The aesthetics of music in the eighteenth century was related to the “Doctrine of Affects”, which had been developed earlier in the seventeenth century. It focused on how music creates specific emotions, and can eventually move the feeling of the audience. The relation between music and emotion lies in what we called ‘topic’. The very first topic theory was initiated by Leonard Ratner (1916-2011) which focus on style and types of music and was developed by some other music theorists subsequently. Based on these topic theories, the characteristics of each key, rhythm, and tempo in correlation with the dance type that supported the emotion and background story of the music can be known.

In this thesis, some selected arias from Mozart’s operas are analyzed. Mozart in his later years tends to use G minor key in some of his arias to illustrate the grief of parting. G minor key is believed to be a special key to Mozart, as it is also found in many of his works. The analysis of these selected arias in G minor will help to better understand Mozart’s preferences of key related to the story plot and provide deeper insight into the interpretation of each aria with different backgrounds and stories.