Cantata denotes, simply, music ‘to be sung’, as opposed to ‘sonata’, music ‘to be played’. Ironic, then, that the composer who took the sacred cantata to its apogee, Johann Sebastian Bach, rarely used the term, titling his Sunday offerings for Leipzig either ‘concerto’ – denoting combined voices and instruments – or, bluntly, ‘Stück’ – ‘piece’.
Despite late outliers, from Haydn’s Arianna a Naxos to Bartók’s Cantata Profana and Britten’s Cantata Academica and Cantata Misericordium, the cantata is a quintessentially Baroque genre. Its first twitchings were the 1620 song collection Cantade et arie by the Venetian Alessandro Grandi. But the term only became enshrined around 1650, when Italian composers were producing secular chamber cantatas by the bushel.
Giacomo Carissimi, in Rome, led the way, followed by, inter alia, Stradella and Alessandro Scarlatti, whose 600-odd cantatas combine melodic suavity with harmonic daring. By the 1680s the form had morphed from a simple song with variations to a pattern of mingled recitative, aria and arioso, scored for one or two solo voices with either continuo alone or orchestra.
The subject matter of these aristocratic entertainments was typically pastoral-amorous. From the spats of Arcadian nymphs and swains composers created unstaged miniature operas, in an age when successive popes banned opera as a corrupting force (though they had no qualms about castratos). Even more overtly dramatic were cantatas on mythical or quasi-historical subjects: Carissimi’s Il lamento di Maria di Scozia; Scarlatti’s graphic depiction of the psychopath Nero in Il Nerone, or of the grieving Orpheus in Dall’ oscura magion dell’arsa.
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