Cantata
(It.;
Fr. cantate; Ger. Kantate).
A
work for one or more voices with instrumental accompaniment. The cantata was
the most important form of vocal music of the Baroque period outside opera and
oratorio, and by far the most ubiquitous. At first, from the 1620s in Italy, it
was a modest form, but at its most typical it consists (notably in Italy in the
later 17th century) of a succession of contrasting sections which by the early
18th century became independent movements, normally two arias, each preceded by
a recitative. Most Italian cantatas of this period are for a solo voice, but
some were written for two or more voices. Up to the late 17th century the
cantata was predominantly a secular form, but the church cantata, which
included choral movements ranging from simple chorale harmonizations to
complex, extended structures, was a major feature of Lutheran music in early
18th-century Germany. The standard form of accompaniment gradually expanded
from continuo alone in the mid-17th century to an orchestra, including
obbligato instruments, in the 18th. Cantatas, mainly secular, were also fairly
widely cultivated elsewhere, especially in France and Spain and to a lesser
extent in England. Both the secular and the sacred cantata sharply declined in importance
after the middle of the 18th century. In contrast to the previous 100 years and
more, the cantata has enjoyed no consistent independent existence since then,
and the term has been applied, somewhat haphazardly, to a wide variety of works
which generally have in common only that they are for chorus and orchestra.
I. The Italian cantata
to 1800
II. The German cantata
to 1800
III. The French
cantata to 1800
IV. The English
cantata to 1800
V. The Spanish cantata
to 1800
VI. The cantata since
1800
COLIN TIMMS (I, with NIGEL FORTUNE, I, 1, and MALCOLM BOYD, I, 2(ii–iv), 3), FRIEDHELM
KRUMMACHER (II), DAVID TUNLEY (III), MALCOLM BOYD/ JAMES R. GOODALL (IV), JUAN JOSÉ CARRERAS (V), MALCOLM BOYD
(VI)
Cantata
I. The Italian cantata to 1800
From
the early 17th century to the late 18th the cantata was the principal form of
Italian vocal chamber music. During this period, when practically every
composer of standing in Italy cultivated it – some, notably Marazzoli,
Alessandro Scarlatti and Benedetto Marcello, extensively – it grew from a
comparatively short piece, accompanied only by continuo, into an extended,
orchestrally accompanied complex of movements reflecting contemporary operatic
music.
The
poetical texts of the Italian cantata, throughout its lifespan, are typically
pastoral or amatory, but some are historical or mythological, and a few
humorous or satirical, while a significant proportion deal with moral or
devotional subjects; the latter may resemble contemporary motets, but motets
are settings of Latin words and meant for use in church. Cantata texts are also
normally lyrical monologues, i.e. the direct expression of a named or unnamed
personage, articulated by a poet and composer and delivered by a singer;
dialogues and other cantatas for two or more characters inevitably incline
toward the dramatic, but works intended for staging fall outside the scope of
the chamber cantata, as does theSerenata. The Italian cantata was cultivated in
all courts and cities of the peninsula and by Italians and others north of the
Alps, especially at Catholic courts such as Vienna and Munich; it was also
cultivated in England and, to a lesser extent, in France.
1. Emergence.
2. c1620–c1725.
3. c1725–1800:
Naples.
4. The Italian cantata
north of the Alps.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cantata, §I: The
Italian cantata to 1800
1. Emergence.
Accompanied
song was cultivated in Italy in the 16th and early 17th centuries, long before
the word ‘cantata’ was common or had acquired a stable meaning. The term is
first encountered, so far as is known, in the Cantata pastorale fatta per
Calen di Maggio in Siena (Siena, 1589) marking the wedding in 1586 of
Cesare d’Este and Virginia de’ Medici; the contents of this libretto – ‘azioni
sceniche e coreografiche’, ‘rime per musica pastorali e ninfali’, an
‘egloghetta’ and two substantial madrigals for eight voices – immediately
relate the cantata to the pastoral and to musical drama. The word appears also
in Michelangelo Buonarotti the younger’s La Tancia (Florence, 1611) to
denote Pietro’s plea for inspiration from the Muse (Act 1 scene iii); unlike
the surrounding lines (spoken ottavas), his ‘cantata’ is composed of ottonari
(eight-syllable lines) that were meant to be sung.
The
cantata emerged during a period of experimentation and change in Italian
poetry. The settenari and endecasillabi (seven- and
eleven-syllable lines) of the Renaissance madrigal survived into the 17th and
18th centuries and became the basis of the accompanied madrigal and of
recitative. The influence of the Pléiade was reflected in Italy in the formal
and metrical innovations ofGabriello Chiabrera (1552–1638), whose strophic
canzonettas provided the words of many early arias and paved the way for others
based on verse of various kinds (e.g. quaternari, quinari, senari).
Refrains became increasingly common and were paralleled by rondo-like structures
in music. The cantata was essentially a musical genre, but it fathered a
substantial corpus of verse that was specially designed to be sung (poesia
per musica).
In
the early 17th century cantata-like compositions were often settings of
madrigal or aria texts or published under such titles as ‘musiche’, ‘arie’,
‘madrigali’ or ‘scherzi’. The earliest example of the word in an exclusively
musical collection occurs in the first set of Cantade et arie by
Alessandro Grandi (i), of which only a reprint of 1620 is known; the first
edition doubtless appeared shortly before. Grandi adopted the term to define
three pieces for which he seems to have found the word ‘aria’ inadequate. They
are essentiallyStrophic variations in common time, but they differ in that
the bass now generally moves regularly in crotchets and the varying vocal lines
for each strophe are more aria-like than madrigalian. The term ‘strophic-bass
cantata’ has been applied to such pieces, which form a small, well-defined
group at the very outset of the history of the cantata. Oh con quanta
vaghezza (1624) by G.P. Berti is a particularly fine example, and
Monteverdi’s Ohimè ch’io cado (published by Carlo Milanuzzi in 1623 or
1624) is another. The latter was not described as a cantata, and a comparable
piece by Pellegrino Possenti, Ecco Filli, o pastori (1625), is simply
headed ‘canzonetta’.
There
was clearly no agreement, therefore, among composers or publishers that such
pieces should be called cantatas. At the same time the term began to be applied
to other solo vocal pieces, usually more ambitious than the madrigal or the
simple strophic aria. For example, the ‘cantata … in stile recitativo’ in
Francesco Turini’s Madrigali … libro secondo (1624) is simply a lettera
amorosa; the three similarly designated pieces in Francesco Negri’s Arie
musicali (1635) are settings of a lament for a pet, a scena for an enraged
lover and a madrigal respectively; and the ‘cantata’ in Giovanni Rovetta’s Madrigali
concertati (1629) is an arioso setting of five ottavas, and in effect a
lament. There are also signs that the term was being used rather
indiscriminately and becoming a vogue word attaching to any vocal piece. For
instance, most of the contents of Domenico Crivellati’s Cantate diverse
(1628) are elementary strophic songs, the status of which seems to have been
elevated through one or two more cantata-like elements elsewhere in the book.
Even so late a book as Rinieri Scarselli’s Cantate (1642) consists
mainly of straightforward strophic songs, the title apparently being prompted
by the three laments that make up the rest of the book.
There
are in fact hardly any strophic-bass cantatas in the four books of Cantade
et arie by Grandi up to 1629 (insofar as they can be assessed) or in the
two by Berti (1624–7), and there are only a handful, by composers such as
Lazaro Valvasensi (1634) and Milanuzzi (1635), after 1630. Grandi and Berti or
their publisher, Alessandro Vincenti, may also, however, have thought of some
of the more ambitious strophic arias as cantatas, especially those by Berti
that divide into recitative and aria. The alternation of recitative and aria is
a prominent feature of most later cantatas, anticipated in the 1620s by other
composers besides Berti – for example D’India and Landi – in books in which the
word ‘cantata’ does not appear.
Two
volumes of 1633 – the two parts of Sances’s Cantade, the first for solo
voice, the second mainly for two voices – are crucial in the early development
of the cantata. At least 11 of the 19 very varied items in the two parts are
typical of the comparatively ambitious vocal works, both through-composed and
strophic, to which the term was henceforward increasingly applied. They include
older forms such as strophic variations (the ‘cantata … passeggiata’ Altre
le vie in Part i) and the madrigal (Filli, mirando il ciel, i), as
well as newer ones such as the passacaglia (Usurpator tiranno, i) and
chaconne (Lagrimosa beltà, ii), both interrupted by arioso sections. The
most significant form, however, is the type of extended work, represented by Presso
l’onde tranquille (i), in which recitative, arioso and aria-like writing
(including here a substantial section on an ostinato bass) succeed one another
at the dictates of the text and for which ‘cantata’ is the most appropriate –
indeed the only plausible – term. A few pieces similar to this by other
composers are also called cantatas. They include two by Martino Pesenti, one of
which, Quanto t’inganni, Amor (1636), is a hybrid combining the newer
varied form with elements of the strophic-bass cantata. Three of the five
strophes (the first, third and fourth) adhere to the latter type, the music of
the third and fourth being almost identical; the second verse is aria-like and
in triple time, and the last is set as recitative; the three middle strophes
are all followed by ritornellos. The first two verses and the last, and the
first two ritornellos, are in C, the remainder in A minor. A further
development, anticipated in a madrigalian duet in Rovetta’s Madrigali
concertati, occurs in a few works in Nicolò Fontei’s Bizzarrie poetiche
poste in musica (1635–9). This is the introduction of rondo or refrain
forms to unify and articulate hybrid, cantata-like structures; for details seeFontei,
Nicolò.
See also Monody.
Cantata, §I: The Italian cantata to 1800
2. c1620–c1725.
(i) Rome, c1620–75.
(ii) Rome, c1675–c1725.
(iii) Bologna, Modena
and Ferrara.
(iv) Venice.
Cantata, §I, 2: The
Italian cantata to 1800: c1620–c1725
(i) Rome, c1620–75.
Although
many of the earliest cantatas were printed in Venice, the principal centre of
cantata composition throughout the 17th century was Rome. Rome provided ideal
conditions for the cultivation of vocal chamber music, including a large,
wealthy aristocracy willing and able to support composers and performers. Most
of the leading musicians associated with the cantata in Rome were employed,
permanently or temporarily, by at least one prominent Roman family (e.g. theBarberini, Borghese, Chigi, Pamphili,
Colonna, Ottoboni, Ruspoli), or by the diplomatic representative of a foreign
power, or by one of the many other foreign residents, of whom by far the most
important as a patron was QueenChristina of Sweden. Singers, organists,
harpsichordists and composers also frequently held posts in the papal chapel or
in one of Rome’s many churches; some idea of a singer’s training may be gained
from Bontempi’s account of the school run byVirgilio Mazzocchi. The authors of cantata texts
were often noble amateurs or educated professionals such as secretaries,
lawyers or clerics; the most prominent poets of mid-17th-century Roman cantatas
wereFrancesco Balducci, Domenico Benigni, Francesco Melosio,
Antonio Abati, Giovanni Lotti andGiovanni Filippo Apolloni. Cantatas in Rome were
typically performed at weekly or occasional conversazioni in private
palaces before audiences of cognoscenti who appreciated displays of erudition,
technical skill (in the composition and performance of both poetry and music),
topicality and spontaneity. Each occasion required a new composition, so
cantatas were normally copied by hand and rarely committed to print.
Nevertheless, Roman cantatas were known throughout most of Italy and much of
Europe and set an example for many ‘non-Roman’ composers.
The
earliest Roman cantatas probably antedate the latest music discussed in §1
above, but because the repertory survives largely in undated manuscripts it is
impossible to be entirely certain about chronology. According to Murata (1987),
the manuscripts are of four main kinds: autograph copybooks (rare), which
belonged to the composer and passed to his patron after his death; miscellanies
of pre-existing fascicles, which may contain music originating from diverse
periods and places (including arias from Roman operas); formal anthologies or
single-composer collections (most prominent in the late 17th century), which
contained a particular repertory and helped to disseminate it north of the
Alps; and, most unusual, fascicles of single works.
Given
the nature of the sources, it is also difficult, in the present state of
knowledge (which, however, is much fuller than it was), to sketch the history
of the cantata as a form in any but rather general terms. Holzer (1991) defined
the 17th-century cantata as ‘a piece of vocal chamber music whose text combines
versi sciolti [(generally) unrhymed lines of seven or eleven syllables]
and canzonetta verses [strophic poems composed of rhymed lines of any length]
and whose music generally sets these elements with recitative and aria; it can
also be a series of unrelated canzonettas set in recitative and/or aria style’.
Among the earliest composers of such pieces in Rome were Orazio Michi and Luigi
Rossi; cantata-like works by Michi were copied by about 1635, and precedents
for them can be found in manuscripts associated with the patronage of
Alessandro Peretti, Cardinal Montalto. Montalto’s repertory also suggests that
the multipartite Roman cantata owed something to the earlier Roman and
Neapolitan villanella and aria, and that it did not depend entirely on
Florentine monody.
The
most prolific composers in the early history of the cantata were Rossi, who
served Marc’ Antonio Borghese and Cardinal Antonio Barberini, and Marco
Marazzoli, most of whose 379 cantatas date from about 1640–60 and survive in a
dozen autograph manuscripts in the Chigi collection in the Vatican library. Two
main types of cantata have been distinguished in Rossi’s output: works
consisting more or less of a single aria, described by Caluori (1971) as ariette
corte (‘short ariettas’), and works in which a number of sections in
recitative, arioso and aria styles follow one another according to the demands
of the text (arie di più parti: ‘arias in several sections’). A large
majority of Rossi’s and Marazzoli’s cantatas are ariette corte, the form
that appears to have dominated the Roman repertory in the first half of the
17th century.
Rossi’s
ariettas really are quite short: the text normally consists of two or three
strophes, set to music (rarely more than 60 bars) in binary, rondo, ternary or
rounded binary form. In binary cantatas the music may embrace the entire text
or accommodate the first strophe only and be repeated to subsequent strophes
(strophic binary, sometimes with a closing refrain). The B section is
often marked by a change of musical metre, normally (but not always) prompted
by a similar change in the text – a trait shared by the rondo and ternary
cantatas. The rondos are settings in three strophes, the first of which is
repeated after the second and again after the third (ABAB'A). In some
cases the B sections use strophic variation rather than straightforward
strophic repetition, and in others the second and third strophes have different
music altogether (ABACA). Moreover, some rondos include two or more
internal restatements of the refrain, and these may be varied or truncated. The
rounded binary cantatas differ from the ternary in that the reprise is not a separate
closed section: it is based on only the first line of the text and is
incorporated into the second or both of the two main sections (AB/CA' or
ABA'/CA').
The
same types of form predominate in the cantatas of Marazzoli and Mario Savioni.
As in most cantata composers of the period, changes of metre between and within
sections are a principal means of articulating structure. Marazzoli’s treatment
of the forms is very similar to Rossi’s, though he preferred more extensive
variation in the repeats in strophic, rondo and ternary cantatas, while in
Savioni’s ternary and rondo cantatas the B section is often composed as
strophic variations and occasionally set over an ostinato bass. Although
strophic variation is thus to be found in Roman cantatas of the mid-17th
century, it was not one of the commonest methods of organization and it died
out altogether by about 1670. Its place was taken, in one sense, by shorter,
ostinato basses. These were particularly favoured in arie di più parti,
possibly because they brought a degree of order to these settings of longer and
more varied texts: even in Rossi’s cantatas, ostinatos appear more frequently
in arie di più parti than in ariette corte.
The
formal principles of the solo cantata also governed the composition of the
relatively small proportion of works for two or more voices, of cantatas with
sacred (Italian) texts and of cantatas with instruments other than continuo.
Most of the duets by Rossi and his contemporaries are ariette corte;
although they make use of imitative points, these are rarely pursued at any
length and the texture is predominantly homophonic. Rossi’s three cantatas with
instruments (two violins, in two cases with lute) are all five-part settings of
sacred texts bordering on oratorios. The same combination of instruments is
used in most of Marazzoli’s accompanied cantatas, which, however, include
secular settings and are for three to six voices; these were probably composed
in the later 1650s, when he was closely associated with Fabio Chigi. His solo
cantata celebrating Chigi’s election in 1655 as Pope Alexander VII (Salutate
il nuovo Aprile) is one of the few works by him that are more heavily
scored (in this case for two violette piccole, viola alta, viola bassa
and continuo) and offers an example of an occasional text, a type encountered
throughout the history of the cantata, though in comparatively small numbers.
A
significant change of emphasis can be seen in the cantatas of Carissimi.
Although about a quarter of these are ariette corte, and a further tenth
are strophic variations, the largest single group of cantatas, representing
about a third of the total, comprises arie di più parti. This cannot
automatically be taken as a sign of historical development, because Carissimi’s
cantatas (at least those from 1640–72) overlap in date with those of Rossi,
Marazzoli and Savioni. But the cantatas of the later 17th century can be
regarded as arie di più parti in all but name and certainly appear to be
descended from this earlier type of work.
Although
the distinction between recitative, arioso and aria is generally fairly clear,
the arie di più parti are characterized by the ways in which these
styles are blended and juxtaposed. At the prompting of the text a recitative
may become more lyrical and transform itself almost imperceptibly into an
extended section in aria style, or an aria may be interrupted by a brief
passage of recitative. The cantatas often embrace two or more arias, and these
alone display a variety of forms, including those of the ariette corte
and the ubiquitous extended binary (ABB'). Recitative frequently appears
at the beginning of a cantata but less frequently at the end, and tonal unity
throughout the work is normally secured by starting and finishing in the same
key. Some of Carissimi’s arie di più parti are further unified by means
of repetition. In most of these the opening section is repeated, with or
without variation, at the end (AB … A), and in the remainder it is
restated at least twice, in the manner of a refrain (ABAC … A). In both
cases section A is an aria, while sections B and C may
include any combination of styles. The sections are longer and more varied than
those in, for example, Rossi’s ariette corte, so it would be
inappropriate to consider these as works of that type; but it is permissible to
see in them the application of organizational principles typical of ariette
corte. The adoption of these procedures would have been a natural step – a
similar purpose is served by an arioso refrain in most of Rossi’s laments – and
may have been prompted in part by the growing dimensions of arie di più
parti.
Carissimi’s
duets also differ from those of the composers discussed above. Only a third of
them are simple strophic arias. According to Rose (MQ, xlviii, 1962,
pp.204–15), most are settings of dialogue-like texts in which each singer
represents a distinct and sometimes named character. Most of the texts (e.g. Chi
fugge d’amor gl’affanni for Thyrsis and Phyllis) are pastoral or amatory in
nature and thus are typical of cantata poetry in general, but others (e.g. Alma,
che fai, che pensi? for Alma and Corpo) have a moral flavour and one (A
piè d’un verde alloro) is a philosophical debate between Heraclitus and
Democritus. The characters sing as individuals in the recitatives and arias for
solo voice, but generally lose their identity in the duets. These movements,
which display a variety of homophonic and contrapuntal textures, including
recitative a due, serve to set the scene and provide comment during the
course of a work and at the end. Similar texts and techniques are to be found
in Carissimi’s cantatas for three voices, which may be considered secular
equivalents of his oratorios.
Most
of the features of Carissimi’s cantatas also appear in the works of slightly
younger composers such as A.F. Tenaglia, Carlo Caproli and Antonio Cesti.
Cesti’s cantatas, which are relatively few in number and probably date mainly
from about 1656–61, when he was associated with Alexander VII, are noteworthy
partly for the prevalence of languorous arias in 3/2 time, of the kind so
frequently encountered in Venetian operas of the period. They are also, so far
as is known, among the earliest cantatas in which the final couplet or endecasillabo
of a recitative stanza is regularly set in aria style in AA' form. This
type of concluding arioso, orCavata, recalls Rossi’s predilection for
setting off the last part of a section, but by the time of Cesti this practice
had led to a most distinctive design. The melody of the cavata is first stated
in the dominant, the key in which the recitative normally ends, and is then
repeated, sometimes with decoration or extension, in the tonic. Such cavatas
are extremely common in cantatas of the late 17th century and in those by 18th-century
Venetians such as Albinoni and Benedetto Marcello.
Cesti’s
mastery of the cantata is perhaps most thoroughly displayed in his Aspettate!
adesso canto, a setting of a satirical text, probably by the composer
himself, which pokes fun at many of the clichés of mid-17th-century song. Among
the topics held up to ridicule are the typical amatory subject matter of most
cantatas, the preciosity of the language in which it is couched and the
standard range of musical effects by which it is illustrated. There follows an
extended aria, combining strophic and rondo elements, in which the popularity
of the genre is attributed to these features, and the cantata ends with a brief
recitative in which the audience is twitted for having sat through the performance.
Cesti’s
few cantatas for two or more voices are varied in form and are among the finest
examples of his art. One of the duets (L’amoroso veleno) is labelled
‘dialogo’, but at least one other (Pria ch’adori, described as a
‘canzonetta amorosa morale’) is also a setting of a dialogue text. Most of the
cantatas for two voices, however, are chamber duets in which both singers have
the same words. Lacrime mie may be counted as an aria di più parti,
but Quante volte is in ABB' form, and Disperato morirò is
a strophic aria in which both strophes are followed by a ritornello for two
violins and continuo. Disperato morirò displays a greater variety of
textures than the duets of Carissimi and other composers discussed above; they
range from more persistent imitation to affective, halting sequences in
parallel motion, similar to those in Cesti’s Viennese operas of the 1660s.
To
the cantatas of the late 17th and early 18th centuries the terms arie di più
parti and ariette corte become increasingly inappropriate. The distinction
between recitative and aria grows unmistakably clear, and rapid alternation
from one style to the other far less common. Recitative occupies a smaller
proportion of the cantata as a whole, while arias expand into longer, separate
movements. In short, cantatas tend from now on to comprise a smaller number of
sections or movements, each of which is more clearly defined. These changes
reflect similar developments in opera and instrumental music and are due partly
to trends affecting the style of Italian music in general in the late 17th
century. Formal definition in the aria, for example, is related partly to the
more systematic use, including repetition (possibly with transposition or
extension), of thematic material, and partly to the rise of the Classical
system of key relationships. The changes in the cantata were also affected,
however, by the increasingly important role of the continuo. By supplying more
introductions, codettas and ritornellos in arias and cantatas, the continuo
helped to articulate the structure; and by echoing and anticipating the vocal
material it was frequently drawn into a contrapuntal relationship with the
voice. As a corollary, perhaps, the style of vocal writing in the late 17th
century was increasingly affected by instrumental idioms.
All
these trends may be seen in the work of Alessandro Stradella, who worked in
Rome between 1667 and 1677. The three arias in Ombre, voi che celate,
for example, are clearly defined and well contrasted in metre, key, style and
form. In two of them the repetition of phrases is underlined by means of echo
effects, and the second is constructed over a bass that moves almost entirely
in quavers. This type of bass is closely related to the ostinato, a common
feature in Stradella’s works and one that he treated with great freedom and
resource. The third aria is an example of what Jander (Alessandro Stradella
and his Minor Dramatic Works, diss., Harvard U., 1962) called an
‘aria-pair’: it is in two halves, each of which is in ABB' form. Similar
structures, along with other more complex multi-sectional arias, occur in
cantatas by Carissimi, Cesti, Steffani and their contemporaries. This one is
exceptional in that section A is the same in each half (the form is ABB'/ACC')
and in having the tonal layout of a cavata, which is not, however, to be found
in the cavata at the end of the first recitative.
Since
Stradella is one of the few outstanding Italian composers of the 17th century
to occupy an important position in the history of instrumental as well as of
vocal music, it is hardly surprising that cantatas with instruments form a
larger part of his output than of that of his predecessors. The normal
requirement is a pair of violins, but two cantatas call for four-part strings
and three are scored for larger and more varied ensembles. Most of the
accompanied cantatas are also for two or three singers; of the few for solo
voice, two are settings of moral or sacred texts (Crudo mar di fiamme
orribili: ‘Sopra l’Anime del Purgat[ori]o’ and Da cuspide ferrate: ‘Crocifissione
e morte di N[ostro] S[ignor] Giesù Christo’).
One
of the most ambitious examples is the serenata Qual prodigio è ch’io miri?,
which is scored for two sopranos and bass voice, two concertinos, each of two
violins and continuo, and a concerto grosso of four-part strings and continuo.
The arias are all accompanied by one or other of the concertinos, but some of
them are supported also by the concerto grosso, of which the main function is
to provide ritornellos. The duets, on the other hand, are accompanied by
continuo alone. The fact that each group of instruments should be mounted on a
separate carriage, together with a reference halfway through to the opening of
a window, indicates that some kind of staging may have been envisaged for this
work – which, together with the dramatic nature of the text, places it outside
the realm of the chamber cantata.
