CANTATA. - The cantata in general has its origins in the 17th century. Accompanied monody, which succeeded the polyphony of the 16th century, gave occasion to the cantata, which seems to summarize the two preceding forms in the promiscuous use it makes of chorus and recitative. A distinction is drawn between a church cantata and a chamber cantata. The former developed principally in Germany, reaching perfection of form in the art of Bach. The latter found its favorable soil in Italy, where it manifested itself in as many as four schools: in Florence, in Venice, in Rome and in Naples.
The church cantata opens with a chorus for several voices, followed by a series of arias and duets, concluding with another final chorus. Bach left a rich series of cantatas; more than two hundred are counted. The majority are for the Protestant religious service. The chamber cantata, as the term itself indicates, was performed in the apartments of noble houses, with few singers, with few instruments and without choral parts. Its subject was never religious. It may be said that the chamber cantata, by cultivating and developing solo singing in every way, prepared the way for theatrical music.
In Rome, as in Venice, Florentine monody assumed independent forms, though still uncertain ones. Luigi Rossi and Giacomo Carissimi gave it a stable form in Rome, the former for the chamber cantata, the latter for the church cantata. In Bologna too the cantata had illustrious cultivators, such as Cazzati, Bononcini, Perti. In Naples, through the genius of Alessandro Scarlatti, the chamber cantata reached the highest degree of artistic interest, both for its increasingly dramatic subjects, and for its increasingly rich instrumental writing, and for the rich melodic vein proper to that land. The form of the cantata exhausted itself in Naples with the year 1700. From the cantata two currents would be determined: pure instrumental music and theatrical music.
Bibliography
Francesco Coradini