Know Your Composer
Handel’s “Un ‘Alma Innamorata”: A Secular Cantata for the Wounded Lover
Before television, internet, movies, and rock and roll, there was the secular cantata. During the late Baroque period in Italy, these dramatic vocal works were popular entertainment in wealthy, aristocratic circles. Made up of a brief sequence of recitatives and arias, the secular cantata amounted to a kind of highly