Human and divine tones, theatrical pieces and religious carols by Juan Hidalgo de Polanco (1614-1685), composer of capital relevance for our musical history.

Harpist of the Royal Chapel and theatrical musician par excellence of the seventeenth century, Hidalgo put music to numerous texts by Calderón de la Barca and other dramatists of his school, he was an inspired composer in the aristocratic genre of human tone, he also excelled as the author of music for carols and reached the highest levels of expressiveness and sensitivity in his attempt to translate into music the allegorical dictation of poetry. He was the musician of the court par excellence and enjoyed the greatest and best privileges to which a composer of the Old Regime could aspire.

We know the melodic Hidalgo, who develops with great mastery in the art of composition for voice alone, and the Hidalgo operatic, who is subtle and expert in musically emphasizing the dramatic action through solos, recited, duets and passages to four voices, the latter almost always in homophony to facilitate the intelligibility of the text. But perhaps we do not know so much the polyphonic and contrapuntal Hidalgo, the Hidalgo who handles the voices imitatively in the polyphonic carols and who surpasses, with a greater exhibition of expressive resources, the legacy of the masters who preceded him. Because of its connection to the Royal Chapel, Hidalgo also composed a large number of Christmas carols, some of which have been selected to be part of this volume along with theatrical tones and the human and divine tones.