements brings contrast in color, texture and mood, perfectly reflecting the meaning of the text.

©2017 John P. Varineau

Blessed are they that considereth the poor, HWV 268, "Foundling Hospital Anthem"

Georg Frideric Handel (1685–1759)

Written: 1749

Movements: Eight

Style: Baroque

Duration: 28 minutes

If you mention Handel’s Messiah to the “person on the street,” they will immediately think of the Hallelujah Chorus. Everybody knows and loves it. (But not everybody realizes that there is a lot of music—and sitting—that precedes the standing for the Hallelujah Chorus.) With the abundant performances of the Messiah, especially around Christmas, it may be a surprise to know that there was a time when it almost died out.

Initially, Georg Frideric Handel didn’t want to write the Messiah. He had been writing Italian operas ever since he was nineteen. He had gone to England because, for an opera composer, “England, of all European countries, was the least exploited.” Italian opera was never a financial success in England, however. They were expensive to produce and audiences were slim. The superstar Italian imports demanded exorbitant salaries, the English audiences preferred less serious fare and, frankly, something in a language they could understand. By 1741 Handel had endured the financial collapse of several opera companies. There were rumors that, after nearly thirty years, Handel was giving up and returning to Germany.

Occasionally, Handel wrote dramatic works in English (called oratorios) for the London audiences. They were generally a financial success. Now, seeing Handel’s financial distress, Charles Jennens—the man who assembled the texts for Handel’s other oratorios—got him to write another one. Jennens’ invitation arrived at the same time that Handel was invited to Dublin to present a series of concerts. Handel seized on the opportunity and spent three frenetic weeks in August of 1741 writing Messiah. The performance in Dublin was a great artistic and financial success. However, saying “the rest is history,” wouldn’t be accurate. Back in London, the Messiah met with tepid response. “Partly from the scruples some person had entertained against carrying on such a performance in a Play House, and partly for not entering into the genius of the composition, [the Messiah] was but indifferently relish'd," the Earl of Shaftesbury wrote.

In the same year of the premiere of Messiah, a new hospital was going up in London to care for babies who were abandoned by their mothers. The great painter William Hogarth was one of the governors of the new hospital. In one of the first examples in history of a “charity auction,” Hogarth and his other painter friends (like Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough) donated paintings to the hospital. All of a sudden, the rich were showing up to see the paintings and ending up making a donation.

In 1749, Handel got in on the act and offered to stage a benefit concert to fund the hospital’s new chapel. He wrote a “new” work for the concert. (Actually he reused a lot of music he had already written and “borrowed” from other composers.) The concert was such a success that he staged another concert the next year, this time simply programming Messiah complete. That was so successful it had to be repeated two weeks later. . . and every year after that until the 1770s. Before he died, Handel willed a set of performance parts to Messiah so that the hospital could keep performing it after his passing.

83400264. used the first three verses of Psalm 43 as the basis for the anthem at that first benefit for the Foundling Hospital: Blessed are they that considereth the poor. Like his other oratorios and anthems, it alternates arias and duets with pieces for chorus. He ends the work with the Hallelujah Chorus. And the rest is history.

©2017 John P. Varineau