Language and rhythm in the choruses of Italian opera

Even though music and language are different in many aspects, they share some similarities, among which rhythm plays a central role. Researchers investigated the human tendencies in perceiving, producing and processing rhythm in both domains in a dynamic multidisciplinary perspective. This doctoral dissertation, following the path traced by the linguistic and musicological generative literature, will be focused on the analyses of the language and rhythm of the choruses of nine selected Italian operas among the ones composed by Gioacchino Rossini, Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini. Indeed, it is in songs, and particularly in the choral sections, that one can find at work all the components of human rhythm cognition, including the isochrony and the periodicity of the underlying metric structure and the entrainment between several dynamic systems. The goals of this thesis are, firstly, to identify the interdependence relationship between musical and linguistic rhythm through qualitative synchronic analysis, focusing on the most interesting phenomena selected from different musicological and textsetting studies: the stress-beat match and mismatch alignments, the duration and pitch discrepancies in pre-pausal context, the use of anacrusis vs. thetic patterns, the employment of melismatic and syllabic configurations, the application of synaloephas and dialephas, and the treatment of diphthongs and hiatuses. In the second place, the reasons that led the composers to favour the linguistic component over the musical one and vice versa will be brought to light. To conclude, the diachronic comparison of the obtained results served to identify the musical practices that were most commonly adopted in the choral sections and to substantiate the compositional tendencies observed by the musicological literature.