A
dramatic element is also to be found, however, in a considerable proportion of
Stradella’s continuo cantatas. Some historical or legendary subjects appear to
have been chosen specifically for their dramatic potential, and the cantatas
based on them often have titles such as ‘Il Seneca’ or ‘Seneca svenato’ (Se
Nerone lo vuole); ‘Il Nerone’ or ‘Incendio di Nerone’ (Sopra un’eccelsa
torre); and ‘La Medea’ (Già languiva la notte). Schmitz, who coined
for works of this kind the term ‘Sujetkantate’, thought that they first
appeared in Bolognese sources of the 1670s–90s, but those by Stradella may be
somewhat earlier. In any case, similar cantatas were composed by Cesti, who
also set ‘Il Nerone’, and they are probably related to the historical laments
of earlier composers such as Marazzoli (e.g. A pena udito havea:
‘Lamento di Cleopatra’, and Già celebrato havea la regina: ‘Lamento
d’Artimisia’). Despite these precedents, however, historical and dramatic
cantatas seem to be commoner in Stradella than before, and they continued to
appear sporadically in the later 17th century and beyond.
Cantata, §I, 2: The
Italian cantata to 1800: c1620–c1725
(ii) Rome, c1675–c1725.
The
quite profound changes that took place in the development of the chamber
cantata at the end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th centuries are best
observed in the works of Alessandro Scarlatti, the greatest and most prolific
exponent of the genre. His extant cantatas (excluding those that fail to
satisfy the most stringent tests of authenticity) number about 600, more than
500 of which are for solo voice (usually soprano) and continuo. They cover
every period of his creative life and are as remarkable for their quality as
for their number. Many were composed for aristocratic patrons in Rome,
including Cardinals Ottoboni and Pamphili, or for meetings of the Arcadian
Academy, of which Scarlatti became a member in 1706; others were no doubt
written to flatter or recompense singers who took part in his operas.
Scarlatti’s
earliest cantatas date from his first Roman period (1672–84) and show the
influence of older composers active in Rome at that time, including Carissimi
(who was possibly one of his teachers), P.S. Agostini, Savioni and Stradella.
They are extremely varied both in their subject matter (which includes
incidents from Roman history and classical mythology, as well as the ubiquitous
amatory situations) and in their construction. Some are quite short, while
others are in as many as 12 or more distinct sections. Unity is achieved partly
by distributing the keys of the arias around a central tonality in which the
cantata begins and ends, and sometimes (particularly in longer works) by
repeating an aria or a passage of arioso at various points in the cantata, as
Rossi and others had done. While the division between recitative and aria is
clearly made from the start, the transition from one to the other is frequently
softened by quite long stretches of arioso or by cavatas. Some of these
passages involve a change of time signature to 3/2, as in the cantatas of
earlier Roman and Venetian composers, but more often they are a tempo
extensions of the simple 4/4 recitative in which the bass plays an active,
usually imitative part. In either case textual repetition is involved. Correa
nel seno amato, one of the most attractive of Scarlatti’s early cantatas,
includes both types of arioso.
The
arias of the early cantatas are correspondingly diverse in structure. Da capo
form appeared quite early, but until the last decade of the 17th century it
remained less important than other structures, particularly the ground bass and
extended binary form (ABB'). The early da capo arias are mostly
rudimentary and very brief, with mainly short vocal phrases, much exact
repetition within each section and an unadventurous key scheme. A second
strophe is often set to the same music, as had been the case in binary and ground-bass
arias as well. As Scarlatti’s mastery of the new form developed, the da capo
arias became longer and tonally more ambitious. Second strophes occurred less
often, and in the 18th century they virtually disappeared altogether, along
with other aria forms.
The
last decade of the 17th century brought with it other changes, which tended to
standardize both the musical structure and the expressive content of the
cantata. To a considerable extent this uniformity resulted from – or perhaps
resulted in (since it is difficult to separate the priority of poet and
composer in the reforms) – a new strain of lyrical poetry expressly designed
for musical setting and consisting of two or three rhymed strophes in
contrasting metres separated by unrhymed lines of seven or 11 syllables (versi
sciolti). The former were designed for arias, the latter for recitative and
arioso passages. This kind of cantata verse had already been used extensively
by mid-17th-century composers; what is new in the late 17th-century cantata is
the small number of text sections, the relatively regular alternation of
recitative and aria, and the greater brevity of the aria texts, allowing the
music to expand over a greater canvas. Occasionally cantata texts were printed,
but they mostly circulated in manuscript, the majority appearing anonymously in
musical sources. Their subjects are almost exclusively Arcadian, describing the
thoughts and feelings of a contented or (more often) unrequited lover in an
idyllic pastoral setting. The jealousy of the lover and the inconstancy of the
beloved are recurrent themes, but although the sentiments are undistinguished
and stereotyped, the verses are artfully designed to allow the composer every
opportunity for the expression of human emotion and the portrayal of nature in
its various moods.
The
cantata also existed in a similar form, though in much smaller numbers, as a
sacred work, distinguishable from the solo motet by virtue of its vernacular
text and the circumstances in which it was performed. The cantata spirituale
was cultivated above all in Rome. Crescimbeni reported that during the summer
the priests of S Maria in Vallicella (the Chiesa Nuova) were in the habit of
listening to cantate spirituali in the garden of the church of S Onofrio
and that Cardinal Spinola had them performed ‘con bella splendidezza’ each
Wednesday at his palace. Crescimbeni added that cantate spirituali also
were heard every year on Christmas Eve at the pontifical palace in the presence
of the sacred college of cardinals. It was quite possibly for a Christmas
meeting of the Arcadian Academy that Scarlatti wrote the cantata by which he is
best known today, Oh di Betlemme altera, for soprano, strings and
continuo. The text celebrates the good fortune of the shepherds in being the
first witnesses of Christ’s birth, a favourite theme among members of the
Academy, who had chosen the infant Jesus as their tutelary deity.
The
Arcadian Academy was founded in Rome in 1690 by participants in the former conversazioni
of Christina of Sweden, who had died the previous year. Colonies were soon
established in other Italian cities, and existing academies quickly became
affiliated to the parent body in Rome. Pastoral conventions had dominated
Italian literature since the appearance of Sannazaro’s Arcadia at the
dawn of the 16th century, and still prevailed in the 18th. The Academy held
meetings in the spring and summer at which cantatas were performed and even
improvised; at one such meeting, according to Crescimbeni, Scarlatti composed
music to verse by G.B.F. Zappi as quickly as the latter, a lawyer, could write
it. Crescimbeni, the first historian of the Academy, also provided the classic
definition of the cantata in the early 18th century:
Certain
other types of poetry were introduced for music, which are commonly known as
cantatas. They are made up of long and short lines without regular rhyme scheme
[versi, e versetti rimati senza legge], mixed with arias [ariette].
Some are for a single voice, some for more than one, and they were and still
are written with an admixture of dramatic and narrative elements. This kind of
poetry was an invention of the seventeenth century; previously madrigals and
other regular verse forms served for music.
Crescimbeni
described the cantata as a kind of poetry that was both written for music and
recognized as a literary genre in its own right. He also seems to have regarded
it essentially as recitative into which arias were inserted. Dramatic or
narrative elements (including, on occasion, reported speech) were normally confined
to recitative; arias were concerned with lyrical expression. Except in France,
the 18th-century cantata normally comprised two da capo arias, each preceded by
recitative (R–A–R–A); the most usual alternatives were R–A–R–A–R–A, A–R–A–R–A
and A–R–A (cantatas ending in recitative or arioso, quite common in the 17th
century, became increasingly rare after 1700). The literary historian F.S.
Quadrio wrote that it was natural for the poet to begin with a recitative, as
this allowed him to set the scene and introduce the subject (Quadrio, 1741).
This arrangement also suited the singer, who could use the recitative to warm
up for the first aria.
The
last decade of the 17th century and the first 20 years of the 18th were the
heyday of the late Baroque cantata in Rome, in terms of quantity and quality.
Scarlatti composed his finest cantatas there during this period; so, too, did
Gasparini, Bononcini, Handel, Domenico Scarlatti, Caldara and a host of lesser
figures. Most of these cantatas are for solo voice (predominantly soprano) and
continuo and could have been performed by a single person, as were those of
Astorga; some, however, are scored for two or more voices, some for one or more
obbligato instruments (predominantly violins) and others for orchestra (usually
strings).
The
composer usually respected the structure provided by the poet, setting versi
sciolti as recitative and rhymed stanzas as arias. Tonal unity was normally
created by setting the final aria in the key in which the cantata began. If the
first movement was a recitative, it could modulate widely and lead to an aria
in a key far removed from the opening. The two arias would then be contrasted
in key and could – and should – be further contrasted in tempo, metre and
style. In addition to conveying the dominant ‘affection’ of the words, the
music of the arias was often designed, it appears, as an exhibition of the
composer's harmonic or contrapuntal technique or as a vehicle for the display
of the singer’s virtù. If the poetry of cantatas presents countless
variations on well-worn themes, the music places a similar emphasis on style
rather than content.
Scarlatti’s
second Roman period (1703–7) was a particularly fruitful one for the
composition of cantatas. Of those that can definitely be assigned to these
years the vast majority are in R–A–R–A form. Standardization of form was
encouraged by stylistic features observable in opera and oratorio as well as in
the cantata. Arioso sections in 3/2 time disappeared entirely, while the other
type of arioso described above (in the second paragraph of this section) became
less common and, like the recitatives themselves, shorter. Recitatives are now
punctuated by stereotyped cadential formulae, while the ubiquitous da capo aria
proceeds along tonal paths whose main outlines rarely change.
Although
they are to a certain extent predictable in these areas, Scarlatti’s later
cantatas are nevertheless remarkably varied in the minutiae of their design and
in the range of their expression, and they exhibit a new richness of harmonic
resource and a greater freedom of incidental modulation. The F
minor setting of Andate, o miei
sospiri, which figured in a famous exchange of cantatas with Francesco
Gasparini in 1712, is a tour de force of chromatic harmony and extreme
modulation, but it was by no means the only cantata that earned for Scarlatti
the reputation of an ‘extravagant und irregulair’ harmonist (as Heinichen
described him in Der General-Bass in der Composition, 1728). Al fin
m’ucciderete (1705), one of his best-known cantatas to judge from the large
number of surviving copies, is very typical in the wide-ranging modulations of
its recitatives and in the harmonic richness of its two arias. The arias also
demonstrate a degree of contrapuntal artifice, another hallmark of his mature
chamber style and one that is used in some works on even more formal lines. Farfalla
che s’aggira (1706), Nel dolce tempo (1712) and Qui dove al fin
m’assido all contain arias in which voice and bass proceed entirely in
canon at the octave, and the duet cantata Questo silenzio ombroso (1707)
ends with what is in effect a two-part fugue above a continuous quaver bass.
Questo
silenzio ombroso is one of a relatively small number of duet cantatas in which the
singers share the same text, rather in the manner of Steffani’s chamber duets
(see §4 below). The form is that of the solo cantata, except that the
recitatives are replaced by arioso movements in which both voices join, as in Francesco
Durante’s once popular arrangements of recitatives from Scarlatti’s solo
cantatas. Another type of duet cantata takes the form of a dialogue in which
the singers share roughly the same feelings but not the same text. Usually
rather longer than the solo cantatas, these dialogues are composed of alternate
recitatives and arias evenly divided between the two ‘characters’, and they end
(and often begin) with a duet. A particularly fine example of this kind of duet
cantata is Scarlatti’s Ahi che sarà di me?, written at Urbino in 1707.
Among
the many contemporaries of Scarlatti who cultivated the solo cantata, one of
the most prolific was the influential and much-travelled Giovanni Bononcini,
who left 283 examples of the genre along with 37 cantatas and serenatas for two
or more voices. Most of his solo cantatas and half of his serenatas were
composed in Rome in 1692–8; a handful date from his years in Vienna
(1698–1713), and he published 12 cantatas and two duets in London in 1721.
Bononcini’s
cantatas may be musically inferior to Scarlatti’s, but in many ways they
represent the mainstream of the genre in the first quarter of the 18th century.
In them an assured, fluent technique is allied to a gift for inventing pleasing
melodies, even if their working-out relies too frequently on exact or
sequential repetition. There is little sign of the more expansive phrases of
Scarlatti, and in some arias designed to exhibit vocal technique melisma is
mechanically applied to the final or penultimate syllable of a phrase
regardless of its appropriateness to the text – a practice that became even
more widespread in the vocal writing of the succeeding generation. The
figuration in Bononcini's bass parts occasionally shows the hand of an
experienced cellist, but as a rule the bass line merely echoes or supports the
vocal phrases in the conventional manner. The opening recitative of Ecco
Dorinda il giorno has sometimes been singled out for its modulations
through 12 different keys. This is in fact an exaggeration, although Bononcini's
recitatives are often quite adventurous in their chromaticism. He was also one
of the few composers to attempt the recherché procedures of Scarlatti’s mature
cantatas. His Era la notte e lo stellato cielo, if it is indeed by him,
was probably written to test Handel's powers of sight-reading when the two
composers met in Berlin. Its notational complexities are far removed from the
harmonic audacities of Scarlatti, but it does exemplify the role often played
by the cantata as a vehicle for the kind of experimentation that might appeal
to the connoisseur.
Perhaps
the only composer who succeeded in matching the suave sensuality of Scarlatti‘s
most characteristic melodies and the intellectual beauty and power of his
counterpoint is Handel. The exact number of his cantatas is uncertain – some
survive in a fragmentary state, others in two or more versions – but they
probably total about 100, not counting his two dozen chamber duets and trios.
Nearly half of them were composed for the Marquis Francesco Maria Ruspoli, whom
Handel served in Rome between 1707 and 1709; some were written for other Roman
patrons, such as the cardinals Benedetto Pamphili and Pietro Ottoboni, or for
meetings of the Arcadian Academy (of which Handel was not a member); others
were composed in Naples and probably elsewhere in Italy between 1706 and 1710.
The
majority are for solo voice and continuo only. Most of these are for soprano,
but there are at least 16 for alto and two for bass. These proportions seem
typical of the Italian cantata in general in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Tenors were no more favoured in the chamber than in the theatre. If a work for
tenor was required, a cantata, according to Giovanni Legrenzi (Cantate e
canzonette, 1676) and T.B. Gaffi (Cantate da camera, 1700), could be
sung an octave lower. It also seems clear from Legrenzi and Gaffi, however,
that cantatas for alto were not to be sung an octave lower by a bass, a voice
for which a special style of writing, combining melodic and harmonic features,
was developed in the Baroque.
The
forms of Handel’s continuo cantatas resemble those already encountered in
Scarlatti. Nearly half of them comprise two arias, each preceded by recitative
(R–A–R–A); a further fifth dispense with the initial recitative (A–R–A), and one
cantata, Sarei troppo felice, appears to consist of only a single
recitative and aria. A number of works end with recitative, among them the
remarkable Udite il mio consiglio, in which the final passage is a
resetting of words heard near the beginning of the cantata. The scale of this
work is comparable to that of O numi eterni (‘La Lucrezia’), the form of
which might be summarized as R–A–R–A–R–Arioso–R–Arioso. The historical subject
of this cantata recalls similar themes in works by Stradella, and Handel’s
extraordinarily dramatic setting fully deserves its reputation as the finest of
his continuo cantatas.
O
numi eterni
is untypical of Handel, however, in that it ends in the key in which it begins:
this characteristic of most cantatas by most composers of the period is
contradicted in the majority of Handel’s works. The arias, nearly all of which
are in da capo form, begin and end in the same key, of course; but the
recitatives often move quite swiftly from one key centre to another, and there
is occasionally a tonal hiatus between the end of one movement and the
beginning of the next. Even in a cantata of standard design, the closing key is
frequently far removed from that of the opening: Lungi da voi, che siete
poli (1708), for example, begins in F minor, which is also the key of the
first aria; the second recitative, however, begins in C minor and ends in A
minor, and the ensuing (final) aria is in D major. One of the few other
composers of ‘modulating’ cantatas was Alessandro Marcello; 12 of his cantatas
were published at Venice in 1708, and Handel may have seen and been influenced
by them.
The
cantatas for solo voice and intruments may be divided into two groups: those
with a single obbligato movement, and those with orchestral accompaniment. Two
cantatas have obbligato parts for flute, one a part for violin, one for
‘cembalo concertato’ and one, on a Spanish text, for guitar. In those with
orchestral accompaniment the ensemble consists essentially of strings. Wind
instruments are added in some of these cantatas, e.g. Ah! crudel, nel pianto
mio and Da quel giorno fatale (‘Delirio amoroso’), but the two
greatest of them, the quasi-operatic scenas Dietro l’orme fuggaci
(‘Armida abbandonata’) and Dunque sarà pur vero (‘Agrippina condotta a
morire’) rely solely on strings. These are used most resourcefully, especially,
in Dietro l’orme fuggaci, in the accompaniment of recitative, a function
rarely served by the orchestra in the generation before Handel.
Most
of Handel’s cantatas for two and three voices are chamber duets modelled on
those of Steffani (a predecessor of his as Kapellmeister at Hanover); like his
solo cantatas, most are relatively early works, but six were composed in
England in 1741–5. Although they resemble Steffani’s duets, they differ from them
in three important respects: they prefer open key schemes, shun solo movements
and, with one exception, avoid overall formal designs involving repetition.
Handel’s few complete cantatas for two or more voices and instruments, on the
other hand, are more akin to Scarlatti’s dialogue-like duet cantatas; indeed
they represent a cross between them and Handel’s own accompanied solo cantatas.
Arresta il passo (‘Aminta e Fillide’) is scarcely less impressive than
the better-known La terra è liberata (‘Apollo e Dafne’). The unexpected
interruption of the furioso section of the overture by the first line of
recitative would make a tremendous impact in any context; here it also serves
to underline the fact that by 1708, when it was probably first performed, the
Italian cantata could command the dramatic power and expressive means of
contemporary opera and, by presenting them in a more concentrated format, make
a proportionately deeper impression.
Cantata, §I, 2: The Italian
cantata to 1800: c1620–c1725
(iii) Bologna, Modena and Ferrara.
The
types of cantata developed in Rome were also cultivated in practically every
other musical centre in Italy. One of the most prominent of these centres in
the 17th century was the university city of Bologna, which lay within the Papal
States and boasted a large number of churches and musicians. Some Bolognese
composers appear to have thought of themselves as offshoots of the Roman
school: G.P. Colonna was a pupil of Carissimi, while G.A. Perti, in his Cantate
morali e spirituali (1688), described Rossi, Carissimi and Cesti as ‘the
three greatest lights of our profession’. Most of the leading composers in the
city were associated with the basilica of S Petronio or the Accademia Filarmonica
(founded in 1666), of which the aristocratic members formed one of the
principal cantata audiences.
Unlike
the Roman repertory, cantatas in Bologna were frequently printed, alongside
instrumental and sacred vocal music, at the presses of the Monti and Silvani
families. Between 1659 and 1720 these publishers issued approximately 60 books
of vocal chamber music, some of it by composers active elsewhere. In addition
to ‘cantate amorose’, ‘morali’ and ‘spirituali’, some with parts for violins,
this repertory includes arias and canzonettas for one or more voices, and
madrigals for two to four, all with basso continuo. A distinctively Bolognese
quality is suggested by the fact that the authors of the poetical texts, many
of whom are named in the books, were lawyers or doctors in the locality.
The
first important composer in Bologna during this period was Maurizio Cazzati,
who published at least nine books of secular vocal music between 1649 and 1677.
Most of them contain cantatas, arias and canzonettas for solo voice, but one of
them comprises madrigals and canzonettas for two and three voices, while
another, of 1677, is entitled Duetti per camera and is thus the earliest
printed source to bear this designation. Cazzati seems also to have pioneered
the ‘spiritual’ cantata in Bologna, for his Cantate morali e spirituali
op.20 (1659) was apparently the first work of its kind to have been published
there. His successor as maestro di cappella of S Petronio, G.P. Colonna,
wrote very few cantatas, but Perti, who followed Colonna in 1696, left over 140
in manuscript in Bologna and Assisi. Another prolific Bolognese composer of
cantatas was the noble dilettante Pirro Albergati, who published four
collections between 1685 and 1714 and a further single cantata (Corona de pregi
di Maria op.13) in 1717; he also patronized other composers and mounted
cantata and serenata performances in his palace.
Albergati’s
Cantate spirituali op.9 (1702) were published not at Bologna but in the
neighbouring town of Modena, where enthusiastic musical patronage was provided
in the second half of the 17th century by the ruling Este family. Two books of
cantatas by Bononcini’s father, G.M. Bononcini, were published at Bologna in
1677–8, but they were clearly a result of his employment in Modena (from 1671).
Domenico Gabrielli often worked in Modena during his brief career, but his Cantate
a voce sola were published at Bologna (posthumously) in 1691. Although G.B.
Vitali composed several large-scale cantatas for the Accademia de’ Dissonanti,
founded in 1683 with the encouragement of Duke Francesco II, there appear to be
no comparable works by his son, Tomaso Antonio. Cantatas by the long-serving maestro
di cappella Antonio Giannettini, and by his successor A.M. Bononcini,
survive in manuscript and, like so many other examples of the genre, remain
virtually unknown.
Perhaps
the most prolific cantata composer in northern Italy during the late 17th
century was G.B. Bassani. Although he held posts at various times in Modena,
Bergamo and elsewhere, he worked mainly in Ferrara, where the cantata was
fostered by the Accademia della Morte and the Accademia dello Spirito Santo.
Between 1680 and 1713 he published 13 volumes of ‘cantate amorose’, to most of
which he gave fanciful collective titles such as L’armonia delle sirene
(op.2), Il cigno canoro (op.3), Eco armonica delle muse (op.7)
and Languidezze amorose (op.19). The contents display several features
found in Scarlatti’s cantatas of the same period, including, in many of the
arias, both the da capo form and the motto opening (seeDevisenarie). Two of the cantatas in
op.2, Se tu parti io morirò and In traccia del suo bene, are in
fact attributed to Scarlatti in certain manuscript sources. A few of Bassani’s
cantatas call for instruments other than continuo, and one of his books, La
moralità armonica (op.4), is devoted to cantate spirituali. Other
cantata composers who were active in Ferrara include Cazzati, Legrenzi,
Mazzaferrata and G.F. Tosi. That the works of such composers were normally
printed in Bologna or Venice is a sign that there was no music publisher in
Ferrara at the time. The same is true of Mantua, where M.A. Ziani and Antonio
Caldara served the Gonzaga family between 1686 and 1707, but not of Florence
and Lucca, where eight books of cantatas were published between 1686 and 1704;
those of Vinaccesi (1688, lost) and Albinoni (1702) were dedicated to members
of the Medici family.
Cantata, §I, 2: The
Italian cantata to 1800: c1620–c1725
(iv) Venice.
The
majority of mid- to late 17th-century Venetian composers appear to have made
only a lesser contribution to the history of the cantata. This may be due
partly to a variety of social factors, such as the lack of a single ruling
dynasty with a court, though vocal chamber music was cultivated in academies
and in the palaces of the Venetian nobility. The comparative neglect of the
cantata may be due also to the success in Venice of opera. Arias from operas
were copied without orchestral parts or recitative and performed out of season
as chamber music. This may help to explain why relatively few cantatas were
written by such regular opera composers as Cavalli, Sartorio and Pallavicino.
On the other hand, the style of Venetian opera was known throughout Italy and
exerted an influence on that of the cantata in all parts of the peninsula.
The
most important figure for the history of the cantata in mid-17th-century Venice
was the singer and composer Barbara Strozzi. Although a pupil of Cavalli, she
appears to have written no opera. Between 1644 and 1664, however, she published
at least seven books of secular vocal music; the first comprises madrigals for
two to five voices and continuo, but the others contain cantatas, arias and
ariettas, most of them for solo voice, some for two and three voices. She was
the first composer anywhere to publish cantatas in such quantity. Her Cantate,
ariette e duetti op.2 (1651) was the first printed book to include the word
‘duetti’ in the title, and her Sacri musicali affetti op.5 (1655) was
the earliest published volume of ‘cantate spirituali’. In these respects she
could have been a model for Cazzati, who pioneered these genres in Bologna.
Strozzi’s
cantatas should be viewed against the background of Venetian publications of
the earlier 17th century (see §1 above) and in relation to the cantatas of
Rossi, Carissimi, Cesti and their contemporaries in Rome (see §2(i) above). Her
1651 book alone embraces an impressive range of pieces, including strophic
arias in 3/2 and common time, two of them (to texts from librettos by her
adoptive father) with instrumental accompaniment and ritornellos; an aria in
strophic rondo form (ABAB'A); a dialogue set for solo voice; an
extended, multi-sectional wedding cantata; and a long and deeply felt lament (Sul
Rodano severo) on the execution at Lyons in 1642 of Henri de Cinq Mars, a
piece evidently so popular that Strozzi included it also in her Cantate e
ariette op.3 (1654).
