10 Greatest Masters of Baroque Music

 by Hermione Lai, Interlude

© aesdes.org

If I could take only one style of music to a deserted island it would have to be Baroque music. Music written during that period is full of drama and energy, and it can be very intimate or simply grandiose. It is lively and tuneful, and always seems to express a fundamental and universal order. It also gave birth to opera, and the orchestra became a musical force. My favorite among all these wonderful and expressive genres, however, is the concerto. Soloists on all kinds of instruments started to take center stage and amazed audiences with their technical skills and highly expressive music.

You can probably tell already that Baroque Music was famous for its stylistic diversity. Italy led the way in terms of musical innovation, and the beginning of the 17th century saw one of the most dramatic turning points in the history of music. While earlier music was composed in accordance with the rules of counterpoint that took precedence over the text, the new modern Baroque style now focused on musically expressing the meaning of the words. All this paved the way for the establishment of a modern harmonic language, one we still use today. Countless composers were active during this exciting period in musical history, so we decided to compile a list of the 10 greatest Baroque composers starting with Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713). 

Arcangelo Corelli

The Italian Baroque is famous for its incredible violinmakers. Amati, Stradivari, and Guarneri are names that are still instantly recognizable today. The composer at the center of this golden age of string music in Italy was Arcangelo Corelli. He worked for some very important musical patrons, including Queen Christina of Sweden and Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, who later became Pope Alexander VIII. Corelli started to compose instrumental sonatas in several sections and movements, scored for two to four solo instruments and support by the basso continuo. These pieces are called ensemble sonatas, and they unfold alternating slow-fast-slow-fast movements. In addition, Corelli was also at the forefront of establishing a new and exciting musical genre, the concerto. This ingeniously pitted a soloist, or a group of soloists, against an instrumental ensemble. Corelli uses many of the harmonic progressions that form the basis of modern tonality, and he was the first composer to gain an international reputation solely on the basis of his instrumental music. He definitely is one of the greatest and most beloved composers of Baroque music. 

Jean-Baptiste Lully

Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687) was one of the most dominant figures of the French baroque. He originally hailed from Florence and became the Italian language tutor to
Louis XIV’s cousin Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans in Paris. He initially served as her chamber boy, but attracted the attention of the young Louis XIV by dancing with him in the magnificent Ballet royal de la nuit. Soon he was appointed “compositeur de la musique instrumentale.” Working with the playwright Molière, Lully produced a number of highly successful comédies-ballets over the year. His claim to fame was the tragédie-lyrique, a French opera in five acts incorporating ballet, chorus and lavish sets. These productions reflected the magnificent life at the court of the Sun King, and it was not uncommon to see machines that made angels fly or huge ships battling stormy seas on stage. Because of such innovations, Lully easily made it onto my list of great Baroque composers. 

George Frideric Handel

George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) was one of the all-time great composers, and everybody still knows his name and some of his music. He started out as a violinist and composed his first operas in his native Germany. Handel then traveled to Italy where he met with Vivaldi and took lessons from Corelli. In 1712, Handel moved to London as Kapellmeister to the Elector of Hanover, who eventually became King George I. Handel arrived in London as a famous opera composer, and as a shrewd businessman, he started three commercial opera companies to supply Italian opera to English nobility. Handel was a resourceful and workaholic musician of great charisma with a genius for invention. And when London audiences turned their backs on Italian opera, Handel reinvented himself and focused on the composition of Oratorios. These works combine sacred dialogues and narrative meditations with music that includes instrumental dances, choral declamations and elaborate arias. With his Messiah, Handel scored a huge commercial hit and it is still one of the composer’s most popular and enduring works. Handel, without doubt, is one of the foremost Baroque composers. 

