Music which is sung. The Italian solo cantata of the 17th18th-c was a setting of secular (usually amatory) verses, alternating recitative and aria. Lutheran cantatas (eg those of Bach) were church compositions for soloists, choir, and instruments. More recent cantatas, whether sacred or secular, are usually choral and orchestral pieces, with or without soloists; many are festival or commemorative pieces.
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. With the rise of the Da Capo aria the cantata became a group of two or three arias joined by recitative.
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 (see list of cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach), or the Chandos Anthems of Handel. 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. But no one will maintain this who realizes the place which the church cantata occupied in the Lutheran church service. 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.
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. Mendelssohn's Symphony Cantata, the Lobgesang, is a hybrid work, partly in the oratorio style. 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. 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.
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