# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Aria

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​ARIA (Ital. for “air”), a musical term, equivalent to the English “air,” signifying a melody apart from the harmony, but especially a musical composition for a single voice or instrument, with an accompaniment of other voices or instruments.
The aria originally developed from the expansion of a single vocal melody, generally on the lines of what is known as binary form (see Sonata and Sonata Forms). Accordingly, while the germs of aria form may be traceable in the highest developments of folk-song, the aria as a definite art-form could not exist before the middle of the 17th century; because up to that time the whole organization of music was based upon polyphonic principles which left no room for the development of melody for melody’s sake. When at the beginning of the 17th century the Monodists (see Harmony and Monteverde) inaugurated a new era and showed in their first experiments the enormous possibilities latent in their new art of accompanying single voices by instruments, it was natural that for many years the mere suggestiveness and variety of their experiments should suffice to retain the attention of contemporary listeners, without any real artistic coherence in the works as wholes. But, even at the outset, mere novelty of harmony, however poignant its emotional expression, was felt by the profounder spirits of the new art to be an untrustworthy guide to progress. And Monteverde’s famous lament of the deserted Ariadne is one of many early examples that appeal to an elementary sense of form by making the last phrase identical with the first. As instrumental music grew, and the modern sense of key became strong and consistent, composers felt themselves more and more able to appeal to that sense of harmonically consistent melody which has asserted itself in folk-music before the history of harmonic music may be said to have begun. The technique of solo singers grew as rapidly as that of solo players, and composers soon found their chief musical interest in doing justice to both. In Sir Hubert Parry’s work, The Music of the 17th Century (Oxford History of Music, vol. iii.), will be found numerous illustrations of the early development of aria forms, from their first indications in Monteverde’s instinctive struggles after coherence, to their complete maturity in the works of Alessandro Scarlatti.
By Scarlatti’s time it was thoroughly established that the binary form of melody was that which could best be expanded into a form which should do justice both to singers and to the players who accompanied them. Thus the aria became on a small scale the prototype of the Concerto; and under that heading will accordingly be found all that need be said as to the relation between the instrumental ritornello and the material of the voice part in an aria.
So far we have spoken only of the main body of the aria; but the addition of a middle section with a da Capo, which constitutes the universal 18th-century da Capo form of aria, adds a very simple new principle to the essential scheme without really modifying it. A typical aria of the Scarlatti or Handelian type is a very large melody in binary form, delivered by the voice, which expands it with florid perorations before each cadence (and sometimes also with florid preludes); while relief is given to the voice, further spaciousness to the form, and justice done to the accompaniment, by the addition of an instrumental ritornello containing the gist of the melody not only at the beginning and end, but also in suitable shorter forms at the principal intermediate cadences in foreign keys. A smaller scheme of the same kind in a new group of related keys, but generally without much new material, is then appended as a middle section after which follows the main section da Capo. The result is generally a piece of music of considerable length, in a form which cannot fail to be effective and coherent; and there is little cause for wonder in the extent to which it dominated 18th-century music. It was not, however, invariable. In the Cavatina we find a form too small for the da Capo; and in the oratorios of Handel and the choral works of Bach we find a majority of arias in a larger form which evades the possibility of exact repetition.
The aria forms are profoundly influenced by the difference between the Sonata style and the style of Bach and Handel. But the scale of the form is inevitably small, and in any opera an aria is hardly possible except in a situation which is a tableau rather than an action. Consequently there is no such difference between the form of the classical operatic aria of Mozart and that of the Handelian type as there is between sonata music and suite music. The scale, however, has become too large for the da Capo, which was in any case too rigid to survive in music designed to intensify a dramatic situation instead of to distract attention from it. The necessary change of style was so successfully achieved that, until Wagner succeeded in devising music that moved absolutely pari passu with his drama, the aria remained as the central formal principle in dramatic music; and few things in artistic evolution are more interesting than the extent to which Mozart’s predecessor, the great dramatic reformer Gluck, profited by the essential resources of his pet aversion, the aria style, when he had not only purged it of what had become the stereotyped ideas of ritornellos and vocal flourishes, but animated it by the new sense of dramatic climax to which the sonata style appealed.
In modern opera the aria is almost always out of place, and the forms in which definite melodies nowadays appear are rather those of the song in its limited sense as that of a poem in formal stanzas all set to the same music. In other words, a song in a modern opera tends to be something which would be sung even if the drama had to be performed as a play without music; whereas a classical aria would in non-musical drama be a soliloquy. This can be shown by works at such opposite poles of musical and dramatic technique as Bizet’s Carmen and the later works of Wagner. In Carmen the librettist has so managed that, if his work were performed as a play, almost the whole of it would have to be sung; and the one exception of musical importance is the developed soliloquy of Micaëla in the third act, which, although treated in no old-fashioned or commonplace spirit by the composer, is the one thing in the opera which sounds “operatic.”
In the later works of Wagner those passages in which we can successfully detach complete melodies from their context have, one and all, dramatically the aspect of songs and not of soliloquies. Siegmund sings the song of Spring to his sister-bride; Mime teaches Siegfried lessons of gratitude in nursery rhymes; and the whole story of the Meistersinger is a series of opportunities for song-singing.
The distinctions and gradations between aria and song are of great aesthetic importance, but their history would carry us too far. The distinction is obviously of the same importance as that between dramatic and lyric poetry. Beethoven’s Adelaïde is a famous example of what is called a song when it is really entirely in aria style; while the operas of Mozart and Weber naturally contain in appropriate situations many numbers which really are songs. The composers themselves generally give appropriate names. Thus Mozart, in Figaro, calls “Non so piu cosa son” an aria, because of its free style, though Cherubino actually sings it as a song he has just invented; while “Voi che sapete,” being more purely lyric, is called Canzona.
The term aria form is applied, generally most inaccurately, to all kinds of slow cantabile instrumental music of which the general design can be traced to the operatic aria. Mozart, for example, is very fond of slow movements in large binary form without development, and this is constantly called aria-form, though the term ought certainly to be restricted to such examples as have some traits of the aria style, such as the first slow movement in the great serenade in B flat. At all events, until writers on music have agreed to give the term some more accurate use, it is as well to avoid it and its cognate version, Lied-form, altogether in speaking of instrumental music.
The air or aria in a suite is a short binary movement in a flowing rhythm in common or duple time and by no means of the broadly tunelike quality which its name would seem to imply. (D. F. T.)