As someone who loves music, especially in the classical genre, I’ve always been interested in finding out what influenced music from hundreds of years ago, from the composers’ personal dramas to the historical circumstances they lived in. Without that knowledge, it’s hard to connect with and appreciate music from so long ago. What we have to realize is that the musicians of long-ago were just like us, beefing with rivals and worrying about the next paycheck. The one thing that truly sets us apart is the circumstances in which we live. Just like COVID has heavily impacted the global music scene in our day, historical events impacted long-gone musicians. In this article, I’m talking about the impact of historical events and circumstances on the musicians of the Baroque era, which was especially impacted by those factors.
Before we get into it, let’s talk about what the Baroque era of music was first. Coming from the Portuguese word barroco, or “oddly shaped pearl,” this era was in full swing from about 1600 to 1750. It’s known as a time of lavish, ornamented details in everything from fashion to architecture. Just imagine a painting full of bright, royal colors and moving and passionate depictions of religious images with a thick gold frame and you’ve just about got the character of the times. The Baroque era was also the era of J. S. Bach, a composer we still know and idolize hundreds of years later.
Arguably the most important historical factors of the Baroque era were the simultaneous Renaissance and Enlightenment periods. Within these intellectual movements, the principles of the ancient Greeks and Romans became revered idols and were infused into nearly every aspect of European culture. Believe it or not, the very idea that music was meant to express the deepest emotions of the human soul is Greco-Roman and was only brought back into music in the Baroque era. Not only that, but the structure of one melody over bass and harmony was a forgotten Greco-Roman concept until the Renaissance brought the ancients back into fashion.
Another important influence on music at the time was the power of the patron. Musicians did not have the free reign that many enjoy today with song-writing and performance. The middle class was only just emerging, meaning that the concept of art for all and not only for the rich few was a fairly new concept. Other than the emerging opera music form (another call back to the arias and oratorios of the ancients), public performances were none-existent for musicians. They instead relied on the patronage of art-loving aristocrats and hymn-singing churches, and so their venues remained confined to private salons and church congregations. There was no freedom of choice when it came to composing for a patron—if the patron was a church council, the musician was ordered to write a certain number of religious pieces (often cantatas), not some heart-aching song about the girl who got away. If the patron was a prince, you had better write whatever he fancies or the prison guard or even executioner could come a-knocking.
The composer J. S. Bach is a primary example of the heavy influence of patronage on art; he composed over 250 cantatas (form of musical composition) for the Church as well as his famous St. John and St. Matthew Passions. There’s one story about Bach that truly sums up what artists went through at the time: the story of his Brandenburg Concertos. During a trip to Berlin for either a spa treatment or the creation of a new harpsichord (the keyboard instrument that came before the piano), Bach met the margrave (prince) of the city, who immediately fell in love with Bach’s work. Bach, who was looking for a new job, set out to compose a set of jaw-dropping pieces for the margrave as a job application. Once he returned to Cothen, his current hometown, Bach composed one of his most famous set of works: the Brandenburg Concertos. Once his masterpieces were complete, he sent them, along with an embarrassingly groveling letter, to the margrave in Berlin. After all that hard work, however, the margrave never so much as replied to Bach’s letter and may not have even had his orchestra play Bach’s work. Imagine humiliating yourself and getting zip in return. It just shows how desperately musicians of the Baroque era relied on patrons for work and success. We can at least be relieved that Bach finally was financially stable enough to work for himself by the end of his life in the mid 18th century, producing incredible works such as the Art of Fugue with his own money. Hooray for Bach!
From Western intellectual movements, to employer-employee relationships, to countless other factors, the Baroque era of music was defined by its historical circumstances. Without knowledge of these events, it seems impossible to truly understand the meaning of any music composed during that time, and I believe that that is the reason for the widespread misunderstanding of Baroque music such as Bach’s in today’s mainstream culture, where his and others’ music is deemed boring and unrelatable. So, next time you hear a Bach prelude and fugue or the like, just think of what motivated his writing, and it will immediately enrich your listening experience!