The
Venetian cantata is represented in the next generation by P.A. Ziani, Carlo
Grossi and, especially, Giovanni Legrenzi, who published two books for solo
voice in 1676 and 1678 and one for two and three voices, also in 1678. The
first book contains cantatas and canzonettas. The latter are strophic settings
of brief strophic poems, and the canzoni in the solo book of 1678 appear to be
identical in layout. The cantatas, on the other hand, are settings of longer,
more varied texts; their forms are similar in kind to those already encountered
in Roman works (see §2(i) above) and seem to be typical of the cantata at this
stage in its history.
Around
and after the turn of the century a number of Venetian composers achieved a
degree of individuality in their cantatas, among them Caldara, Albinoni, Lotti,
Vivaldi and the Marcello brothers. Gasparini also worked at Venice for a time:
his exchange of cantatas with Scarlatti (see §2(ii) above) occurred during his
period as maestro di cappella of the Pietà (1701–13). Some of Caldara’s
and Albinoni’s cantatas were written for patrons elsewhere (e.g. Mantua and
Florence, respectively), but those of their Venetian compatriots appear to have
been destined mainly for local consumption. If Vivaldi’s cantatas sometimes
betray the growing influence of opera in the settled structure of their
large-scale da capo arias, their elaborate vocal writing and intricate
bass-line figurations, the best of Lotti’s works display a closely woven
contrapuntal texture based on a small amount of motivic material. In this respect
they adhere to an older tradition that is reflected, also, in the bracing fugal
cavatas of Albinoni’s cantatas. At the same time, the dominance of major keys
in Lotti’s arias is a sign of the changes that were to transform the style of
Italian vocal music from the 1720s onwards.
Born
into a patrician family, Alessandro and Benedetto Marcello wrote cantatas in
which occasional unorthodox or daring procedures show the true hallmark of the
dilettante. As noted in §2(ii) above in connection with Handel, the 12
published by Alessandro in 1708 include some rare examples of cantatas that
begin and end in different keys. The general level of attainment is high enough
for one of them, In fra notturni orrori, to have been attributed
elsewhere to Scarlatti. More important, however, are the cantatas of Benedetto
Marcello, of which there are about 360 for solo voice and 80 for two voices,
mainly with continuo accompaniment, and about a dozen serenatas. The cantatas
are mostly of the conventional Arcadian type, but he seems to have excelled in
larger-scale works of a dramatic nature built around a central heroic figure
such as Andromache, Cassandra or Lucrezia (the cantata concerning the
last-named is based on the text used by Handel in O numi eterni). These
often contain bold gestures of expression or technique (for example the huge
and frequent leaps in the vocal part of Dalle Trojane all’Africane rive,
a version of the Dido and Aeneas story). In Stravaganze d’amore he set
out to mystify the reader (but not the listener) by writing the voice part in
one key and the figured bass in its enharmonic equivalent. A full appraisal of
his importance in the history of the cantata must await a more thorough
investigation of the field as a whole, but it is possible to see his works,
together with the attractive and well-written examples of the Sicilian baron
Emanuele Astorga, as representing the final phase of the cantata as a genuinely
da camera form, still in some respects stylistically independent of
opera.
Cantata, §I: The
Italian cantata to 1800
3. c1725–1800: Naples.
It
was during the 18th century that Naples became a major centre for the cantata.
Many of Scarlatti’s works were written there in 1684–1702, 1708–18 and 1722–5,
when he was maestro di cappella to the Spanish viceroy, but few of his
predecessors had shown much interest in the genre. Francesco Provenzale,
generally regarded as the founder of the Neapolitan school, left only about a
dozen cantatas, of which those discussed by Riemann display a clear distinction
between recitative and aria, the latter in da capo form with motto. Cataldo
Amodei’s Cantate op.2 (1685) is the only book of cantatas to have been
printed in Naples before Pergolesi’s Quattro cantate da camera (?1736):
the bulk of the repertory is manuscript.
The
most prolific cantata composer among Scarlatti’s contemporaries was Francesco
Mancini (1672–1737), who served the Neapolitan court from 1704 and also
directed the Conservatorio di S Maria di Loreto from 1720. Mancini composed 206
solo cantatas, of which eight are accompanied by orchestral strings and two by
obbligato instruments (in addition to continuo); a similar proportion of
instrumental accompaniments is found in the 76 cantatas of his contemporary,
Domenico Sarro. Most of Mancini’s cantatas comprise normal combinations of
recitative and aria; eight display irregular groupings; some incorporate a
cavata; three end with recitative. His arias seem transitional in approach: da
capo form is standard from about 1700, when strophic, rondo and ground bass
structures disappear, and is expanded after about 1716 by the development of
contrasting themes composed of longer, more balanced phrases.
It
was in the cantatas of Scarlatti’s successors at Naples that four-part strings
with continuo became the standard form of accompaniment and that the
instruments played continuously during the arias. The scoring itself is
identical in style and layout with that of contemporary opera arias. It should
not be assumed for this reason that cantatas were accompanied by orchestra as a
matter of course, though the fact that they were so accompanied, even in
Scarlatti’s lifetime, at some of the larger musical establishments is evident
from the Ottoboni archives in Rome.
This
new type of cantata can with some justification be called Neapolitan, since it
was cultivated most significantly by composers born, trained or otherwise
active at Naples, including Porpora, Leonardo Vinci, Leonardo Leo, Johann Adolf
Hasse, Pergolesi and Jommelli. Many such composers were associated, as pupils
or as teachers of composition or singing, with one or more of the four
Neapolitan conservatories, which provided a foundation for the city’s music
throughout the century, much as did the four ospedali in Venice. Since
cantatas combined both recitative and aria, they furnished appropriate and
valuable study material for singers wishing to embark on a career in opera.
This is one reason why they were cultivated in such numbers: according to
Quadrio (1741), nothing but cantatas was to be heard in halls (‘sale’),
theatres, oratorios or churches.
In
18th-century Italy the cantata was also the poetical form ‘di più intensivo
consumo’ (Folena). The greatest cantata poet of the age – perhaps of any age –
was Pietro Metastasio, whose first serenata (1720) and first
opera libretto (1723) were both set for Naples, by Porpora and Francesco Feo
respectively. Metastasio’s cantatas inhabit the same Arcadian world as those of
his predecessors and contemporaries, but his poetry is altogether superior in
quality, possessing greater invention, dignity, elegance and grace.
Furthermore, his letter of 14 February 1735 to the young Calzabigi gives the
ultimate explanation for the standard cantata form (R–A–R–A):
Now,
a cantata of this kind [for solo voice] with four arias cannot be performed,
because there is no musical organ so indefatigable as to be able to sing four
arias, and as much recitative, without a break; and a cantata that cannot be sung
is no less reprehensible than a tragedy that cannot be staged. If you were to
remove the first and third arias and abridge the last recitative, the
composition would be of the standard length.
Of
Metastasio’s 34 cantata texts, 21 are in R–A–R–A form and nine in A–R–A.
Although
the R–A–R–A scheme remained the norm, it became increasingly common in the
second quarter of the century for cantatas to dispense with an opening
recitative. According to Quadrio, this development was due partly to maestri
di cappella, who hated setting ‘so much rubbish’ (‘molta roba’) to music,
and partly to audiences, who, caring little for recitative, encouraged
composers to reduce it. In 1751 Telemann informed the composer and tenor C.H.
Graun, who had sung his own cantatas to Frederick the Great, that the form had
gone out of fashion in Germany because of an aversion to recitative.
If
the rise of A–R–A form was symptomatic also of the growing importance of the
aria, the omission of an introductory recitative carried both poetical and
musical disadvantages. The poet was no longer able to set the scene but was
forced to plunge straight into lyrical expression, like an orator ‘who begins a
speech with an exclamation or some other affetto’ (Quadrio). The
composer was obliged, if overall tonal unity was to be created, to write both
arias in one and the same key; since the arias were expected to be contrasted
in character, the differences between them had to be achieved by other means,
which made the composer’s job more difficult.
The
musical style of the Neapolitan cantata is virtually indistinguishable from
that of contemporary opera. There is, for example, a preference for major over
minor keys (in Scarlatti’s works the reverse applies), and accompanied
recitative is frequently used in a ‘broken’, agitated style. The da capo
structure (ABA') is still used in the arias, but the A sections
are given more material while the B section is proportionately reduced
and is often separated from the others by a change of time signature and speed.
The texture tends to be melody-dominated – a simple bass line, with slow
harmonic rhythm, supporting an ornamental melody, often based on arpeggios,
providing scope for vocal display. Lombard rhythms and other melodic
syncopations typical of the period in general invade the vocal line, which is
frequently doubled or ‘shadowed’ by violins, while the bass takes on the
functional role that it had performed in the cantatas of Benedetto Marcello and
others. Melisma, which in Scarlatti’s hands had been a powerful agent for
expressive or picturesque word-painting, now fulfils the quite different
purpose of creating climax: in the A section of an aria a passage of
elaborate coloratura, on an open ‘a’ or ‘o’, sound, is nearly always found in
the bars leading to the central (dominant) cadence and is balanced by a
similar, but still longer, treatment of the same word immediately before the
final vocal cadence in the tonic. Further opportunities for display are
provided by pauses inviting cadential improvisation.
The
bulk of Porpora’s 132 solo cantatas (including 11 with instruments) were
probably composed in about 1710–22, though 12 of his Metastasio settings were
published in London in 1735. Most are in the standard form, but as many as four
in ten lack the initial recitative. In two-thirds of his cantatas, also, the
second aria is faster than the first, reflecting the gradual intensification of
feeling and acceleration of metre that often run through a cantata text. His
London works are a poignant illustration of early 18th-century stylistic
change; though rooted in the Baroque, they employ carefully sculpted lines for
voice and bass and include the only non-da-capo aria in his cantatas – a binary
structure in which both sections cadence in the tonic key.
The
cantatas of the somewhat younger Niccolò Jommelli are comparatively few in
number but more symptomatic of mid-18th-century developments. Dating from the
1740s to the early 1770s, they include works for one, two and three voices and
settings of devotional texts. Most of his solo cantatas are accompanied by
strings; one has strings (included divided violas) with pairs of oboes and
horns. Those for two voices range from simple chamber duet with continuo to
large-scale dialogue with orchestra. Four of his large-scale sacred cantate
a tre were performed on feasts of the Virgin in 1749–52 at the Collegio del
Nazareno in Rome; similar cantatas were performed there almost annually from
1681 to 1784 and were often referred to as oratorios. His later cantatas
display a growing use of recitativo accompagnato and of arias not in da
capo form, developments that may be attributable to his 16 years (1753–69) in
Stuttgart.
The
adoption of such operatic features as coloratura display and orchestral
accompaniment, in both recitative and aria, combined with social and
institutional changes to bring about the decline of the solo cantata in Italy
in the mid- to late 18th century. A large-scale cantata characterized by such
features was no longer private chamber music on an appreciable literary base
but a public concert piece in which poetry was of little account. So closely
did it resemble an operatic scena that before the end of the century the solo
cantata as an independent form had virtually ceased to exist, a fact lamented
by Rousseau in his Dictionnaire (1768) and by Burney in his General
History of Music (1789). A few Italian composers such as Girolamo
Crescentini, Ferdinando Paer and N.A. Zingarelli continued to use the
conventional Baroque structure for solo cantatas until well into the 19th
century, but by that time the genre had been almost entirely transformed into
the scena or concert aria, or supplanted by a different kind of work for solo
voices, chorus and orchestra.
Cantata, §I: The
Italian cantata to 1800
4. The Italian cantata north of the Alps.
The
Italian cantata was cultivated in many other parts of Europe, especially, but
by no means exclusively, in Catholic courts and countries. The most important
centres were Vienna and Munich, Paris and London. Cantatas were written there
by both Italian and native musicians. The general form and style of their works
paralleled the development of the cantata in Italy, though composers north of
the Alps were more strongly influenced by French music than their
contemporaries on the peninsula.
At
the Catholic court of Vienna Italian music was actively encouraged by all four
Habsburg emperors between the accession of Ferdinand III (1637) and the death
of Charles VI (1740), each of whom was also a composer. The cultivation of
opera, oratorio and cantata was assisted, furthermore, by the appointment of
Italian librettists as court poet, a prestigious post that was held by such
eminent figures asnicolò Minato (from 1669), Donato Cupeda (from 1698),Pietro
Pariati (from
1714),Apostolo Zeno (from 1718) and Metastasio (from 1730).
The main exponents of vocal chamber music before the reign ofLeopold
I (1657–1705)
were Antonio Bertali and G.F. Sances (see §1 above).
Although
Leopold was the best of the emperor-composers and the most interested in music
in general, he did little to encourage the chamber cantata and wrote only a
handful of examples himself. Apart from the output of C.A. Badia, fewer than
500 cantatas were composed in Vienna during the second half of the 17th
century, and most of these were by such minor contributors to the genre as
Antonio Draghi, Filippo Vismarri, Carlo Capellini and G.B. Pederzuoli (ten accademie,
1685). Badia alone wrote 53 cantatas and duets, many to texts by Cupeda, and
was the only composer in Vienna at the time to have a book of cantatas printed
(Tributi armonici, Nuremberg, ?1699).
Leopold
did, however, contribute to the cultivation of vocal chamber music by
introducing, from 1659, larger-scale cantatas (componimenti) to
celebrate the birthdays and namedays of members of his family. The introduction
of these cantatas came shortly after the composition of similarly occasional
works by Strozzi and Marazzoli (see §§2(iv) and (i) above). Further occasions
were added to the list in later years, and the custom was maintained in the
18th century. A similarly domestic dimension is present in the nine complimenti,
each comprising a single recitative and aria, written by Metastasio and set to
music, in some cases by Gassmann, for performance by the Habsburg children.
The
most prominent composers of vocal music during the reigns of Leopold, Joseph I
and Charles VI (1711–40), apart form those mentioned above, were all Italians:
the violinist G.B. Viviani (1650s and 70s), P.A. Ziani (1660s), Giovanni and
Antonio Bononcini (1697/8–1712/13), M.A. Ziani (1700–12), the theorbist F.B.
Conti (1701–32), Attilio Ariosti (1703–11), the singer P.F. Tosi (1705–11) and
Antonio Caldara (1716–36). Most of these musicians wrote cantatas in Vienna, as
did such relatively transitory visitors as Astorga (c1711–14) and
possibly Porpora (1714, 1718 and 1753–8/9). Texts by Metastasio were set by
later composers including Hasse, Reutter (ii) and Bonno, but not in the
cantatas of Salieri, the last Italian Kapellmeister of the court.
The
Bavarian court at Munich was introduced to opera in 1651, but the first
important composer of Italian vocal chamber music there was Agostino Steffani.
Apart from a period of study in Rome (1672–4), he remained at Munich from 1667
to 1688. At least one cantata can be assigned to his Roman years, and in Munich
he probably composed his 12 cantatas with instruments – six for solo voice (scherzi)
and six duets. He specialized, however, in both Munich and Hanover (from 1688;
see §2(ii) above), in chamber duets with continuo alone, of which he wrote
about 80. These masterly works, which combine the best of late 17th-century bel
canto style with the most elegant of counterpoint, were as influential as
Corelli’s trio sonatas. Most of them include solo movements, but the singers do
not become separate characters. Over half of them exhibit the shape of an
extended aria in ternary (ABC … A), rondo (ABACA) or
strophic rondo (ABABA) form. Those without solos, about a third, are
essentially continuo madrigals. The remainder, settings of more varied texts,
comprise a series of duet and solo movements of which none is repeated; these
are best considered as a textural expansion of the solo cantata, to which they
are thus closely related.
Steffani
was followed at Munich by G.A. Bernabei, Pietro Torri and Giovanni Porta. When
the elector Maximilian II Emanuel became governor of the Spanish Netherlands in
1692, Torri went with him to Brussels. His output of solo cantatas and chamber
duets was closely modelled on Steffani’s, and some of his duets are
sufficiently polished to have been attributed to his mentor in contemporary
manuscripts. Steffani’s duets were performed both in Brussels and in Berlin,
when Giovanni and Antonio Bononcini briefly joined Ariosti there in 1702.
The
Italian cantata was cultivated also, from time to time, at nearly every other
court in the empire. Since, however, it normally depended on the interest of
the ruling prince or a member of his court, its fortune could rise and fall
quite unpredictably. One of the more consistent centres of Italian music was the
Saxon court of Dresden, where cantatas were composed between 1654 and 1680 by
Vincenzo Albrici and after 1747 by G.A. Ristori; others may have been written
there by Lotti (1717–19), Hasse and Porpora (1747–52). Cantatas and duets were
also composed at Ansbach, Düsseldorf, Kassel, Würzburg and elsewhere by such
lesser figures as F.A. Pistocchi, C.L. Pietragrua, Ruggiero Fedeli and
Fortunato Chelleri.
Although
opera was taken to Paris in the mid-17th century, and Rossi, Marazzoli and Atto
Melani may have composed and performed cantatas there during the same period,
it was not until the 1690s that Italian music gained a foothold in the French
capital. The progress of vocal chamber music may be charted from the
publications of the Ballard family. These were preceded, however, by the Airs
italiens (1695) of Paolo Lorenzani, who worked in Paris from 1678 to 1694
and also left cantatas in manuscript, and by the Recueil d’airs italiens
(1696) of Theobaldo di Gatti, a composer and bass viol player active in Paris
from about 1675. These two publications helped to create a demand for Italian
vocal music that was met by Christophe Ballard’s Recueil des meilleurs airs
italiens (five books, 1701–8), by the few Italian items in his Recueil
d’airs sérieux et à boire (six books, 1701–10) and by isolated pieces in
J.-B.-C. Ballard’s Meslanges de musique latine, françoise et italienne
(eight books, 1725–32).
Lorenzani
and Gatti helped pave the way also for the nine books of Italian vocal chamber
music published between 1691 and 1726 in Amsterdam and Hamburg. The first of
these collections, after Jan van Geertsom’s isolated Canzonette amorose
(Rotterdam, 1656), was Amédée Le Chevalier’s Scielta delle più belle ariette
(Amsterdam, 1691), dedicated to the princess of Soissons. Roger entered the
lists in 1698/9 with a volume of Scherzi musicali by Pistocchi and went
on to publish cantatas by Scarlatti, Caldara, Carlo Francesco Pollarolo,
Albinoni and C.A. Marino (three books, 1701–2); a few Italian pieces also
appeared in his Recueil d’airs sérieux et à boire (1707, 1711). Two
years later, in Hamburg, Keiser published his Divertimenti serenissimi delle
cantate, duette ed arie diverse senza stromenti (1713). The next volume of
cantatas to be published in Amsterdam, Le Cène’s Recueil de cantates
françoises et italiennes et d’airs sérieux et à boire did not appear until
1726 and was the last in this phase of the history of the genre. The number of
cantata books published in northern Europe was not very large, but they
indicate that there was a demand for such music in commercial centres outside
Italy and that the cantata did not depend exclusively on the patronage of a
court.
Different
conclusions are to be drawn from the printing of Italian cantatas in London.
After the (again) isolated publication by Godbid and Playford of Girolamo
Pignani’s Scelta di canzonette italiane (1679), there was a gap of 42
years before the appearance, in quick succession, of books of cantatas by
Bononcini (1721), Ariosti (1724), Chelleri (1727), P.G. Sandoni (1727), Mauro
D’Alay (1728), Carlo Arrigoni (1732) and Porpora (1735). Most of these
composers came to London to work on Italian opera (Chelleri’s dedication speaks
of his returning to the court at Kassel) and all of them dedicated their works
to a royal or noble patron or director of one of the opera companies. For these
composers the cantata was related to the opera and retained its original
aristocratic associations, from which they hoped to profit. That they also
wished to maximize the appeal of their publications is suggested by the
inclusion in Ariosti’s, Sandoni’s and D’Alay’s books of instrumental works for
viola d’amore, harpsichord and violin respectively. Italian cantatas and duets
were also composed in London by Handel; one, at least, was sung on stage in
1721 in a benefit performance by Margherita Durastanti, who was joined by
Senesino in some Steffani duets, and another was performed, with Arrigoni on
lute, between the parts of Alexander’s Feast (1736). Such use of the
cantata sums up its transformation during the two centuries of its history.
Cantata, §I: The
Italian cantata to 1800
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durante il Seicento, ed. D.A. D’Alessandro and A. Ziino
(Rome, 1987), 125–50
M. Murata: ‘Roman Cantata Scores as Traces of Musical Culture and Signs of its
Place in Society’, IMSCR XIV:
Bologna 1987, i, 272–84
J.G. Suess: ‘The University of Modena, the “Accademia dei Dissonanti”, and the
Academy Cantatas of Giovanni Battista Vitali: an Example of Cartesian
Rationalism and Music’, IMSCR
XIV: Bologna 1987, i, 58–66
P. Mioli: A voce sola:
studio sulla cantata italiana del XVII secolo, i: Firenze,
Venezia, Roma (Florence, 1988)
F. Carboni, T.M. Gialdroni and A. Ziino: ‘Cantate ed arie romane del tardo Seicento nel Fondo Caetani della
Biblioteca Corsiniana: repertorio, forme e strutture’, Studi musicali, xviii (1989), 49–192
T. Antonicek: ‘Musik und italienische Poesie am Hofe Ferdinands III’, Mitteilungen der Kommission für Musikforschung, xiii (1990)
N. Dubowy: ‘“Una nuova foggia di componimenti”: sulla formazione dei caratteri del
testo della cantata italiana’, I
Quaderni della Civica Scuola di Musica, xix–xx (1990), 9–18
T.M. Gialdroni and A. Ziino: ‘Alcune osservazioni sui rapporti tra poesia e musica proposito di otto
cantate romane del tardo Seicento’, I Quaderni della Civica Scuola di Musica,
xix–xx (1990), 58–70
C. Gianturco: ‘The Italian Seventeenth-Century Cantata: a Textual Approach’, The Well Enchanting Skill: Essays in Honour
of F. W. Sternfeld, ed. J. Caldwell, E. Olleson and S.
Wollenberg (Oxford and New York, 1990), 41–51
C. Guaita: ‘Le cantate lamento della seconda metà del diciasettesimo secolo’, I Quaderni della Civica Scuola di Musica, xix–xx (1990), 40–57
C. Timms: ‘Brigida Bianchi’s poesie musicali and their settings’, I Quaderni della Civica Scuola di Musica , xix–xx (1990), 19–39
L. Zoppelli: ‘Considerazioni sulla categoria del “privato” nello Stylus Cubicularis’, I Quaderni della Civica Scuola di Musica, xix–xx (1990), 71–6
R. Holzer: Music and
Poetry in Seventeenth-Century Rome: Settings of the Canzonetta and Cantata
Texts of Francesco Balducci, Domenico Benigni, Francesco Melosio and Antonio
Abati (Ann Arbor, 1991)
P. Besutti: ‘Produzione e trasmissione di cantate romane nel mezzo del Seicento’, La musica a Roma attraverso le fonti
d'archivio: Rome 1992, 137–66
M. Mangani: ‘Le canzoni della “lira” del Marino nelle stampe musicali del ’600’, Rassegna veneta di studi musicali, v–vi (1992), 75–101
S. Leopold: Al modo
d’Orfeo: Dichtung und Musik im italienischen Sologesang des frühen 17.
Jahrhunderts, AnMc, no.29 (1995), esp.
