(It.: ‘excavated’).
(1) In the 17th and early 18th centuries a setting in aria style (‘arioso’) of the last line or couplet of a recitative text – i.e. an aria ‘excavated’ from recitative. The words normally sum up the sentiment of the passage, and the setting underlines their significance. This kind of cavata, which is described by Salvadori, Neumeister, Walther and Quadrio, is found in most forms of Baroque vocal music, including opera, though the most characteristic examples occur in Italian chamber cantatas from about 1670 to 1720. It may take one of a variety of forms (e.g. AA', AABB), normally exhibits a contrapuntal texture between voice and basso continuo, and is often the tonal complement of the preceding recitative. The earliest cavata is the six-bar phrase ‘La Ragion perde dov’il Senso abbonda’ in Domenico Mazzocchi’s opera La catena d’Adone (1626, Rome), while some of the latest appear in the church cantatas of Bach (e.g. bwv76 and 117).
(2) In the first half of the 18th century a substantial and carefully composed aria, with instrumental accompaniment, set to blank or rhymed verse but not in da capo form. This definition, derived from Mattheson, could apply to many cavatas of the standard type (1), but it also seems to refer to the kind of non-da capo aria, increasingly common in 18th-century opera, that came to be known as the Cavatina. By 1751 and 1760 Traetta could use the words ‘cavata’ and ‘cavatina’ apparently without distinction.
WaltherML
G.G. Salvadori: Poetica toscana all’uso (Naples, 1691), 74–5
E. Neumeister: Die allerneueste Art, zur reinen und galanten Poesie zu erlangen (Hamburg, 1706), 228
J. Mattheson: Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre (Hamburg, 1713), 183
J. Mattheson: Der vollkommene Capellmeister (Hamburg, 1739/R), 213
F.S. Quadrio: Della storia e della ragione d’ogni poesia, ii (Milan, 1741), 335
C.G. Krause: Von der musikalischen Poesie (Berlin, 1753), 128–9
N. Pirrotta: ‘Falsirena e la più antica delle cavatine’, CHM, ii (1956–7), 355–66; Eng. trans. in Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 335–42, 464
W. Osthoff: ‘Mozarts Cavatinen und ihre Tradition’, Helmuth Osthoff zu seinem siebzigsten Geburtstag, ed. W. Stauder, U. Aarburg and P. Cahn (Tutzing, 1969), 139–77
G. Allroggen: ‘Die Cavatine in der italienischen Oper des 18. Jahrhunderts’, Festschrift Arno Forchert, ed. G. Allroggen and D. Altenburg (Kassel, 1986), 142–9
C. Timms: ‘The Cavata at the Time of Vivaldi’, Nuovi studi vivaldiani: Venice 1987, i, 451–77
P. Fabbri: ‘Recitativo e cavate’, SOI, vi (1988), 180–85
COLIN TIMMS