Lamento
Lament piece with a descending bass figure.
What it means
A lamento is a lament song or lament piece. As a musical genre it is known above all from the opera and cantata of the seventeenth century, where a character voices their lament in a situation of loss or despair. Characteristic in many cases is a descending bass figure, constantly repeated as an ostinato.
Musical use
The typical bass model is the descending fourth: the bass steps downward stepwise from the tonic through a fourth to the dominant, in minor for instance from A down to E. This figure appears diatonically or chromatically; in the chromatic form all the semitones in between are filled in, so that an evenly descending line of semitone steps results. The connection of this movement with lament was so firmly fixed in the music of the time that the figure itself was understood as a sign of pain; it belongs to the stock of what musical rhetoric describes as the depiction of affect.
Over the recurring bass, the vocal line unfolds freely, often with dissonances against the bass, sighing figures made of falling seconds, and repetitions of individual words. The contrast between the relentlessly unchanging bass and the expressively moving upper voice makes the effect.
The figure of the descending bass has survived far beyond the lamento and is encountered in instrumental music and later vocal music as a sign of lament.
The lamento as a genre is to be distinguished from the basso ostinato as a compositional technique: not every ostinato is a lamento, and not every lamento rests on an ostinato.
The most famous examples come from Italian and English opera of the seventeenth century, for instance in Monteverdi and Purcell. Over the descending basso ostinato a melody unfolds that moves freely against the repetitions of the bass. The pattern later became an emblem of lament and is still used in art music and popular music today.
Performance practice
Keep the descending bass figure even and calm; its effect lies in its persistence. Shape the upper voice expressively but simply — lament works more strongly without exaggeration. And give the dissonances between the voice and the bass room, instead of smoothing them over.