User:Lingzhi2/Recitative and aria

Recitative and aria is a pairing of musical forms, commonly used in the 18th century. In traditional number opera, singers employ two styles of singing: recitative, a speech-inflected style, and self-contained arias. Traditional opera, often referred to as "number opera", consists of two modes of singing: recitative, the plot-driving passages sung in a style designed to imitate and emphasize the inflections of speech, and aria (an "air" or formal song) in which the characters express their emotions in a more structured melodic style.
 * here "stylistic division between the music used for narrative and reflective text widened further in Roman and Venetian opera, gradually settling into the categories of *recitative and aria, although such rigid definitions were not widely accepted until much later. (P) Following the reforms of the libretto initiated by *Zeno and his contemporaries. and even more so *Metastasio, composers concentrated increasingly on the aria, maintaining the recitative as a narrative link between stylized outpourings of feeling."
 * "Over the following decades the style gradually split into two branches which later ... terms stile rappresentativo. stile recitatlvo, and stile monodico. contemporary ..."
 * 1649 in music – Giasone by Francesco Cavalli, premieres in Venice, the first opera to separate aria and recitative
 * Monody Contrasting passages in monodies could be more melodic or more declamatory: these two styles of presentation eventually developed into the aria and the recitative, and the overall form merged with the cantata by about 1635.
 * The use of recitative in opera is widely attributed to Vincenzo Galilei, since he was one of the inventors of monody, the musical style closest to recitative.
 * The stile recitativo, as the newly created style of monody was called, proved to be popular not only in Florence, but elsewhere in Italy. Florence and Venice were the two most progressive musical centers in Europe at the end of the 16th century, and the combination of musical innovations from each place resulted in the development of what came to be known as the Baroque style. Giulio Caccini's achievement was to create a type of direct musical expression, as easily understood as speech, which later developed into the operatic recitative, and which influenced numerous other stylistic and textural elements in Baroque music.
 * During both the Baroque and Classical periods, recitative could appear in two basic forms, each of which was accompanied by a different instrumental ensemble: secco (dry) recitative, sung with a free rhythm dictated by the accent of the words, accompanied only by basso continuo, which was usually a harpsichord and a cello; or accompagnato (also known as strumentato) in which the orchestra provided accompaniment. Over the 18th century, arias were increasingly accompanied by the orchestra. By the 19th century, accompagnato had gained the upper hand, the orchestra played a much bigger role, and Wagner revolutionized opera by abolishing almost all distinction between aria and recitative in his quest for what Wagner termed "endless melody".
 * one voice without accompaniment

Section 1
Erdmann Neumeister was an influential writer of texts for cantatas. He was a pioneer of the use of a format using recitative and aria, which was new in religious music, but established in secular cantatas and baroque opera. This gave scope to carry over techniques from the world of secular music, and the texts were set by Johann Philipp Krieger, the kapellmeister at Weissenfels, and other composers, notably Bach. Other cantata librettists in this genre included Georg Christian Lehms.
 * Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas is occasionally considered the first genuine English opera, though that title is usually given to Blow's Venus and Adonis: as in Blow's work, the action does not progress in spoken dialogue but in Italian-style recitative.
 * Rossini's handling of arias (and duets) in cavatina style marked a development from the eighteenth-century commonplace of recitative and aria. In the words of Rosselli, in Rossini's hands "the aria became an engine for releasing emotion".
 * Barthold Feind
 * Christian Hunold
 * Antonio Cesti

Section 2
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