Baroque Arias
Baroque Arias
The term “aria” is intimately linked to beautiful melodies that seduce our ears and captivate our hearts. To think of an aria is to think of the profound expression of feelings, in the form of poetic verses, which, united with that melody described above, makes us enter a state of aesthetic enchantment.
By the 17th century, the enormous madrigal tradition generated a new way of moving the listener, utilizing much simpler and direct verses and, above all, making use of melody, of the homophonic texture that, accompanied or not, could penetrate the consciences of those who enjoyed those little poetic pearls.
The aria is undoubtedly the privileged instrument by which, united with other resources, one of the most important musical genres of our history was forged: opera. It allowed the composer to transmit to the public the emotional states of his characters and to do so in a way that the audience, being moved, became complicit with the one who cried, or was ecstatic with love. People sang the joy of one or cried with the other, but always making use not only of simple and well-written verses but above all of music, and specifically of a melody that people would never forget for weeks and that after listening to it would sing in their day-to-day lives.
In our concert, we will briefly introduce how those first arias of the 17th and 18th centuries were constructed, and what the cultural and musical environment that gave them birth was like. We will notice those rhetorical resources used by the great masters of that time to guide their listeners through their musical work, but above all, in our Concert, we are going to immerse ourselves in the music, singing and interpreting it, to leave full of it and carry it in our hearts.
