Farinelli

Among the soundtrack's many numbers, this is the overture, for orchestra alone with no voice. It opens Hasse's opera “Artaserse,” which features Arbace, Farinelli's signature role, so you can hear the sound of Les Talens Lyriques before any voice enters.

• The overture to an eighteenth-century Italian opera is called a sinfonia. It is built in three parts, fast–slow–fast, and served to settle a noisy theater before the curtain rose.
• This is a period-instrument performance that revives the instruments and playing styles of the Baroque era. Because it uses gut strings twisted from sheep intestine, the sound is lighter than a modern orchestra's, and the grain of the moving bow comes through clearly.
• Hasse was the most popular opera composer of Farinelli's time. “Artaserse,” first staged in Venice in 1730, was revised and revived in city after city in the years that followed.

An aria Riccardo wrote for his younger brother, which won fame along with Farinelli's London performances. The brilliance of the years when one brother wrote and the other sang is gathered in this single piece.

• A song in which the singer likens himself to a ship tossed by a storm. The strings' surging, wave-like figures paint the sea, while the voice rising and falling above them paints the pitching ship.
• Listen for the messa di voce (placing of the voice), in which a long note begins softly, swells, and then fades again. Farinelli was renowned as a master of this technique.
• It is a long piece, over eight minutes. Some have pointed out that notes sustained longer than any human could manage on a single breath are the result of repeating and splicing recorded sound.
• This is a da capo aria (an aria that returns to the beginning), whose melody comes back in an A-B-A shape. It rewards comparing the returning A section, with its ornaments far more lavish than the first time, and the cadenza (a solo close), in which the singer displays virtuosity alone while the accompaniment falls silent.

A slow aria Farinelli sang in Riccardo's opera “Idaspe.” It holds the elder brother's lyrical face, which makes it hard to write off the brother of the film as a composer who knows nothing but virtuosity.

• The longest piece on the soundtrack, running just over nine minutes. Over an unhurried slow beat, the voice stretches a single syllable across many notes.
• Because it is slow, there is pleasure in listening for the places where the two singers' voices are joined. Critics said it was hard to tell by ear when one voice passes into the other.
• Heard against the brothers' story, the word “shadow” in the title takes on a particular resonance. It can even sound like a question: who is whose shadow?
• After the film's release, other singers recorded this piece as well.

An aria from “Polifemo,” which Porpora wrote for London's Opera of the Nobility. The real Farinelli sang it in London to great acclaim, so it was, in effect, a weapon of the theater that was vying with Handel.

• A song in which the shepherd Acis, killed by the one-eyed giant Polifemo and brought back to life as a river by divine grace, offers his thanks to Jupiter, king of the gods.
• Long, soaring notes and wide leaps take precedence over rapid virtuosity. It sounds like a piece that shows how well Porpora knew his pupil's breath and range.
• While the strings keep a calm, steady beat, the voice alone floats high above. This contrast gives the song its character as a prayer offered to a god.
• A composer guide from the Florida State University library notes that this aria is probably the best known of Porpora's works thanks to this film.

An aria from Handel's “Rinaldo,” sung by the knight Rinaldo as he longs for his abducted beloved. It is one of the Handel songs the film brings out in its London section, and its grain is utterly different from Riccardo's music.

• It begins as a slow, dark lament in a minor key. The chromatic descent, slipping down a half step at a time, seems to deepen the sorrow.
• In the middle section the tempo and mood change abruptly, and it becomes a fierce song rebuking the dark powers that carried off his beloved. It is an example of the A-B-A form of the da capo aria (an aria that returns to the beginning) being used to set grief against fury.
• At the 1711 London premiere, the aria was sung by the castrato Nicolò Grimaldi, known as Nicolini. It was, in other words, a castrato's song from the very start.
• There is hardly a passage meant to show off technique. The film's contrast, that Handel's music uses the voice to convey feeling, comes through clearly in this piece.

Carlo sings it after learning the truth his brother had hidden, and Handel faints as he listens. It is the best-known scene in the film.

• It follows the gait of the sarabande, a slow dance in triple time. The rhythm, with its weight falling on the second beat as if it walks and then briefly falters, sounds like a sob.
• In “Rinaldo” it is originally a soprano aria sung by Almirena, a woman taken captive. The film turns this woman's song into the song of a man who has just learned what was done to his body.
• The melody has its roots in a dance from Handel's early opera “Almira” (1705). He reused it with different words in the oratorio “Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno” (1707). It is a melody Handel cherished and reworked many times.
• Scenes of childhood memory break in between the phrases. As the song on the stage and the sounds of the past overlap, the music becomes a key that unlocks the character's memory.