50 Fun Facts About Baroque Music

The word "baroque" is usually traced to the Portuguese barroco, a term for an irregularly shaped what?

An irregular pearl gave the era its name because eighteenth-century critics used "baroque" as an insult for music they found overloaded and lacking clear melody.

What reportedly saved Handel's life by turning aside a sword during his 1704 duel with composer Johann Mattheson?

A large button on Handel's coat deflected the blade after the two friends quarrelled during a performance of Mattheson's opera about Cleopatra. They made up and wrote to each other for life.

Bach's comic cantata of the 1730s pokes fun at a young woman's addiction to which fashionable drink?

Coffee is what the daughter, Lieschen, refuses to give up, however much her father grumbles. The piece was probably first performed in Zimmermann's coffee house, where Bach led a student ensemble.

Which Baroque set of violin concertos was published with sonnets describing birdsong, storms and a barking dog?

The Four Seasons paired each concerto with a sonnet, possibly by Vivaldi himself, and in Spring the violas imitate the sleeping goatherd's dog.

Handel's coronation anthem Zadok the Priest was adapted in 1992 into the anthem of which football competition?

The UEFA Champions League anthem lifts its rising string phrase from Handel, as its composer Tony Britten cheerfully admitted. The original has been sung at every British coronation since 1727.

Which court composer to Louis XIV died of gangrene after striking his own foot with a conducting staff?

Jean-Baptiste Lully struck his foot while beating time in a Te Deum celebrating the king's recovery from surgery. He then refused to have the toe amputated.

A recording of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 left Earth in 1977 on the Golden Record of which NASA probes?

Voyager 1 and 2 each carry a copy of the disc, which holds three Bach pieces alongside Beethoven's Fifth and Chuck Berry. Both probes have since reached interstellar space.

Which affliction struck both Bach and Handel, born weeks apart in 1685, late in their lives?

Blindness overtook both men, and each had been operated on by the same travelling eye surgeon, John Taylor, who is now widely regarded as a charlatan.

What happened to Bach in 1717 when he pressed too stubbornly to leave his post at the Weimar court?

He was jailed for almost a month and then dismissed in disgrace. Bach moved straight on to the court of Köthen, whose prince had hired him as director of music.

Which keyboard instrument, a mainstay of Baroque ensembles, makes its sound by plucking the strings with small quills?

The harpsichord plucks each string with a tiny plectrum, so a note sounds equally loud however hard the player presses the key.

Audiences traditionally rise to their feet for one chorus of which Handel work, first performed in Dublin in 1742?

Messiah gets listeners standing for its Hallelujah chorus, supposedly because King George II once rose for it, though nothing shows he was there. Handel wrote the whole score in 24 days.

Leopold Stokowski's orchestral version of Bach's famous D minor organ toccata features in which 1940 Disney film?

Fantasia sets the piece to abstract patterns rather than a story. Walt Disney even planned to show the sequence in 3D, handing audiences cardboard viewing frames, before dropping the idea.

Antonio Vivaldi, ordained a priest in 1703, was excused within a year from which duty because of poor health?

Saying Mass was something Vivaldi did only a few times, and he complained of a tightness in the chest. Venetians still knew him as the Red Priest, after the colour of his hair.

The 1968 hit album Switched-On Bach performed Baroque pieces entirely on which then-new electronic instrument?

The Moog synthesizer could sound only one note at a time, so Wendy Carlos built every track up line by line over about a thousand hours. The album went on to win three Grammys.

Which Cremona craftsman made the 1721 Lady Blunt violin, which sold in 2011 for a record $15.9 million?

Antonio Stradivari built more than a thousand instruments, and the Lady Blunt was auctioned to raise relief money after Japan's 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

An early biographer claimed that Bach wrote the Goldberg Variations for a Russian ambassador who suffered from what?

Insomnia kept the count awake, the story goes, so young Johann Goldberg played to him from the next room. Bach was said to have been paid with a golden goblet full of coins.

Antonio Vivaldi wrote much of his music for the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, which was what kind of institution?

