Recitative
The elder Galilei, influenced by his correspondence with Girolamo Mei on the writings of the ancient Greeks and with Erycius Puteanus on the writings of Hucbald[1] and wishing to recreate the old manner of storytelling and drama, pioneered the use of a single melodic line to tell the story, accompanied by simple chords from a harpsichord or lute.
This division of labour persisted into the 19th century: Rossini's La Cenerentola (1817, recitatives by Luca Agolini[2]) is a famous example.
In the early operas and cantatas of the Florentine school, secco recitatives were accompanied by a variety of instruments, mostly plucked fretted strings including the chitarrone, often with a pipe organ to provide sustained tone.
A 1919 recording of Rossini's Barber of Seville, issued by Italian HMV, gives a unique glimpse of this technique in action, as do cello methods of the period and some scores of Meyerbeer.
There are examples of the revival of the harpsichord for this purpose as early as the 1890s (e.g. by Hans Richter for a production of Mozart's Don Giovanni at the London Royal Opera House, the instrument being supplied by Arnold Dolmetsch), but it was not until the 1950s that the 18th-century method was consistently observed once more.
This form is often employed where the orchestra can underscore a particularly dramatic text, as in "Thus saith the Lord" from Händel's Messiah; Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart were also fond of it.
A more inward intensification calls for an arioso; the opening of "Comfort ye" from the same work is a famous example, while the ending of it ("The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness") is secco.
[4] Later operas, under the influence of Richard Wagner, favored through-composition, where recitatives, arias, choruses and other elements were seamlessly interwoven into a whole.
C. P. E. Bach included instrumental recitative in his "Prussian" piano sonatas of 1742, composed at Frederick the Great's court in Berlin.
Leon Plantinga argues that the second movement of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto is also an instrumental recitative,[5] although Owen Jander interprets it as a dialogue.