Claudio Monteverdi

Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) was probably the most important musician in late 16th and 17th century Italy. He was the first great composer of opera, and he developed powerful ways of expressing and structuring musical drama. Monteverdi instigated a shift in musical thinking that left the late Renaissance and ushered in the artistic expressions of the early Baroque. Monteverdi, according to many historians, is the creator of modern music. In all, Monteverdi composed at least eighteen operas, but sadly only a handful has survived. His first opera L’Orfeo of 1607 blends existing musical styles into a unity that was entirely new. Combining elements of madrigal singing and monody—what we would call recitative today—with dancing and instrumental passages defined Monteverdi’s “innovative creativity and his discovery of a new expressive frontier.” Monteverdi was a superstar of early Baroque music, and he is rightfully considered one of the greatest Baroque composers. 

Georg Friedrich Telemann

It might come as a little surprise, but Georg Philipp Telemann (1681–1767) was considered the greatest German composer in the 18th century. He was much more famous than J. S. Bach, and his salary in Hamburg was three times larger than Bach’s in Leipzig. In fact, Telemann might have been the most industrious composer of all time. He wrote over 1,700 church cantatas, almost 50 Passions, and seemingly countless opera. And let’s not forget that he composed massive amounts of instrumental music, among them approximately 125 orchestral suites, 125 concertos, several dozen other orchestral works and sonatas in five to seven parts, nearly 40 quartets, 130 trios, 87 solos, 80 works for one to four instruments without bass and roughly 250 pieces for keyboard. Telemann was the most important composer of German-language operas in the first half of the 18th century, and his concertos do represent the history of that genre in German lands. However you want to look at it, Telemann was one of the greatest Baroque composers. 

Barbara Strozzi

Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677) was one of the finest singers and most prolific composers of her time. Adopted daughter of the renowned poet Giulio Strozzi, Barbara grew up in the city of Venice and made her mark as a composer by publishing eight collections of songs. She dedicated her opus 1 to Vittoria della Rovere, duchess of Tuscany, with the words, “I reverently consecrate this first work, which I, as a woman, all too ardently send forth into the light, to the august name of Your Highness, so that under your Oak of Gold it may rest secure from the lightening bolts of slander prepared for it.” The majority of her music is written for accompanied female voice, and her settings create an intimate relationship between the words and the music. Frequently, she explores unusual and surprising harmonies, and before her death in 1677, there was more of her music in print than even the most famous composers of her day. No doubt, Strozzi is one of the greatest Baroque composers. 

François Couperin

Both Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel described the Baroque composer François Couperin (1668–1733) as the epitome of French music. A member of a family dynasty of musicians, he established himself as one of the leading composers of his day, and his use of harmony and melodic construction far surpassed his contemporaries. At the height of his career, Couperin was considered the most sought-after harpsichord and organ teacher. Skillfully blending French and Italian musical styles, he published music for organ, chamber ensembles, vocal music and his famous four books of harpsichord music, totaling about 220 keyboard works. His music reflects the social milieu from which it emerged. He was described as the “poet musician par excellence, who believed in the ability of music to express the conflict between personal passion and self-control.”

Henry Purcell

Henry Purcell

( 1659-1695) incorporated Italian and French stylistic elements in his music. However, Purcell’s compositions represent a uniquely English form of Baroque music. He was the son of a court musician, and essentially spent his entire life in Westminster. His royal duties included writing music for special occasions at court. In addition, he also wrote chamber music and became involved with the growing London pubic concert scene. And that included writing incidental music for the theatre. Purcell famously composed a number of semi-operas, and Dido and Aeneas is the only complete English language opera in the 17th century. Purcell was one of the finest and most original composer of his day, and “he gave to the theatre some of his happiest melodic inspirations, distributed among solemn overtures, cheerful or pathetic airs, and delightful dances of every imaginable kind.” Purcell is one of the highly original minds of Baroque music. 

Antonio Vivaldi

We all know and love the music of Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741). Throughout his extended career as musical director at the “Ospedale della Pietà” (Hospital of Mercy) in Venice, a post he held from 1703 to 1740, Vivaldi authored roughly 500 concertos, 46 operas and numerous smaller instrumental and sacred compositions. His best-known work, the four violin concertos titled “The Four Seasons,” dates from between 1716 and 1725. Each concerto features three movements and is based on a series of poems. It is one of the very first pieces in which music tells or follows a narrative. I suppose, this music was seriously ahead of its time because the score to “The Seasons” was stored in an attic for over 200 years. Re-discovered around 1950, it has since become one of the most recorded work of all time.

