Great Courses:  How To Listen To And Understand Great Music:  Part II:  The High Baroque, taught by Professor Robert Greenberg

One of the pleasures of listening to this series of lectures, which in its entirety goes on for 48 lectures of 45 minutes apiece–this particular part of the course being eight lectures within that larger arc, is listening both to great music and to someone who is both passionate and knowledgeable about it.  As someone who has listened to many hours of this particular professor talking about music and various composers, this is definitely a course I appreciate, and if you have gotten to this point of the lectures, you definitely have much that you will enjoy as well.  Over and over again the instructor laments that he is unable because of a shortage of time to introduce still more music, but for many people, there is still a great deal to enjoy with the way that the author not only introduces a good variety of Baroque songs here but also that he introduces some of them in different contexts so that one can appreciate the layers of what good Baroque composers like Percell and J.S. Bach were doing in their works, and that makes this even more valuable than just a superficial survey of Western music.

In the eight lectures included here the author manages to discuss a few fascinating aspects of the High Baroque era that are worthwhile and notable.  First, the instructor begins (9) with a discussion of the rise of German nationalism in music and how that influenced the course of the Baroque when compared with the Italian focus on beautiful music inspired by a different language that allowed for more melisma than German offered.  After that the author discusses the characteristic fondness of Baroque for the vivid creativity and tight compositional control that were exercised in the fugue (10).  This leads to two lectures on the Baroque Opera (11, 12) that look both at the beginnings of opera in Italy and how it was inspired by madrigals and similar art forms that sought to capture the emotional resonance that classical Greek music was thought to have as well as the way that operas were created in Northern Europe, with a focus on Percell’s Dido & Aeneas.  After that there are two lectures that focus on Baroque sacred music with a lecture on the oratorio (13) that focuses on Handel’s Messiah and another one on the Lutheran Church Cantata that focuses on Bach’s efforts (14).  The series of lectures then concludes with two lectures on Baroque instrumental forms, namely the Passacaglia/chacone (15) and the ritornello form and the Baroque concertinos (16).

It is by no means necessary to be an orchestra music snob to appreciate these lectures, and the author does a good job at expanding the sort of music that a listener can appreciate.  Though I have been by no means hostile to operas, this particular series of lectures gave me an appreciation for the best of Baroque operas that will encourage me to listen to them more often if they are available.  Likewise, the author explained some of the struggles of Johann Sebastian Bach to be thought of as a serious composer and the way that instrumental and vocal forms were affected during the Baroque period by the politics of nationalism and by the desire of mainstream audiences for fare that was less complicated and easier to understand in both vocal and instrumental forms.  Likewise, the author does a great job at showing how it is that abstract instrumental music came to have genres that allowed it to be understood and appreciated by ordinary audiences, likely including the listeners here as well.