page_title: Ostinato
section_title: Late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
hierarchical_section_title: Ostinato / Classical music / Late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
caption_attribution_description: English: Beethoven Op 131 Trio from Scherzo, bars 69-76
context_page_description: In music, an ostinato is a motif or phrase that persistently repeats in the same musical voice, frequently in the same pitch. Well-known ostinato-based pieces include both classical compositions, such as Ravel's Boléro and the Carol of the Bells, and popular songs such as Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder's "I Feel Love", Henry Mancini's theme from Peter Gunn, and The Verve's "Bitter Sweet Symphony".
  The repeating idea may be a rhythmic pattern, part of a tune, or a complete melody in itself. Both ostinatos and ostinati are accepted English plural forms, the latter reflecting the word's Italian etymology. Strictly speaking, ostinati should have exact repetition, but in common usage, the term covers repetition with variation and development, such as the alteration of an ostinato line to fit changing harmonies or keys.
  If the cadence may be regarded as the cradle of tonality, the ostinato patterns can be considered the playground in which it grew strong and self-confident.
  — Edward E. Lewinsky
  Within the context of film music, Claudia Gorbman defines an ostinato as a repeated melodic or rhythmic figure that propels scenes that lack dynamic visual action.
context_section_description: Ostinatos feature in many works of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Mozart uses an ostinato phrase throughout the big scene that ends Act 2 of the Marriage of Figaro, to convey a sense of suspense as the jealous Count Almaviva tries in vain to incriminate the Countess, his wife, and Figaro, his butler, for plotting behind his back. A famous type of ostinato, called the Rossini crescendo, owes its name to a crescendo that underlies a persistent musical pattern, which usually culminates in a solo vocal cadenza.
  
  In the energetic Scherzo of Beethoven’s late C sharp minor Quartet, Op. 131, there is a harmonically static passage, with "the repetitiveness of a nursery rhyme" that consists of an ostinato shared between viola and cello supporting a melody in octaves in the first and second violins:
   Beethoven reverses this relationship a few bars later with the melody in the viola and cello and the ostinato shared between the violins:
  
  Both the first and third acts of Wagner's final opera Parsifal feature a passage accompanying a scene where a band of Knights solemnly processes from the depths of forest to the hall of the Grail.  The "Transformation music" that supports this change of scene is dominated by the iterated tolling of four bells:
   
  Brahms used ostinato patterns in both the finale of his Fourth Symphony and in the closing section of his Variations on a Theme by Haydn:
caption: Beethoven Op 131 Trio from Scherzo, bars 69–76
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