Italian Baroque Music

Description

Italian Baroque Music The Trio Sonata, an instrumental composition generally demanding the services of four players reading from three part-books, assumed enormous importance in Baroque music, developing from its earlier beginnings at the start of the seventeenth century to a late flowering in the work of Handel, Vivaldi, Johann Sebastian Bach and their contemporaries, after the earlier achievements of Arcangelo Corelli in the form. Instrumentation of the trio sonata, possibly for commercial reasons, allowed some freedom of choice. Nevertheless the most frequently found arrangement became that for two violins and cello, with a harpsichord or other chordal instrument to fill out the harmony. Although some composers tended to compromise in matters of form, trio sonatas were more often than not either in the form of the Sonata da chiesa, the Church Sonata, with a sequence of four movements, slow, fast, slow, fast, the quicker movements fugal in character, or in the from of the Sonata da camera, the Chamber Sonata, rather resembling a suite of dance movements. The trio sonata was the foundation of the concerto grosso, the instrumental concerto that contrasted a concertino group of the four instruments of the trio sonata with the full string orchestra, which might double louder passages. The form was adapted to the new Rococo requirements of the later eighteenth century, before being displaced by the duo sonata, for solo instrument and keyboard. The Italian composer and violinist Arcangelo Corelli exercised a wide influence on his contemporaries and on the succeeding generation of composers. Born in Fusignano, he studied in Bologna, a distinguished musical centre, he established himself in Rome in the 1670s, and by 1679 had entered the service of Queen Christina of Sweden, who had taken up residence in Rome in 1655, after her abdication the year before, and had established there an academy of literati that later became the Arcadian Academy. He dedicated his first set of twelve Church Sonatas, Opus 1, published in 1681, to Queen Christina, describing the work as the first fruits of his studies. His second set of trio Sonatas, Chamber Sonatas, Opus 2, was published in 1685 with a dedication to a new patron, Cardinal Pamphili, whose service he entered in 1687, with the violinist Fornari and cellist Lulier. A third set of trio sonatas, a second group of twelve Church Sonatas, Opus 3, was issued in 1689, with a dedication to Francesco II of Modena, and a final set of a dozen Chamber Sonatas, Opus 4, was published in 1694 with a dedication to a new patron, Cardinal Ottoboni, the young nephew of Pope Alexander VIII, after Cardinal Pamphili's removal in 1690 to Bologna. Corelli occupied a leading position in the musical life of Rome for some thirty years, performing as a violinist and directing performances often on occasions of the greatest public importance. His style of composition was much imitated and provided a model, both through a wide dissemination o