Italian Song

Singing is one of the most highly enjoyed and respected forms of art for Italians. Opera began in Italy around 1600, and it is still an enormous part of the Italian spirit. Italians are zealous about opera and about good singing in general. Pictures of composers appear on national stamps, and streets in every town are named for musicians. Almost every small town has its own lyric theatre, and opera is programmed regularly on Italian radio and television. Music’s renown in Italy did not burst into bloom overnight. It progressed over time through the innovative minds of brilliant Italian composers and a developing social hierarchy. The development of Italian song is best traced through the composers who brought it into existence.

Early composers wrote for the theatre. Accompanied solo song, which we now call ‘art song’, was unable to compete with the splendor of opera, and so held little interest as a musical form. With few exceptions, art song lay dormant from 1725 to around 1850. Before this time, most of Italian song literature was excerpted from operas. Many of the songs that are performed as ‘art songs’ today are actually arias from early Italian operas. Composers, with the exception of Barbara Strozzi, were focused primarily on their operatic literature. Italian art songs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were showcases for the voice, exploiting its musical and technical capabilities. For that reason, these songs focus very little on blend of poetic and musical elements, but are instead slanted toward featuring the voice as the primary performance medium. In the majority of early Italian music, the accompaniment provides support for the voice and little more, although it is difficult to make anything but generaliz...

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...definite place in music history and is not in danger of losing its status any time soon.

Bibliography

Bowers, Jane M., and Judith Tick. Women making music: the Western art tradition, 1150-1950. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

Coffin, Berton, and Werner Singer. Singer's repertoire, Vol. 5. 2nd ed. New York: Scarecrow Press, 1962.

Kimball, Carol. Song: a guide to art song style and literature. Rev. ed. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2005.

Lakeway, Ruth C., and Robert C. White. Italian art song. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

MacClintock, Carol. The Solo Song. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1973.

Rosand, Ellen. "Barbara Strozzi, virtuissima cantaprice: The Composer's Voice." Journal of the American Musicological Society 31:2 (1978): 241-281.

Sadie, Stanley. The New Grove dictionary of opera. New York: Grove's Dictionaries of Music, 1992.