Stile rappresentativo
Italian opera term
Stile rappresentativo (Italian for "representational style") is an Italian opera term. It is a style of singing developed in the early Italian operas of the late 16th century that is more expressive than speech, but not as melodious as song. It is a dramatic recitative style of the early Baroque era in which melodies move freely over a foundation of simple chords.
In The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music, it is defined as follows:
stile rappresentativo (Italian, "In representational style"). Term used by early Italian composers of opera and oratorio to describe their new device of recitative, in which human speech was represented dramatically as in Peri's Euridice (1600) and Monteverdi's L'Arianna (1608).
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 6, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q16977695. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1600 and 1608.
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This entry incorporates text from “Stile rappresentativo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.