Through Caldara's biography, the story of the evolution of the oratorio as a genre and the history of the Vienna Hofmusikkapelle, I aim to immerse the reader in the time and the city where Caldara lived during those twenty years. Of course the picture is incomplete in the sense that one should have talked about the musicians around him, the composers whose music he heard at court, the contemporary pieces to the oratorios he composed, and also the operas he wrote in those same years to create more links between all these data. But of course a master's work cannot spend so much time on such a variety of subjects to contextualise, so I present these three parts concerning three important aspects of Caldara that are at the heart of my dissertation: his life, his oratorios, and the place for which he composed them.

1) CONTEXTUALISATION

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