The Short

energy and pathos of expression, equally as the Serious.’ The concert recitative he regarded as including ‘all other
descriptions of Recitative’, and he believed that it ‘admits of more ornament than either of the preceding, as not being
so narrative or requiring the accompaniment of action’. 1144 Other authorities did not draw such clear distinctions or, in
the case of Mancini, for instance, disagreed with the idea that church, theatre, and chamber recitative each
automatically required a different style of performance. 1145
Most writers laid particular emphasis on the delivery of secco recitative in natural speech rhythms, and the importance of
never being constrained by the notated rhythms. Schulz considered that
Recitative is distinguished from true song by the fact that a note should never, not even at perfect cadences, be
sustained noticeably longer than it would be in declamation… One can imagine the recitative as a brook that now
flows gently, now rushes between stones, now plunges over cliffs. In the same recitative peaceful, merely narrative
passages occur from time to time; a moment later, however, powerful and extremely pathetic passages. 1146
On the subject of ornamentation he remarked:
THE FERMATA 599
A singer of feeling does not fail, here and there, where the expression [Affekt] allows beauty, to introduce vibrations
and drags [Schwebungen und Ziehungen: ?vibrato and portamento], also appoggiaturas (hardly trills), which however,
look very silly on paper, and which no singer who is not a born and professional singer can well accomplish. For
mediocre singers simple declamation, where one note is set to one syllable, makes a better effect. 1147
Koch shared the view that ‘with respect to the duration of the individual syllables the recitative should be performed
just like a speech’, but he observed that this was by no means a universal practice, remarking:
In some regions of Germany the rural cantors and schoolmasters have the habit of performing the recitative in their
church music in a measured tempo and teaching this manner to their singing pupils; by this means it acquires a
modification that is wholly against its nature, and many passages in it get an extraordinary hardness and sound
extremely nonsensical. 1148
Many of the same recommendations were made a generation later by A. F. HÄser. He advised that in general there
should be ‘almost no ornamentation’, but in accompanied recitative, perhaps recalling Schulz's view, he allowed that ‘in
very passionate passages, and also at the end, there can admittedly be exceptions, but it is advisable even in these
instances to make use of portamento and messa di voce, and that sparingly, rather than over-elaborate coloratura’. With
respect to appoggiaturas, however, he was at pains to point out that recitative should not be sung strictly as written:
1144
The Singer's Preceptor, 71.
1145
See W. Crutchfield, ‘Voices’ in Howard Mayer Brown, ed., The New Grove Handbook of Performance Practice: Music after 1600 (London, 1989), 296.
1146
In Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie,
1147
Ibid. 11.
2nd edn. iv. 5.
1148
Musikalisches Lexikon, art. ‘Recitativ’.