Ensemble baroque Les Indes Galantes director: Vincent de Meester

Music for Chamber and Church

Italy, after having favoured an unprecedented development of art painting, covered itself with cathedrals, churches, palaces, monasteries, thus enlarging the domain of architecure und sculpture...but at the beginning of the 17th century it fell asleep upon the treasures which it had offered to the world. Miraculously, a sudden musical apotheosis is following the effervescence of sculptural arts, which took place mainly before 1600. Thus the obsession with beauty which the Florentines, Venetians and Romans cutivated in a sort of drunkenness is shifting and changing its form of expression: Venice and Naples start to build Opera houses in the same way they had built Churches before and poeple are aquiring a taste for sonatas like they ordered some painting on easel before. Everything the baroque loves is better said in music than in the spatial arts.

Because the baroque is not only, as is believed, the art of the curve and counter-curve. Before all, it is the art of evrything moving, happening, fleeing. It is the art preferring the reflection to the thing, the art which loves the game of mirrors, the ambiguous, the metamorphosis, the multiple, the fleeing, the contrast. Music is moving in the time. It is vanishing as soon as it is grasped. It touches the mind and disappears.

It is the art of movement.

Thus, the architecture is replaced by theatre decoration, the statues by the play of the actors, the sculpture by trompe l'oeil decoration, the poetry by the chant. In this way the Italian 17th century brought forth the Opera.

The Opera and its first daughter, the cantata, have been born und developed in the genial work of Monteverdi. This new genre starts its proliferation as soon as it blossomes and covers so to speak the whole cultural life of a society, somehow like the cinema in the 20th century. The productivity shown by the composers in the face of the public demand goes beyond any imagination. The influence is such that it will mark also the sacral music in the motets, transforming a former more interior sentiment into a spectacular or sensual demonstration of the voice. The motet for single voice and cordes is in the Italy of the 17th century still not a familiar forme for the musicians, but is destined for a great rise.