Johann Sebastian Bach

Vivaldi was one of the greatest Baroque composers, and the same is certainly true of the giant of Baroque music, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750). He was born into a large musical family, and he was considered the greatest organ virtuoso of his day. While he did hold a number of smaller appointments, his most important job was as music director and cantor at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. Bach composed well over 1,000 works, including instrumental and orchestral music and a seemingly endless number of cantatas for liturgical use. While Bach was predictably famous during his lifetime, at the time of his death he was considered old-fashioned. When he died in 1750, the glorious period of Baroque music ended. However, in 2019 a poll among 174 living composers confirmed that Bach was not only the greatest Baroque composer, but also the greatest composer of all time. Now you know my favorites; can you think of other Baroque composers that should be part of this list?

Jean-Philippine Rameau - His Music and His Life

A legendary composer who transformed the face of French opera, Jean-Philippe Rameau was ahead of his time, his theories and works inspiring such succeeding operatic innovators as Gluck and Wagner.

Who was he? The most distinguished French composer of the late baroque.

Why is he important? He revolutionised French opera and was a leading theorist

What are his most famous works? Hippolyte Et Aricie; Castor Et Pollux; Les Indes Galantes; La Poule; Les Cyclopes; La Triumphante; Gavotte Variée


Rameau was one of the most profoundly gifted of all French composers. At a time when the finest musician in Spain was an Italian (Domenico Scarlatti) and England’s most celebrated composer was German (Handel), Rameau stemmed the tide of popular Italian operatic imports with a series of bracing theatrical masterpieces.

He shunned trends towards showpiece arias sung by the latest stars charging exorbitant fees and put the focus firmly back on dramatic tension and pacing.

“I conceal art with art,” was his maxim, and his desire to unite all the arts in one magnum musical opus led to the operatic reforms of Gluck and, most notably, Wagner.

Considering Rameau’s importance, it is surprising how little we know with any certainty about his personal life. He was extremely tall and thin: “more like a ghost than a man” attested one contemporary, another that “he had a sharp chin, no stomach and flutes for legs” and that he “resembled a long organ pipe with the blower away”.

Those who knew him in childhood remembered a lively, outgoing personality. Yet as time went by, while his music retained a boyish sparkle and vigour, he personally became more withdrawn and introspective as he dedicated his energies exclusively to composing and writing learned treatises.

As one close friend put it: “His heart and soul were in the harpsichord; once he had shut its lid, there was no one home.”

Rameau was notoriously careful with money. Having amassed a small fortune, by the time of his death he owned just a few clothes, a single pair of worn-out shoes and a harpsichord that was seriously in need of repair. Yet he supported his family generously – he set up a large dowry for his daughter when she took holy orders – and helped a number of promising musicians, most notably Claude-Bénigne Balbastre.

Above all his belief in the power of music – what he described as “the language of the heart” – remained absolute, and woe betide anyone who disagreed with him. He made personal enemies of a number of influential people whose views he opposed and avoided intimacy at all costs – yet he seemed quite content in his own skin.

“The emptiness he found in society made him avoid it,” observed the artist Jacques-Fabien Dagoty.

Rameau belongs to that select group of composers – alongside Bruckner and Franck – who produced little of any real significance before they were 40 years of age. Although he could play the harpsichord before he could read or write and was actively encouraged by his father (along with 10 other siblings!), Jean-Philippe was enrolled in a Jesuit school with the ultimate aim of his becoming a lawyer.

However, his heart was never really in it and eventually he was asked to leave. Having finally received his parents’ blessing to make music his career, he made his way to Milan with a view to making up for lost time.

