La Diva

Winter in Schwetzingen

They rule, suffer, love and despair – the great female characters of Baroque opera are not saints, but human beings in extraordinary circumstances. Octavia, cast out by Nero; Dido, abandoned by Aeneas; Cleopatra, victorious in defeat. What makes these characters immortal is the music that pushes their emotions to the limit – a sigh that swells into an aria, a coloratura that barely distinguishes between triumph and pain. Arias that do not merely describe what a character feels, but transport the listener directly into that emotion.

Baroque opera developed a whole arsenal of rhetorical devices for this purpose – figures of affect that do not merely illustrate, but become the emotion itself. Johanna Kaldewei and the lautten compagney BERLIN explore this wealth together: from Reinhard Keiser’s Hamburg stage, via the Neapolitan Leonardo Vinci, to Handel’s London masterpiece »Giulio Cesare« – three milestones in an art form that transforms the all-too-human into something supernatural.