An orphanage for abandoned children, the Pietà trained its most talented girls as musicians. Its all-female orchestra and choir became renowned, and Vivaldi taught there for decades.

Which composer, then aged just 20, revived Bach's long-neglected St Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1829?

Felix Mendelssohn had been given a copy of the score by his grandmother some years earlier. His Berlin performance brought Bach's large-scale works back to public attention.

Which German organist wrote the Canon in D, a wedding favourite that lay in obscurity until a 1968 recording?

Johann Pachelbel may have written it for a wedding in the Bach family in 1694. Its chord pattern has since been borrowed by a long line of pop songs.

Giuseppe Tartini said his most famous violin sonata came to him in a 1713 dream in which who played?

The Devil played so beautifully in the dream, Tartini said, that he woke and seized his violin to capture it. He judged what he wrote down far inferior to what he had heard.

Which era of music history followed the Baroque, bringing the lighter style of Haydn and Mozart?

The Classical period arrived by way of a short transition called the galant style, which prized light elegance over grandeur. The Baroque itself is usually dated from about 1600 to 1750.

Which woodwind did Italian Baroque scores usually mean by the plain word flauto?

The recorder was the default flute of the age, so a composer wanting the side-blown kind had to write flauto traverso. Bach's fourth Brandenburg Concerto gives solo parts to two recorders.

Bartolomeo Cristofori, instrument maker to a Medici prince, is famous for inventing which instrument around 1700?

The piano struck its strings with hammers, so a player could vary the volume by touch alone. A Medici inventory drawn up in 1700 is the first firm evidence that the new instrument existed.

Opera grew out of a circle of Florentine thinkers who hoped to revive the drama of which ancient civilisation?

Greece was the model for the Florentine Camerata, a group of poets, musicians and scholars who met at the house of Count Giovanni de' Bardi. Their experiments led to the first operas.

Handel's Water Music was first played in 1717 from a barge following King George I along which river?

The Thames carried about 50 musicians on a barge of their own beside the royal party. The king was so pleased that he ordered the music repeated at least three times that evening.

Handel died a wealthy man in 1759 and was given a state funeral at which London landmark?

Westminster Abbey drew more than three thousand mourners for the funeral, and Handel is buried there. He had arrived in England from Germany nearly half a century earlier.

Which Baroque form, the focus of Bach's unfinished late collection, has each voice enter in turn with the same theme?

The fugue takes its name from the Latin for flight, as each voice seems to chase the one before. Bach's The Art of Fugue was still incomplete when he died and was printed a year later.

Which composer wrote L'Orfeo for the Mantuan court in 1607, the earliest opera still regularly performed?

Claudio Monteverdi was beaten to the genre by Jacopo Peri, whose Dafne is generally counted as the first opera. L'Orfeo was written for the yearly carnival at the Gonzaga court.

Which English composer wrote Dido and Aeneas, an opera first known from a staging at a London girls' school?

Henry Purcell died at just 36, and the heroine's closing lament from the opera has outlived him. A band version is played each year at the Cenotaph in London on Remembrance Sunday.

After giving up the opera business, Handel found greater success with which unstaged genre, often on biblical stories?

An oratorio is given as a concert piece, with the chorus in a central role, and Handel all but created the English kind. Two early successes, Esther and Deborah, earned enough for him to start investing again.

Which near-universal Baroque accompaniment pairs a bass line with chords filled in by a keyboard or lute player?

Basso continuo players read a bass line marked with figures and improvised the chords above it, so no two performances were quite alike. A cello or bassoon usually doubled the bass.

Which Baroque form, used by Handel in his Opus 6, passes the music between a small solo group and the full orchestra?

Concerto grosso is Italian for big concerto, and the small solo group inside it is called the concertino. Several of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos loosely follow the same plan.

In Baroque opera, which speech-like style of singing carries the plot forward between the big solo songs?

Recitative follows the rhythms of ordinary speech and never repeats lines the way a formal song does. The plainest kind was backed by nothing more than a keyboard and a cello.

Farinelli, who sang nightly for Spain's King Philip V for nine years, was the most famous example of which voice type?

