CANTATA. – The c. in general originated in the seventeenth century. The accompanied monody, which succeeded sixteenth-century polyphony, gave rise to the c., which seems to combine the two preceding forms in its alternating use of chorus and recitative. A distinction is made between the church c. and the chamber c. The former developed principally in Germany, attaining perfection of form in Bach’s art. The latter found favorable ground in Italy, where it appeared in four distinct schools: in Florence, Venice, Rome, and Naples.
The church c. opens with a chorus in several voices, followed by a series of arias and duets, and concludes with another final chorus. Bach left a rich series of c.; more than two hundred are counted. Most of them were composed for Protestant religious services. The chamber c., as the term itself indicates, was performed in the apartments of aristocratic residences, with few singers, few instruments, and no choral parts. Its subject was never religious. It may be said that the chamber c., by cultivating and developing solo singing in every way, prepared the way for theatrical music.
In Rome, as in Venice, Florentine monody assumed independent, though still uncertain, forms. Luigi Rossi and Giacomo Carissimi gave it a stable form in Rome, the former in the chamber c., the latter in the church c. The c. also had distinguished practitioners in Bologna, such as Cazzati, Bononcini, and Perti. In Naples, through the genius of Alessandro Scarlatti, the chamber c. attained its highest degree of artistic interest, both through its increasingly dramatic subjects and its increasingly substantial instrumental forces, as well as through the rich melodic vein characteristic of that region. The form of the c. reached its culmination in Naples around 1700. Two currents would emerge from the c.: pure instrumental music and theatrical music.