Cantata
Christoph Graupner, Georg Philipp Telemann and Johann Sebastian Bach composed cycles of church cantatas for the occasions of the liturgical year.
[3] A cantata consisted first of a declamatory narrative or scene in recitative, held together by a primitive aria repeated at intervals.
At the same time, vocal pieces of similar scope, often with several singers, and various instruments, were in great demand for the services of the Lutheran church.
Such pieces for the liturgy or other occasions were not only composed by Bach but also by Dieterich Buxtehude, Christoph Graupner, Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel and Georg Philipp Telemann, to name a few.
The term was then retroactively applied by Philipp Spitta to refer to comparable works by composers from Heinrich Schütz onwards.
Christoph Graupner was Hofkapellmeister at the court of Hesse-Darmstadt and provided over 1,400 cantatas during his nearly 50 years of employment there, making him the most significant contributor to the genre.
In early 19th-century cantatas, the chorus is the vehicle for music more lyric and songlike than in oratorio, not excluding the possibility of a brilliant climax in a fugue as in Ludwig van Beethoven's Der glorreiche Augenblick, Carl Maria von Weber's Jubel-Kantate, and Felix Mendelssohn's Die erste Walpurgisnacht.
The full lyric possibilities of a string of choral songs were realized by Johannes Brahms in his Rinaldo, which, like the Walpurgisnacht—was set to a text by Goethe.
While almost all of the Prix de Rome cantatas have long since been forgotten (along with their composers, for the most part), Debussy's prize-winning L'enfant prodigue (1884, following his unsuccessful Le gladiateur of 1883) is still performed occasionally today.
Late in the century, Gustav Mahler wrote his early Das klagende Lied on his own words between 1878 and 1880, and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor created a successful trilogy of cantatas, The Song of Hiawatha between 1898 and 1900.
[8] Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to claim that one of the most popular pieces of classical music of the 20th century to the layman's ears, is a cantata, namely Carmina Burana (1935–1936) by the German composer Carl Orff.
Joseph Ryelandt also composed secular and sacred cantatas, such as Le chant de la pauvreté Op.
Béla Bartók composed the secular Cantata Profana, subtitled "The Nine Splendid Stags" and based on a Romanian folk tale, in 1930.
Although it began as a song cycle (as reflected also by its title), Arnold Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder (1900–1903/1910–11) evolved into one of the century's largest secular cantatas.
35, for soprano, oboe, viola, and cello (1924), Mahnung an die Jugend, sich der Musik zu befleissigen (from the Plöner Musiktage, 1932), and Ite angeli veloces for alto and tenor, mixed chorus, and orchestra, with audience participation (1953–55).
In 1940, the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos created a secular cantata titled Mandu çarará, based on an Indian legend collected by Barbosa Rodrigues.
Francis Poulenc composed in 1943 Figure humaine, FP 120, a cantata for double mixed choir of 12 voices on poems by Paul Éluard.
37 (1971), and Gottfried von Einem composed in 1973 An die Nachgeborenen based on diverse texts, the title taken from a poem of Bertolt Brecht.
Herbert Blendinger's Media in vita was premiered in 1980, his Mich ruft zuweilen eine Stille (Sometimes a silence calls me) in (1992), and Allein den Betern kann es noch gelingen (It can only be achieved by those who pray) in 1995.
Cantatas were also composed by Mark Alburger, Erik Bergman, Dave Brubeck, Carlos Chávez, Osvald Chlubna, Peter Maxwell Davies, Norman Dello Joio, Lukas Foss, Roy Harris, Arthur Honegger, Alan Hovhaness, Dmitry Kabalevsky, Libby Larsen, Jón Leifs, Peter Mennin, Dimitri Nicolau, Krzysztof Penderecki, Allan Pettersson, Daniel Pinkham, Earl Robinson, Ned Rorem, William Schuman (A Free Song), Roger Sessions, Siegfried Strohbach, Michael Tippett, Kurt Weill, Jörg Widmann (Kantate, Cantata in tempore belli) and Jan Ryant Dřízal [cs] (Christmas Cantata).
