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Rococo: The Art of Feeling and Grace (1740–1770)
Rococo marked a deep change in Italy’s musical spirit: from the rationality of the Enlightenment one moved toward a more intimate, elegant, and sentimental taste. Sound became lighter and more transparent, and songs became the direct voice of feeling. The galant style—bright, elegant, conversational—led song to express the human soul with lightness and grace.
Opera and the Emergence of Feeling
In the theaters of Venice and Naples, opera—which, as we have seen, is a set of songs (Arias) inserted into a coherent plot—embodied the taste of a refined and brilliant society. Song (that is, the Aria) became an expression of feeling, in perfect harmony with the new sensibility that permeated painting and literature. Composers of opera buffa began to display a new sensitivity, drawing inspiration from real life and from contemporary novels and comedies.
The success of sentimental and semi-serious works such as Cecchina, la buona figliola (1760) by Niccolò Piccinni also owed much to Carlo Goldoni, a lyricist of marvelous songs, modeled on bourgeois heroines such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. In these pieces, tones fused: comic characters stood alongside figures of nobility. Musical language alternated buffo and solemn traits, progressively bringing serious and comic song closer together. This style—mixing the comic with the sentimental—perfectly reflects Rococo’s light taste.
Baldassarre Galuppi, among the Venetian masters (nicknamed the Buranello), favored Goldoni’s comic librettos. His music is immediately recognizable for its rhythmic vitality, the insertion of popular elements, and a timbral richness that anticipates Neoclassical transparency.
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 Centrality of Melody
The galant style (1740–1770) made melody the undisputed queen. Song texts moved toward spontaneity and nature, with a more direct and immediate language. Contrapuntal conception then gave way to the singable line, placing melody at the center of composition. Basso continuo began to decline, replaced by a lighter, more transparent harmonic accompaniment (such as the Alberti bass, based on arpeggiated chords).
For the sake of formal clarity, melodic phrases became more defined and structured, so that periods grew symmetrical—especially in slow movements—symbolizing the balance that would later culminate in the subsequent Neoclassicism.
The Querelle des Bouffons and Italian Song in Europe
A crucial Rococo episode was the arrival in Paris, in 1752, of an Italian company that staged Giovan Battista Pergolesi’s La serva padrona. It was the triumph of Simplicity. The success was overwhelming, and the French capital split in two: intellectuals such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau praised the melodic spontaneity of Italian opera buffa, opposing it to the rigidity of French tragédie lyrique. Parisian audiences were conquered by the liveliness of the plots and the expressive immediacy of Italian melodic songs.
The dispute—though confined to an aesthetic polemic (known as the Querelle des Bouffons)—encouraged the birth of French opéra-comique, a new theatrical genre adopted wholesale from the Italians, in perfect harmony with the spirit of Rococo and the Enlightenment. Rococo was, therefore, a phase of great formal refinement in Italy, during which song acquired the grace and lightness that would definitively open the road to modern musical language.
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, and it is not even ours: it comes 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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