| In the early 18th century, French operatic audiences witnessed a multitude of new orchestral topoi that required an expansion of the orchestral palette: storms, sleep scenes, earthquakes, battles, infernal furies, oracles, and others began pervading the stage. Nowhere was this new expressive development of instrumental music more evident, however, than in the use of these topoi in a non-operatic genre-the cantata. This dissertation examines two important topoi that originated in the tragedie lyrique and found their way into the 18th-century French cantata---tempete and sommeil. These topoi epitomize a baroque aesthetics that favors the dramatic opposition between diametrical poles of expression. Recognizing their expressive power, composers employed these topoi not only to evoke a particular, scenario or mood, but also to trigger opposing emotions---rage or fear on the one hand, tranquility on the other---in the characters and, by extension, the audience.; The cantata offers the ideal ground for exploring these topoi owing to its distinctively aural appeal. My work investigates the ways in which the cantata's lack of staging shapes the aesthetic experience of the listener in radically different ways than in opera. By inviting the listener to imagine rather than to observe, the cantata rejects the visual magnetism of opera and diverts the spectator's attention to sound alone, thus emphasizing the acoustic potential of these topoi. In chapter 1, I demonstrate that a similar aesthetics was in place across different artistic media---operas, cantatas, paintings, and ekphrastic prose---concerning the way in which storms and sleep affected the emotions of the listener, the beholder, or the reader. Chapter 2 examines the musical language of tempest and sleep vis-a-vis contemporaneous notions of rhythm and tempo---"mouvement" in French---and expression in music. Chapter 3 and 4 offer four case studies devoted to each topos, demonstrating how tempest and sleep affected not only the emotions of the characters and the audience but also the dramatic pace of a cantata. This dissertation suggests that these topoi transcended boundaries of both genre and medium, thus demonstrating that their expressive power was a pervasive element of a fundamental baroque aesthetics. |