267–82
J.W. Hill: Roman
Monody, Cantata, and Opera from the Circles around Cardinal Montalto (Oxford, 1997), esp.
i, 232–4
18th century
E.T. Ferand: ‘Embellished “Parody Cantatas” and “Parodistic Cantatas” in the Early
Eighteenth Century’, JAMS, x (1957), 133–7
E.T. Ferand: ‘Embellished “Parody Cantatas” in the Early Eighteenth Century’, MQ, xliv (1958), 40–64
L.E. Bennett: The Italian
Cantata in Vienna, c.1700–c.1711 (diss., New York U., 1980)
C. Timms: ‘The Dramatic in Vivaldi’s Cantatas’, Antonio Vivaldi: teatro musicale, cultura e società, ed. L. Bianconi and G. Morelli (Florence, 1982), 97–129
P. Mioli: Ricerche
storiche e bibliografiche sul canto settecentesco: aspetti teorici e didattici
nella cultura emiliana (Bologna, 1983)
G. Gronda: ‘Tra lirica e melodramma: la cantata da Lemene a Metastasio’, Le passioni della ragione (Pisa, 1984), 121–54
L.E. Bennett: ‘The Italian Cantata in Vienna, 1700–1711: an Overview of Stylistic
Traits’, Antonio Culdara: Essays
on his Life and Times, ed. B.W. Pritchard (Aldershot, 1987), 184–211
A.L. Bellina: ‘Metastasio: le cantate a voce sola’, I Quaderni della Civica Scuola di Musica,
xix–xx (1990), 134–41
N. Maccavino: Catalogo
delle cantate del Fondo Pisani del Conservatorio ‘V. Bellini’ di Palermo (Palermo, 1990)
J. Riepe and C. Vitali: ‘Aspetti della cantata veneziana intorno al 1730’, I Quaderni della Civica Scuola di Musica, xix–xx (1990), 122–33
M. Talbot: ‘The Cantatas’, Tomaso
Albinoni: the Venetian Composer and his World (Oxford, 1990), 115–43
M. De Angelis: Melodramma,
spettacolo e musica nella Firenze dei Lorena (1750–1800) (Milan, 1991)
T.M. Gialdroni: ‘Le “fatiche dei prologhi”, ovvero la cantata/prologo a Napoli dal 1761
al 1781’, IMSCR XV: Madrid 1992 [RdMc, xvi (1993)], 2888–913
M. Talbot : ‘The Cantatas’, Benedetto
Vinaccesi: a Musician in Brescia and Venice in the Age of Corelli (Oxford, 1994), 156–87
R. Strohm: ‘A Book of Cantatas and Arias bought in Florence, 1723’, British Library Journal, xxi/2 (1995), 184–201
anthologies
Facsimiles
G. Vecchi, ed.: BMB,
section 4, lvii, lxiv–lxvi, lxxii, lxxxv, lxxxva, cxxiii–cxxiv, cclii
P. Mioli, ed.: Archivum
musicum: la cantata barocca, i–iii, v, vii, xiv–xv,
xix, xxi–xxii, xxvi, xxviii–xxix (Florence, 1980–)
C. Gianturco, ed.: The Italian
Cantata in the Seventeenth Century, i–xvi (New York, 1985–6)
Critical editions
F.A. Gevaert: Les gloires
de l’Italie (Paris, 1868)
A. Parisotti: Arie antiche (Milan, 1885–1900/R;
Eng. trans., 1990)
L. Torchi: Eleganti
canzoni ed arie italiane del secolo XVII (Milan,1894)
J.A. Fuller
Maitland:
Duetti da camera: Italian Chamber Duets by Various Masters of
the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1904)
L. Torchi: Composizioni
ad una e più voci, secolo XVII, AMI, v (1898–1907/R)
H. Riemann: Ausgewählte
Kammer-Kantaten aus der Zeit um 1700 (Leipzig, 1911)
H. Riemann: Kantaten-Frühling
(1633–1682) (Leipzig, 1912)
L. Landshoff: Alte Meister
des Bel Canto (Leipzig, 1912–27)
F. Vatielli: Antiche
cantate d’amore (Bologna, 1916–20)
P. Floridia: Early
Italian Songs and Airs (Boston, 1923–4)
H. Prunières: Les maîtres
du chant (Paris, 1924–7)
K. Jeppesen: La flora (Copenhagen, 1949)
K.G. Fellerer: Die Monodie, Mw, xxxi (1968; Eng.
trans., 1968)
R. Jakoby: Die Kantate, Mw, xxxii (1968; Eng.
trans. 1968)
E. Saville: Italian
Vocal Duets from the Early Eighteenth Century (New
York, 1968)
C. MacClintock: The Solo
Song, 1580–1730 (New York, 1973)
R. Blanchard, ed.: Arie e
cantate barocche: collezione d’inediti (Milan, 1976), i–ii
Cantata
II. The German cantata to 1800
The
German cantata stands apart from that of other countries, above all because it
was cultivated primarily as a sacred genre and because its origins and
development were largely independent of Italian models. The heterogeneous
nature of its texts and musical structures is also in marked contrast to the
more straightforward constituents of the Italian form, and a correspondingly
complex vocabulary is needed to describe it.
1. Terminology.
2. Types.
3. The church cantata:
sources, background.
4. The 17th-century
Protestant cantata.
5. The 18th-century
Protestant cantata.
6. The Catholic
repertory.
7. The secular
cantata.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cantata, §II: The
German cantata to 1800
1. Terminology.
In
modern usage the German word ‘Kantate’ refers both to the secular Baroque type
and to the form of Protestant church music that reached its highest point of
development and attainment in the cantatas of Bach. The term was first applied
generally to Bach’s works of this kind in the 19th century by the editors of
the Bach-Gesellschaft, and Spitta extended it to cover older analogues of the
genre from the time of Schütz onwards. It is not found in German church music
before 1700, however, and only rarely in secular music. After that date it was
reserved primarily for the solo cantata, both secular and sacred, and its
transference to other multi-sectional forms took place only when the traditions
and functions of the genres became less rigid. Both before and after 1700, and
even into the 19th century, the church cantata was referred to as a Kirchenstück
or as Kirchenmusik – terms that emphasized its function rather than its
form. Borrowed terms, notably ‘concerto’ and ‘motetto’, were common. These
referred primarily to the first section and are to be understood as pars pro
toto, the other sections having designations of their own, such as
recitative, aria and chorale. It would be an act of terminological purism to
attempt to do away with the term ‘cantata’ for such works.
German
theorists after 1700, including Walther, Mattheson and J.A. Scheibe, defined
the cantata mainly in terms of the Italian type. That Mattheson was against
using the term for the Kirchenstück shows that he was aware of the
affinity between it and the Italian cantata. When Erdmann Neumeister introduced
madrigalesque poetry into church music after 1701 (together with the modern
recitative and aria) he likened the cantata to ‘a piece out of an opera’, and
C.F. Hunold defined the genre similarly in 1706. The term itself did not gain
currency with the Neumeister ‘reform’, though some have argued that it should
be used exclusively for those compositions of the Bach period that are
characterized by madrigalesque poetry. To do so, however, would be to ignore
the similarities that exist between the ‘older’ and ‘more recent’ church
cantata (to use Spitta’s terminology) – similarities that were already obvious
to contemporaries such as Walther and Mattheson.
The
church cantata, then, may be defined in terms of its function as the principal
music of the Lutheran service, and in terms of its structure as a vocal work
comprising a number of relatively independent movements. This definition covers
both the older (17th-century) type with its mainly heterogeneous textual
origins, and the newer type using mainly madrigalesque poetry. This section of
the article deals mostly with the older type of Protestant church cantata,
which is much more accessible in editions and studies than the cantata of the
Bach period, the secular cantata or analogous forms of Catholic church music,
and which occupied a central position in the history of German church music.
Cantata, §II: The
German cantata to 1800
2. Types.
The
differentiation of types within the genre presents few problems as far as the
18th-century cantata, with its madrigalesque texts, is concerned; recitative
and aria formed the basis of the secular form, to which, in the church cantata
of the Bach period, choruses and arioso sections to biblical or chorale texts
might be added. The less stable forms of the older church cantata are more
problematic. In contrast to Blume’s somewhat makeshift labels, such as Erbauungskantate
(‘devotional cantata’), Predigtkantate (‘sermon cantata’) and Perikopenkantate
(‘pericopean cantata’), together with the adjectives ‘lyrical’, ‘contemplative’
or ‘dramatic’, Georg Feder (MGG1, §D) proposed a distinction on the
basis of the type of text used. These are the Spruch (scriptural text),
the Ode (modern poetic text) and the Chorale (Protestant hymn),
which can be combined to form, for example, the Spruchodenkantate. But
this conveys only the textual basis and not the musical form, and therefore the
terms ‘concerto’, ‘aria’ and ‘chorale’ may be usefully introduced; these terms
were current when the works were written and appeared as headings to individual
movements. ‘Concerto’ was used for vocal and instrumental settings of mainly
scriptural texts, but also of aria and chorale texts (the ‘aria concerto’ and
‘chorale concerto’ respectively); stylistically these movements combine
concertato and contrapuntal (motet) elements to form what was sometimes
referred to as the ‘motetto concertato’. ‘Aria’ signifies the strophic song and
its variants, ranging from strictly strophic settings and others with melodic
variations over a repeated bass to episodic and other forms approaching the
18th-century aria. The term ‘chorale’ was applied to a movement in which a
borrowed chorale melody was worked out in one of several compositional methods.
(A musically free setting of a chorale text would be called an aria or
concerto, rather than a chorale.)
This
scheme does not cover the (predominantly solo) arioso settings of biblical
texts, which parallel the later recitative and are in fact derived from Italian
monody and the few-voiced concerto. These arioso sections were not given a
designation of their own, and they usually defy formal characterization; they
figure prominently in certain types of work (multi-sectional dialogues, psalm
compositions and Gospel settings) which cannot be allocated a place in the
typology of the cantata.
Cantata, §II: The
German cantata to 1800
3. The church cantata: sources, background.
From
about 1660, when large manuscript repertories were being formed in the leading
German musical centres, the printing of complex music became increasingly
difficult, partly because of the restricted market and the technical limitations
of printing from type. Simpler pieces with few parts, including some by
Hammerschmidt, J.R. Ahle and Briegel, continued to be printed, but in many
cases the music is inferior or conventional, and there are only rare instances
of true cantatas. The exceptions are some volumes printed shortly before 1700
containing genuine cantatas, some of them of good quality, by G.C. Wecker
(1695), Georg Bronner (1696), J.P. Krieger (1697) and Nicolaus Niedt (1698).
The printed repertory virtually came to an end with these works, however, and
for a long time after 1700 only occasional music was printed, and no cantata
collections except for some by Telemann.
The
decline in publication was complemented by an increase in the manuscript
repertory, in which varying characteristics reflect local and regional
conditions and requirements. Approximately 50 manuscript collections are known,
of which about a fifth survive, and they indicate a repertory whose variety
helps to account for the limited market for printed works. Contrary to what has
sometimes been thought, it was not the regional differences in the people
themselves that brought about this striking variety. More important were the
differences in the structure and organization of musical life resulting from
varying reactions to the new impulses of reform orthodoxy and Pietism. In the
central Lutheran areas (especially Saxony), where the organization of the
school Kantoreien remained intact under the unbroken sway of orthodoxy, figural
music could draw on a concentration of forces under the leadership of the
Kantor, as in Leipzig. Where the ties with the schools had been loosened, Ratskapellen
were formed, making smaller and rather more expert ensembles available to the
municipal Kapellmeister, as in Danzig and the imperial cities of south Germany.
Again, if a central Kantorei was unable to provide a constant supply of figural
music to all churches, the gap was filled by the work of individual organists,
as at Lübeck, Hamburg and other north German cities.
By
contrast court musicians, instead of being part of a stable bourgeois
tradition, were dependent on the changing tastes and requirements of a noble
master who could determine the texts of their compositions and the use to which
they were put. Court musical establishments (and hence the music itself) varied
a good deal, while the organists also tended to vary their texts and structures
in settings for smaller forces. Figural music in the centralized municipal
Kantoreien, on the other hand, was usually bound by liturgical traditions and
the resources of school choirs. When the organists wrote vocal music they
tended to compose few-voiced concertos, arias and mixed forms for Communion and
special occasions, rather than music linked to the sermon. The figural music of
municipal Kantors and Kapellmeister, on the other hand, was devoted principally
to the cantata placed between the Gospel (or Credo) and the Credo hymn just
before the sermon, and related to the pericope and its interpretation.
All
these factors, together with the nature of the texts and the forces used,
affected the structure of the music itself. The vocal music of north German
organists, with their independent status, showed a predilection for
non-schematic forms and intense expression; that of the central German Kantors
tended to perpetuate well-established structures, often in annual cycles; and
the music of court musicians, despite its variety, revealed a common interest
in newer developments, such as extended aria forms, inserted recitatives and
virtuoso solo sections. After 1700 these differences disappeared, or at least
became less apparent. Following Neumeister’s textual reforms, the standard
recitative and aria began to characterize the cantatas of municipal and court
composers, and the composition of annual cycles, often with a uniform
structure, cancelled out the differences even more after organized and somewhat
commercial methods had been established for the interchange of musical works.
Cantata, §II: The German
cantata to 1800
4. The 17th-century Protestant cantata.
(i) Origins.
(ii) The printed
repertory.
(iii) Genres without
mixed texts.
(iv) Simple hybrid
forms.
(v) Multiple hybrid
forms.
Cantata, §II, 4: The
German cantata to 1800: The 17th-century Protestant cantata
(i) Origins.
It
would be one-sided to attribute the formation of the cantata solely to the
process of textual mixing, and short-sighted to describe it only in terms of
musical structure. The two factors belong together. If the structural aspect
alone is studied it might appear that the German cantata merely developed from
the Italian. Italian influence was certainly important (in the concertato style
and the recitative, as well as in aria forms and the use of instruments), but
the independence of the German church cantata is beyond dispute, and this is
borne out by a consideration of the texts. The literary aspects of Caspar
Ziegler’s treatise Von den Madrigalen (1653) did not go unnoticed, but it
was not until the Neumeister reform that its musical consequences were felt.
And although Caspar Kittel had published a volume of Arien und Cantaten
as early as 1638, subsequent developments were not analogous to those in Italy.
The German and Italian genres have common origins in the madrigal, motet and
vocal concerto, along with their hybrid forms; and yet there are distinct
differences. In the Lutheran tradition the biblical text, as the only basis for
the words, required interpretation and elucidation; whether this was achieved
by rhetorical expansion or by an illuminating juxtaposition of different texts,
the result paralleled the development of closed forms within the cantata. Also,
the aria retained a closer link with the regular strophic pattern of the Ode
than was the case in Italy, and a tendency towards latent periodic structures
was contained in the metrical uniformity of the texts. In its basic form of a
strophic song the aria’s affinity with domestic music made it a good vehicle
for the expression of personal piety and of a new kind of simplicity, and it
became important as a counterpart to the chorale, the specifically Lutheran
portion. The chorale shared with the aria a strophic text, but it was at the
same time associated with a corpus of traditional melodies; elaborations of it
could take various forms, and this provided an early impulse for the
development of works in several movements.
Some
writers have traced the origins of the German church cantata to the
chorale-based works of Praetorius, Scheidt and Schein rather than to Italian
precursors. But although Praetorius’s Polyhymnia caduceatrix (1619) in
particular contained multi-strophic chorale concertos, their influence was not
felt until some time after the Thirty Years War because of the large forces
involved. Moreover, the repetition and ritornello elements in them were
paralleled only to a limited extent in the later cantata, and the same applies
to Scheidt’s few-voiced concertos (1631–40), where the textual units and the
musical structure do not always coincide. The concertos in Schein’s Opella
nova (1618, 2/1626) are mostly in a single movement to one stanza of text.
Where emphasis is placed on the rhetorical heightening of words, as in Schütz’s
works, the textual dependence of the music hinders the development of
independent sections. One requirement of the cantata is that emphasis should be
placed on the ‘Affekt’ rather than on individual words, so that the textual
pattern and the musical structure may coincide.
Cantata, §II, 4: The
German cantata to 1800: The 17th-century Protestant cantata
(ii) The printed repertory.
Since
it was easily accessible, the printed repertory for a long time shaped accepted
views about 17th-century music; it is, however, somewhat different from the
manuscript tradition and played a different role in the history of the cantata.
Textual mixing is found in the mid-17th-century printed collections of Andreas
Hammerschmidt, J.R. Ahle and W.C. Briegel, but genuine cantata forms occur only
in exceptional cases. Instead of an amalgam of independent movements, the
dominant form is a complex mixture of textually different but musically
undifferentiated sections; this occurs more frequently with Hammerschmidt than
with Ahle, and is particularly common with Briegel. Genuine cantatas of any
substance are the exception also in the printed works of Rosenmüller, Bernhard,
Weiland, Martin Köler, Werner Fabricius, Zeutschner and others, the dominant
forms being the traditional motet and vocal concerto. These existed alongside
Gospel pieces (W.C. Brückner, J.C. Horn), occasionally with the text in a
poetic form. Isolated examples of the early concerto-aria cantata are to be
found in Christoph Bernhard’s Geistliche Harmonien (1665; ed. in EDM,
lxv, 1972) and more numerous ones in collections by C.C. Dedekind (1672–4).
After this printed collections relevant to the development of the cantata
became increasingly infrequent and eventually disappeared altogether.
Manuscript
sources relevant to the period before 1700 are mostly difficult to date, and
the survey that follows is therefore organized according to type, rather than
chronologically.
Cantata, §II, 4: The
German cantata to 1800: The 17th-century Protestant cantata
(iii) Genres without mixed texts.
Among
works using only biblical texts, those that came closest to the cantata were,
on the one hand, settings of passages from the Gospels (more rarely the
Epistles), and, on the other, settings of the psalms. The first category is
characterized by a tendency to alternate commentary and dialogue, situation and
maxim, and leans towards a fluid structure in which expansion into separate
sections is made difficult by the continuity of the story. Settings tended to
divide into small and frequently contrasted sections rather than independent
movements. The development towards the musical form of the true cantata can be
seen more clearly in psalm compositions, particularly in large-scale works, but
also in solo and few-voiced compositions. The character of many psalms was such
that verses could be set as independent sections, since they were not part of a
continuous narrative. They could be expanded musically as fugatos or fugues,
ariosos or concertos, and later as recitatives and arias. Every important
composer of the period contributed to the Latin or German-texted ‘cantata-like
psalm-concerto’: in north Germany Tunder, Matthias Weckmann, Geist, Kaspar
Förster, Christian Ritter, Buxtehude, J.V. Meder, Bruhns and Hanff; in central
Germany Rosenmüller, Sebastian Knüpfer, Johann Schelle, C.A. Schulze, Kuhnau,
Pohle, Clemens Thieme, Johann and Johann Philipp Krieger; and in south Germany
Bockshorn (Capricornus), J.A. Kress, J.M. Nicolai, Strattner, Pachelbel and
others (for editions of some of their music see DDT, iii, vi, xiv, liii, liv,
lviii, lix; and EDM, xlviii).
Among
the earliest types of Protestant compositions to show unmistakable features of
the cantata were those based on the chorale. From about the mid-century
isolated works of this kind by J.E. Kindermann, J.A. Herbst, Tunder and others
demonstrated the possibilities of using a closed form for each stanza, and
Knüpfer created a standard pattern in which basically identical though varied tutti
movements formed a framework for imitative or canonic solo and ensemble
sections. Standard procedures were also established for outer and inner
movements; they included the line-by-line alternation of a contrapuntal setting
with a chordal repetition, cantional settings with instrumental figuration, and
the canonic working-out of ornamented line-incipits. The younger central German
Kantors, including Schelle and Schulze, continued to write works of this kind,
but in a simpler style, and the form also spread to north and south Germany
with Gerstenbüttel, Förtsch and J.S. Welter. Younger composers, such as
Österreich, Bronner, Zachow and Kuhnau, filled the large-scale framework with
aria-like movements. Expressive solos and complex tutti movements reached their
climax in works by Tunder and more especially in the large-scale chorale
cantatas by Buxtehude.
The
chorale cantata was less widely cultivated among court composers, such as J.P.
Krieger, Georg Österreich and Emanuel Kegel, but where it did occur its composers
either were influenced by the central German types or adopted Pachelbel’s
methods. These corresponded largely to those in Pachelbel’s organ chorales, but
were more varied. The ‘pure’ chorale cantata virtually disappeared after 1700,
except in the works of Bach. (For further discussion of the form see Chorale
settings, §I, 4 and 5.)
From
1670 until after the turn of the century the aria cantata (not a solo work, but
the setting for various forces of a modern, poetic text) occupied a central
place. Initially both Latin and German texts were used, but later only German.
The form was particularly favoured by the organists and the court composers,
somewhat less by the municipal Kantors, but virtually all composers of the
period contributed to it. The borderline between the strophic aria and its
cantata-like extensions is vague, and the differences are not so much formal as
qualitative. Rather than the strophic variation technique of the early
17th-century Italian cantata (see above, §I, 1), settings of German ‘odes’
cultivated metrical and melodic parallels between the strophes. The use of
instrumental introductions and ritornellos foreshadowed the later
single-strophe aria, especially where lines and words were separated or
repeated. Suggestions of the Devisenarie and the da capo aria are present in
those instances where the text of the first line is used as a motto or where
the last line flows into a repeat of the first. A tendency towards internal
symmetry (a feature of the strophic and linear structure of the aria text)
finds expression in musical (and sometimes textual) correspondences between the
outer sections of a work and in the layout and scoring of the inner movements.
Rondo-like forms may result from the use of choral refrains or from the regular
alternations of solo and tutti movements.
Since
the interpretation of individual words became subordinate to the general
affect, the aria contributed a good deal towards establishing a cantata
structure made up of separate movements. This applied to the cantata-like
extensions of the aria by Kapellmeister from south and central Germany
(Bockshorn, Kress, Pohle, J.P. Krieger and others) and to the melismatic lines
of the hymn cantatas of north German organists (Tunder, Geist, Buxtehude,
Bruhns and others). The various stages in the development of the genre can be
seen side by side in the cantatas of Buxtehude, which range from works in
several sections with identical stanzas and concerto-like through-composed
pieces, via an alternating or rondo-like arrangement of the strophes, to
large-scale cantatas with independent, well-differentiated movements.
Cantata, §II, 4: The
German cantata to 1800: The 17th-century Protestant cantata
(iv) Simple hybrid forms.
Hybrid
forms combining chorale texts with biblical or aria texts do not occur
frequently, and neither the concerto–chorale cantata nor the aria–chorale
cantata became established types. After 1660 chorales did occur more frequently
in biblical concertos and dialogues, but the combination of biblical and
chorale texts became standard only after 1690, as in the annual cycles of
Christian Liebe and C.F. Witt. These can be called cantatas only in a limited
sense, the biblical settings still largely following the multi-sectional design
of Gospel dialogues. Witt used chorales for final movements but only rarely for
internal ones, while in Liebe’s works a short tutti movement to a biblical text
was followed by a series of chorale verses or free song strophes (with
occasional hybrid forms). The combination of aria and chorale was even rarer,
the two textual forms being apparently considered to be too strongly opposed.
The
combination of aria and biblical texts was much more important and the
possibilities were greater (dialogues and Gospel settings had often
incorporated aria tropes of various kinds). The concerto–aria cantata (what
Feder called the Spruchodenkantate) became the most important of all
17th-century cantata types because it combined the required interpretation of
the biblical text with a clearly arranged formal plan. In 1665 D.E.
Heidenreich, in a text which might be called the ‘birth certificate’ of this
kind of cantata, referred to the settings of the Halle Kapellmeister, David
Pohle, using the terms Sprüche (‘maxims’) and Oden (‘odes’) for
the text and Concerten and Arien for the music. The concerto–aria
cantata normally began and ended with a concerto to a biblical text for the
combined forces, and the middle part consisted of a strophic aria or a series
of hymn stanzas set for either soloist or a small ensemble. The biblical
settings used the usual compositional techniques of the ‘motetto concertato’
and the aria embodied the principles valid for the strophic song and its
variants. Each component was not basically different from the corresponding
forms without textual mixing, except that they tended to be shorter. The
concerto–aria cantata is similar in structure to the chorale cantata, with
external tutti movements and aria-like internal movements, but it can also be
said to resemble the aria cantata with a large-scale concertante framework and
intermediate stanzas using smaller forces.
The
development of the concerto–aria cantata still requires close study, but its
form seems to have remained standard until after 1700. While there are no
examples of the genre by older composers such as Tunder, Weckmann and Bütner,
works of this kind were written by Pohle, Clemens Thieme (d 1668) and
Knüpfer (d 1676). After 1670 the form was cultivated by important
composers of all social and regional groups: in the north by municipal
musicians such as Buxtehude (e.g. Herr, auf dich traue ich, Ich habe
Lust abzuscheiden, Eins bitte ich vom Herrn), Gerstenbüttel, Meder
and Bruhns, and by the court composers Köler, Ritter, Förtsch and Österreich;
in central Germany by Schelle, Schulze, Kuhnau, Liebe and others in the towns,
and by Krieger, Erlebach, Garthoff and Eberlin at the courts; and in the south
by Kress, Nicolai, Strattner, Pachelbel, Weltner and others. Formal differences
in the cantatas of these composers are less significant than differences in
quality and technique. The basic prototype was eventually discarded when extra
internal movements or final chorales were added.
Cantata, §II, 4: The
German cantata to 1800: The 17th-century Protestant cantata
(v) Multiple hybrid forms.
It
is clear that the number of textual components was not the only decisive factor
in the formation and development of the cantata; this is shown by multiple
hybrid types (i.e. works containing more than two textual sources), some of
which are less like cantatas than are the forms with no textual mixing at all.