A castrato kept a boy's high voice into adulthood because of surgery before puberty. Philip's queen hoped that Farinelli's singing would lift her husband's severe depression.

In which German city did Bach serve for 27 years as music director of St Thomas Church until his death?

Leipzig offered Bach the job only after two other composers had turned it down, each staying on better terms at home. He oversaw the music in four of the city's churches.

Which German composer, a friend of Bach and godfather to one of his sons, left more than 3,000 works?

Georg Philipp Telemann was also first choice for the church post that Bach took in 1723, but he stayed in Hamburg after winning a raise. About half of his music is now lost.

Which composer, born in 1685 like Bach and Handel, wrote 555 keyboard sonatas while serving Iberian royalty?

Domenico Scarlatti taught the Portuguese princess Maria Barbara and followed her to Spain when she married the crown prince. His father Alessandro was a famous composer too.

The famous Adagio in G minor, largely the work of a 20th-century musicologist, is popularly credited to which Venetian?

Tomaso Albinoni supposedly left a fragment of bass line that Remo Giazotto said he had found and expanded. Some scholars suspect the fragment never existed and call the affair a hoax.

Which cellist found a second-hand edition of Bach's Cello Suites in a Barcelona shop at 13 and made them famous?

Pablo Casals was nearly 60 before he agreed to record the suites, starting in a London studio in 1936. Until he championed them they were little known and rarely played in public.

Which three-part song form of Baroque opera has the singer repeat the opening section with added ornaments?

A da capo aria rarely had its third section written out, because the composer simply wrote an instruction to go back to the start. The Italian phrase means from the head.

What name is given to the Baroque habit of switching abruptly between loud and soft with no gradual swell?

Terraced dynamics were often a matter of numbers, with the contrast made by setting a few players against many. Later Baroque composers such as Vivaldi used more varied shading.

Which Italian term names the full-orchestra passage that alternates with the solo episodes in a Vivaldi concerto?

Ritornello literally means little return, and Vivaldi standardised the plan across hundreds of concertos. The idea of a recurring block for full ensemble goes back to Giovanni Gabrieli.

Which Baroque theory held that music could stir specific passions in listeners, such as joy, hatred or sorrow?

The doctrine of the affections drew on thinkers such as Descartes, who counted six basic passions. The label itself was coined only in the twentieth century by German musicologists.

In 1705 the young Bach walked some 250 miles from Arnstadt to Lübeck to hear which celebrated organist?

Dieterich Buxtehude was offering his post to visiting musicians on condition that the successor marry his eldest daughter, and Handel had already said no. Bach stayed nearly three months.

Bach's Musical Offering grew from a theme given to him at Potsdam in 1747 by which flute-playing king?

Frederick the Great handed Bach a long, awkward theme and asked him to improvise on it there and then. The visit came about because one of Bach's sons was a musician at the court.

Which violinist-composer, buried in the Pantheon in Rome, wrote the Christmas Concerto and 48 trio sonatas?

Arcangelo Corelli made his name in Rome playing for wealthy patrons, cardinals among them. Part of his Christmas piece turns up in the film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

The French court musician Marin Marais published a 1725 piece that depicts, step by step, which medical ordeal?

Bladder-stone removal gets a blow-by-blow account in the score, with captions that follow the patient through the ordeal, including being tied down with silken cords. It is an early case of music telling a story.

Handel's rivalry with Giovanni Bononcini inspired a 1725 epigram with the first printed use of which pair of names?

Tweedledum and Tweedledee were the poet John Byrom's way of saying there was little to choose between the two composers. Lewis Carroll gave the names to two brothers in Through the Looking-Glass.

The prelude to a Te Deum by French composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier is familiar as the theme of which broadcasts?

Eurovision adopted the tune in 1954, just a year after a French musicologist rediscovered the long-forgotten work. Most people know it from the opening of the Song Contest broadcast.

Baroque violins were strung with which material, rather than the metal and synthetic strings of modern instruments?

Sheep gut strings are sometimes, and inaccurately, called catgut. Baroque players also use a bow built to an older pattern than the modern one.