Upstaging the voice: diegetic sound and instrumental interventions in the French Baroque cantata

This article explores the unique dramatic rapport between the voice and the instrumental accompaniment-either as obbligato instruments or as a simple continuo line-in select examples of early 18th-century French cantatas. Through examples by Campra, Morin, Bernier and Monteclair, it presents a taxonomy of the different types of dramatic interaction by looking primarily at recitatives. The study shows that composers turned instrumental music into an essential part of the drama by legitimizing its presence either as a diegetic occurrence, a representation of sound-musical, human or otherwise-heard by the singer or as an external manifestation of the singer's inner self. In its most basic form, the interaction between singer and instrumental music helps the listener envision the dramatic action, as in Campra's La dispute de l'Amour et de l'Hymen, where the sound of a bourree gradually interrupting Venus's sleep heralds the arrival of Love and Hymen. Another type involves the representation of imagined sound, as in Morin's Le naufrage d'Ulisse, where brief interjections of the storm interrupt the singer as if materializing from his narration of past events. Composers sometimes turned mimesis into diegesis as in Monteclair's Le depit genereux, where a descending chromatic bass depicting the singer's urge to weep becomes his real weeping in the following aria, or in Bernier's L'amour vainqueur, where the instrumental interjections first represent the singer's attempts to burst into song, then represent actual singing when they turn into the ritornello of the following aria. More overtly theatrical interactions between singer and instruments can be found in Monteclair's Le retour de la paix, where the 'fight' between violins and singer is an allegory of war, and in Campra's Le Jaloux where the singer engages in a dramatic tete-a-tete with the violins, whose sound becomes a dramatic interlocutor for the singer throughout the entire piece.