The complex mixing of textual elements was often based on a setting of a Gospel
text which was then troped with other biblical fragments, aria stanzas and
chorale lines. Because the multiple hybrid texts drew on such a variety of
sources, it is difficult to categorize their structures; yet it was settings of
this type that, because of their reference to the pericopes, were produced in
annual cycles. The beginnings of this development can be seen in the printed
works of Hammerschmidt, J.C. Horn, Briegel and others. A few annual cycles rich
in tropes exist in manuscripts, mainly from the central German area (the most
important area for printed works, too). The fact that Buxtehude wrote very
little music for the Gospel is typical of the north German organists – such
works are absent also from the music of Tunder, Weckmann, Geist, Hanff and
Bruhns; even the works of this type that were written in north Germany were
largely by composers such as Georg Böhm and J.P. Förtsch who came from central
Germany. The interlocking of brief textual sections in the annual cycle by
Augustin Pfleger (who was only temporarily active in north Germany) is not
representative of north German practice. There is also a Breslau cycle by M.
Mayer and others by central German musicians such as Liebe and Witt which are
closely related to the standard 17th-century cantata types. Only a few examples
are known of the more interesting Gospel pieces by Schelle (preceded in Leipzig
by some of Knüpfer’s) and of those by Krieger, C.L. Boxberg and others. There
are a great many similar pieces by little-known central German Kantors.
Although
these works do not share the clear sectional form of the cantata, they
nevertheless embody, in their use of illuminating tropes, the element of
contrast that characterizes cantata forms. By reducing the number of textual
sections and increasing the length of their musical treatment, composers
achieved a clearer formal arrangement, while at the same time dialogue features
invaded the cantata in its aria, chorale and concerto–aria forms. Gospel
cantatas with a clearly defined structure were written by Kantors and
Kapellmeister, especially in central Germany but also in the north and south
(Gerstenbüttel, Meister, Förtsch, Meder, J.P. Krieger, Erlebach, Boxberg,
Kuhnau, Zachow, Künstel, Strattner, Pachelbel); simultaneously cantatas of the
psalm, hymn, chorale and concerto–aria types were further modified by the
addition of extra movements. The numerous possibilities make strict
systematization impossible, but the variants never gained the general validity
of the standard types.
In
its expanded forms the older cantata approached very closely the threshold of
the 18th-century form. Arioso movements or chorales were introduced into hymn
cantatas, biblical and aria texts were added to chorale cantatas, final
chorales were appended to concerto–aria cantatas, and so on. Precise examples
are afforded by the large-scale, probably late cantatas of Buxtehude (such as Gott
hilf mir, Alles was ihr tut; ed. in DDT, xiv, 1903, 2/1957), and by
similar pieces written about 1700 by Meder, Meister, Bruhns, Schelle, Krieger,
Kuhnau, Erlebach, Zachow, Pachelbel and Strattner. In the gradual transition to
the more modern cantata the principle of textual mixing can be recognized also
in the adoption of madrigalian textual elements; its effects can still be felt
in Bach’s cantatas (bwv106, 131, 196).
Although
the Neumeister ‘reform’ after 1700 was an important turning-point, it did not
find the genre totally unprepared. Admittedly Caspar Ziegler’s effort (1653) to
introduce madrigal poetry had few musical consequences, and there are hardly
any musical compositions to match the literary cultivation of the madrigal by
Kongehl (1683) and Christian Gryphius (1698), apart from isolated settings of
‘strophic madrigals’, by Bruhns, for example. But musical considerations are at
least as important as the texts. The decline of the pure chorale cantata, which
was clearly the inspiration behind the division of works into several
independent sections, took place at the same time as the crystallization of
multifarious tropes in cantata-like forms. While chorale elaborations became
simpler, the aria expanded formally in many ways. In solo settings of biblical
texts a sharper distinction was drawn between arioso and recitative (the term
‘Rezitativ’ is found even before 1700 in works by Krieger, Kuhnau, Bronner and
Österreich). Concertante movements for large forces showed increasing signs of
internal structuring and of contrasting closed sections. The part played by instruments
in this process is particularly important; instead of merely supporting the
text, they played their own part in the composition, unifying it with motifs
and providing a basis for the large-scale forms of the new cantata. The
development of the aria is also symptomatic of the new trends. The abandonment
of the strophic pattern is manifest in the pairing of metrically different
stanzas or in the stringing together of single-strophe arias, in the loosening
of the ritornello framework and in the increased importance of the instruments.
Such features are more important to the historical development of the form than
the rather fortuitous occurrences of early da capo structures.
While
these changes were taking place in the cantata, such genres as the psalm
concerto and the biblical motet, which used either a single-section structure
or a latent but undeveloped multi-sectional one, disappeared altogether, and
there was also a decline in the use of Latin texts, which had previously been
important. When Italian compositions were also ousted from the repertory
denominational distinctions became more pronounced, and the Protestant cantata
of the Bach era was characterized by its exclusively German texts.
The
transition from the old to the new type of cantata can be observed in the works
of composers such as Kuhnau, Zachow, Österreich, Jacobi, Aster and Liebhold,
who wrote in both styles (for examples by Kuhnau and Zachow see DDT, lviii–lix,
1918/R, and xxi–xxii, 1905/R). Other composers (such as Krieger,
Erlebach, Witt and Käfer) who played a leading part in disseminating the modern
cantata left only a few cantatas in the older style, while composers of Bach’s
generation mostly turned directly to the modern type.
Cantata, §II: The
German cantata to 1800
5. The 18th-century Protestant cantata.
(i) The madrigalian
form.
(ii) Bach and his
contemporaries.
(iii) After Bach.
Cantata, §II, 5: The
German cantata to 1800: The 18th-century protestant cantata
(i) The madrigalian form.
‘To
put it briefly, I would say that the cantata resembles exactly a piece from an
opera, composed of “Stylo Recitativo” and arias.’ When Neumeister summarized
his textual reform with these words he was probably thinking of German opera
rather than of direct Italian precursors. Stile recitativo had been
familiar to the Germans for a long time, but it was Neumeister who recommended
the da capo form for the aria, without however proscribing other forms. Though
the old and new types of cantata overlapped in many ways, it was the use of
madrigalian recitative and mainly da capo arias that most distinguished the
modern style.
The
extent to which German cantata poetry is indebted to the Italian madrigal
remains a matter for investigation, but even contemporaries referred to the
textual principle as ‘madrigalian’. Not only recitatives but also arias show
the freedom of the madrigal in their length, linear structure and rhyme
schemes. Neumeister restricted himself to recitatives and arias only in his
first published annual cycle (1700–01), intended for the Weissenfels court and
set to music by J.P. Krieger. In his next cycle (1708, for Rudolstadt, set by
Erlebach and others) he included short tutti movements, and in his 1711 and
1714 cycles (for Eisenach, set by Telemann and others) he incorporated biblical
passages and chorale strophes, without however keeping to any fixed pattern. A
further cycle, consisting once again of ‘odes’ and set by Krieger, appeared
together with its predecessors in Neumeister’s Fünffache Kirchen-Andachten
(Leipzig, 1716–17), and two supplements (1726 and 1752) contained old as well
as new texts (including the Poetische Oratorien, which Krieger had
partly set in 1696–9). The mixed types were more important and influential than
the pure madrigalian cantata restricted to recitative and arias. Most other
cantata poets (Neukirch, König, Postel, Richey, Rambach, Lehms, Franck and
others) cultivated mixed types, and it is these that are found in the vast
majority of extant cantatas from Bach’s time.
In
mixed cantatas biblical passages were used either as dicta (i.e. as the
basis for full-scale opening movements) or else as recitatives and ariosos
corresponding to the solo movements of the specially written text. Except in
Bach’s works, chorales rarely appeared in elaborate settings; in most cases they
were purely cantional, occasionally in combination with other texts. Later
there was a return to the practice in the older cantata of repeating the
opening movement at the end (this was done even by Neumeister). Many
librettists, including J.G. Seebach (1718–19), G.C. Steinel (1728) and L.
Reinhardt (1725), provided little opportunity for recitative, or continued to
use the old ‘ode’ form for the arias, and this is reflected in musical settings
with short recitatives and few da capo arias. Whether such works reflect the
wishes of the poets or of the composers it is impossible to say. In any case
the main tendency (even more marked towards the middle of the century) is for
annual cycles to repeat the standard textual and formal patterns.
The
new type did not bring with it any basic change in the function of the cantata,
but whereas before there was no typological difference between the ‘Hauptmusik’
of the divine service and other figural music, cantata production after 1700
concentrated on music linked to the sermon, and cantatas in other positions
were rare. The structures associated with the cantata also had a considerable
influence on other genres, such as the mass and the Magnificat. With its
freely changing metres and line lengths, madrigalian poetry provided a certain
amount of variety in both recitative and arias, but the madrigalian cantata was
nevertheless threatened with standardization, a danger to which the older type
had not been exposed. The recitative and aria as a textual unit was universally
dominant, and no matter how flexible the texts themselves might be, the musical
structures were basically rigid; settings of biblical texts or chorales offered
no fundamental alternatives. Along with this went a greater standardization in
the forces employed – basically four-part choir and four-part strings, with
additional wind instruments, usually in pairs.
As
the madrigalian forms gained ever more dominant currency, the genre became
still more standardized, and where a complete annual cycle followed the same
textual pattern for each cantata the restrictions placed on composers
(particularly the less gifted ones) were even greater. Moreover, the pressure
on composers, especially those in important posts, to be productive was far
greater than before. It is, of course, incorrect to think that every Kantor
wrote his own cantatas. In Bach’s generation the repertory was dominated by the
cycles by famous Kapellmeister and Kantors that circulated widely, frequently
with some kind of commercial exchange. The local musicians’ works were used
only for high festivals and special occasions. It was only later in the
century, when the court composers devoted themselves to other tasks, that the
cantatas of less prominent composers became widespread – a fact that speaks for
the decline of the genre.
Cantata, §II, 5: The
German cantata to 1800: The 18th-century protestant cantata
(ii) Bach and his contemporaries.
More
cantatas were composed during the first half of the 18th century than at any
other period, but it is only recently that the work of Bach’s contemporaries
has begun to be made available in modern editions. Although many works have not
survived, it is barely possible to survey the vast quantities that have. The development
of the genre during this period can conveniently be observed in the extant
cantatas (over 1400) of Christoph Graupner, which are carefully written and
increasingly lean towards pronounced homophonic textures and standardized forms
(see DDT, li–lii, 1926). The same applies to the church music of G.H. Stölzel,
from whose 12 annual cycles, originally containing some 1150 works, about 450
cantatas survive. The tendency towards greater standardization is most
noticeable in those cycles where a single textual and musical layout is
constantly reproduced. Most widespread of all were the cantatas of Telemann,
who is credited with three printed cycles and almost 1150 other works. His
best-known works are the printed solo cantatas, Harmonischer Gottesdienst
(1725–6, 1731–2), but there are also some remarkably fine ones in manuscript.
Other
composers were almost as productive. J.T. Römhild composed at least 12 annual
cycles, from which 235 works are known; J.F. Fasch wrote at least eight (and
possibly 13) cycles, from which only 70 pieces can now be traced; and J.C.
Frauenholz produced at least five cycles, from which about 50 works survive. As
well as these, there were municipal musicians such as J.B. König, Georg Gebel
(i), J.S. Beyer, M.D. Freisslich and J.B.C. Freisslich (and also J.G. Görner,
C.G. Schröter, J.G. Ziegler, Gottfried Kirchhoff, Christoph Stolzenberg,
Maximilian Zeidler and others, by whom only a few cantatas survive), and
Kapellmeister such as Reinhard Keiser, G.C. Schürmann, J.D. Heinichen, J.A.
Kobelius and Christoph Förster, in whose output the church cantata was
subordinate to other genres. Although circumstances affecting the cultivation
of the genre continued to vary from place to place, the general acceptance of
madrigalian texts and their attendant musical forms meant that there were no
longer sharp differences between local traditions.
The
history of the genre undoubtedly culminates in Bach's cantatas. They took
current texts and forms as their point of departure and, like those of his contemporaries,
are adapted to local circumstances and are grouped together in annual cycles.
In their structure, their high quality and their variety of formal
combinations, however, Bach's works are unique. The few cantatas composed in
Bach's early period (up to 1708) mainly reflect the central German tradition
with which he was familiar. They include one chorale cantata and one psalm
cantata (bwv4 and 195), settings of psalm texts with
chorale verses or freely composed poetry (bwv131 and 150)
and more extensive combinations of texts for a town council ceremony and a
funeral service (bwv71 and 106). Chorale combinations
also occur in the Weimar cantatas written after 1714 (many of them to texts by
Salomo Franck), which show new formal developments and, increasingly, involve a
concertante instrumental part. The secular cantatas of the Cöthen period
further emphasize such concertante features. During his first years in Leipzig
Bach concentrated on church cantatas. For all its astonishing diversity, the
first cycle (1723–4) shows remarkable unity of purpose. At the same time,
Bach's systematic revival of his Weimar cantatas suggests a period of
concentrated work, particularly apparent in the opening choral movements. The
obbligato instrumental part is gradually extended (culminating in bwv67, 104 and 37); in three cases Bach reverts to strict motet
setting (bwv179, 64 and 144), combines poetic texts with
chorale quotations (bwv77, 25 and 48) and extends chorale
settings with recitatives (bwv138, 95 and 73). While Bach's
expressive style of cantional setting became established in the closing
chorales with instrumental figuration, the arias and duets constantly explore
new ways of combining the vocal and instrumental parts. His growing
differentiation of the recitatives is particularly obvious in the accompagnato,
which increasingly shapes the motivic writing of the instruments. The cantatas
do not follow a single typical pattern, however, less because of the absence of
homogeneous texts than out of Bach's dislike for anything schematic. The second
cycle of chorale cantatas (1724–5) is particularly self-contained; it breaks
off before Easter, but is partly completed by later works. This cycle, too, is
without contemporary parallels. While Telemann's few chorale cantatas confine
the use of chorale elaborations to the simple outer movements and do not use
them in the inner movements, Bach's anonymous librettist adapted the texts of
the chorale's stanzas to provide material for arias and recitatives, thereby
fully realizing the possibilities of the genre's rich tradition; it is only in
later additions that original chorale texts are used word for word. While
concerto and chorale movements merge in the opening movements, many different
combinations, including chorale quotations, occur in the inner movements, so
that the format is constantly undergoing individual modification. There are
analogous tendencies in the third annual cycle, which is less complete, and in
further works here the first movements in particular achieve a very high degree
of compositional independence. After about 1730 the number of works that can be
dated, including both secular cantatas and the later chorale cantatas, is even
smaller. Bach's obituary states that there were once five cycles, but the actual
number lost to us remains uncertain, even if the setting of an annual cycle on
texts by Picander (1728) is taken into account. However, the cantatas that have
survived reflect an artistic diversity that is striking by comparison with
Bach's contemporaries. Motet-like movements, chorale elaborations and canonic
structures clearly hark back to older traditions, but there are no parallels
elsewhere for the combinatory style of the tutti movements, concertante rather
than fugal in structure, the thematic development of the arias and the
sensitive word-setting in the recitatives. The close connection between Bach's
music and its texts has its roots in his dense working out of themes; this is
also a prerequisite for the practice of ‘parody’ (adapting the music to a
different text), which entails the maximum freedom of arrangement, particularly
in the later works. The process of ‘parody’ does not indicate a dismissive
approach to the music, nor is it simply a labour saving device. On the
contrary, it provides evidence of the richness of the structures that Bach
thought worthy of reworking.
From the beginning the church cantata was subject to criticism,
particularly from theologians. Before 1700 this was concerned less with the
genre itself than with its technical complexities, its excessive use of
coloratura and its obscuring of the text. Those whose criticisms were to some
extent in line with early Pietism included Theophil Grossgebauer (1661) and J.
Muscovius (1694), while those who advocated figural music (and were rather
closer to reform orthodoxy) included J.C. Dannhauer (1642) and H. Mithobius
(1665). Only after 1700 did discussion centre on the form of the cantata, and
particularly on its adoption of ‘operatic’ recitative and aria. Criticism was
voiced by theologians such as Christian Gerber (e.g. in 1703), by musicians
such as J.H. Buttstett (1716) and by writers such as Joachim Meyer (1726,
1728). Defence of the new cantata as a modern form of textual interpretation
was left to musicians such as Georg Motz (1703), Mattheson (1713, 1717 etc.)
and later Caspar Ruetz (1750–53), rather than to theologians such as Neumeister
and Tilgner (1716). The fact that the dispute was long-lasting does not merely
indicate that the cantata had to make its way in the face of opposition.
Although critical misgivings as to its function lacked any real justification,
they did attest to its wide cultivation. In the later 18th century criticism
was levelled more at the petrifaction of the structure and at the allegorical
character of the texts, features that made the cantata seem outmoded and
fossilized to the Enlightenment and the age of Sensibility.
Cantata, §II, 5: The
German cantata to 1800: The 18th-century protestant cantata
(iii) After Bach.
It would be wrong to assume that the history of the church cantata
concluded with Bach. Initially, at least, cantatas were written and performed
to almost the same extent in the succeeding period. The genre did, however,
forfeit its central position in the second half of the 18th century, and this
was due as much to changes in the intellectual climate as to purely musical
developments. Because of its effect on the divine service and the liturgy, the
Enlightenment indirectly affected the cantata as well. The language of
madrigalian poetry, rich in metaphors, was considered to be as cold and
irrational as the musical forms in which it was clothed. As Classical
discontinuity replaced the Baroque unity of affect and structure as a basic
principle of composition, the strict closed forms of arias and choruses were
relaxed, and this in turn threatened the existence of multi-sectional
structures. Thus the typical regularity of the cantata was discarded and
replaced by occasional borrowings from other genres or reversions to the basic
forms of the older cantata. Pure biblical texts and chorales became more
common, new songlike and hymn-like poems also appeared, and with the ousting of
madrigalian poetry the recitativo semplice and da capo aria lost their
previous validity. The church cantata took second place to secular (especially
instrumental) genres, while simple motets, hymns and so on became increasingly
cultivated in the Church. Even where the Kantorei persisted and where the
Hofkapelle continued to supply church music, competition came from the
bourgeois collegium musicum, public concerts and opera. Figural music on a
Sunday was no longer the chief manifestation of bourgeois and court music. This
led to the disbanding of the boys’ choirs and Kantoreien, the freeing of the
school choirs and Kapellen from their duties to church music, and the combining
of the previously separate offices of Kantor and organist.
C.P.E. Bach wrote some occasional and festival cantatas and W.F.
Bach a series of de tempore works, but the main representatives of the
church cantata immediately after J.S. Bach were the Thomaskantor J.F. Doles,
and the Kantor of the Kreuzschule at Dresden, G.A. Homilius, each with some 160
extant works. There were also several prolific younger composers, including
J.G. Hoffmann, J.P. Kellner, J.C. Seibert and Georg Gebel (ii), as well as J.W.
Glaser, Johann Trier, G.F. Gessel and J.H. Rolle. The Kapellmeister now played
a less prominent part; two annual cycles by C.H. Graun and three by Georg Benda
are known, but relatively few works have come down to us by J.G. Graun, J.F.
Agricola, J.W.F. Härtel, A.C. Kunzen, E.W. Wolf and others. It is
characteristic that more and more cantata composers born after 1730 were active
either in small towns or in minor posts. The widely known works of C.G. Tag or
J.G. Vierling show competent craftsmanship, but those of F.V. Buttstett,
Matthäus Rempt, J.G. Weiske, C.F.W. Nopitsch and others were restricted to a
narrow circle, and the decline of the genre is patently obvious in the cantatas
of composers such as Martin Wirbach and H. Wundsch.
Despite the fact that older texts continued to be set in many
cases, the multi-sectional form was reduced to a rudimentary framework (e.g.
tutti–recitative–aria–chorale), while more modern types of composition also
came into use. As well as songlike poems, Doles, G.D. Türk and others
cultivated ‘figured chorales’ (simple chorale settings with preludes and
interludes) and also biblical texts (especially psalms) without textual mixing
and frequently in new translations or in a recast form. In the choral writing
mostly homophonic textures with tuneful upper parts and sentimental clichés
were balanced by fugues which, with their schoolmasterly themes, tended towards
plainness and brevity. While the recitative lost its declamatory intensity or
moved towards a rather songlike expression, the aria was either modified in
formal scheme to accommodate galant ornamentation and virtuoso
coloratura or else tended towards short, lied-like forms.
The features in this process that might appear as a return to
earlier stages in the genre can be explained rather as a reaction against the
stylized cantata types of the high Baroque period. These later forms, which
dispense with textual mixing and revert to the setting of complete chorales or
biblical passages, are less part of the history of the cantata than a symptom
of its decline. The genre was increasingly expelled to the periphery of music
history, and by the time of Mozart and Beethoven it had become almost an
anachronism. Türk wrote a psalm cantata and several chorales with independent
instrumental parts, as well as some traditional cantatas; J.H. Knecht set psalm
paraphrases and other poems by Klopstock, Schlegel, Gellert and others; Moses
Mendelssohn’s versions of the psalms were set by J.F. Reichardt, who also, like
J.A.P. Schulz, wrote hymn-like choral works with solo episodes. Between 1801
and 1805 J.R. Zumsteeg published a number of church pieces which, however, can
hardly be considered as cantatas in the traditional sense. Features of the
cantata’s traditions and of its Romantic renewal overlap in the early chorale
cantatas and later psalm compositions of Mendelssohn.
Cantata, §II: The
German cantata to 1800
6. The Catholic repertory.
The term ‘cantata’ was applied to Catholic church music (as to
Protestant) comparatively late, and its use was rather sparse and irregular.
The main liturgical genres of the Catholic Church – mass, Magnificat,
psalm etc. – retained their primacy into the 18th century, and while names such
as ‘motet’ and ‘concerto’ were commonly used for smaller works, they were
largely subsumed under such liturgical headings as hymns, offertories and
antiphons. There was hardly any reason to call such works cantatas, especially
since the term was associated with the Italian solo cantata, particularly in
south Germany. Since genres are identified by their function as well as by
their structure, it is not possible to speak of a ‘Catholic church cantata’.
Even though the works in question might include recitative and aria, their
texts are quite different and they are not, as the Protestant cantata was, the
principal music of divine service. Because the functional need was not present,
the standard textual and musical pre-conditions of the Protestant cantata
(Gospel dialogue and chorale elaboration) were also missing.
Although no independent Catholic cantata developed, the formal
principles of the cantata affected other genres, including the Kantatenmesse
(‘cantata mass’). The church music of both religious denominations in the early
17th century reflected the innovations of the stile nuovo, and textual
mixing is found in Catholic music of the later 17th century. An example is J.M.
Gletle’s motets, Expeditionis musicae classis, i (1667) and iv (1677),
which contain not only multi-sectional forms and passages designated
‘Rezitativ’, but also simple aria cantatas and works with inserted arias that
correspond in form to the concerto–aria cantata (see SMd, ii, 1959). By
contrast, the motets of J.C. Kerll (Delectus sacrarum cantionum, 1669)
show no clear distinction between the movements and do not, for the most part,
use obbligato instruments. Carl Rosier (Cantiones sacrae, 1667–8) also
preferred hybrid forms without textual mixing, although he freely altered his
textual sources. These features are common also to the motets of Georg Arnold
(1661), Fidel Molitor (1659–68), Valentin Molitor (1681, 1683), J.K. Heller
(1671), J.G. Rauch (i) (1687) and J.M. Caesar (1690, 1691–2). It is, however,
mainly in the offertories that a predilection for cantata-like elements is
seen, and the custom arose of replacing these texts with new ones, or of
interpolating passages into them.
The beginning of the 18th century brought no such turning-point in
Catholic church music as that caused by the Neumeister reform of the Protestant
cantata. The transition to secco recitative and the da capo aria was rather
more gradual, and, although ritornello and da capo forms in a regular succession
of recitatives and arias were used for example by J.C. Pez (1710) and R.I. Mayr
(1681, 1702), it was only later, and probably in isolated instances, that
entire collections were entitled ‘Cantaten’. Examples include Eugen Willkomm’s Philomela
sacra … sive Cantatae (1732), Isfrid Kayser’s Cantatae sacrae
complectentes arias XVIII cum recitativis (1741), and Marianus
Königsperger’s Philomela benedictina, sive X. cantatae (1763), which
are, characteristically, solo cantatas in the true Italian fashion. On the
other hand, many cantata-like works with secco or accompanied recitatives and
da capo arias were designated motets. They include some 30 compositions by J.A.
Hasse and about 50 by F.X. Richter, as well as numerous others by lesser
composers. The liturgical functions of these shorter works (the nearest forms
to the cantata) are not always clear, but their styles and structures
influenced almost all genres (hymns, antiphons, litanies and particularly
offertories).
