cavatina

The tradition & historical record

Cavatina (Italian for "little song") is a musical term, originally meaning a short song of simple character, without a second strain or any repetition of the air. It is now frequently applied to any simple, melodious air, as distinguished from brilliant arias or recitatives, many of which are part of a larger movement or scena in oratorio or opera. "Ecco, ridente in cielo" from Gioachino Rossini's opera The Barber of Seville, "Porgi amor" and "Se vuol ballare" from Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro are well-known cavatinas. A famous piece that bears the name, although without words, is the 5th movement of Beethoven's String Quartet in B-flat major, Opus 130. Ralph Vaughan Williams also gave the title of "Cavatina" to the 3rd movement of his Symphony No. 8. Camille Saint-Saëns wrote a Cavatine for trombone and piano. In opera, the term has been described as:

a musical form appearing in operas and occasionally in cantatas and instrumental music....In opera the cavatina is an aria, generally of brilliant character, sung in one or two sections without repeats. It developed in the mid-18th century, coincident with the decline of the previously favoured da capo aria (in which the musical form is ABA, with the repeated A section given improvised variations). Examples occur in the operas of Mozart, Weber, and Rossini.

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Cavatina”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.

cavatina is vocal piece in a smaller form than the aria, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ¹

The source record links this tradition to 13 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ¹