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ABSTRACT: Performance practice for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century recitativo semplice remains problematical as it was so sketchily captured in notation, leaving many elements to the discretion of the performers. The literature on declamation provides a practical model for recitative delivery, however: spoken oratory according to the discipline of rhetoric. When recitative is read in the way suggested by contemporary sources, not as 'music' but as musically elaborated declamation, it becomes apparent that a performer of recitative has available all of the rhetorical resources of spoken declamation to express the meaning and affect of the words, including variation of rhythm, pacing, timbre, articulation, emphasis and pitch inflection. While the notation of simple recitative gives much less obvious clues to expression than does the notation of an aria, affect can nevertheless be deduced from the words and from musical cues, particularly relating to vocal tessitura and the harmonic tension encoded in the continuo. The expressive range of declamation is then dictated by the objectives of dramatic verisimilitude, constrained and directed by the principles of rhetorical decorum. Analysis of the words and music of a scene from Handel's Tamerlano demonstrates a historically informed approach to the delivery of recitativo semplice according to rhetorical precepts.
KEY WORDS: Recitative, rhetoric, opera, Tamerlano
RECITATIVE AND AFFECT
In the case of Italian opera between the late seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries, the power of music to move the passions has generally been understood as being located primarily in the arias, with their overtly expressive vocal melodies, usually reinforced by orchestral accompaniment. A corollary of this is that the more speech-like recitativo semplice (simple, or 'secco' recitative), in which the bulk of the dialogue is set, may tend to be read as comparatively neutral in affect. And even when singers do intend to invest the recitatives with affective expression, the lack of clear guidelines for recitative delivery in the primary and secondary literature on historical singing means that this is necessarily done on the basis of limited information about what might constitute appropriate expressive parameters. A broader reading of historical sources can, however, provide some insight into the ways in which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century singers may have used their voices to deliver recitativo semplice, a dramatically vital but often musically neglected genre which,...