Cantata

A multi-section work for voices and instruments, sitting between song and opera.

Related

BaroqueCantataVoiceOrgan

A cantata is a multi-section work for voices and instruments, between a song and an opera.

Origins and era

In early seventeenth-century Italy, solo song with continuo was performed in private rooms, forming the chamber cantata. Carissimi and Scarlatti in Rome divided it into arias and recitatives. In eighteenth-century Germany, Lutheran churches placed the cantata in the service, and Bach left more than two hundred church cantatas as well as secular ones. After 1800 the cantata moved into the concert hall, with works by Brahms, Elgar and Britten.

What you hear

A cantata moves through arias, recitatives, duets, choruses and chorales. Instruments provide preludes, interludes and postludes, and continuo runs through Baroque examples. Church cantatas often end with a chorale the congregation can join. Secular cantatas use characters and dialogue and come close to a small opera.

Key figures

Carissimi fixed the sectional design of the chamber cantata, and Scarlatti left a large body of solo cantatas. Bach built church cantatas into an annual cycle; Telemann and Buxtehude were equally prolific. Mendelssohn and Brahms brought it back to the concert hall, and Britten reused the title in the twentieth century.

Lineage

Monody, the motet and the Lutheran chorale feed in; oratorio, Passion settings, symphony-cantata and modern choral works come out.

Common misunderstandings

A cantata is not an oratorio, being shorter and usually without full narrative. It is not simply a large chorus, since soloists and instruments matter equally. Bach's cantatas were not all liturgical, as the Coffee Cantata is secular.

Sources

• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry Cantata（Oxford University Press），用于核对意大利与德国两条源流
• The Cambridge Companion to Bach, edited by John Butt（Cambridge University Press, 1997），用于核对巴赫康塔塔的礼拜语境

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.