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Arcadia: The Triumph of Reason and the Aria
With the beginning of the eighteenth century, Italy stood at the center of a new age of art and reason. Vocal music, in particular, embodied the spirit of balance and clarity that defined the era, overcoming the emotional excesses of the Baroque. The reform of librettos and the ingenuity of Italian composers made opera the universal language, in which the song (the Aria) became the expressive form par excellence.
The Reform of Melodrama: Measure and Virtue
At the end of the seventeenth century, Italy reacted against Baroque excess with a renewed demand for clarity and proportion. The Accademia dell’Arcadia was founded to promote a more rational, sober, and harmonious poetry, freeing the opera libretto from disordered plots and grotesque figures. Two poet-architects intervened to restore order.
Apostolo Zeno (1668–1750) was the first great reformer of melodrama. He wrote 35 librettos, eliminating comic scenes and reducing choruses in order to reintroduce order and clarity of action. His melodrama once again became a theater of reason and a school of ethics, where drama arose from moral conflict between virtue and desire.
Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782), the greatest poet of musical theater, whose fame spread across Europe, wrote 27 dramas (Didone abbandonata, Artaserse, La clemenza di Tito) that were set to music in more than eight hundred versions. Metastasio perfected Zeno’s reform, creating the model of Italian opera seria, where sentiment and reason meet within a harmonious structure.
What Do We Mean by Song?
Throughout this journey, the term “song” is understood in the original sense of our tradition, that of Dante Alighieri, who defines the song as the final union of words and music. The song includes arias, salon romances, and chamber vocal pieces. They are all forms of the same great Italian family of sung poetry, and it is important to remember this in order to avoid modern misunderstandings that separate what historically has always been united.
The Structure of the Dramatic Song
Metastasian dramas, always in three acts, alternate two fundamental moments that define the operatic song:
The Recitative, the narrative or dialogic moment (unrhymed verses, often hendecasyllables and heptasyllables), intended to convey action and plot development. Rational clarity prevails here, supported by sparse basso continuo chords.
The Aria, a closed and measured song, concentrating emotion and lyrical effusion. The Italian song almost always adopted the A–B–A structure (known as the da capo aria), which became the quintessential moment of vocal virtuosity.
Metastasio’s theater thus became the place where modern man learns to recognize and govern his passions through the succession of songs and the power of the word.
Alessandro Scarlatti, Father of the Operatic Song
Alessandro Scarlatti (1660–1725) is the figure who bridges the seventeenth-century song and that of the eighteenth century. His historical role was to define the new musical architecture of the collection of songs—that is, opera on a single literary theme, commonly called melodrama. Scarlatti generalized the A–B–A form, expanding its emotional dimension through repetition of words and phrases and enriching it with harmonic depth and melodic breadth.
With more than sixty operas, Scarlatti transformed Naples into the true capital of Italian opera, flooding the city—and from there all Europe—with magnificent songs that also circulated independently. Naples could rely on its Conservatories to train a constellation of composers (Pergolesi, Jommelli, Piccinni) and singers of European fame, who continued along his path.
The Legacy of Vocal Genres
Other vocal genres also adapted to the new taste. The Cantata, like opera a succession of songs interspersed with more recitative-style sections, continued to develop as a composition for solo voice and basso continuo, increasingly defined by the alternation between Recitative and Aria. It served as a stylistic model for melodrama.
The Oratorio, though without staging, followed the evolution of opera, developing through recitatives and arias and serving as a moral alternative to secular spectacle during Lent.
Alongside Naples, Venice maintained its central role thanks to its opera houses and Ospedali musicali (orphanages such as the Pietà), where young female students (fiole) received musical education of the highest level, and whose performances became famous throughout Europe for their spirituality and technical perfection. The eighteenth century was the age in which the song, in its highest and most virtuosic expression (the Aria), completed its conquest of Europe, elevating the Italian musical language to a universal model of elegance, proportion, and harmony.
Why Does Italian Song Begin Here in the Middle Ages?
In this history we do not separate what, in Italian culture, has always been united. For centuries, “song” meant what today we would call a poetic-musical form, regardless of duration. The troubadours, the Sicilian School, Dante, Petrarch, the madrigalists, opera composers—all wrote songs. The fracture between art music and song is a late nineteenth-century idea, not even originally Italian, but imported from the German-speaking world. It reflects other realities. For this reason, narrating the history of the Italian song means following a single thread that runs through seven centuries—from the Stil Novo to Metastasio, from monody to opera, from Monteverdi to Cherubini, from Puccini to our singer-songwriters. It is a continuous path, not a collection of disconnected episodes.
© Collezione Varrone & Romano (Tutti i diritti riservati).
Read the first complete and documented history of the Italian song tradition, with extended analysis and theoretical references.
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