Around 1600, a group of Florentine intellectuals decided that music had been ruined by complexity. They wanted to bring back the drama of ancient Greek tragedy, in which, they believed, words were sung clearly over simple chords. What they invented, more or less by accident, was opera. A few years later, in 1607, Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo showed what the new style could do, and a century and a half of music now called “Baroque” was under way.
The word was originally an insult, borrowed from a jeweller’s term for a misshapen pearl. Critics in the eighteenth century used it to mean overwrought and bizarre. It has since become a label for an astonishingly rich period: the birth of opera, the oratorio, the concerto, the sonata, the modern orchestra and the system of major and minor keys we still use.
The composers to know
| Composer | Dates | Country | Start with |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claudio Monteverdi | 1567–1643 | Italy | L’Orfeo; Vespers of 1610 |
| Girolamo Frescobaldi | 1583–1643 | Italy | Toccatas for keyboard |
| Heinrich Schütz | 1585–1672 | Germany | Musikalische Exequien |
| Barbara Strozzi | 1619–1677 | Italy | Cantatas and arias |
| Jean-Baptiste Lully | 1632–1687 | France | Armide; Le bourgeois gentilhomme |
| Dieterich Buxtehude | c. 1637–1707 | Denmark / Germany | Organ works; Membra Jesu nostri |
| Marc-Antoine Charpentier | 1643–1704 | France | Te Deum |
| Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber | 1644–1704 | Bohemia / Austria | Rosary Sonatas |
| Johann Pachelbel | 1653–1706 | Germany | Canon in D |
| Arcangelo Corelli | 1653–1713 | Italy | Concerti grossi, Op. 6 |
| Henry Purcell | c. 1659–1695 | England | Dido and Aeneas |
| Alessandro Scarlatti | 1660–1725 | Italy | Cantatas and operas |
| Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre | 1665–1729 | France | Harpsichord suites |
| François Couperin | 1668–1733 | France | Pièces de clavecin |
| Tomaso Albinoni | 1671–1751 | Italy | Oboe concertos |
| Antonio Vivaldi | 1678–1741 | Italy | The Four Seasons |
| Georg Philipp Telemann | 1681–1767 | Germany | Tafelmusik |
| Jean-Philippe Rameau | 1683–1764 | France | Les Indes galantes |
| Johann Sebastian Bach | 1685–1750 | Germany | Brandenburg Concertos; St Matthew Passion |
| George Frideric Handel | 1685–1759 | Germany / England | Messiah; Water Music |
| Domenico Scarlatti | 1685–1757 | Italy / Spain | Keyboard sonatas |
Where Purcell fits
Purcell is a middle-Baroque composer. He died in 1695, ten years after Bach and Handel were born, and his world was the one Lully and Corelli dominated: French dance music and the Italian trio sonata. Purcell absorbed both. His Sonnatas of III Parts (1683) openly imitate “the most fam’d Italian masters,” and his theatre overtures and dances are full of French style.
What he added was English: an obsession with the sound and stress of the language, a love of dissonance inherited from the Tudor church composers, and a theatrical streak that came from writing for the London stage. Nobody else in the Baroque sounds quite like him.
He also matters for what came after. When Handel arrived in London in 1710, he found an audience trained on Purcell, and his English oratorios, with their choral grandeur and their word-setting, owe Purcell a clear debt.
The late Baroque giants
Bach and Handel, both born in 1685, are the two names most people know. Bach spent his career as an organist and church musician in Germany, writing cantatas, passions and keyboard music of unequalled depth; he was little known outside his region until the nineteenth-century revival. Handel, an international star, made his fortune with Italian opera in London and then reinvented himself with English oratorio. Vivaldi, the “red priest” of Venice, wrote hundreds of concertos and turned the form into a vehicle for virtuoso display.
If Purcell had lived as long as Handel, into the 1750s, he would have overlapped with all of them. It is one of music history’s great what-ifs.
Where to go next
Start with one major work by each, in roughly chronological order: Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Corelli’s Op. 6, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and Handel’s Messiah. You will hear a century and a half of music change, and a family resemblance throughout.