Let Me Weep, Let Me Dance: Baroque Music as Radical Self-Care

by Evelyn Fong

When did you last stop? Not pause between notifications. Not scroll while waiting, no phone, no plan, no purpose…and simply sit with yourself?

For most of us, the answer is uncomfortable. We live in a world that rewards speed, noise, and constant output. Silence feels like wasting time. Reflection feels like falling behind.

Baroque composers understood this tension three hundred years ago. They lived in an age of religious war, political instability, and the first stirrings of modern capitalism. Their world was loud too. And they turned to music to make sense of it.

The German theorist Johann Mattheson believed that music could do more than entertain—it could move the soul. He spent years mapping specific musical techniques to specific emotions. But you do not need to study his theories to hear what he heard. Large intervals tend to lift us with joy, expansion, and release. Small intervals tend to pull us inward with sadness, contraction, and restraint. These patterns are built into the music itself, waiting for us to stop long enough to feel them.

The French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau took this further, exploring how different keys carried their own emotional weight. Again, you do not need to know his system to sense it. A bright, open key like D major feels different from a darker, more inward key like D minor. The feeling is there, whether you can name it or not.

Three centuries later, these techniques still work. You do not need a degree in music theory to hear joy in a leaping melody or grief in a slow, descending line. The emotion is built into the notes—waiting for you to stop long enough to feel it.

In this article, I will explore two emotional worlds Baroque composers mastered: pleasure and melancholy—the fast movements that lift us and the slow movements that lay us bare. We will listen to two pieces, not as musicologists dissecting scores but as people seeking a moment of honest feeling in a busy world.

Let us begin with a piece you may already know: George Frideric Handel’s Lascia ch’io pianga (Let me weep).

It first appeared in his 1705 opera Almira. Two years later, he recycled the melody as an aria in the oratorio Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno, this time with the words “Lascia la spina”—”Let the thorn go.” Then, in 1711, he brought it back again for his opera Rinaldo, with the words we know today: Lascia ch’io pianga.

Three versions. Three contexts. One melody.

Why did Handel keep returning to this music? Composers do not recycle failure. They recycle what works. And this melody worked. It still does. Three centuries later, Lascia ch’io pianga remains one of Handel’s most beloved arias – a piece that stops listeners in their tracks.

In Rinaldo, the aria appears in Act II. The setting is a magical garden in Jerusalem during the Crusades. Almirena, the heroine, has been abducted. She cannot escape. She cannot fight. Longing for freedom and feeling despair, all she can do is weep.

But the music does something remarkable. It does not collapse into despair. Instead, it moves with a slow, deliberate grace, as if weeping itself has become a form of dignity. It starts with F major, a key which Matteson claimed is ‘capable of expressing the most beautiful sentiments, whether these be generosity, steadfastness, love, or whatever else may be high on the list of virtues,’ showing that Handel had already planned to portray Almirena’s sadness as melancholically beautiful, captivating, and virtuous.

Listen to the very first phrase. The melody does not leap. It steps. One note, then the next, then the next—a slow, patient descent. These are small intervals. They stay on similar pitches. They do not shout. They do not reach for the sky. They move like footsteps, like breathing, like a thought forming in silence.

But listen closer. There is something else beneath the stillness: a longing. The melody steps downward, but it seems to resist each step—like someone trying to escape pain, only to find themselves drawn back in. It is an inward mental battle. A fight between wanting to let go and being held in place.

Handel does not resolve this tension quickly. He lets it breathe. He lets it return. And in that space between the notes, the listener stops.

This aria has been my top choice for reflection for years. When I need to pause, to sit with myself, to clear my heart, this is the piece to which I return. Not because it lifts me out of sadness, but because it makes reflection and emotion feel safe. It reminds me that even the saddest moments can be fully felt and beautifully expressed. There is no need to escape. Life always holds beauty and hope, no matter the circumstances. There is peace in that—if one allows it to arrive.

Under Handel’s hand, even sorrow becomes a kind of beauty.

Lyrics of Lascia ch’io pianga (Let me weep):

Italian: Lascia ch’io pianga
la cruda sorte,
e che sospiri
la libertà.

Il duolo infranga
queste ritorte
de’ miei martiri
sol per pietà.		English translation: Let me weep
cruel fate,
and sigh
for liberty.

May sorrow break
these chains
Of my sufferings,
 for pity’s sake.

Let us now turn to a very different kind of feeling.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s Concerto for Three Keyboards in C Major, BWV 1064, was composed in Leipzig around 1730. But the piece has an earlier life: Bach originally wrote it as a concerto for three violins in D major (BWV 1064R), but it had been lost. He later transcribed it for three harpsichords, transposing it down to C major. However, both C major and D major were associated to brightness and joy.

The theorists Mattheson and Rameau both agreed that C major was the key of joy. Pure, uncomplicated, bright. Mattheson went further, adding that a clever composer could use this key to create something ‘tender and charming’ as well.

Bach did all of the above and added something else: mischief.

Listen to the opening of the first movement. Three harpsichords, one orchestra. The rhythm starts with offbeat, unexpected accents that throw your body off balance just enough to make you dance. Then it rapidly shifts between on- and offbeat, as if playing a game with you, making it hard to predict what Bach will do next.

The melodies leap. They jump from note to note like a child who cannot sit still. Wide jumps everywhere—the opposite of Handel’s gentle, stepwise grief. And underneath it all, C major holds everything together, refusing to let the energy collapse into chaos.

This is not joy that arrives gently. It is joy that grabs you. It pulls you into its rhythm before you can decide whether to immerse. The shifting beats keep you guessing. The leaps keep you moving. And by the time the movement ends, you realise something: you have been smiling without noticing.

Joy, in Bach’s hands, is not just a feeling. It is also an invitation you cannot refuse. Once it catches you, you do not want to escape.

In the fast, information-overloaded world, we are often too focused on what comes next—the next task, the next destination, and the next problem to solve. We rush past the present moment, measuring our lives by what we achieve rather than what we feel. We barely give ourselves time to stop, to breathe, to notice the joy already here. Bach’s music fills that void. It tells us to focus on the present. Beauty is already here. Live fully.

Handel gave us permission to stop. Bach gives us permission to be moved. One is stillness. The other is surrender. Both are forms of self-care.

We often think self-care means doing something—a bath, a walk, a holiday. But sometimes it is simply stopping, letting the difficult emotions arrive without rushing them away. That is Handel: his music stays with you, step by step, until the weight becomes bearable.

And sometimes self-care is being caught. Letting joy grab you before you decide if you deserve it. That is Bach: he sweeps you up, leaps you forward, and before you know it, you are smiling. So here is my invitation: find a piece that stops you. Find a piece that moves you. Sit with one. Let the other carry you. That is how music helps us to stay human.

附錄  Bibliography

Dissmore, Joshua L. “Baroque Music and the Doctrine of Affections: Putting the Affections into Effect.” The Research and Scholarship Symposium, 2017.

http://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/research_scholarship_symposium/2017/podium_presentations/18

Mattheson, Johann, and Hans Lenneberg. “Johann Mattheson on Affect and Rhetoric in Music (I).” Journal of Music Theory 2, no. 1 (1958): 47–84. https://doi.org/10.2307/842930.


Mattheson, Johann, and Hans Lenneberg. “Johann Mattheson on Affect and Rhetoric in Music (II).” Journal of Music Theory 2, no. 2 (1958): 193–236. https://doi.org/10.2307/843199.

Paul, Charles B. “Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764), the Musician as Philosophe.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 114, no. 2 (1970): 140–54. http://www.jstor.org/stable/986031.