(It.: ‘song’).
(1) In the broadest sense, the Italian word for any lyric or poetic expression. It is in this sense that the term has been used by non-Italians as a title for selfconsciously simple or ‘song-like’ compositions, such as the slow movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, marked ‘in modo di canzone’.
(2) In the 16th century, the term most often used by musicians to denote a vocal work of popular or folklike character, usually followed by designation of its regional origin, for example canzone villanesca alla napolitana.
(3) Since the early 16th century, a term used intermittently as a title for instrumental works, originally transcriptions or arrangements of vocal models in several contrasting sections. Also called canzoni da sonar, this type of piece constituted an important instrumental genre in the early 17th century and was particularly significant as a forerunner of the sonata. In modern usage the word ‘canzona’ is most commonly used for such a piece, even though the spelling is virtually unknown in Italian sources (see Canzona).
(4) Any lyric poem, usually either a canzone ‘pindarica’ (a poem modelled on Pindar’s odes) or a canzone ‘dantesca’ or ‘petrarchista’. Canzoni by, or in imitation of, Dante and Petrarch were the most serious and cultivated form of Italian verse, and were often set by frottola and madrigal composers of the 16th and 17th centuries (see Frottola, §2, and Madrigal, §II). Typically canzoni consisted of any number of stanzas, each of any number of lines of seven or eleven syllables, without a specific rhyme scheme. The canzone is thought to have originated during the vogue of the dolce stil nuovo in Italian poetry, blending elements of the native ballata and the freer chansons of Provençal 12th-century poets. Dante Alighieri defined the form, discussing the rules governing its rhymes, the number, nature and length of its lines and the relationships between stanzas; he gave many examples and remarked that the canzone should be appropriate to musical setting (De vulgari eloquentia, II, x, dating from c1305). Each stanza of a canzone could be divided into two parts, the fronte (or piedi or pedes), two or more metrically identical groups of lines (usually two or three) with shared rhymes, and the sirima (sirma, coda or volte), the lines of which were metrically distinct from those of the fronte, usually with different rhymes; a single line called the chiave may separate these two parts. Usually a canzone had between five and seven stanzas, most often ending with a commiato (or congedo: ‘leave-taking’), a short stanza linked by rhyme to the penultimate one. The commiato served either to summarize the scope and argument of the poem or to identify the person to whom it was addressed. