E quando mai potro cessar di piangere ? : an exploration of the links between arias with obbligato instruments and musical affects in Antonio Caldara’s oratorios composed between 1716 and 1736 for the Habsburg’s Hofmusikkapelle in Vienna

Maud Haering

Student Number 3262561 Supervisor Inês de Avena Braga Title E quando mai potrò cessar di piangere ? An exploration of the links between arias with obbligato instruments and musical affects in Antonio Caldara’s oratorios composed between 1716 and 1736 for the Habsburg’s Hofmusikkapelle in Vienna Research Question What is the link between obbligato instruments, text and affects in Antonio Caldara’s oratorios composed for the Vienna’s Hofmusikkapelle between 1716 and 1736? Sub-questions How can the creation of a descriptive catalogue of Caldara’s oratorios help uncover his choices for instrumentation in relation to the libretti and religious context? How does Caldara’s choice of obbligato instrument emphasize the affects already present in the text? Summary The aim of this research is to rediscover music that has been forgotten for centuries. Through the topic of making links between obbligato instruments and affects in the texts from the libretti in Caldara's oratorios written when he was a composer at the Vienna Hofmusikkapelle, I would like to shine a light on new arias for voice and obbligato instruments which are, in my point of view, very beautiful and which deserve to be highlighted. Antonio Caldara needed to adapt to the imperial court music taste and also to its available instrumentarium, and from the day he started to compose for Charles VI, he began to use different instruments in his way of writing arias in his oratorios. In order to keep the focus of the research on his oratorios composed in Vienna, I purposefully will not discuss the considerable number of operas he composed in the same period, and I will contextualize these works thanks to a descriptive catalogue of each of the oratorios, to the translations of the texts of the arias, and by paying attention to the Habsburg dinasty in Vienna. Short biography Maud Haering is a French soprano. After studying Medieval Music at the Sorbonne University of Paris (France), she decided to continue her specialization in the Early Music repertoire in singing more Baroque and Renaissance music. With several ensembles, she performed different baroques styles (Italian, German, English and French) of different periods (17th and 18th centuries) either secular or sacred. Always looking for new repertoire to discover and sing, she really enjoys going into libraries to see manuscripts or to explore the thousands of resources available online to find new pieces. This research about Caldara is one of her explorations.

“E quando mai potrò cessare di piangere?”

And when will I ever be able to stop crying, Gioseffo asks us, accompanied by a chalumeau, in Caldara’s oratorio Gioseffo che interpreta i sogni composed during Lent 1726 for the Hofmusikkapelle in Vienna.

When I began to think about a subject that would include the music of Antonio Caldara, I did not know where exactly it would lead me, nor how many new pieces I would be led to discover. One of my first motivations was to discover new arias, especially for soprano, but also for other voice types. Having discovered and loved Caldara through one of his early oratorios, Maddalena ai piedi di Cristo (1698), I naturally turned to the oratorios he composed during his lifetime. I wanted to focus on a specific period of his life, in particular to reduce the number of oratorios to be studied (he wrote more than 40), but also to find a common thread between them. This thread then became clear to me, and it would be Vienna, with the Hofmusikkapelle and the Habsburgs, where Caldara lived for twenty years of his life from 1716 until his death in 1736. These twenty years were also the most prolific in oratorios, with 26 compositions, 24 of which were for the Imperial Chapel during the Lenten period.

Of the 24 oratorios he composed for the Hofmusikkapelle, I quickly had access to half of them online on the website of the Vienna library, which scanned and made some of the manuscripts available free of charge. I then started to describe the contents of these manuscripts, thinking that it could be very practical for singers and instrumentalists to know what was in these works, with the goal of producing a descriptive catalogue including all of the oratorios I studied, to be made freely available as one of the results of my research. It was then that while virtually leafing through these manuscripts, I came across arias with obbligato instruments from time to time. Most of the arias being for strings, basso continuo (BC) and voice, or only BC and voice, I became very intrigued by these arias written for voice and chalumeau, or voice and two trombones, or voice and salterio. With each page turned, I hoped to come across another of these arias with obbligato instruments. This is how I became particularly interested in the arias with obbligato instruments in the oratorios composed by Caldara for the Imperial Chapel. The more I discovered them, the more excited I became at the idea that nobody had sung them since their creation, and that I was looking at voice/instrument combinations that I had never encountered before.

At a rate of zero to five arias with obbligato instruments per oratorio, and having had access to 21 out of 24 manuscripts, I now find myself with 38 arias to study. With this musical material, I formulated my research question: what is the link between obbligato instruments, text and affects in Antonio Caldara’s oratorios composed for the Vienna’s Hofmusikkapelle between 1716 and 1736? As secondary questions, I wanted to find out how the redaction of the descriptive catalogue of Caldara’s oratorios would help uncover his choices for instrumentation in relation to the libretti and religious context. And finally, I wanted to discover how Caldara’s choice of obbligato instrument emphasizes the affects already present in the text.

To answer these questions, I will first place Caldara back into his musical and geographical context by starting to explore his life. Then I will focus particularly on the oratorio as a genre, its creation and its evolution up to Caldara. Next, I will give an overview of musical life in the Viennese Hofburg of the Habsburgs, culminating with the emperor Charles VI, for whom Caldara was vice-kapellmeister. I will then get to the heart of the matter by presenting the catalogue entries of each of the oratorios to which I had access. Following that, I will present the arias with obbligato instruments separately, first in a summary table, then by category of affects, in order to explore the text, the emotions and feelings involved. I will then present an aria by affects that I will analyse, to show how the treatment of the instrument emphasizes the affect present in the text. I will then go on to describe what this research brings me professionally and how, as a singer, this subject nourishes my development. Finally, I will conclude with the elements and reflections gathered over the course of this research.

INTRODUCTION

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