Chopin's Cantabile, etc.

Hi everyone! I wrote my thesis on a short, overlooked and untitled work by Frederic Chopin from 1834, marked Cantabile. (Above are a facsimile of the original and my transcription.) This word—literally 'singable' in Italian—became the springboard for a broad investigation into its eighteenth and nineteenth-century uses as a broad style, tempo and expressive markings (written on scores), a specific type of aria that peaked in the 1830s, and a musical texture with certain melodic, harmonic, and embellishing characteristics. For the Phd. I am currently most interested in the powerful eighteenth-century aesthetic ideal of 'cantabile' that initiated these later manifestations. I recently explored the angle of 'musical government,' and the fact that a restrained style like cantabile regulated expression and conditioned a response of unanimous enthusiasm from the eighteenth-century collective. Because of my background in piano, I'm most interested in opera and works for piano, and the merging of singing melody into keyboard works. But I really want to make sense of this powerful musical aesthetic that dominated for over a hundred years...