The eighteenth century saw a great increase in secular music for solo voice and continuo set to texts in Venetian, then a recognized literary language rather than a mere Italian dialect. Most of these compositions are short gondola songs or canzonettas, but a few are cantatas in several movements, indistinguishable from their counterparts with Italian texts except in language and subject matter, which favours contemporary themes treated in a comic manner. The two Venetian cantatas for soprano an...