Rameau stayed in Italy just a few months before returning to France and joining a troupe of wandering players as a violinist. His wanderlust continued as he accepted a series of organist posts in fairly quick succession around Paris and the provinces, including five months in Avignon, four years apiece in Clermont and Dijon, and two years in Lyons.

All the while he was refining his composing technique and in 1706 he produced his Premier livre de pièces de clavecin, the first of his works to roll off the printing presses.

However, it was only after Rameau finally settled in Paris in 1722 that his career took off in earnest. That same year he published his Traité De L’harmonie, which immediately won him the respect and admiration of his peers.

Meanwhile, his books of harpsichord pieces, with such characterful titles as La Villageoise, La Joyeuse, Les Cyclopes and La Triumphante, had become all the rage. His newfound happiness was compounded when in 1726 he married a gifted pupil of his, Marie-Louise Mangot, who bore him four children.

Not all was plain sailing. Rameau tried repeatedly to gain an organist’s post in the French capital, but finally threw in the towel in 1727 when he lost out to Louis-Claude Daquin – composer of that delightful keyboard charmer Le Coucou – for a job at St Paul.

As if to rub salt in the wound, his trailblazing second treatise Nouveau Système De Musique Théorique (1726) was witheringly dismissed by traditionalists, the first of a series of musical controversies that would haunt the remainder of Rameau’s career.

Rameau was already 50 when he produced his first opera, Hippolyte Et Aricie, in 1733. Its searing dramatic urgency and unprecedented attention to orchestral detail and colouristic effects caused a sensation.

Immediately lines were drawn between the staunch supporters of the well-established Lully tradition, with its unmistakably French poise and reserve, and those who preferred the red-blooded passion and intensity of Rameau – or as the Lullyists put it, his “grotesque, discordant music” replete with “noisy instrumentation”.

Nowadays it is difficult to hear quite what all the fuss was about, but at the time it was akin to the storms of protest that greeted another infamous Paris premiere – that of Stravinsky’s The Rite Of Spring. As time went by, so the initial furore gradually died down.

Between 1735 and 1753 Rameau served as the Maître de musique to the wealthy financier La Pouplinière. This was something of a dream appointment, for it not only gave him the opportunity to mix with the cream of Paris’s writers, artists, musicians and even the infamous libertine Giovanni Casanova (!) at La Pouplinière’s various residences, but it also brought him into direct contact with the French court.

He became Compositeur de la musique de la chambre du roy in 1745, the same year he was invited to compose a comédie-ballet in collaboration with the great writer-philosopher Voltaire – La Princesse De Navarre.

The same team went on to produce Les Surprises De L’amour for the Théâtre des Petits-Cabinets of Mme de Pompadour in 1748. Also that year, working alongside his favourite librettist Louis de Cahusac, he scored a hit with Zaïs, whose overture features a heart-stopping depiction of the world’s creation, complete with atmospheric rustlings, swirling explosions and an ominous tolling drum.

With his position at court now unassailable and his reputation soaring, Rameau was at the very height of his career when on April 22, 1749 he premiered his three-act pastorale-heroïque Naïs.

Another Cahusac collaboration, it was composed in celebration of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle signed the previous year. This highly evocative story of a nymph’s love for a stranger (Neptune in disguise), luxuriates in the simple pleasures of life and features an enormous cast of giants, gods, goddesses, zephyrs, sea-divinities, nymphs and shepherds.

This groundbreaking work inspired a wave of nostalgia for the Arcadian ideal amongst the Parisian elite, which rapidly spread to all the arts.

Just as it seemed as though nothing could go wrong, Rameau unwittingly found himself embroiled in fresh controversy. In 1752, a visiting opera troupe staged a performance of Pergolesi’s La Serva Padrona in Paris that hit the musical scene like a thunderbolt.

Now it was Rameau’s turn to be declared old-fashioned by the likes of Rousseau and Diderot, although he retained some powerful allies including the loyal Voltaire – who passionately declared “Rameau has made of music a new art” – and the King himself.

