Cavatina

(It.; Fr. cavatine; Ger. Kavatine).

In 18th-century opera the term, the diminutive of Cavata, signifies a short Aria without da capo; it may occur as an independent piece or as an interpolation in a recitative. Many such arias, though not necessarily described as cavatinas, occur in the operas of Keiser, C.H. Graun and their contemporaries: Graun’s Montezuma (1755) has an unusually large number of cavatinas, apparently at the prompting of Frederick the Great, who wrote the original libretto. Mozart used the term three times in Le nozze di Figaro (1786), for Figaro’s ‘Se vuol ballare’, the Countess’s ‘Porgi amor’ and Barbarina’s ‘L’ho perduta', and Haydn used it for Hanne’s ‘Licht und Leben’ in The Seasons (1799–1801). The tradition was maintained in the 19th century by Rossini, as in ‘Ah! che scordar non so’ in Tancredi (1813), Weber in ‘Und ob die Wolke’ in Der Freischütz (1821) and ‘Glöcklein im Thale’ in Euryanthe (1823), and by French composers, for example ‘Salut! demeure chaste et pure’ in Gounod’s Faust (1859) and the Duke’s ‘Elle sortait de sa demeure’ in Bizet’s La jolie fille de Perth (1867). While the French and German terms retained their meaning, by 1820 the Italian one was regularly applied to a principal singer’s opening aria, whether in one movement or two; but it could also serve for an elaborate aria demanding considerable virtuosity, such as Rosina’s ‘Una voce poco fa’ in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia (1816) or Lady Macbeth’s ‘Vieni! t’affretta’ in Verdi’s Macbeth (1847, rev. 1865). Modern writers frequently employ it to describe the slow first movement (more often called ‘cantabile’) of a double aria; this has no basis in 19th-century usage. The term has also been used in its original sense for a songlike piece of instrumental music, as in the penultimate movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in B op.130.

For bibliography see Aria and Cavata.