The term and concept of cantabile developed in the context of Italian opera, where it characterized a slow-moving, lyrical aria; but in and after the eighteenth century it assumed a far broader role in European composition and performance, providing a defined and recognizable context for ornamentation and tempo rubato in both vocal and instrumental music. Although modern scholarship has recognized diverse elements of cantabile, particularly in nineteenth-century opera, its signature features of ornamentation and tempo rubato remain comparatively unexplored in relation to the essential domain of piano music. Indeed, since Gerald Abraham’s landmark Chopin’s Musical Style (1939), nineteenth-century piano cantabile has most often been relegated to the status of a generic lyricism that requires no further explanation.
My dissertation restores a forgotten reality, first by tracing the absorption of cantabile into French music, where it formed a natural alliance with bon go¿¿t and came to play a key role in French piano methods by leading early nineteenth-century pedagogues, and then by studying more closely the music and Parisian environment of Fr¿¿d¿¿ric Chopin, who most spectacularly reproduced cantabile’s vocal qualities in an original pianistic idiom. The fifteen cantabile markings found in his compositions, datable between 1828 and 1846, allow a focused and penatrating glimpse of his stylistic trajectory, from brillant pianism to stripped-down simplicity and, ultimately, integration of contrapuntal density, always underpinned by the use of harmonies and rhythmic figures derived from the Polish music of his youth. As they broaden our vision of cantabile to a fundamental yet idealized style involving spontaneous embellishment and responsive rubato, these passages also refine our understanding of how melody was created and improvised in standard early-nineteenth-century performance practice, why cantabile was particularly conducive to an intersection of French and Italian style, and how Chopin’s own cantabile writing could represent the pinnacle of its adaptation to piano music.