With 12 years remaining to him and with his creative powers in decline, Rameau deeply regretted that he had not spent more time composing earlier in his career rather than dedicating himself to theoretical tracts – much to his own amazement he had composed only half-a-dozen solo keyboard pieces since 1728.

The last of his works to be performed appears to have been Les Paladins, a delightful comédie-ballet premiered in February 1760.

Despite his deteriorating health, Rameau remained active almost to the end. He secured for his eldest son, Claude-François, a highly paid sinecure as valet de chambre to the King and was ennobled just four months before his death in Paris from “a fever” on September 12, 1764.

He was buried at St Eustache, Ile de France, and although a bronze bust and red marble tombstone were erected in his memory there by the Société de la Compositeurs de Musique in 1883, the exact site of his burial remains a mystery.

Arcangelo Corelli - His Music and His Life

Arcangelo Corelli was born February 17, 1653, in Fusignano, Italy. He studied violin with Bassani at the Music school in Bologna. In Rome he studied composition under Matteo Simeoni, the singer of the pope's chapel. Corelli established himself as composer and violinist in the 1670s. In 1672 he made a sensational debut in Paris, then successfully toured Euripean capitals. In 1678-1680 Corelli was in the service of Queen Christina of Sweden, who had taken up residence in Rome after her abdication. In 1681 Corelli was the court musician for the Prince of Bavaria.

Back in Rome Corelli composed and dedicated music to his aristocratic patrons, such as, Queen Christina, Cardinal Pamphili, Francesco II the Prince of Modena, Cardinal Ottoboni, who was Pope Alexander VIII from 1689-1691. Corelli gained recognition for the nice tone of his playing and for his elegant presentation. He was very attractive, well-mannered, and known for his talent for creating a special ambiance. Corelli was well received in the highest circles of the aristocracy. He was the permanent leader of the famous Monday concerts at the palace of Cardinal Ottoboni, where he also resided for the most part of his life.

His rivalry and partnership with Georg Friedrich Haendel was legendary. Corelli was a great musician, but not a virtuoso. As it may be seen from his writings he never wrote or played above D on the highest string. Once Corelli refused to play the melody to the high A in the Handel's oratorio. Then Handel himself played the melody to the highest A, making Corelli very upset. Handel made a visit of respect to the great Corelli, as they both resided at the palace of Cardinal Ottoboni in 1708-1710. Handel also continued the tradition of Corelli's Concerti Grossi.

Corelli developed Concerto Grosso into a form of secular entertainment for the aristocracy. He used the idea of a musical competition between two groups of musicians during the Concerto. A smaller group has only two violins and a cello, while the larger group is the full orchestra. At the beginning of concerto each group presents their beautiful theme with arrangements. During the course of the concerto both groups develop musical interaction and their melody lines become intertwined until they reach mutual culmination in the climax of the grand finale.

Many of Corelli's Concerti Grossi were based on the beautiful flowing melodies from his own violin sonatas. Corelli composed violin sonatas for his solo performances before his high patrons. Corelli's dynamic markings in all of his written music show his use of traditional terrace method of forte and piano dynamics. While unmarked, crescendo and diminuendo were left to be played intuitively between the extremes of piano and forte. Corelli also liberated the accompanying parts from restrictions of the counterpoint rules.

Corelli was a highly reputable teacher of music and composition. Besides giving music lessons to his aristocratic patrons, he taught such composers as Francesco Geminiani and Pietro Locatelli. His strong influence was recognized by Antonio Vivaldi who became Corelli's successor at the palace of Cardinal Ottoboni. Johann Sebastian Bach studied Corelli's compositions. A remarkable tribute to Corelli was made by Serge Rachmaninoff in his concerto for piano and orchestra titled 'Rhapsody on a theme of Corelli' (aka.. Corelli Variations, Opus 42,1931).

Arcangelo Corelli died on January 8, 1713, in Rome and was laid to rest in the Pantheon of Rome.

Corelli's Concerti Grossi may be heard in film soundtracks as well as in numerous recordings of the Baroque music and in live concert performances.