Cantata, §II: The
German cantata to 1800
7. The secular cantata.
(i) Definition.
The German secular cantata retained closer links with the Italian
form than did the church cantata, and cannot be regarded in the same way as an
independent form. Admittedly the German Baroque lied shared certain features
with the sacred aria, but in the former there was no combining of different
texts and compositional techniques, and as a result the lied did not tend
towards cantata-like expansion. Exceptions were Johann Nauwach’s Arie
passegiate (1623) and Kittel’s Arien und Cantaten (1638), which
contained nine through-composed pieces, some of them polyphonic, and 21
strophic songs. Heinrich Albert’s arias (eight vols., 1638–50) combine
recitative, arioso and cantabile melodies, but most are strophic in form; more
rarely, different melodies alternate with each other (e.g. fifth book, no.8;
eighth book, no.8; and second book, no.12), and the most cantata-like forms are
found in some of the occasional pieces (e.g. fifth book, nos.9 and 11; fourth
book, nos.10 and 13; and eighth book, no.10). A strophic layout was the rule,
even where instruments were included in ritornellos and interludes. The same is
true of Adam Krieger’s Arien (1657) and Neue Arien (1667), in
which strophic forms with ritornellos still predominate, while
through-composed, cantata-like pieces occur only rarely (Neue Arien,
first book, no.5, and fourth, nos.8 and 9). Cantata-like features are found
mainly in polyphonic pieces rather than in solo songs, for example in works by
Johann Martin Rubert (1647), J.C. Horn (1678), J. Kremberg (1689) and Johann
Krieger (1684). The lieder of Erlebach (1697, 1710) approximated even more
closely to the modern aria and expanded occasionally into cantata-like forms (1710,
no.3, see DDT, xlvi–xlvii, 1914/R); but by that time the genuine solo
cantata began to appear in Germany with Reinhard Keiser’s works.
Although Ziegler had pointed out the advantages of madrigalian
poetry in 1653, texts of this kind remained the exception and were reserved
mainly for church music. It was only at the turn of the century that a secular
counterpart to the church cantata came into being. C.F. Hunold (‘Menantes’)
discussed the textual requirements of the opera and the cantata in his Die
allerneueste Art (1707). He supported Neumeister’s definition of the
cantata (see above, §5, i), and the importance of the Italian model was
emphasized also by Walther (1732), Mattheson (1713, 1739) and Scheibe (1745).
The standard criteria mentioned were a restriction to recitative and aria, and
to a solo vocal part, usually with continuo accompaniment but sometimes with
concertante instruments. Also, the secular solo cantata, in contrast to the
‘public’ church cantata, was intended as domestic music or Tafelmusik.
An independent type of German secular cantata for solo voice did develop after
about 1750, which must be distinguished from the compositions for several
voices that were written for academic, municipal or court festivities. The most
famous examples of this type are Bach’s secular cantatas, which also show the
close similarities between such works and the church cantata – similarities
that made sacred parodies possible. Pieces like this by Bach’s contemporaries
(Telemann, Stölzel, Fasch, Graupner and others), as well as by south German and
Austrian composers, continued to be written until the late 18th century.
Despite their proximity to the church cantata it is not really sensible to
include them under the heading ‘cantata’. They were usually known by other
names (most frequently ‘serenata’, but also ‘oratorio’ or ‘dramma per musica’),
whereas the term ‘cantata’ was reserved for the secular solo cantata, where a
clear affinity to the Italian model was apparent.
(ii) The solo cantata to c1750.
The fact that printed works with German texts at first
predominated in the repertory of the solo cantata may be due to the
requirements of domestic music. Keiser’s Gemüths-Ergötzung (1698)
contains seven Sing-Gedichte (words by C.H. Postel) for solo voice with
instrumental accompaniment. These quite extensive works include at least four
da capo arias as well as freer forms, and both recitativo semplice and
arioso in the older style. Their non-schematic layout parallels the diversity
of their structures and the intensity of their expression. By contrast Keiser’s
four Moralische Cantaten (1714), to words by Hunold, use only brief
forms and continuo accompaniment. The two or three arias in each, usually in a
da capo form, seem already to indicate a standard type. Keiser’s Friedenspost
(1715) contains mainly sections from festival compositions; his other solo
cantatas survive in manuscript.
Telemann published Moralische Cantaten in three collections
each containing six pieces (with concertante instruments, 1731; with continuo,
1735; and with solo instrument, 1736). They show a definite predilection for
the short form of aria–recitative–aria; the arias are almost exclusively da
capo, and the works tend towards a high degree of formal and textual
standardization. A further 23 manuscript cantatas by Telemann to German texts
have more varied layouts; only four similar works to Italian texts are extant.
The 16 unpublished German solo cantatas by Stölzel use no obbligato instruments
and contain for the most part only two arias. Only Bach’s solo cantatas to
German texts (bwv202, 204, 210) stand out for their
instrumental and structural variety. A few German solo cantatas by other
composers, such as the Graun brothers and J.H. Rolle, are also extant.
The solo cantata to Italian texts came increasingly to the fore,
but remained exclusively a court genre stimulated by Italians active in
Germany. It was an offshoot of the Italian cantata and is mentioned here only
in passing, even though many more Italian than German solo cantatas were written.
Once again, Keiser played a leading part and the rather brief forms in his Divertimenti
serenissimi delle cantate, duette ed arie diverse (1713) are representative
of the Italian type. Further examples of this period by Johann Fischer, Jakob
Greber and J.C. Pez survive, but the principal representative was J.D.
Heinichen, with some 50 cantatas. These are mainly for alto or soprano and
usually have only continuo accompaniment, which is, however, sometimes an
obbligato part. There are usually two (sometimes more) arias, and the voice
part tends towards either a tuneful cantabile style or considerable virtuosity.
In contrast to Handel, who wrote some 100 solo cantatas mainly during his
Italian years, Bach and Telemann wrote few works to Italian texts; moreover,
the authenticity of bwv203 and 209 is questionable. In
his 20 cantatas J.A. Hasse frequently used concertante instruments (a German
speciality), and in his aria forms, as well as in his arioso and accompagnato
passages, he frequently sought to modify the standard types. While the solo
cantatas of C.H. Graun are distinguished by colourful instrumental parts,
technical artistry and expressive melody, J.M. Molitor’s brief forms are rather
more representative of the average composition. Only isolated contributions are
known by J.G. Graun, J.H. Rolle, E.W. Wolff and J.C.F. Bach, and these already
point towards the second half of the century.
(iii) The later 18th century.
During the declining years of the Italian solo cantata in Germany
J.G. Naumann occupied a special place by virtue of the structural freedom, rich
instrumentation and sensitive melody of his works. Others worthy of note were
the Dresden composers Joseph Schuster and Franz Seydelmann and the north German
dilettantes Jacob Schuback and D.A. von Apell. The texts of Metastasio were
frequently set, especially in south Germany, where Florian Gassmann, L.A.
Kozeluch, G.C. Wagenseil and, to a lesser extent, Carl Stamitz, J.W. Michl and
G.J. Vogler contributed to the genre. Although Haydn also wrote a few cantatas,
including the famous Arianna a Naxos (1790) with piano accompaniment,
the genre continued to decline until it eventually merged into the dramatic
scena, of which Beethoven’s Ah perfido! (1796) is a prominent example.
The German cantata was at first cultivated only sporadically in
the second half of the century, for example by F.G. Fleischer (1756–7, 1763)
and J.A. Hiller, whose Cantaten und Arien (1781) attempted to enrich the
Italian form with features of the lied. Before this, however, a new type of
cantata poetry which combined mythological and dramatic elements began to
replace the traditional lyrical or moral texts. The initial impulse was given
by such celebrated poets as J.E. Schlegel, K.W. Ramler and J.W. von
Gerstenberg, who with J.J. Rambach, L.C. Lichtenberg and others enlisted the
ideas of the Enlightenment with the aim of renewing the cantata as a national
genre. One impressive example was Gerstenberg’s Ariadne, Schlegel’s main
contribution was Pygmalion (set by J.C.F. Bach and F.W.H. Benda among
others), and the most popular text of all was Ramler’s Ino (set by
J.C.F. Bach, Telemann, Kirnberger and Vogler). Just as these texts did away
with the sharp contrast between recitative and aria, so composers made use of
non-schematic layouts, frequent arioso and accompagnato passages, colourful
instrumentation, cantabile rather than coloratura melody, and many interpolated
interludes or transitional passages.
This new type of cantata, like the corresponding sacred form,
tended towards a formal freedom which seems to echo earlier stages of the
genre. J.A. Scheibe’s Tragische Kantaten (1765, words by Schlegel and
Gerstenberg) were significant not least because of the ‘epistle’ to Gerstenberg
that preceded them. Rather surprisingly, Telemann also took up the new type of
composition at the end of his life (Ino, DDT, xxviii, 1907/R).
J.C.F. Bach’s Ino is musically more important than other settings, and
his cantatas as a whole represent a culminating point in the development of the
type. They also included settings of Ramler’s Pygmalion (1786) and
Gerstenberg’s Amerikanerin (1776), and are characterized by variety in
their aria forms, long accompagnato passages and gradual transition between one
and the other. Mention should also be made of C.P.E. Bach’s Die Grazien
(words by Gerstenberg, 1789), Anton Schweitzer’s Polyxena (1774), E.W.
Wolff’s Polyxena (1776), Georg Benda’s Pygmalion (1779) and other
works, F.W.H. Benda’s Pygmalion (1783) and Die Grazien (1788),
and pieces by Naumann, Seydelmann, Kozeluch, Peter von Winter and J.H. Egli (Sechs
Schweizer Kantaten, words by Lavater). Mozart’s late Freimaurerkantaten
(masonic cantatas), k623 and 619, both written in 1791,
are particularly valuable contributions to the genre, and similar works were composed
by Reichardt (Ariadne, 1780, etc.) and Zumsteeg (Der Abschied,
1803).
Cantata, §II: The
German cantata to 1800
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H.E. Smither: ‘Arienstruktur und Arienstil in den Oratorien und Kantaten Bachs’, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach und die
europäische Musikkultur: Hamburg 1988, 345–68
G.J. Buelow: ‘Expressivity in the Accompanied Recitatives of Bach’s Cantatas’, Bach Studies, ed.
D.O. Franklin (Cambridge, 1989),
18–35
F. Krummacher: ‘Gespräche und Struktur: über Bachs geistliche Dialoge’, Johann Sebastian Bach: Leipzig 1989, 45–59
K. Küster: ‘Die Frankfurter und Leipziger Überlieferung der Kantaten Johann Ludwig
Bachs’, BJb 1989, 65–106
F. Krummacher: ‘Bachs
frühe Kantaten im Kontext der Tradition’, Bach-Studien, x (1991), 172–201;
repr. in Mf, xliv (1991),
9–32
M. Kube: ‘Bachs “tour de force”: analytischer Versuch über den Eingangschor der
Kantate Jesu, der du meine Seelebwv78’, Mf, xlv (1992), 138–52
D. Parr and P. Walker: German
Sacred Polyphonic Vocal Music between Schütz and Bach
(Warren, MI, 1992)
B.J. Sing: Geistliche
Vokalkomposition zwischen Barock und Klassik: Studien zu den Kantatendichtungen
Johann Gottfried Herders in denVertonungen Johann Christoph Friedrich Bachs (Baden-Baden, 1992)
F. Krummacher: Bachs Zyklus
der Choralkantaten: Aufgaben und Lösungen (Göttingen, 1995)
U. Leisinger: ‘Die geistliche Vokalmusik Johann Christoph Friedrich Bachs: Aspekte
der Entstehungs und Überlieferungsgeschichte’, BJb 1995, 115–43
A. Nagel: Studien zur
Passionskantate von Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
(Frankfurt, 1995)
S. Oeschsle: Bachs Arbeit
am strengen Satz: Studien zum Kantatenwerk
(Habilitationsschrift, U. of Kiel, 1995)
A. Wehrend: Musikanschauung
– Musikpraxis: Kantatenkompositionen in der Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine … von 1727
bis 1760 (Frankfurt, 1995)
M.E. Frandsen: ‘Albrici, Peranda und die Ursprünge der Concerto-Aria-Kantate in
Dresden’, Schütz-Jb 1996, 123–39
G. Webber: North German
Church Music in the Age of Buxtehude (Oxford, 1996)
W. Hobohm: ‘Kantatentextsammlungen der ersten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts: Texte
zur Musik?’, BJb 1997, 185–92
P. Wollny: ‘Materialien zur Schweinfurter Musikpflege des 17. Jahrhunderts: von
1592 bis zum Tod Georg Christoph Bachs (1642–1697)’, Schütz-Jb 1997, 113–63
P. Wollny: ‘Neue Bach-Funde’, BJb
1997, 7–50
catholic repertory
FellererG
H.-P. Schanzlin: Johann
Melchior Gletles Motetten: ein Beitrag zur schweizerischen Musikgeschichte des
17. Jahrhunderts (Berne, 1954)
R. Walter: ‘Zu J.C.F.
Fischers geistlicher Vokalmusik: neue Funde’, AMw, xxxii (1975), 39–71
F.W. Reidel: Kirchenmusik
am Hofe Karls VI (1711–1740) (Munich, 1977)
J. Buzga: ‘The Vocal Works of Jan Dismas Zelenka’, EMc, ix (1981), 177–83
E.T. Chafe: The Church
Music of Heinrich Biber (Ann Arbor, 1987)
secular cantata
KretzschmarG
SchmitzG
H. Landsberger: Die
weltlichen Kantaten Georg Philipp Telemanns (diss., U.
of Rostock, 1920)
R. Petzoldt: Die
Kirchenkompositionen und weltlichen Kantaten Reinhard Keisers (diss., U. of Berlin, 1935)
I. Finley: J.S. Bachs
weltliche Kantaten (diss., U. of Göttingen, 1950)
I. Finley: ‘Bach’s Secular Cantata Texts’, ML, xxxi (1950), 189–95
E.T. Ferand: ‘Embellished Parody Cantatas in the Early 18th Century’, MQ, xliv (1958), 40–64
H.R. Jung: ‘Weltliche Festmusiken Johann Sebastian Bachs und Georg Philipp
Telemanns’, Internationales
Bach-Fest III: Leipzig 1975, 205–14
A. Glöckner: ‘Anmerkungen zu Johann Sebastian Bachs Köthener Kantatenschaffen’, Hofkapellmeisteramt: Spätbarock,
Frühaufklärung: Köthen 1985, 89–95
C. Mühne: ‘Zu einigen Fragen der Überlieferung der weltlichen Solokantaten Georg
Philipp Telemanns’, Georg
Philipp Telemann: Werküberlieferung, Editions- und Interpretationsfragen:
Magdeburg 1987, ii, 109–13
G. Fleischhauer: ‘G.P. Telemanns Zyklen “VI Moralische Cantaten” (TWV 20:23–28 und 29–34) im Urteil J.A. Scheibes’,
Musica Privata … Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von
Walter Salmen, ed. M. Fink, R. Gstrein and G. Mössner
(Innsbruck, 1991), 315–38
Cantata
III. The French cantata to 1800
The form known as the cantate françoise attracted almost
every French composer during the first half of the 18th century. The resulting
repertory amounts to well over 800 works, most of which were printed; some 150
printed works are no longer extant. Early scholars such as Fétis tended to
underestimate the intrinsic worth of French cantatas. Yet though it would be
wrong to claim too much for them, the best of them have a fresh and engaging
eloquence. As few are available in modern editions, however, even these finest
cantatas are not widely known.
1. Origins.
2. Early stages: J.-B.
Morin.
3. Texts.
4. To 1730.
5. Decline of the
cantata and cultivation of the cantatille.
Cantata, §III: The
French cantata to 1800
1. Origins.
The French cantata was essentially an 18th-century form, for in
the 17th century the salons had indulged above all in their literary interests,
while the court had delighted in ballet and spectacle, leaving little
opportunity for the cultivation of serious vocal music outside the ballet de
cour and subsequently the tragédie lyrique. Cantata-like works may
have been performed at private concerts before 1700, but little is known about
them. It is highly unlikely that such works would have been called cantatas,
since this term appeared relatively late in French music – even M.-A. Charpentier's
Orphée descendant aux enfers (1683), which has often been cited as one
of the earliest French cantatas, is not so called in the manuscript. Brossard
did not apply the term to French music in the first edition of his Dictionaire
de musique (1703) but used it only as a translation of the Italian word.
Later editions, however, do include the term ‘cantate française’, mentioning
that such works had been appearing in recent years. The French cantata thus
arose as a distinct form nearly a century after its Italian counterpart.
It is significant that the first French cantatas appeared during
the last years of Louis XIV's reign, when society was beginning to turn from
the rather insular, sober-minded atmosphere of Versailles to that of more
cosmopolitan Paris. A symptom of this change was the cultivation of Italian
music in various quarters, including the household of the Duke of Orléans, the
future Regent of France. Another lively source of Italian music in Paris was
the presbytery of St André-des-Arts, where Abbé Mathieu gave fortnightly
concerts of works by Carissimi, Alessandro Scarlatti and others. The Italian
vogue was also reflected in the Italian arias issued by Ballard in the closing
years of the 17th century and in the many manuscript copies of similar works
(now in F-Pn) that are thought to date from this period. Some of the
composers included in Ballard's Italian publications were in fact French, and
they later became exponents of the French cantata. The merits of French and
Italian music were long debated, but a number of works by French composers,
such as Couperin's Les nations – published in 1726 but containing
sonatas composed as early as 1692 – convincingly demonstrated that the two
styles were indeed compatible. From their union the French cantata was born.
The academies, societies and salons then beginning to proliferate in Paris and
the provinces provided a further stimulus and created a demand for music of
modest proportions. With the example of the Italians before them it was natural
that French composers should rise to the occasion and provide their patrons and
public with French cantatas.
Cantata, §III: The
French cantata to 1800
2. Early stages: J.-B. Morin.
18th-century sources unanimously named Jean-Baptiste Morin as the
pioneer composer of the French cantata. His first book of Cantates
françoises à une et deux voix melées de symphonies, dedicated to the Duke
of Orléans, was published by Ballard in 1706, though he remarked that
manuscript copies of the six works in it were already circulating. He declared
in the preface his attempt to retain the sweetness of French melody while using
both greater variety in the accompaniments and the tempos and modulations
characteristic of the Italian cantata. His words provide a clue to the style
not only of his own works in this genre but of French cantatas as a whole. It
is mainly for this reason that his book is interesting, for the cantatas
themselves are musically less impressive than those of many of the composers
who followed him.
The sweetness of French melody consisted in a lyricism that
avoided angular leaps and that, lacking the propulsion of the motivic
development that lies at the heart of the mature Italian aria, moved with the
graceful gestures of the dance, or else was inflected, like an arioso, by the
shape of the text; delicate ornamentation imaginatively caught the nuances of
the words. The retention of this melodic style gave the French cantata a
certain independence of its Italian models. From the latter Morin borrowed an
element of vocal bravura foreign to the Lullian tradition and such structural
devices as the da capo form, anticipation of the first vocal phrase by the
basso continuo, and the ‘devise’ opening. These, together with instrumental
interludes, brought a sense of expansion to the simple French air.
Ostinato-like figures in the accompaniment and often a nimble bass line gave an
Italianate impetus to the music. In those works with obbligato instruments the
influence of the Italian sonata is clear. In certain movements of Enone,
scored for voice, two violins and continuo, the idiomatic string writing of a
trio-sonata grouping supports the voice, in sharp contrast to the heavy
five-part texture of traditional French operatic accompaniment. Morin's claim
to have adopted modulations characteristic of Italian music is confirmed in Circé,
but in his other cantatas the harmonic influence lies less in chordal
vocabulary and modulation than in a generally bracing harmonic drive. Yet there
are movements that show few traces of Italian influence; they are closer in
style to the airs sérieux et à boire (see Air
à boire)
cultivated by French composers in the years preceding the heyday of the
cantata. In his recitatives Morin achieved a compromise between French and
Italian attitudes to declamation. He avoided changes of metre and tended to
begin over sustained chords, thus frequently producing a freer and more rapid
delivery of the text than was typical of the Lullian tradition. Yet once the
recitative is under way the bass line is inclined to move more quickly than in recitativo
semplice. Nor are there any instances in Morin, and very few in the entire
repertory, of the ‘delayed cadence’ characteristic of the Italian school.
Whether in recitative or air, however, the relative emphasis on French
and Italian traits varied from movement to movement: to describe the form
merely as an alternation of French recitatives and Italianate airs is a
misleading over-simplification.
Morin's cantatas set a pattern that most French composers followed
during the next two decades. The French cantata was characteristically a
six-movement form of alternating recitatives and airs for solo voice,
accompanied either by continuo alone (‘sans symphonie’) or with continuo and
obbligato instrument (‘avec symphonie’). The latter was usually violin or
flute, and some large-scale works also include optional parts for trumpets,
horns, oboes, bassoons and drums. Many pastoral cantatas call for the musette;
there are occasional parts for the vielle; and the harp makes a unique
appearance in Brossard's unpublished sacred cantata Les trois enfants de la
fournaise de Babylone. Cantatas with obbligatos tend to be more demanding,
and many may have been written with professional forces in mind. Almost no
cantatas require a chorus. While duo and trio cantatas are to be found, solo
works are much the commonest. Most cantatas are secular; the handful of sacred
works are mostly by Bousset, Brossard and Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La
Guerre.
Cantata, §III: The
French cantata to 1800
3. Texts.
If Morin set the style for the music of the cantata, Jean-Baptiste
Rousseau set the style for its poetry. After some initial experiments with free
poetic forms he gave shape to cantata poetry by presenting an incident from
mythology in three recitatives and three airs, choosing events that lent
themselves to allegorical interpretation. The subject was almost invariably
amorous, and the final stanza, in which the allegory appeared, served as a kind
of lovers' maxim. Rousseau's style ranged from the melodramatic (Circé)
to the witty (Les forges de Lemnos). Such was his understanding of the
special problems of combining words and music that his 26 texts provided
composers with ideal material and other poets with ideal models. During the
18th century the cantata became a minor poetic form in its own right, and the Mercure
de France regularly published cantata texts over a number of years. The
cantata's popularity probably owed as much to the freedom of its verse
structure as to the fancifulness of its subjects; both stood in sharp contrast
to the mordant alexandrines of most French poetry of the time. Although
mythology remained the main source for cantata texts, contemporary events and
literature sometimes provided the stimulus. There are cantatas about coffee,
freemasonry, Gulliver, Don Quixote, natural phenomena, battles and victories,
royal births and convalescence and many in praise of patrons. Most of the poets
were probably mere literary dabblers, whose names have not survived, but the
reputable ones included (in addition to Rousseau) Danchet, La Motte and Roy.
Cantata poetry is shot through with references to the island of Cythera (the
reputed birthplace of Venus), which provided the setting for many an amorous
encounter. Although the real Cythera was unknown to most Frenchmen, poetic
imagination invested it with the sights and sounds of the Ile de France. Its
rippling streams, concerts of birds, and clear skies smiling on a mischievous
Cupid and his indulgent mother formed a romantic world in which the cantata
found its true home.
Cantata, §III: The
French cantata to 1800
4. To 1730.
Cantatas by Nicolas Bernier, Stuck (who published his under the
name Battistin), Thomas-Louis Bourgeois, Brunet de Molan and Campra soon
followed Morin's volume of 1706. Bernier, with 39 works, was one of the most
prolific of French cantata composers. As well as using all the procedures found
in Morin's cantatas, he included in his airs some of the earliest
examples in French music of the new ritornello structure. His cantatas, often
light and witty, are particularly attractive and include some of the finest
early examples of the form. Among them are two large-scale works published (in
his fifth book, 1715) under the title Les nuits de Sceaux; written for
the famous nocturnal entertainments presented to the Duchess of Maine and
subtitled ‘cantatas in the form of divertissements’, they are hybrid works
containing dances and choruses as well as movements more typical of the
cantata. Like Morin and Bernier, the Italian-born Stuck was in the service of
the Duke of Orléans, a noted patron of Italian music. His first set of French
cantatas (1706) are more overtly Italianate than those of his contemporaries.
Whereas Morin had attempted to set French poetry to music displaying both
French and Italian traits, Stuck, in the preface to this first book, claimed to
have modified the Italian style to suit the particular genius of the French
language. He allowed no compromise, however, in the very movements where it
might have been expected: the recitatives bear all the hallmarks of Italian recitativo
semplice. In his subsequent volumes, however, the Italianate declamation is
gradually tempered until in the fourth (1714) it is sometimes indistinguishable
from traditional French recitative. On the other hand, the three books of
charming cantatas by Campra became perceptibly more Italianate. Yet even the
most French of his cantatas are in striking contrast to his celebrated L'Europe
galante (1697); a comparison of this opéra-ballet and his cantatas,
together with Bernier's divertissement cantatas, provides an illuminating study
of characteristic forms in 18th-century French vocal music.
