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Cantata
Music Sound
Cantata
A cantata (Italian, 'sung') is a vocal composition
accompanied by instruments and generally containing more than one
movement.
In the
16th century, when all serious music was vocal, the term had no reason to exist,
but with the rise of instrumental music in the 17th century cantatas began to
exist under that name as soon as the instrumental art was definite enough to be
embodied in sonatas. From the middle of the 17th till late in the 18th century a favourite form of Italian
chamber music was the cantata for one or two solo voices, with accompaniment
of harpsichord and perhaps a few other solo instruments. It consisted at first
of a declamatory narrative or scene in recitative, held together by a primitive
aria repeated at
intervals. Fine examples may be found in the church music of
Carissimi; and the English vocal solos of Henry Purcell (such as Mad Tom and Mad
Bess) show the utmost that can be made of this archaic form. With the rise of
the Da Capo aria the cantata became a group of two or three arias joined by
recitative. George Frideric Handel's numerous Italian duets and trios are examples on a
rather large scale. His Latin motet Silete Venti, for soprano solo, shows
the use of this form in church music.
The Italian solo cantata tended, when on a large scale, to become
indistinguishable from a scene in an
opera. In the
same way the church cantata, solo or choral, is indistinguishable from a small
oratorio or portion of an oratorio.
This is equally evident whether we examine the unparalleled church cantatas of
Bach, of which nearly 200 are extant, or the Chandos Anthems of
Handel. In
Johann Sebastian Bach's case many of the larger cantatas are actually called
oratorios; and the Christmas Oratorio is a collection of six church
cantatas actually intended for performance on six different days, though
together forming as complete an artistic whole as any classical oratorio.
The essential point, however, in Bach's church cantatas is that they formed
part of a church service, and moreover of a service in which the organization of
the music was far more coherent than is possible in the Anglican church. Many of
Bach's greatest cantatas begin with an elaborate chorus followed by a couple of
arias and recitatives, and end with a plain
chorale. This
has often been commented upon as an example of Bach's indifference to artistic
climax in the work as a whole. But no one will maintain this who realizes the
place which the church cantata occupied in the Lutheran church service. The text
was carefully based upon the gospel or lessons for the day; unless the cantata
was short the sermon probably took place after the first chorus or one of the
arias, and the congregation joined in the final chorale. Thus the unity of the
service was the unity of the music; and, in the cases where all the movements of
the cantata were founded on one and the same chorale-tune, this unity has never
been equalled, except by those 16th-century masses and motets which are founded
upon the Gregorian tones of the festival for which they are written.
In modern times the term cantata is applied almost exclusively to choral, as
distinguished from solo vocal music. There has, perhaps, been only one kind of
cantata since Bach which can be recognized as an art form and not as a mere
title for works otherwise impossible to classify. It is just possible to
recognize as a distinct artistic type that kind of early 19th-century cantata in
which the chorus is the vehicle for music more lyric and songlike than the
oratorio style, though at the same time not excluding the possibility of a
brilliant climax in the shape of a light order of fugue.
Ludwig van Beethoven's Glorreiche Augenblick is a brilliant pot-boiler in this
style; Carl Maria von Weber's Jubel Cantata is a typical specimen, and Felix
Mendelssohn's Walpurgisnacht is the classic. Mendelssohn's Symphony Cantata, the
Lobgesang, is a hybrid work, partly in the oratorio style. It is preceded by
three symphonic movements, a device avowedly suggested by Beethoven's ninth
symphony; but the analogy is not accurate, as Beethoven's work is a symphony of
which the fourth movement is a choral finale of essentially single design,
whereas Mendelssohn's Symphony Cantata is a cantata with three symphonic
preludes. The full lyric possibilities of a string of choral songs were realized
at last by Johannes Brahms in his Rinaldo, set to a text which Goethe wrote at
the same time as he wrote that of the Walpurgisnacht. The point of Brahms's work
(his only experiment in this genre) has been lost by critics who expected in so
voluminous a composition the qualities of an elaborate choral music with which
it has no relationship. Brahms has probably said the last word on this subject;
and the remaining types of cantata (beginning with Beethoven's Meeres-stille,
and including most of Brahms's and many notable English small choral works) are
merely so many different ways of setting to choral music a poem which is just
too long to be comprised in one movement.
See also
Home | Up | Album | Aleatoric music | Anthem | Ballet | Cantata | Choir | Compositions by instrument | Concert band | Concerto | Film score | Incidental music | Jazz | Mass | Minimalist music | Opera | Operetta | Oratorio | Overture | Pieces | Ragtime | Recorded music | Serialism | Sonata | Song | Suite | Symphonic poem | Symphony | Television news music | Twelve tone technique | Fanfare | International Standard Musical Work Code | Lyrics | Precompositional | Round
Music Sound, v. 2.0, by MultiMedia
This guide is licensed under the GNU
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