The Baroque era - roughly the years from 1600 to 1750 - was an astonishingly dynamic period in Western cultural history. In art, science, and politics, the achievements of Michelangelo and Bernini, Newton and Descartes, and the explorers of the New World came out of a turbulence that still animates much of our own time.
It was an age of extremes, of grand schemes and mighty ambitions, and of emotions exaggerated and of emotions exaggerated and stretched to the breaking point. Even the word baroque suggests this stretching and twisting; it comes from a Portuguese word meaning "deformed pearl," one that is tear shaped, or elongated, perhaps, and not perfectly spherical. The Baroque era prized such aberration, seeing in it a symbol of the individual pushed to the maximum.
Extreme emotions powered Baroque arts, and the supreme of extremes was Baroque opera, a wonderful collaboration of writers, musicians, performers, painters, and "special effects" men. The word opera itself is the plural of the Latin opus, meaning, "work" - and in Baroque opera the audience certainly got "the works."
It all began in the last decade of the Italian Renaissance, when a group of noblemen in Florence attempted to re-create Greek drama. The Renaissance had explored the arts of antiquity, rediscovering ancient writings, sculpture, and buildings. But the mode of presenting Greek drama, which they knew to have been immensely powerful, was lost. They speculated that the actors must have projected their lines through masks in a kind of singsong way, somewhere between speech and song. Accordingly, the Florentine nobles created plays in which a single actor delivered his lines in a simple melodic style, supported by a slight musical accompaniment such as a lute. The first of these plays were Peri's Dafne in 1597 and Peri and Caccini's Euridice in 1600. It took only a few years for these simple works to develop into opera much as we know it today. By 1607, Monteverdi had created his Orfeo, and opera was full blown.
In their attempt to bring out the emotional content of the text, opera composers used every resource available. Musically, the solo voice dominated, but it was joined by ensembles and choruses and a colorful orchestra. To keep the text clear, the top line carried most of the interest, supported by a strongly harmonic bass line. This was a far cry from the complicated counterpoint that characterized vocal music of the Renaissance. The high points of an opera were found in its arias, each of which expressed an intense emotion such as rage, fear, love, or despair. Recitatives, in simpler melodic style, served to advance the action of the play from one emotional high point to another. A detailed system of musical symbols known as Affects evolved to more evocatively depict a variety of emotions. For example, a melodic line characterized by descending half-steps, like sobs, would be an obvious representation of sadness; an upward-leaping line would suggest joy or triumph.
The presentation of opera, though, involved far more than music. The greatest painters of the courts and palaces would be hired to make the sets and scenery; architects created theaters of magnificent proportions and often included built-in optical illusions; engineers provided special effects, such as shipwrecks, storms, fires, and gods flying through the air. Opera was spectacle of a very high order, all in the service of intense emotional
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