Perhaps the most satisfying balance of national traits was struck
by Louis-Nicolas Clérambault, whose cantatas are generally considered the
finest of all in France. Like most of his compatriots he changed the stylistic
emphasis from movement to movement, yet he was more successful than most in
achieving an unforced, personal eloquence. All the elements that make up the
French cantata are present in varying degrees in his 25 works (including one
sacred cantata, Abraham), which were published between 1710 and 1742.
They range from simple pieces such as La musette to powerful works such
as Orphée (widely regarded as his masterpiece), while his Soleil
vainqueur des nuages is a fine example of the spectacular occasional
cantata; it was written to celebrate a royal convalescence and is scored for
soprano, oboes, flute, violins, ‘basse de violon’, bassoon and continuo.
Other composers who wrote cantatas in France before 1730 were
Montéclair, Courbois, André Cardinal Destouches, Charles-Hubert Gervais,
Laurent Gervais, Jacquet de La Guerre, Collin de Blamont, Boismortier, Grandval
and Mouret. Rameau also composed a handful of cantatas, of which six are
extant. (Two others previously attributed to him, Actéon and La
musette, are by Boismortier and Pierre de la Garde respectively.) They date
from the decade before his first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), and
he regarded them as prentice works for his operas. They decidedly bear the
imprint of his technical resources and are far more Italianate than his stage
works.
The popularity of the cantata reached its zenith in the 1720s.
Although many of the favourite works had been written much earlier, the vogue
for concert-giving was such that they, as well as later ones, had a better
chance of being heard now than ever before. It was the time of the Concert
Français (an offshoot of the Concert Spirituel), of the Concert chez la Reine,
at which cantatas were often performed as operatic entr'actes, and of weekly or
fortnightly concerts presented by well-known Parisian musicians. It was also a
period when provincial académies flourished and some of them organized
concerts along the lines of the Concert Spirituel. Two of France's finest
singers, Mlles Le Maure and Antier, often sang cantatas, but few of these (as
reported in the Mercure de France) were new; the popular cantatas came
from the past.
Cantata, §III: The
French cantata to 1800
5. Decline of the cantata and cultivation of the cantatille.
The decline of the French cantata coincided with Rameau's
revitalizing of opera in Paris. The cantata had served its purpose: it had
satisfied the appetite for Italianate music in the early years of the century,
and in it composers had developed techniques that passed into the common
coinage of French music. These techniques imparted more brilliance to both
vocal and instrumental writing and enriched the harmony of the French Classical
style. The history of the decline, stretching almost to the Revolution, is
largely concerned with the cultivation of the cantatille.
The term ‘cantatille’ came into common use about 1730. As the name
suggests, a cantatille is a short cantata, usually comprising two or
three airs and one or two brief recitatives; yet the reduction in length
was not matched by a reduction in instrumental forces nor in technical demands.
The cantatille is the Rococo version of the Baroque cantata and is often
richly embellished. It sought grace and charm in profusely ornamented melody
instead of the intensity and drama characteristic of the earlier form. Mouret
and Le Maire were its chief exponents; others included Charles Noblet (who
suggested a further diminutive of the term by calling his works
‘cantatillettes’), Louis Antoine Lefebvre, Légat de Furcy, Pierre de La Garde
and the Chevalier d'Herbain. The later cantatilles of the last four of
these composers show the marks of a new style, for after the middle of the
century the form took two paths, both branching away from the Rococo into the
early Classical style; neither path led to anything of lasting worth. On the
one hand, the cantatille degenerated into a banal vocal piece with
guitar accompaniment; on the other, it responded to the stimulus of the
developing symphonic style, and it is significant that in these longer works
with relatively large instrumental forces the term ‘cantata’ began to replace
‘cantatille’. As well as the four composers mentioned above, Jean-Claude Trial,
François André Danican Philidor and Antoine Bailleux were involved in these new
developments. Given the hand of a master the cantata might have found a new
lease of life. Yet other, larger factors prevented this development: the cantate
française was essentially the product of an aristocratic world and could
not hope to withstand the Revolution.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
AnthonyFB; SchmitzG
J. Bachelier: Recueil des
cantates (Le Haye, 1726)
J. Tiersot: ‘Cantates françaises du XVIIIe siècle’, Le ménestrel (23 April–11 June 1893)
M. Barthélémy: ‘Les cantates de Jean-Baptiste Stuck’, RMFC, ii (1961–2), 125–37
D. Foster: ‘Parodies on Clérambault's cantatas by Nicolas Grandval’, RMFC, iv (1964), 120–26
D.H. Foster: Louis-Nicolas
Clérambault and his Cantates françaises (diss., U. of
Michigan, 1967)
D. Tunley: The
Eighteenth-Century French Cantata (London, 1974, 2/1997)
R.J. Anthony: ‘French Binary Air within Italian Aria da capo in Montéclair's Third
Book of Cantatas’, PRMA, civ (1977–8), 47–55
P. Nelson: ‘Nicolas Bernier’, RMFC, xviii (1978), 51–87
G. Sadler: ‘A Letter from Claude-François Rameau to J.J.M. de Croix’, ML, lix (1978), 139–47
M. Cyr: ‘A New Rameau Cantata’, MT, cxx (1979), 907–9
G.E. Vollen: The French
Cantata: a Survey and Thematic Catalog (Ann Arbor, 1982)
M. Cyr: ‘An Investigation of the Baritone Solo Cantatas of Jean-Philippe Rameau’, Journal of Research in Singing, vi (1982–83), 30–54
M. Cyr: ‘Performing Rameau's Cantatas’, EMc, xi (1983), 480–89
M. Cyr: ‘Towards a Chronology of Rameau's Cantatas’, MT, cxxiv (1983), 539–41
M. Vollen: The Secular
Cantatas of Nicolas Bernier (diss., U. of Michigan, 1984)
A. Rose: ‘Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre and the Secular Cantate françoise’, EMc, xiii (1985), 529–41
M. Couvreur: ‘Marie de Louvencourt, librettiste des cantates françoises de Bourgeois
et de Clérambault’,RBM, xliv (1990), 25–40
L.H. Sloan: The
Influence of Rhetoric on Jean-Philippe Rameau's Solo Vocal Cantatas and
Treatise of 1722 (New York, 1990)
D. Tunley, ed.: The
Eighteenth-Century French Cantata in Facsimile (with
commentaries) (New York, 1990–91)
G. Garden: ‘A Link between Opera and Cantata in France: Tonal Design in the Music
of André Campra’, EMc, xxi (1993), 397–412
Cantata
IV. The English cantata to 1800
The relatively short history of the English chamber cantata
coincides with the rise and fall in popularity of the Italian opera in London
during the first half of the 18th century. That Italian cantatas circulated
widely at the time is shown by the number of manuscript copies surviving in
British libraries and also by the success of several volumes of Italian
cantatas printed in London, especially those of Giovanni Bononcini (1721) and
Attilio Ariosti (1728). A few English composers, notably Thomas Roseingrave and
Maurice Greene, attempted to capitalize on the vogue for Italian music by
writing cantatas to Italian texts; Roseingrave's volume of six cantatas to
texts by P.A. Rolli appeared about 1735, and had probably been composed as much
as 15 years earlier. The main spur to cantata writing in England, however, was
the desire on the part of both poets and composers to demonstrate that the
English language was as capable as Italian of furnishing the two essential
elements of the cantata text – recitative and aria. Some poets, such as John
Hughes and the music historian John Hawkins, made this explicit in the prefaces
they provided for cantata publications, and they can be said to have achieved a
moderate success. Volumes of English cantatas – or, more commonly later, those
combining a cantata or two with a number of other vocal pieces – issued from
the London presses fairly regularly from about 1710. Some 320 English cantatas
so styled survive in contemporary sources. That in sheer number they fell short
of their Italian models may be attributed as much to the Englishman's suspicion
of ‘Recitative Musick’ (as Hughes called it) as to his reluctance to allow that
native musicians might excel in Italian forms. Both factors are certainly the
subject of complaint in many a cantata preface. It should be noted that Handel,
who had produced dozens of Italian cantatas during his few years in Italy,
showed virtually no interest in the English variety, having presumably foreseen
that the genre would afford little scope in his adoptive land.
Although the English cantata is associated mostly with Georgian
composers, it had already been cultivated to some extent before 1700. The fact
that 17th-century composers in England did not use the term ‘cantata’ for any
of their works is of little significance: even in Italy the term was by no
means invariably used except in printed collections. The influence on these
earlier cantatas is again predominantly Italian. John Blow and William Croft
are known to have copied Italian cantatas, and Purcell too must have been
acquainted with them. Several of his later solo vocal pieces outside the plays
– for example Fly swift, ye hours and The Blessed Virgin's
Expostulation – reveal in points of both style and structure some attempt
to emulate cantatas emanating from Rome and Venice in the middle of the 17th
century. These extended alternations of declamatory arioso and formalised air
with a distinct italianate flavour are cantatas in all but name.
The first English cantata so called seems to have been Daniel
Purcell's otherwise unremarkable Love, I defy thee, published in Walsh's
Monthly Mask of Vocal Musick in September 1708, and the word ‘cantata’
began to appear frequently on title-pages of solo vocal music (which circulated
mainly in printed copies) from about 1710, when Walsh issued Six English
Cantatas by J.C. Pepusch. The preface, written by Hughes, who also supplied
the texts for the cantatas, claimed them to be ‘the first Essays of the kind,
written for the most part several Years ago, as an Experiment of introducing a
sort of Composition which had never been naturaliz'd in our Language’. A second
set of six cantatas followed a few years later. Pepusch's cantatas are not only
the first but in many ways also the best of their kind. They are indebted to
Italian models in their structure – two arias each preceded by a recitative –
and in the almost invariable use of da capo form for the arias themselves,
which display an easy contrapuntal skill in the Italian manner – ‘perfectly
correct and masterly’, in Burney's judgment. Pepusch was, moreover, well
skilled in instrumental music and had published several volumes of sonatas in
Amsterdam before turning to cantatas. Not surprisingly, nearly all his cantatas
require instruments in addition to the continuo, most often the flute, which
enjoyed unprecedented popularity in England. Several later cantata publications
either include a separate flute part or are so arranged that a flute can
deputize for the singer. This extensive use of obbligato instruments was to
remain a prominent feature of the English cantata throughout the century. The
second cantata of Pepusch's first book, Alexis (‘See! from the silent
groves’), was very popular during his lifetime and remained so for many years
after his death. Much inferior to Pepusch's are sets by Daniel Purcell (1713)
and J.E. Galliard (1716), each containing six cantatas composed (as their
title-pages stated) ‘after the Italian manner’. They are in fact even more
self-consciously italianate than those of Pepusch, particularly in the preference
for minor keys and (in Galliard's case) the use of continuo accompaniment only.
Purcell's arias are particularly weak, almost all of them filling out a brief
da capo structure in the most predictable fashion, though Galliard probably
comes closer to the true bel canto style than any of his contemporaries in
England. The three cantatas of George Hayden (1717) were very popular in their
day and were reprinted some years later, but it is as difficult now to
understand as it is to share the enthusiasm with which both Burney and Hawkins
wrote of them.
The cantatas of Pepusch and even more those of Daniel Purcell,
Galliard and Hayden (to whom one might add the names of Abiell Whichello and
Anthony Young) reflect the all-consuming enthusiasm of the period for Italian
opera which, as Daniel Purcell wrote in the preface of his cantatas of 1713,
had ‘so altered the Taste of this Nation, as to MUSIK, that scarce any Thing,
but what bears some Resemblance of the Italian Style and Manner, is
received with Favour or heard with Patience’. But with the waning popularity of
Italian opera around 1740, the English cantata began to lose many of its
italianate characteristics. Arcadian texts, presenting a stylized, stereotyped
situation in which nymphs and shepherds gave vent to their passions, continued
to be popular, but more room was found for poems expressing patriotic
sentiments or celebrating the favourite pursuits of drinking and hunting. The
ubiquitous recitative–aria–recitative–aria structure of the Italians was gradually
abandoned in favour of a freer alternation of recitative, aria and – in
orchestrally accompanied pieces – arioso, in as few as two or as many as ten
sections, as the text demanded. At first the da capo aria continued to exist
alongside other aria forms, but it soon gave way completely to binary forms,
usually extended either by a varied repeat of one of the sections or by the
introduction of instrumental ritornellos at the beginning and end and sometimes
in the middle as well. The English penchant for light, agreeable melody
asserted itself, and major keys once more predominated.
The new style had already established itself side by side with the
old in Henry Carey's Cantatas for a Voice with Accompanyment (1724).
Carey was the first to adapt the cantata to the formal and stylistic practices
of a recognizably home-grown vocal tradition, and in a further set of six
cantatas (1732), three uncompromisingly italianate works alternate with three
bearing a distinctive native accent. In his Three Burlesque Cantatas
(1740) Carey exploited the genre as a vehicle for anti-Italian satire through
the juxtaposition of florid italianate passages with simple rustic ballad airs,
as, for example, in The Musical Hodge Podge (‘An old woman clothed in
grey’). Maurice Greene's three extant cantatas show rather more clearly (and
certainly with greater distinction) the path the English cantata was taking,
for within the da capo structures of their arias contrapuntal development gives
way to a much more direct tunefulness, predominantly syllabic word-setting and
a homophonic texture throughout. The transformation is complete in the second
set of Six Cantatas (op.8, 1748) by John Stanley, who is very nearly the
equal to Pepusch in terms of cantata output and whose work certainly bears
comparison in all other respects. In his first set (op.3, 1742) each work has
at least one da capo aria, and one of the best works, Compell'd by sultry
Phoebus' heat, has two. But among the 13 arias in the second set there is
not a single da capo structure: one is strophic, and the remainder are binary
airs of one sort or another decked out with instrumental ritornellos. The
accompaniments are particularly elaborate, two of them requiring a full
complement of strings, while elsewhere Stanley specifies flutes, oboes and
horns, these last generally to lend an authentic flourish to the latest hunting
cantatas. Instruments feature large, too, in a delightful set of six cantatas
by William Hayes that appeared in 1748. In their imaginative scoring, originality
of form and engaging melody these cantatas are virtually unsurpassed in the
entire English repertory.
Both Stanley's and Hayes's cantatas manage to preserve something
of the intimacy of the chamber cantata while also pointing towards the
larger-scale concert works of the second half of the century, for the most part
destined for performance with full orchestral accompaniment in the London
pleasure gardens. Such was the demand that between 1750 and 1785 some 50
composers contributed to the English cantata repertory, and the number of works
produced far outstrips that for before 1750. William Boyce was among the first
to contribute vocal music regularly to the gardens' programmes. He is best
represented by the cantatas in five of his six volumes of Lyra Britannica
(1747–59). In the last of these, Thou rising sun, clean-cut divisions
between recitative and aria are abandoned altogether in favour of a continuous
succession of short declamatory and lyrical sections responding closely to the
text.
Nearly all of Thomas Arne's 15 extant cantatas were written for
the Vauxhall, Ranelagh or Marylebone gardens, and as a consequence most demand
appreciable instrumental forces. His Six Cantatas for a Voice and
Instruments (1755), for instance, calls for what amounts to a small chamber
orchestra of four-part strings and various combinations of flutes, oboes, horns
and bassoons. What recitative remains is very brief and usually acompanied by
instruments, while the arias aim for symmetrically balanced phrases in a
variety of binary forms and sometimes rather bolder, innovatory structures.
Burney tells us that ‘in 1762, Arne quitted the former style of melody … and
furnished Vauxhall and the whole kingdom with such songs as had improved and
polished our national taste’ – that is, in the galant style, which
breathed new life into the English cantata sufficient to sustain it more or
less to the end of the century. Most other composers associated with the
pleasure gardens at the time, however, fell prey to the public demand for ever
more extravagant displays of vocal virtuosity. During the 1770s and 80s James
Hook, J.A. Fisher, John Potter, Tommaso Giordani, William Bates and John Worgan
turned out cantatas rather routinely for each season, which were subsequently
printed in their annual collections of pleasure gardens songs. Some of these
consist of no more than a perfunctory recitative followed by a single
over-inflated aria whose interest lies in the sheer excess of its coloratura
phrases, though some also incorporate simple strophic airs and a by then hugely
popular rondo. Full orchestral accompaniments were the norm, though for the
most part these are impossible to reconstruct reliably from the rather
haphazard short-score format in which they were published.
The history of the English cantata draws to a close in the 1790s
with a handful of banal and sentimental works, such as Venanzio Rauzzini's Old
Oliver, or The Dying Shepherd. The posthumous vocal music of the two Thomas
Linleys, father and son, published in two volumes around 1800, adds another
half-dozen works of considerable merit to the repertory, the finest of which is
the younger Linley's orchestrally accompanied Darthula (‘Daughter of
heav'n’) in the second volume. Though probably not the very last solo English
cantatas to be composed, these were the last to be published and they contain
music as fine as any to be found in the entire repertory of the English cantata
during its cultivation over the preceding century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BurneyH
HawkinsH
H.D. Johnstone: ‘English Solo Song, c1710–1760’, PRMA, xcv (1968–9), 67–80
M. Boyd: ‘English Secular Cantatas in the Eighteenth Century’, MR, xxx (1969), 85–97
T. Frost: ‘The Cantatas of John Stanley (1713–86)’, ML, liii (1972), 284–92
R. Goodall: Eighteenth-Century
English Secular Cantatas (New York, 1989)
Cantata
V. The Spanish cantata to 1800
1. Terminology and
context.
2. Sources.
3. History.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cantata, §V: The
Spanish cantata to 1800
1. Terminology and context.
The existence of a Spanish cantata tradition, extending from the
late 17th century to the end of the 18th, in the Iberian peninsula and the
American territories of the Spanish empire was until recently largely unknown,
mainly for historiographical and aesthetic reasons. The traditional
musicological approach to Spanish music of the 17th and 18th centuries focussed
on the vernacular and viewed the introduction of Italian forms simply as
evidence of the decadence of the main 17th-century Spanish genres, the sacred
choral villancico and the solo tono humano (secular song) and tono
divino (sacred song). As a result, music dictionaries and encyclopedias
have usually included no reference to Spanish works in their normally extensive
coverage of the cantata (except perhaps to refer to them briefly in an entry on
the villancico), thus presenting an incomplete picture of the development,
assimilation and diffusion of the cantata in Europe and the Americas.
Villancicos and tonos reflect the close adherence of
17th-century Iberian composers to strophic songs (coplas) with refrain (estribillo).
In the late 17th century this repertory began occasionally to include
recitative and aria sections as well, and this gradual transformation of the
villancico and the tono makes it difficult to draw a clear line between
the older genres and the new cantata – a distinction that it is nevertheless
desirable to make, since the inclusion of texts with varying metres,
multi-sectional musical structures and ‘modern’ instrumental and vocal styles
represented something entirely new in Spain. The use of ‘cantata’ as a term to
denote those church and chamber repertories in Spanish which include
recitatives and arias may serve to elucidate some of the changes in the
configuration of genres which took place in Spain around 1700.
Like the villancico and the tono, the Spanish cantata was
closely connected with theatre music; church and chamber cantatas were
frequently composed and performed by musicians also active in producing
zarzuelas and operas, which shared the same basic structures and innovations.
Because of this relationship with the secular sphere, the sacred cantata was
strongly objected to on moral grounds by many writers and theorists, including
Benito Feijóo y Montenegro, in the first volume of his highly influential Teatro
crítico universal (Madrid, 1726), and J.F. de Sayas, who in his Música
canónica (Pamplona, 1761) characterized the cantata as ‘cantada teatral’.
Francesc Valls, in his Mapa armónico práctico (1742), clearly assigned
the villancico to the ‘estilo madrigalesco’ and the cantata and oratorio to the
‘género dramático o recitativo’. This relationship, based on the sharing of
formal and stylistic features, was accentuated by the widespread practice of
circulating musical scenes from plays and zarzuelas as independent cantatas,
continuing the well-established use of theatrical tonos outside their
original dramatic context.
The terminology used for the Spanish cantata fluctuates, some
sources stressing the continuity of functions by retaining traditional names
such as ‘villancico’ or ‘tonada’ for pieces which already embody recitative and
da capo aria, others stressing their stylistic and structural innovations
through the new term ‘cantada’. As in Venice and France, the term ‘cantada’
co-existed alongside ‘cantata’ during the 18th century, though ‘cantada’ was
the form most used.
The 18th-century Spanish cantata was cultivated both as a secular
and as a sacred genre; the term ‘cantada humana’ was used for a secular cantata
with a Spanish text. A more specific terminology based on liturgical context
was used for the sacred cantata, such as ‘cantada al Santísimo’, ‘cantada de
Navidad’, and ‘cantada de Reyes’ for pieces relating to the Eucharist,
Christmas and Epiphany respectively. These were the most important of the
numerous feasts and celebrations for which sacred cantatas were written. Those
for Christmas and Epiphany were sung at Matins, where traditionally villancicos
in Spanish had been included in each nocturn, interpolated between the different
lessons and responsories or actually substituting for the latter. The cantada
al Santísimo is by far the most numerous type to be found in musical
sources, since its use in the Mass and other services (including Corpus Christi
and the Forty Hours Devotion) permitted repeated performance throughout the
year. In all these cases the sacred cantata took over the functions of the
sacred villancico and tono divino, which, however, continued to be
composed in the 18th century.
Adaptations or parodies of secular cantatas as sacred works are
frequent, and sacred pieces were also adapted to serve new liturgical
functions. The term ‘trova’ appears consistently in the sources to designate
this kind of parody. Texts of secular cantatas generally follow the pastoral and
amorous conventions of the Italian model and are scored for soprano and
continuo, sometimes with obbligato solo instruments such as the violin, oboe or
harp. Sacred cantatas are for one or two solo voices and instruments, or for
choral ensemble, mostly in combination with a soloist. The scoring of sacred
cantatas became increasingly elaborate during the 18th century; one or two
oboes, flutes, horns and trumpets were added to the standard string ensemble.
Related secular genres such as the chamber duet and the serenata
were also composed with Spanish texts, but were less important. The oratorio,
frequently presented as a set of four cantatas, developed important local
traditions in such places as Barcelona, Valencia and Zaragoza. The present
state of research allows only a broad presentation of the main sources and
composers related to this vast repertory; this is especially true of sacred
cantatas, the composition of which was part of the professional duties of
almost every maestro de capilla at least until the 1750s. The secular
cantata, although less abundant, also played a prominent role in the first half
of the 18th century.
Cantata, §V: The
Spanish cantata to 1800
2. Sources.
Spanish cantatas are transmitted in a variety of sources,
including manuscript anthologies (mostly for the secular repertory), autograph
scores, individual performing parts copied in pliegos (single sheets,
continuing the main method of transmitting Spanish secular and sacred music
during the previous century) and a huge number of librettos or chap-books
printed each year by the main chapels and musical institutions and containing
the texts of the villancicos and cantatas for Christmas and Epiphany. Texts
were also printed for other occasions, such as festivities celebrating local
patrons or the professions of nuns. The music, too, was sometimes printed: 12
secular cantatas by Emanuele d’Astorga with both Spanish and Italian texts were
published in Lisbon in 1726, and Jayme de la Tê y Sagau issued 166 secular and
87 sacred cantatas in Lisbon between 1715 and 1726. The number of editions
printed in Madrid during the first third of the 18th century by Joseph de
Torres y Martínez Bravo is unknown; they included both secular and sacred
cantatas.
The manuscript sources discussed here fall into two groups:
secular anthologies which transmit a substantial part of the known chamber
repertory, and sacred cantatas in cathedral sources known from catalogues and
other specialized literature. The three main secular anthologies dating from
before 1730 are those at Lisbon (P-Ln Pombalino 82, compiled c1708),
Cardiff (GB-CDp Mackworth 1.14, copied c1715) and Madrid (E-Mn
M 2618, c1730). Provenance and function are different in each case: the
Pombalino manuscript is of Portuguese origin and contains mainly Spanish
cantatas by Portuguese composers such as André da Costa, Francisco José
Coutinho and the Marques de Cabrera, together with others by Spaniards such as
Sebastián Durón, Pedro Rabassa and Jayme de la Tê y Sagau; the Cardiff source
is probably of Italian origin, copied from single sheets and containing 18
cantatas in score, 11 of which are attributed to Torres; M 2618 was certainly
copied in Madrid and includes 23 pieces, carefully classified as solos, tonadas
and cantadas, by Juan Hidalgo, Sebastián Durón, Juan de Navas, Antonio
Cabezudo, Antonio Literes, Joseph de Torres and Juan Serqueira, 17 of which are
cantatas. It is noteworthy that at least three of the cantatas in M 2618 are
nothing other than fragments of zarzuelas included without any reference to
their original dramatic context and labelled ‘cantada humana’. Conversely, two
chamber cantatas in this anthology are also known to have been used as the
musical and theatrical kernel of an independent dramatic dance in the form of
an intermezzo (baile de la cantada). That a musical section made up
basically of a succession of recitative and da capo arias inserted into a
theatrical piece could also be considered a cantata is shown by a print of the
music by Joaquín Martínez de la Roca for the play Los desagravios de Troya
(Madrid, 1712), where the musical interventions of Venus and Juno are headed
‘cantada’. As well as these three anthologies, there is in Paris an important
collection of secular cantatas of Catalan provenance (F-Pn 8040)
containing 12 cantatas of which three are attributed to Valls, the rest being
anonymous. This source is therefore different from the type of retrospective
compilation of works by various composers exemplified by the other secular
anthologies.
