However, "A common misperception exists that the 'lament bass' of
Venetian opera became so prevalent that it immediately swept away all other possible affective associations with this bass pattern...To cite but one example, Peter Holman, writing about
Henry Purcell, once characterized the minor tetrachord as 'the descending ground that was associated with love in seventeenth-century opera'."[4]
Lament bass from
Vivaldi's motet "O qui coeli terraeque serenitas"RV 631, Aria No. 2[5]
Compositional form
There exists a short, free musical form of the
Romantic Era, called complaint or "complainte" (Fr.) or lament.[9] It is typically a set of harmonic
variations in
homophonic texture, wherein the bass descends through some tetrachord, possibly that of the previous paragraph, but usually one suggesting a
minor mode. This tetrachord, treated as a very short
ground bass, is repeated again and again over the length of the composition.
^
abcBrover-Lubovsky, Bella (2008). Tonal Space in the Music of Antonio Vivaldi, p.151-52.
ISBN978-0-253-35129-6.
^Ellis, Mark R. (2010). A Chord in Time: The Evolution of the Augmented Sixth from Monteverdi to Mahler, p.200.
ISBN978-0-7546-6385-0.
^Brover-Lubovsky (2008), p.153. "In the eighteenth century...the lament bass almost automatically invoked somber affection, gravity, and oppressiveness."
^Thompson, Shirley (2010). New Perspectives on Marc-Antoine Charpentier, p.64.
ISBN978-0-7546-6579-3.
^Williams, Peter (1998). The Chromatic Fourth: During Four Centuries of Music, p.69. Oxford University Press.
ISBN0-19-816563-3.
^Frisch, Walter (1996). Schubert: critical and analytical studies, p.10.
ISBN978-0-8032-6892-0.