Recitative and Aria

In his review of West Edge Opera's production of American Apollo, Joshua Kosman wrote this, right at the top:

Open the score of a standard operatic work — literally any piece by Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, or Britten — and you’ll encounter something increasingly rare on the contemporary stage: fast music. Those old-timers understood, in a way that too many living composers don’t, the virtue of having some parts of a score that move. Fast music provides a sense of excitement; it reinforces the rhythmic elements of both the score and the libretto; it provides contrast with slower passages to create a tapestry of varied tempos. It also militates against the jagged, talky text-setting that dominates too much contemporary opera, because those disjunct melodies and shapeless vocal lines are practically impossible to sing at speed.

I agree 100%; this is a problem in too much contemporary opera. But I want to take what he says a step or two further.

One issue is that librettists aren't providing obvious arias – you know, a character singing about what they're feeling, or singing to another character – and duets, and ensembles to their composers. And...composers aren't demanding those things. 

I don't know if there's a fundamental misunderstanding of how opera works, or if everyone is so intent on being collaborative that composers (and librettists) just aren't saying "Look, we need something different here," or what. Composers like Puccini, Verdi, and Mozart understood drama and pacing and didn't hesitate to ask their librettists for something different. These composers left behind correspondence about these things. 

But there's something else that English-language contemporary opera does not have that Mozart and Verdi (and Handel!) had – recitative. You know, that pitched speech that comes between arias? In Mozart, it's usually accompanied by a harpsichord or fortepiano (though sometimes orchestra), in Verdi, the orchestra. 

Here are Rachel Willis-Sørensen and Pavol Breslik in Don Giovanni, in the discussion leading up to Donna Anna's aria "Or sai chi l'onore."

Here's Javier Camarena singing the opening of Act 2 of Verdi's La Traviata. Everything up to the aria "De' miei bollenti spiriti" is Verdian recitative. After the aria (cavatina, I guess, and the orchestra is not sufficiently audible), he sings the cabaletta, "O mio rimorso."

Living composers and librettists need to figure out not just how to have slow and fast numbers in their operas, but how to set conversational material in a way that is different from their arias, duets, and larger ensembles. There's no common language for that the way there was from early opera into the Romantic era, so it's largely up to everyone to figure it out for themselves.

Update, 8/25/26: And of course, there's an alternative to recitative: spoken dialogue. This is the solution used in German Singspiel, like The Magic Flute, and French opéra-comique, like Carmen. (Yeah, you hear sung recitative that Bizet didn't write in too many Carmen productions, sigh.)

Inquiring Minds Want to Know....

.....why the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle, The New Yorker, and San Francisco Classical Voice all think they know better than the composer how to style the title of a particular work?

• Those publications all styled Esa-Pekka Salonen's recent work for clarinet and strings as Kínēma.
• The San Francisco Symphony program note, Salonen's publisher's web site and the title page of the score style the work as kínēma. (I believe that it was italicized in the SFS program.)
• The SFS program page listing the works on the program capitalizes the K.
• Below is a screen shot from the publisher's web site.

• Below is a screen shot of the first page of the score.

I submitted my linked review with the title in all lower case. If I were guessing about this, some kind of amorphous style guideline about capitalizing titles, although since TNY and the Chron enclose titles in quotation marks and SFCV (more correctly, SORRY TNY and Chron) italicizes titles, there's no ambiguity that's resolved by capitalizing a work title against the composer's styling.

UPDATE, December 5: There were several updates to this post on the 4th. SFS communications responded to my query with ""kínēma (lower case) is correct, and based on Esa-Pekka’s note and the score."