(It.; Old It. ciciliano; Fr. sicilienne).
A term commonly used to refer to an aria type and instrumental movement popular in the late 17th and 18th centuries. It was normally in a slow 6/8 or 12/8, characterized by clear one- or two-bar phrases, a quaver upbeat giving an iambic feeling to the rhythm, simple melodies and clear, direct harmonies. From the 18th century to the 20th the siciliana was associated with pastoral scenes and melancholy emotions, and it is thought to be the basis for the Christmas carol Stille Nacht (see Haid, 1993; see also Pastoral). There have been at least two traditional uses of the term, however, apparently distinct from each other: from the 14th century until the early 17th the word denoted the singing or accompanied recitation of a particular poetic form, the strambotto siciliano; from the late 16th to the 18th the term often referred to a dance commonly considered a form of slow gigue (see Gigue (i)).
The earliest known use of the word to refer to a musical performance is in Giovanni da Prato’s novella Il paradiso degli alberi (1389), in which a character is said to have escaped boredom on a journey by singing a ‘ciciliano’ to poetry by Francesco di Vannozzo. A Florentine chronicle of 1449 describing the effects of a plague in the city mentioned that groups of young Florentines sang ‘canzoni di Sicilia’ in their attempts to forget their danger, and as late as 1609 a novella by Malaspini included a reference to the singing of ‘diverse bellissime siciliane’ by a gentleman of Messina, who accompanied himself on the lute (see Tiby). The Roman theorist Pietro della Valle claimed to have introduced the recited or declaimed siciliana to Rome, in a version he had heard in Messina in 1611, but the claim is unlikely (Della musica dell’età nostra, 1640). Della Valle added, however, the interesting information that sicilianas were most appropriate for evoking melancholy or piety, a description that may have referred to the subject matter of the poetry rather than to any musical traits.
Giustiniani remarked in 1628 (Discorso sopra la musica dei suoi tempi) that each area of Sicily had its own pattern for declaiming the siciliana, attesting to a diversity apparent in the few printed examples specifically called sicilianas in the early 17th century (e.g. in Stefani’s Affetti amorosi, RISM 161815, Scherzi amorosi, RISM 162013 and Milanuzzi’s Secondo scherzo delle ariose vaghezze, 1622). Pieces entitled ‘aria siciliana’ or ‘aria di cantar siciliano’ have in common the poetic structure of their texts; all are settings of the characteristic Sicilian form of the Strambotto, eight hendecasyllabic lines with the rhyme scheme abababab. Each consists of a declamatory vocal line, often with subtle rhythmic reflections of textual accents, above a basso continuo realized in the Spanish guitar notation and printed above the vocal part (see illustration). While some common harmonic patterns may be found among the several surviving examples, there seems to have been no standard progression or bass line for the aria siciliana such as that for the ‘aria di Ruggiero’ or the ‘aria di Fiorenza’. All arie siciliane are notated in the mensuration C, rather than in the compound duple metre usually associated with the late Baroque form. Music is normally given for the first quatrain of the text; each line has its own vocal phrase, the third and fourth lines are often linked together without an intervening cadence, and all or part of the fourth line is usually repeated. The second quatrain of the strambotto is printed beneath the music, presumably to be sung as though it were the second stanza of a strophic song. Apparently these arie siciliane were realizations of an improvisatory practice: one of the sicilianas included in Stefani’s Scherzi amorosi was printed in Remigio Romano’s Terza raccolta di bellissimi canzoni (RISM 162220), a collection of poesia per musica, with the same guitar chords indicated above the text but without any printed vocal line. Often a single aria siciliana was intended to serve for several poems, rather like the formulae Petrucci had called ‘mode di cantar sonetti’ a century earlier in his fourth frottola book.
If little is known about the repertory of arie siciliane at the beginning of the 17th century, or about the eventual fate of the form, still less is known about the dance called ‘la siciliana’. Garzoni (La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo, 1599) included the siciliana, along with better-known forms such as the pavan and galliard, in a list of the few popular dances he knew to have resisted the influence of the balletto. No Italian choreographies or descriptions of the 16th-century dance nor any musical accompaniments survive. An anonymous English manuscript of about 1570 (GB-Ob Rawl.poet. 108) includes choreographies for dances called ‘Cycyllya Alemayne’ and ‘Cycyllia Pavan’, all apparently forms of the English country dance, but it is not known if they are related to the Italian dance. The same is true for the single extant 18th-century choreography, three couplets of a dance for a gentleman and a lady entitled The Siciliana, by the English dancing master Mr Siris (1714; see Little and Marsh, no.8040). It was as a dance, however, that the siciliana was known to 18th-century theorists. Brossard (Dictionaire de musique, 1703) described the ‘canzonette siciliane’ as a kind of gigue, with its 6/8 or 12/8 metre and the characteristic dotted quaver–semiquaver–quaver figure on downbeats (he elsewhere described the figure as ‘in saltarello’), and remarked that the siciliana was usually in either rondeau or da capo form. Mattheson (Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre, 1713) linked it with the napolitana and the barcarolle, echoing Della Valle’s remarks by suggesting that it was to be performed slowly and was best used to evoke melancholy passions. Later 18th-century theorists such as Quantz, Rousseau and Türk apparently based their remarks on those of Brossard and Mattheson, stating that the dance was a kind of slow gigue with a pastoral connotation.