While these secular anthologies are all in public libraries, the
sources for most sacred (and also some secular) cantatas are in cathedral
archives, and these represent only a fraction of the numerous works of this
kind heard in cathedrals and churches. Almost all Spanish capillas
performed cantatas by their own maestros and musicians in addition to
those that circulated widely between the various cathedrals, monasteries,
collegiate churches and confraternities. As well as the important urban centres
of the former kingdom of Aragon, such as Valencia and Barcelona, which had
regular contacts with the Italian peninsula, some Castilian and Andalusian
cathedrals played an important role in the development of the genre. Manuscript
anthologies dedicated to a single composer are not common, but two examples may
show the importance of this kind of source: four volumes of compositions by
José Martínez de Arce (E-V) contain a substantial number of cantatas,
and three volumes of music by Juan Manuel de la Puente (E-JA) over 100
sacred and 14 secular cantatas. Also in Andalusia, Málaga Cathedral holds a
large proportion of the cantatas written by its maestro de capilla Juan
Francés de Iribarren. In Castile there are (in addition to the Valladolid sources)
important collections of sacred cantatas in Palencia (84 by Francisco Pascual
Ramírez dating from 1717 to 1742) and Salamanca (31 by Antonio Yanguas, 262 by
Juan Martín and 26 by Manuel Doyagüe). The monastery of El Escorial holds 19
cantatas by Antonio Soler and, outside the peninsula, Las Palmas Cathedral in
the Canary Islands possesses an interesting collection of sacred cantatas dated
between 1735 and 1772 by Joaquín García. Spanish cantatas were also widely
performed in the main American centres, and one of the largest collections of
Spanish cantatas by Torres, Literes and Nebra is in Guatemala Cathedral.
Cantata, §V: The
Spanish cantata to 1800
3. History.
A precise chronology for the introduction and early history of the
cantata in Spain remains to be determined, but it was certainly linked to the
Spanish court and its main Italian connections in Rome and Naples. The Guerra
Manuscript (E-SCu), a recently discovered anthology of solo court song
from about 1680, has been related to the Italian chamber cantata by virtue of
its performing context, but it contains only pieces showing the familiar estribillo–coplas
arrangement. In the sacred repertory recitative appears sporadically in some
villancico settings from the 1670s onwards and possibly earlier, notably those
in the royal monasteries of the Encarnación and the Descalzas Reales in Madrid
and in Toledo Cathedral. The use of recitative is mainly related to the
theatrical dimension of these festivities, as can be deduced from the surviving
texts. In Valencia recitative also appears, along with traditional tonos
and choral interventions, from at least 1685 in quasi-theatrical spectacles
performed in academies. The metrical structures of the extant texts suggest in
most cases a recitative–arioso–recitative (R–Ar–R) setting. Aria-like items are
rare before the turn of the century, probably because the difference with the estribillo
settings was not felt as decisive. An exception is a villancico for Christmas
1696 in Toledo conceived as a dialogue between the Soul and Christ and set to
music by Pedro Ardanaz. This adopts the textual form of estribillo and
an introducción followed by a recitative for the Soul, into which a song
by the infant Jesus is interpolated, and a closing arieta – a
configuration close to the oldest secular cantatas and to the contemporary
zarzuela.
Outside Madrid, which influenced most of the Iberian peninsula and
the colonies, Valencia, Barcelona and Zaragoza played an important role in the
process of adapting the Italian cantata to the Spanish tradition. The presence
in Barcelona, between 1705 and 1713, of an important group of Italian musicians
at the court of Charles of Habsburg must account for a distinctive Catalonian
cantata tradition which is evident as early as 1710 in Elissa gran reyna,
a tono a solo humano by Rabassa showing the ‘mixed’ sequence estribillo–coplas–R–A
(A = aria), a type of structure continued in the Parisian Valls manuscript (see
§2). Manuscripts in Madrid (E-Mn 14097) and Valencia (Biblioteca Serrano
Morales, 6366), which bring together 465 texts by José Vicente Ortí y Mayor for
villancicos and cantatas (including 97 of the latter), clearly show the
importance of the cantata in the kingdom of Valencia, where composers such as
Matías Navarro, Pedro Rabassa, Antonio Teodoro Ortells and José Pradas Gallén
were active.
The gradual evolution of Spanish musical practice during the 17th
century received a decisive impulse from the establishment of the new Bourbon
dynasty in 1700, which encouraged the influence of Italian musicians, singers
and compositional models related to opera and cantata. A group of manuscript
anthologies (E-Mn M 2244–52) related to the Spanish court documents the
reception of cantatas by Alessandro Scarlatti, Giovanni Bononcini and Albinoni
at the beginning of the 18th century. Early examples of the Spanish cantata,
both secular and sacred, present an interesting amalgam of, on the one hand,
the traditional estribillo–coplas, the Spanish theatrical lament
adapted as a closing slow section (Grave) in triple time and various popular
poetic metres such as the seguidilla and, on the other hand, the
recitative–da capo aria module of the Italian chamber cantata, to which
dance-songs such as the French minuet were frequently added as one of the final
sections.
Sebastián Durón, maestro of the royal chapel between 1701
and 1706, was one of the leading composers in the development of the Spanish
cantata around 1700. Two secular cantatas (in addition to two pseudo-cantatas
extracted from zarzuelas) and three sacred cantatas, all dedicated to the
Eucharist, are known. The two secular cantatas contained in the Pombalino
manuscript (P-Ln 82) are probably among the earliest known Spanish
examples of the genre. Al apacible sombra shows the sequence
Ar–A–R–A–Grave–coplas; En el profundo valle (also in the Cardiff
MS) uses the scheme Ar–R–A–R–Ar–Fuga–Grave. The sacred cantata Ay de mí, que
el llanto y la tristeza (in GCA-Gc) seems also to belong to an early
stage, consisting of a short aria with two strophes preceded and followed by
recitative in arioso style. Ay que me abraso de amor, one of the
cantatas in Palencia Cathedral but probably dating from Durón’s Madrid period
(1691–1706), is stylistically more advanced, with its two idiomatic obbligato
violins, da capo aria and clear sectional scheme of estribillo–R–A–coplas–estribillo.
Atiendan escuchen, the other Palencian piece by Durón (designated
‘Cantada al Santísimo’ in the source), uses the traditional form of an estribillo
and four coplas. In this case it is the vocal style of the estribillo,
which includes text repetition and melismatic melodic sequences, which perhaps
explains why this piece was designated a cantata.
The earliest known cantatas in Latin America date from the early
18th century. A copy dated 1719 of Si el alba sonora, a Christmas
cantata for two sopranos and instruments by Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco in
Cuzco Cathedral, Peru, shows the sequence estribillo (duet)–R–A–R–A–estribillo
(duet). The piece is reminiscent of the earliest Spanish examples in that its
recitative is always close to arioso and its arias use a simple form without da
capo.
At the Spanish court in the first third of the 18th century the
cantata was especially cultivated by such composers as Joseph de Torres, who
succeeded Durón as maestro of the royal chapel, and Antonio Literes, one
of the main theatre composers of the early 18th century. About 40 cantatas by
Torres and about 30 by Literes have survived. Literes’s Ah del rústico país
is one of the few early sacred cantatas that can be precisely documented. Its
text appears in a chap-book of the royal chapel in Madrid for Epiphany 1710,
and dated performing parts for soprano, violins, obbligato oboe and continuo
also survive (E-E 61.1). Its sectional structure
([Introduction]–R–A–R–A–R–Minuet–Grave) clearly reflects the practice
documented by royal chapel librettos between 1703 and 1720. A similar
development may be observed in other centres which seem to have introduced the
cantata in various festivities around 1710. Surviving librettos show that in
Zaragoza Joaquín Martínez de la Roca regularly composed sets of cantatas
between 1709 and 1714 for Christmas and Epiphany Matins in Nuestra Señora del
Pilar, a tradition effectively maintained by Luis Serra between 1716 and 1757.
In general there was a clear tendency during the 1720s to simplify the
structure, and by about 1730 this conformed predominantly to the Italian model,
R–A–R–A. Italian composers at the Spanish court adapted this model to Spanish
texts, as can be seen in the Venetian Giacomo Facco’s Si el ave, si la fiera
(E-Mn 5004). Seven cantatas written in 1734 by the Roman court composer
Philipo Falconi for Epiphany Matins at the royal chapel in Madrid use basically
the same layout except for the last cantata, which shows a slightly different
sequence, estribillo–R–A–R–A–R–estribillo. Other Italian
composers, including the Milanese Roque Ceruti, who worked with his disciple
José de Orejón y Aparicio in Lima, were fulfilling a similar role in the
American colonies. Ceruti’s ‘cantada sola a nuestra Señora’, De aquel
inmenso mar interminable (Sucre, Biblioteca nacional de Bolivia, MS 51),
shows the usual R–A–R–A pattern, whereas Orejón’s Mariposa de sus rayos
(Lima, Archivo Arzobispal) shows the later R–A structure and is similar in
style to the cantatas and zarzuelas of the Spanish court composer José Nebra.
Italian cantatas were not only taken as models but also directly adapted in
Spain and Latin America, as can be seen in the numerous sacred Spanish parodies
of cantatas by Vinci, Porpora, Astorga, Hasse and others.
Formal and stylistic innovation was possible only within the
limits of the well-established traditions and functions of the sacred
villancico, as is shown by Torres’s interesting Latin ‘cantada al Santísimo al
estilo italiano’. Flavescite, serenate (published as an appendix to his
1712 edition of Montanos’s Arte de canto llano), with its sequence A–R–A
Grave–R–A–Alegre (‘Aleluia’) clearly inspired by the Italian motet tradition,
was a unique experiment, as it was crossing the clearly established boundaries
between Latin and Spanish genres. The 74 cantatas of Francisco Courcelle,
Torres’s successor at the royal chapel, show the importance at court of the
sacred cantata in the 1740s; 58 of them are for solo voice and instruments.
Other important composers active at court, such as Nebra and Luigi Boccherini,
composed sacred cantatas as a part of their professional duties. Nevertheless,
the era of the Spanish sacred cantata was coming to its end, partly as a result
of enlightened liturgical reforms during the second half of the 18th century,
which affected mainly the performance of pieces in Spanish during the Christmas
and Epiphany services (see Villancico, §2). In some centres the
practice ceased, as it did at the royal chapel in Madrid in 1750 and the
cathedral of Zaragoza in 1757, while in others, such as Toledo or Valencia, it
continued until the end of the century. In Seville, Málaga and certain other
cities Christmas and Epiphany cantatas were still being performed until the
early 1780s. Cantatas for the Eucharist were not affected by these prohibitions
and continued to be composed until the early 19th century. Arias tended to expand
and become a showcase for the virtuosity of the singer, to such a degree that
the cantata took on the mantle of a concert aria. With composers such as F.J.
García Fajer, the influential maestro de capilla at Zaragoza from 1756
to 1809, cantatas appear increasingly as ‘Aria al Santísimo’ and take the form
of an accompanied recitative and an extended da capo aria.
Cantata, §V: The
Spanish cantata to 1800
BIBLIOGRAPHY
StevensonRB
V. Ripollés, ed.: El
villancico i la cantata del segle XVIII a València
(Barcelona, 1935)
M. Querol, ed.: Cantatas y
canciones para voz solista e instrumentos (1640–1760),
MME, xxxv (1975)
A. Martín
Moreno:
‘El compositor mallorquín Antonio
Literes (1673–1747)’, TSM, no.643 (1978), 24–6
M. Querol: ‘El cultivo de la cantata en España y la producción musical de Juan
Francés de Iribarren (1698–1767)’, Eusko-Ikaskuntza, Sociedad de Estudios Vascos, Cuadernos de sección:
Música, i (1982), 117–28
J.H. Baron, ed.: Spanish Art
Song in the Seventeenth Century, RRMBE, xlix (1985)
P. Hernández
Balaguer:
Los villancicos, cantadas y pastorales de Esteban Salas (Havana, 1986)
P.J. Cavallé: ‘Las cantatas de Juan Manuel de la Puente, maestro de capilla de la
Catedral de Jaén (1711–1753)’, Recerca
musicológica, ix–x (1989–90), 341–58
M. Sánchez
Siscart:
‘Evolución formal del villancico y el
oratorio dieciochesco en las catedrales aragonesas’,
ibid., 327–40
J.H. Baron: ‘Spanish Solo Art Song in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century’, De musica hispana et aliis: miscelánea en
honor al Prof. Dr. José López-Calo, ed. E. Casares and
C. Villanueva (Santiago de Compostela, 1990), i, 451–76
M. Sánchez
Siscart:
‘El villancico en la teoría literaria y
musical del siglo XVIII’, Nassarre, vi/2 (1990), 165–88
F. Bonastre: ‘Pere Rabassa … “Lo descans de mestre Valls”: notes a l’entorn del tono
Elissa gran Reyna de Rabassa i la missa Scala Aretina de Francesc Valls’, Butlletí de la Real acadèmia catalana de
belles arts de Sant Jordi, iv–v (1990–91), 81–104
A. Tello, ed.: Manuel de
Sumaya: Cantadas y Villancicos, Tesoro de la música
polifónica en Mexico, vii (Mexico City, 1994)
J.J. Carreras: ‘La cantata de cámara en España a principios del siglo XVIII: el
manuscrito 2618 de la Bibliboteca nacional de Madrid y sus concordancias’, Música y literatura en la Península
Ibérica, 1600–1750: Valladolid 1995, 65–126
L. Jambou: ‘Cantatas solísticas de Valls y compositores anónimos: identidad y
ruptura estilística; apuntes para un estudio’, RdMc, xviii (1995), 291–325
G.A.R. Veneziano: ‘Un ‘corpus’ de cantatas napolitanas del siglo XVIII en Zaragoza:
problemas de difusión del repertorio italiano en España’,
Artigrama, xii, (1996–7), 277–92
P. Laird: Towards a
History of the Villancico (Detroit, MI, 1997)
Á. Torrente: The Sacred
Villancico in Early Eighteenth-Century Spain: the Repertory of Salamanca
Cathedral (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1997)
Á. Torrente: ‘La cantata española en los albores del Setecientos’, Scherzo, no.117 (1997), 114–17
J.J. Carreras: ‘Spanish Cantatas in the Mackworth Collection at Cardiff’, Music in Spain During the Eighteenth
Century, ed. M. Boyd and J.J. Carreras (Cambridge, 1998), 108–22
G. Doderer: ‘An Unknown Repertory: the Cantatas of Jayme de la Tê y Sagau (Lisbon,
1715–1726)’, ibid., 80–107
Á. Torrente: ‘Italianate Sections in the Villancicos of the Royal Chapel, 1700–40’, ibid., 72–9
Á. Torrente and P.-L. Rodríguez: ‘The “Guerra Manuscript” (c.1680) and the Rise of Solo Song in
Spain’, JRMA, cxxiii (1998), 147–89
A. Bombi: Entre
tradición y renovación: el italianismo musical en Valencia (1685–1739) (diss., U. of Zaragoza, forthcoming)
Cantata
VI. The cantata since 1800
Since the beginning of the 19th century the term ‘cantata’ has
been applied to such a variety of works that a straightforward account of its
development is hardly possible. One can only point to certain stylistic and
structural features associated with particularly important composers or centres
of activity. The single most conspicuous change affecting the cantata during
this period was its transformation from a work for a few solo voices, sometimes
with chorus, to one for chorus and orchestra, and even this was less a case of
genuine evolution than the simple appropriation of a term that had by then lost
its original connotation, at least as far as secular music was concerned. The
19th-century cantata is, in short, an entirely different kind of cantata from
that of the preceding two centuries, to which it is connected by only the most
tenuous links.
As a form of chamber music the solo cantata hardly outlived the
Baroque period, although its influence was still felt in isolated works, such
as Mozart's Eine kleine deutsche Kantate k619
(1791), and Schubert's Der Hirt auf dem Felsen d965
(1828). The orchestrally accompanied solo cantata of Pergolesi, Hasse and their
contemporaries (see §I, above) may be said to have survived into the next
period and even into the next century in the form of the concert aria and
scena, exemplified in Mozart's Ch'io mi scordi di te k505
(1786), Haydn's Scena di Berenice (1795), Beethoven's Ah! perfido!
(1796), Berlioz's Cléopâtre (1829) and Mendelssohn's Infelice
(1834–43). Such works, however, were not normally called cantatas, and from
Haydn's time onwards the term has been reserved almost exclusively for choral
compositions with orchestra, usually including parts for solo voices. In this
sense the line between cantata and secular oratorio is not always easy to draw,
although the cantata is usually the shorter work. It is even more difficult
(and perhaps hardly worth attempting) to distinguish between the choral cantata
and similar choral works called ‘ode’ or ‘ballad’ or having no generic title at
all. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries the term ‘cantata’ seems to have
been particularly favoured for commemorative or occasional works on a fairly
large scale and with a strong sense of public involvement. Examples include
Haydn's Esterházy Festkantate (1763–4) for the nameday of Prince
Nikolaus Esterházy, Beethoven's Der glorreiche Augenblick for the
Congress of Vienna (1814) and Weber's Jubel-Cantate (1818) for the 50th
anniversary of the accession of Friedrich August I of Saxony. In 1845 Liszt
wrote a Festkantate for the celebrations that accompanied the opening of
the Beethoven monument in Bonn.
Works such as these have rarely outlived the occasions for which
they were written, but during the 19th century the demand arose for choral
works of modest proportions that could be put to normal concert use,
particularly in Austria, Germany and England, where choral singing flourished.
In Austria and Germany the medium of chorus and orchestra was held in high
esteem, with Beethoven's Mass in D and Ninth Symphony as towering examples
worthy of all emulation. It is perhaps significant that Schumann's eulogistic
notice of Brahms's early music (in NZM, 1853) called upon the young
composer to ‘direct his magic wand where the powers of the masses in chorus and
orchestra may lend him their forces’. Schumann himself had recently completed a
number of important works for chorus and orchestra, including Vom Pagen und
der Königstochter (1852), a cycle of four ballads to poems by Emanuel
Geibel; and Brahms later contributed notably to the form in such works as the Schicksalslied
(1868–71), Nänie (1880–81) and a setting of Goethe's Gesang der
Parzen (1883). Bruckner's six cantatas are all relatively early, but
similar works for male-voice choir (with or without accompaniment) figure
prominently in his output from his earliest works to his last completed
composition, Helgoland (1893). They form part of a long tradition in
German music, stretching at least as far back as Mozart's masonic cantatas and
continuing into the 20th century with such works as Schoenberg's Six Pieces op.35
(1930) and A Survivor from Warsaw (1947). Of 19th-century works in this
tradition those known best outside Germany are probably Brahms's cantata Rinaldo
(1863–8) and his Rhapsodie (1869) for contralto solo, male chorus and
orchestra. Inside Germany the works for male voices by Max Bruch are specially
important. His Frithjof (1864) took the cantata into the realms of
Nordic saga and served as a fruitful example for several other German
composers. During the first half of the 20th century German schools and youth
movements were served with numerous cantatas written in a deliberately popular
style and directed towards patriotic or political ends.
The cantata occupied a special place in French academic circles,
since it was the prescribed form in which aspirants to the coveted Prix de
Rome, awarded annually by the Institut de France, were required to demonstrate
their powers. At first a cantata for solo voice and orchestra was required, and
it was for this medium that Berlioz wrote in his three attempts at the Grand
Prix, succeeding finally in 1830 with Sardanapale. Later the required
number of vocal parts was increased to two, and by the time of Debussy's two
attempts, the unsuccessful Le gladiateur (1883) and the successful L'enfant
prodigue (1884), a cantata for three solo voices, chorus and orchestra was
required. L'enfant prodigue is probably the only Prix de Rome cantata
still performed (albeit infrequently); most of the others are now forgotten,
along with the composers who wrote them.
While serious opera and the larger orchestral forms of symphony
and concerto were for the most part neglected by British composers in the 19th
century, the cantata occupied a position second only in importance to that of
the oratorio. Many cantatas were written for the big annual or triennial
festivals at Norwich, Leeds, Birmingham and elsewhere, and the form played an
important role in what has often been described as the ‘English renascence’ of
the last two decades of the century. Those by Parry – for example Prometheus
Unbound (1880) and Blest Pair of Sirens (1887) – are mostly choral
odes, but they are not generically different from the cantatas of Cowen,
Mackenzie and the other composers with whom Parry shared the responsibility of
keeping English choral societies supplied with the kind of music on which they
thrived. Parry was, however, unusually discriminating in his choice of texts.
The poets he set include Pope, Milton, Swinburne, Tennyson and Bridges, whereas
most other composers were content to accept texts offered to them by
contemporaries of no distinction. Among the several cantata texts by the music
critic Joseph Bennett was that for Sullivan's once popular The Golden Legend
(1886). Stanford's greatest successes came with his choral ballads,
particularly The Revenge (written for the Leeds Festival of 1886), The
Battle of the Baltic (Three Choirs Festival, 1891) and Phaudrig Crohoore
(Norwich Festival, 1896). The festival cantata continued well into the 20th
century to provide the best opportunity for the young and unestablished
composer to try his hand at a large-scale work. It was with such pieces as The
Black Knight (1893), King Olaf (1896) and Caractacus (1898),
all written for English festivals, that Elgar made his early reputation, even
if wider recognition came only when he managed to break away from this
tradition. Vaughan Williams, too, wrote important festival cantatas, including Toward
the Unknown Region (Leeds, 1907) and comparable works such as Five
Mystical Songs (Three Choirs, 1911) and Five Tudor Portraits
(Norwich, 1936). His equally valuable sacred cantatas include Sancta civitas
(Oxford, 1926), Benedicite (Leith Hill, 1930), Dona nobis pacem
(Huddersfield, 1936) and Hodie (Three Choirs, 1954). During the 20th
century, interest in instrumental music increased in Britain, and the general
standard of orchestral playing improved, while the number and size of choral
societies declined. The result was to remove the big festival cantata from the
central position it once held, though works of this type continued to be
written for special occasions. Britten's Cantata academica, for the
500th anniversary of Basle University in 1960, and his Cantata misericordium,
for the centenary celebrations of the International Red Cross at Geneva (1963),
are particularly pertinent to the occasions for which they were composed, while
possessing other qualities likely to ensure their continued revival.
It is not so much the vast number as the wide variety (both
textual and musical) of 20th-century cantatas that defies classification. An
idea of this variety can be gained by noting a few works to which the title of
cantata has been applied by some of the more important composers. Bartók's Cantata
profana (1930) is a large-scale composition based on a Romanian folk
legend; in Alexander Nevsky (1938–9) Prokofiev drew upon music he had
written for Eisenstein's film of the same title; Webern's two cantatas (1939
and 1942) are strict serial works; and Stravinsky's Cantata (1952) used stanzas
from the 15th-century Lyke-wake Dirge as a frame for other anonymous
English lyrics and is scored for soprano and tenor soloists, women's chorus and
small instrumental ensemble. With these works a stage has clearly been reached
where any attempt to trace the development of the cantata as an independent,
identifiable genre is certain to prove unfruitful, if not impossible.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
G. Schwanbeck: Die
dramatische Chorkantate der Romantik (Düsseldorf, 1938)
H. Schnoor: Oratorien
und weltliche Chorwerke (Leipzig, 1939)
W. Konold: Weltliche
Kantaten im 20. Jahrhundert (Wolfenbüttel and Zürich, 1975)
D. Griggs-Janower: ‘Mendelssohn's Chorale Cantatas: a Well-Kept Secret’, Choral Journal,
xxxiii/4 (1992–3), 31–3
U. Wüster: Felix
Mendelssohn Bartholdys Choralkantaten – Gestalt und Idee: Versuch einer
historisch-kritischen Interpretation (Frankfurt, 1996)