The Baroque era historically spans the period roughly from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth century. One of the most important prerequisites for the formation of the new style of music was the desire to revive the art and science of ancient rhetoric and apply it to music theory and practice. It was proved that music and rhetoric were connected by several natural similarities, which were clearly brought out by comparing the rhetorical situations of delivering a speech and the performance of a musical work. These were:

  1. 1.

    the sonic nature of the realisation—the perception of the expression through hearing;

  2. 2.

    the processual nature—becoming in a particular segment of time. In music, the spirit of time is expressed through symmetry and control. Music is sound in time or time in sound, but musical time is a particular aspect of rhythm. This is the change of sonic being in time. To be in time means to be something different in every instance (the modulative quality of the process);

  3. 3.

    the emotional nature, that is, the aim of arousing (or quelling) specific affects;

  4. 4.

    common elements of both languages (verbal and musical): tempo, rhythm, accentuation, articulation, pauses, timbre, intonation and the like.

Alongside rhetoric, another fundamental Baroque theory is the theory of affects. Its origin is associated with ancient theories of ethos, which claimed that music could arouse various feelings in a person. But it was René Descartes’ “Compendium of Music” (Compendium musicae, c. 1650), as well as the treatise “Passions of the Soul” (Les passiones de l’ame, 1649), which exercised the greatest influence on the theory of affects in the Baroque era. In these works Descartes argued that the purpose of music was to provide enjoyment and arouse various affects. And these affects depended on the size and character of the intervals, on certain movements of the soul, in desiring to convey them (the affects). The treatise “Passions of the Soul” shows how “reason, enlightening the will, allows the wise person to control their instincts for the greatest good of the soul.”Footnote 1 Cartesian philosophy, “based on method, is a culture of judgment, a permanent desire to adhere to ideas only because of their clarity and distinction.”Footnote 2

In celebrating the sovereignty of reason, Descartes emerges as the theorist of order and legislator of thought. […] The Cartesian mind is synonymous with an attachment to the knowledge of a universal human truth, a concern for sharpness in thought and clarity in expression.Footnote 3

Without expanding the interpretation of these theories, one can briefly state that the performer-interpreter, before commencing the act of realising the work in sound, must clearly understand “what it is” that they will “talk” about through their expression. This what provides the key to how—to the sphere of the means of expression. And thus the affect—the idea, or the narrative—is the “what,” and its understanding—the act of expression—is the “how.”

Whoever chooses rightly

Eloquence, and clear construction, won’t fail him.Footnote 4

Your first concern should be the thing itself, the second a clear order,

And third and last should be the signs.Footnote 5

The following most prominent theoretical works from the era also discuss musical expressive pronunciation: J. J. Quantz, Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielenFootnote 6 (1752), C. P. E. Bach, Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielenFootnote 7 (1753) and Leopold Mozart, Versuch einer gründlichen ViolinschuleFootnote 8 (1756).

Many parameters of Baroque music are directly or indirectly connected with the principles of verbal rhetoric. However,

if in the system of oral rhetoric there is a discrete part of theory investigating the feature of eloquence – the action – then, in the theory of musical rhetoric, the science of the performance of the work – the execution (in Latin, exsecūtiō, meaning performance, action) is systematised comparatively weakly and almost undescribed. [...] The part of musical execution discusses the intellectual and affective communication between the orator / music and listener, and draws attention to the fact that not only the orator / music (the addresser) but also the listener (the addressee) participates in the becoming of the work.Footnote 9

So the work must be communicated to the latter after it has been understood and appropriately expressed. Baroque theoreticians and practitioners (and they all, the authors of the treatises previously mentioned were indeed practitioners), argued that the performer must be equipped with means of musical organisation, both those based on general logic and typified ones. Structurality, accentuation, dynamics, mastery of articulatory features, agogic organisation of the pronunciation of syntactic units were all necessary to achieve quality in the process of performance (execution). The musician who knows the secrets of expressive playing (singing) can do this. They have to be imbued with the affects which they wish to convey to the listeners. The only way to achieve this is training of the hearing through experience. “It seems to me that music primarily must touch the heart”Footnote 10 (wrote C. P. E. Bach in his “Autobiography”) and “a musician cannot move others unless he himself is moved.”Footnote 11 “Music must become the expression of pure feeling.”Footnote 12 Later on, the approach towards the expression of feeling changed significantly (Eduard Hanslick, Aleksei Losev and others). C. P. E. Bach advised instrumentalists to listen to vocal music: “to sing musical themes to oneself in order to find out how they should be played.”Footnote 13 The ability to think through singing (man lernet dadurch singend denken) and playing expressively are for C. P. E. Bach synonyms. J. J. Quantz advises performers to avoid uniformity when sounding the notes; he also describes the action of rubato, although he does not call it that. “The performance should be free and flexible. If a musician quickens the tempo a little, they should also immediately to some extent slow it down.”Footnote 14 The first person to use the verb rubare in relation to freedom of movement was Pier Tosi in a treatise published in 1723.

Whoever does not know how to steal the time (rubare il tempo) in singing, knows neither how to compose, nor how to accompany himself, and is destitute of the best taste and greatest knowledge. The stealing of time (il rubamento di tempo) in [an elevated style] is an honourable theft in one that sings better than others, provided he makes a restitution with ingenuity.Footnote 15

Rubare il tempo—“stealing time”—meant that in the process of performance some notes were deprived of their length in favour of others. The overall time of the sound of the musical phrase was preserved. Tempo rubato should be treated as a case of agogic nuance. Rubato, compared with agogic nuance, is a more pronounced, more noticeable deviation in the metrorhythmic and tempo sphere of performance. “We can almost think of music as being a perpetual rubato,”Footnote 16 Pablo Casals stated, probably with agogic nuance in mind, which he himself used so tastefully.

The Baroque era saw the formation of the main rules for the organisation of musical language, a certain order of musical behaviour, which was strictly adhered to. It is not for nothing that in the so-called urtexts (Urtext)—the original texts of the works—there was no marking of articulatory nuances, and rarely of dynamic nuances either. The performers, who were most often the authors of the works being performed, were familiar with the order of performance and principles of expression from experience and adherence to the settled rules. So Alexander Baumgarten (1714–1762)—the founder of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline—states: “Since no perfection is conceivable without order, [general beauty of sensory cognitions consists] in the harmony of the order and the sequence in which we consider the beautifully conceived of things.”Footnote 17 The matters of beautiful thought, as well as creation by beautiful expression, are a common theme in all the chapters of this book. The spirit of the principles formed in the Baroque era should be felt everywhere, even if indirectly, though, sadly, these days it is somewhat neglected.