Some early 20th-century scholars linked the Baroque aria type with the dance; Wolff suggested that it began as a popular Venetian dance, perhaps exploiting local colour, like the forlana and napolitana; Heuss saw an early forerunner of it in the closing moresca of Monteverdi’s Orfeo (ex.1). It rapidly gained popularity in the late 17th century and was much used as an aria type in the operas of Alessandro Scarlatti and his contemporaries. Although arias in 12/8 had already appeared (e.g. ‘Piangi ch’assai mi piace’ in Carlo Pallavicino’s Galieno, 1675), Scarlatti used them abundantly, though not always marking them clearly as sicilianas. 13 of the 49 vocal numbers in La caduta de’ Decemviri (1697), for example, are in 12/8, although the fast tempos implied for some of them suggest gighe rather than sicilianas. Scarlatti also frequently used the Neapolitan 6th in his sicilianas, with the flat supertonic in the upper part, a trait common in siciliana arias by his contemporaries and followers such as Perti, Caldara, Lotti, Porpora and Handel. Few of the arias on pastoral or melancholy texts in a slow 12/8 are actually marked sicilianas. Of Handel’s 50 such arias only one, ‘Gioje, venite in sen’ from Amadigi (1715), is so entitled (ex.2). Similarly, Bach seldom labelled the siciliana arias in his cantatas as such, although ‘Stirb’ in mir, Welt’ from the cantata Gott soll allein mein Herze haben (bwv169) is a transcription of a concerto movement he called ‘Siciliano’ in the arrangement he later made of it in his Harpsichord Concerto in E (bwv1053). Slow cantabile arias in 12/8 continued to enjoy popularity throughout the 18th century in both opera and sacred music. Handel used the siciliana style for ‘Your charms to ruin led the way’ in Samson (1743) and for ‘And he shall feed his flock’ in Messiah as well as for many arias, mostly in pathetic situations, in his operas; Haydn may have intended to evoke the pastoral with the 6/8 metre of ‘With verdure clad’ in The Creation, and Mozart in the chorus ‘Placido è il mar’ in Idomeneo and ‘Deh vieni, non tardar’ in Le nozze di Figaro.
Siciliana movements appeared in much 18th-century instrumental music, especially in works influenced by Italian style. The movement entitled ‘La paix’ in Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, for example, seems to be a siciliana, as does the Sinfonia opening the second cantata of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. Bach, Handel, Telemann, Domenico Scarlatti, J.-M. Leclair and François Couperin wrote siciliana movements conforming to the traditional simplicity of style, with short phrases and the characteristic 12/8 metre, but there seem to have been other possibilities. Ex.3 shows the beginning of a movement from J.-F. Rebel’s Les élémens (1737–8), marked ‘Siciliane’ though written in 3 (effectively 3/4) rather than 6/8 or 12/8; similar examples can be found in the works of Bonporti. Siciliana movements continued to be written in the late 18th century, as in the slow movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in A major k488 and Haydn’s String Quartet op.20 no.5. After the 18th century, however, the style fell into disuse; Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable (1831) includes a fast ‘sicilienne’ in the finale of Act 1, and Fauré used a siciliana in the third entr’acte of his incidental music for Pelléas et Mélisande (1898), but these examples seem to have been exceptional.
A. Heuss: Die Instrumentalstücke des ‘Orfeo’ und die venezianischen Opernsinfonien (diss., U. of Leipzig, 1903; extract in SIMG, iv, 1902–3)
E.J. Dent: Alessandro Scarlatti (London, 1905, rev. 2/1960 by F. Walker)
H.C. Wolff: Die venezianische Oper in der zweiten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1937, 2/1975)
O. Tiby: ‘Il problema della “siciliana” dal Trecento al Settecento’, Bolletino del Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani, ii (1954), 245–70
I. Hermann-Bengen: Tempobezeichnungen, Münchner Veröffentlichungen zur Musikgeschichte, i (Tutzing, 1959)
D. Finke-Hecklinger: Tanzcharaktere in Johann Sebastian Bachs Vokalmusik, Tübinger Bach Studien, vi (Tübingen, 1970)
W. Allenbrook: ‘Metric Gesture as a Topic in Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni’, MQ, lxvii (1981), 94–112
R. Wiesend: ‘Siciliana als Vortragsart?’, Auffuhrungspraxis der Händel-Oper: Karlsruhe 1988, 173–83
P. Attinello: ‘Signifying Chaos: a Semiotic Analysis of Sylvano Bussotti's Siciliano’, Repercussions, i/2 (1992), 84–110
M. Little and C. Marsh: La Danse noble: an Inventory of Dances and Sources (Williamstown, MA, 1992)
A. Medina: ‘Musica para salterio en un manuscrito de la Universidad de Oviedo’, AnM, xlvii (1992), 175–93
G. Haid: ‘Siciliano als Typus weihnachtlicher Volksmusik’, 175 Jahre ‘Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!': Salzburg 1993, 135–46
D. Lo Cicero: ‘Nuove fonti per la siciliana seicentesca’, Ceciliana, per Nino Pirrotta, ed. M.A. Balsano and G. Collisani (Palermo, 1994), 111–25
For further bibliography see Aria.
MEREDITH ELLIS LITTLE