All music, it seems safe to say, is deeply involved with emotion. But in the music of different cultures, and also in the music of different historical eras within a single culture, the nature of that involvement can be very different. The emotional effect of Baroque music strikes the modern listener as very powerful and yet, in a curious way, also impersonal. Baroque composers believed firmly that music could and should mirror a wide range of human feelings, or affects, such as had been analyzed and classified by the scientifically oriented psychology of the day. But these composers did not believe that it was their task to mirror feelings of their own. Rather, they tried to isolate and analyze emotions in general — at a distance — and then depict them consistently.

The exhaustiveness of their musical technique made for a similar exhaustiveness of emotional effect. A single movement or aria was usually restricted to depicting one specific emotion, feeling, or mood. As the rhythms and themes are repeated, the music intensifies a single strong feeling. Sadness in Baroque music is presented as the deepest gloom, calmness as profound quiet, brightness as pomp and splendor, happiness as loud rejoicing. These are extreme sentiments; the people who can be imagined to experience them would have to be almost larger than life.

All this fits into place with the Baroque fascination with the theater. The Baroque theater concentrated on grand gestures and high passion, on ideal emotions expressed by ideal human beings. Kings and queens were shown performing noble actions or vile ones, experiencing intense feelings of passion or fury, delivering thunderous speeches, and taking part in lavish stage displays. How these personages looked and postured can be seen in the picture on page 106.

Theatrical emotion has the virtues of intensity, clarity, and focus; it must, if it is to get past the footlights and reach its audience. Actors analyze the emotion they are asked to depict, shape it and probably exaggerate it, and then project it by means of their acting technique. It is not their personal emotion, though for the moment they make it their own. We may come to feel that Baroque composers worked in a similar way, not only in their operas — actual stage works set to music — but also in their oratorios and church cantatas, and even in their instrumental concertos and sonatas.