Recitative

Summary

Recitatives are unloved by performers and audiences alike. People shorten them wherever feasible, and try to get over them as quickly as possible. Then they give a sigh of relief when they get to the next music number. That's a big mistake! Because the ‘dry’, ‘secco’ recitative, accompanied by just harpsichord and cello, is a wonderful invention halfway between spoken drama and opera. It gives singers much of the freedom that actors enjoy, allowing them to create their own performance ‘score’ while still giving them a harmonic and rhythmic frame within which they have to work. Recitative was at the very beginning of opera – the idea that spoken drama could be musicalized. For when it was first invented, opera was dominated by recitative. The drama was placed in the hands of music, which then – in the service of drama – developed its theatrical arsenal and gradually attained full power in opera as the principal means of expression.

In recitative, however, singers are free to adjust tempo, dynamics, tone colours, rests and punchlines as seems appropriate to their dramatic needs. And in recitative, musical time runs concurrently with narrative time. So the performer has to deliver his text in real time. Many singers who like to express emotions in expanded musical time are therefore no friends of recitative. But with the succession of recitative and aria, opera created the invaluable possibility of differentiating between news and commentary. The ‘news’ is unsuited to accompaniment by the orchestra, while the ‘commentary’, being a reflection on the news, demands a more emotional form of presentation in expanded musical time, with the full force of the orchestral accompaniment. Opera thus differentiates between what's worth knowing and what's worth feeling. Many masterpieces of the genre are animated by this very contrast, and if one disrupts the well-balanced equilibrium between the two, then one compromises their overall impact. Not to mention the fact that many of the traditional cuts in recitatives often eliminate core scenes that are essential to comprehending the whole work. This is common practice among dilettantes when masterpieces fail to match their own intentions.