What does sadness sound like? The (musical) key is in the 18th century opera

Music speaks, although what it says usually depends on the listener.

Even so, there are codes that, with exceptions, work for everyone.

If a song is in a minor mode it will sound sad and if it is in a major mode, it will sound happy.

With this basis, the Complutense Institute of Musical Sciences and the Complutense musicology department, with funding from the European Research Council, have analyzed more than 3,000 arias from 200 opera scores from the 18th century to study what emotions sound like.

And he has discovered that joy is in D major and has trumpets, that love sounds like string instruments that are sometimes accompanied by flutes, and that hate has very fast

tempos

.

The arias, 90% of them unpublished, are part of the Didone Project, which is published in beta on February 1 and will be available on its website on April 12.

The goal of the project is to explore how human emotions are expressed through music.

“When this is investigated, it is almost always done in a subjective way: playing music to a group of listeners and each one describing what emotion it produces in them.

And this may be a way, but, in my opinion, it is too subjective.

We start from the basis that there is a coding process in the way of expressing emotions and it occurs above all through music with text and music with action,” explains Álvaro Torrente, director of the ICCMU.

And this is where the opera appears.

To further limit their study, they decided to use only works with text by the great librettist of the 18th century: Pietro Metastasio.

“Today he is not one of the most remembered, but in his time he was God.

Any composer who wanted to pursue an operatic career had to start by setting Metastasio to music.

There are several librettos that had more than a hundred different musical versions.

It has no parallel.

Imagine having a hundred versions of

La traviata

or

The Marriage of Figaro.

“He exercised absolute mastery of the operatic scene,” he clarifies.

Furthermore, in the 18th century a type of opera was consolidated that was directly related to Descartes' treatise on

The Passions of the Soul

, a treatise that he wrote because an aristocrat wanted to know how to control her emotions.

“In the end what she studies is behavior.

He says that emotions are inevitable, but the way to control them is to know them.

That is why he explains them Cartesianly and this very orderly system of exposition and understanding of the passions serves to classify the arias of the operas.

That is why we give it so much importance, because in the end it has a musical implication in how composers think about the action that is represented and how the public perceives it.

It is not an intellectual consumption, it is that they participate in what happens to the singers,” says José María Domínguez, one of the project's researchers.

That is, the audience experiences the emotion that the protagonist sings and the opera thus becomes a kind of school of emotions that today gives clues about how people loved, hated or cried in the 18th century.

Álvaro Torrente, with the scores from the National Library.Jaime Villanueva

And what were those opera performances like?

Well, a show in which the singers were already big stars and that mixed different social classes in the theater.

“It was like cinema today.

Opera was the most popular spectacle among both the aristocratic and lower classes.

It was an interclass meeting point,” adds Domínguez.

Here codes begin to be established that in subsequent centuries will be established through repetition to create a musical language that we all understand.

“A very simple way to explain it,” continues the researcher, “is the major mode associated with the happy and the minor mode with the sad.

This codification has a lot to do with the 18th century.

They are cultural conventions, because if you go to China that doesn't work.

“No Chinese would associate the minor mode with sadness.”

The omnipresent anger

But theory does not always correspond to practice.

Ana Llorens, scientific director of the project, tells it: “The use of tonalities and modes in the 18th century is surprising.

One goes to the treatises and it seems that it is very codified, that such a tonality serves to express an emotion.

When you analyze the music it's not so clear.

The major mode is used for absolutely everything, whether happy or sad.

What is certain is that the minor mode is always used for sadness.

G major seems to be more associated with slightly softer emotions and D major more warlike, but the rest can be associated with any type of emotion.”

A result that indicates that the bases of these codes begin to be established in this century, but will end up being established in later ones.

Another conclusion they have reached is that rarely a single parameter is associated with a specific emotion, it is usually a set of elements.

For example, if the aria is in a minor key, has ternary time signatures, and moderate

tempos

, it is likely to express sadness.

If it is in A major and does not have trumpets, but rather strings (and sometimes flutes as well), it is possible that the aria expresses love.

And they have also discovered that the most present emotion in all these operas is anger, although, beyond a fast tempo, they have not found a direct correlation between this emotion and specific musical characteristics.

“One of the things that happens is that there are very few arias of joy because the operas are all complex, so we find that this emotion is almost always expressed in the final chorus,” adds Torrente.

With all these arias they have created a platform that will allow musicians, musicologists and fans to search for scores according to the composer, the emotion they express, the tonality, the instruments used... On February 1, coinciding with the 300th anniversary of the premiere of the first Metastasio's opera, they are going to publish the beta version so that a group of industry experts can test it and detect possible errors.

On April 12, the date of the librettist's death, they will open the website to the public.

Llorens explains that they have designed this platform for academic use: "If someone is interested in the arias, they can read and study them here, but in order to perform them they do have to consult us because it is subject to rights."

And Torrente concludes: “Composers who are extraordinary have been forgotten.

I think it will be a surprise and, above all, a magnificent opportunity for the singers.”

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