The Chamber Cantatas of Antonio Vivaldi (review)

In the opening to his book-length study of the thirty-seven existing Vivaldi cantatas, Michael Talbot reminds us rightly that these pieces are the "least researched, least discussed, least performed, least familiar" (p. xi) in the composer's compositional output. For a composer who has experienced both a tremendous popular modern revival and whose instrumental music influenced contemporary composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, his vocal works (cantatas, serenatas, sacred concertos) have been given surprisingly little attention by music historians. Michael Talbot's book rectifies this situation in terms of the cantata and provides a much-needed look at Vivaldi's surviving contribution to the genre.

Those of us who have studied and advocated for the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian secular cantata—a specialized genre that appealed in its own time only to a very select, aristocratic audience— are not strangers to the idea that the cantata as a genre has not attracted the same attention as baroque opera from music historians and performers. The primary reason for this neglect is surely that, as Talbot puts it, the cantata is a "dead end" (p. xi). Although this seems harsh, he has a point. Because the cantata has no strong ongoing musical tradition that extends beyond the eighteenth century, music historians have not been overly interested in the cantata or in cantata composers. Without their advocacy, performers have faced the difficulty of access to materials that exist in manuscript copies instead of in modern performing editions. As a consequence few performers have an appreciation for the style of the cantata, its text, or its vocal requirements. The secular cantata needs more champions. Our knowledge of when and where cantatas were performed has been greatly augmented by the work of music historians during the last thirty years or so, and Talbot's recent book takes its place among these. All of this knowledge contributes greatly to our understanding of the zeitgeist of the baroque period as a whole.

Divided into seven chapters with numerous subheadings, Talbot's book provides a thorough discussion of Vivaldi's cantatas, starting with a survey of their publication history, which, like all cantatas of the period, is extremely limited. (chap. 1, "The Rediscovery of Vivaldi's Cantatas," pp. 1–7.) In the second chapter, Talbot succeeds in placing Vivaldi's cantatas within an historical context (pp. 25–60).

Perhaps Talbot's greatest contribution is his truly brilliant discussion of cantata texts in chapters 2 and 3 (chap. 2, "The Cantata Genre, Its Literary Nature," pp. 33–44, and the section in chap. 3 on "The Composer and the Text," pp. 61–66). The text is the key to understanding the cantata in terms of its musical structure and style, and Talbot provides a significant discussion of the texts and the underlying poetic structure of the pieces. Talbot is well versed in the language, very knowledgeable about the subject matter, and generally sensitive to textual issues in the cantata. His attention to the poetry serves as a model for how cantata texts should be approached by the modern music historian.

Talbot then takes the thirty-seven cantatas and assigns them to three periods in Vivaldi's life: his time at the court of the governor of Mantua (chap. 4), the "Middle Years," or as Talbot refers to them, "Vivaldi's Blütezeit (chap. 5), and those cantatas written for Dresden and which yielded the "Dresden Compilation" (chap. 6). These three chapters proceed through a discussion of the cantatas in a straightforward and similar way: first a discussion of the place/performance/audience for the cantatas, and then a thorough, detailed discussion of each cantata, one by one.

The background information that Talbot provides on the specific individuals associated with the cantata composition in these three chapters, is another valuable contribution of the book and adds greatly to our understanding of the cantata's social and cultural impact. For example, Talbot's...