Lyric Form in Ottocento Opera

Abstract

In a study of Verdi's debt to Bellini published over 20 years ago, Friedrich Lippmann set the course for subsequent investigations of phrase structure in ottocento opera by using letters to describe the archetypal shape of many melodies written by Italian composers after 1830. He identified the most common pattern in the music of Bellini and the young Verdi as a1 a2 b a2, in which each letter represents a four-bar phrase in a prototypical 16-bar melody. The method has obvious risks of turning uncomfortably antiseptic for the analyst, but there is much to be said for its virtue of concision. It served Lippmann for his subsequent work on Bellini as well as Julian Budden for his three-volume study of Verdi's operas. With a minimal addition of bulk, Joseph Kerman and Scott Balthazar subsequently formulated a more elaborate alphanumeric system. Both replace Lippmann's use of arabic numerals to demonstrate musical variation with primes (AA' BA’ instead of al a2 b a2; Kerman uses lower-case letters, Balthazar upper-case) and they communicate the number of bars in each phrase, including those longer and shorter than the four-bar norm, with subscript numbers (for example, A4A‘4B3C6). The relationship of each phrase to the standard double quatrain or sestet of Italian poetry is also accounted for by a parenthetical tracking of verse lines for each musical phrase; for example, A4(S11–2)A'4(S13–4) illustrates how the first quatrain is distributed across the first eight bars of a normative melody. More important, Kerman and Balthazar recognize the musical function of phrases within the prototypical 16-bar group. Balthazar, in particular, identifies the first two four-bar phrases as an ‘opening thematic block’, the B phrase as both ‘contrasting’ and ‘medial’, and the last phrase as a ‘closing’ unit ('some version of A or C, depending on whether motives from the opening phrases are present).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 33 citations exist upstream.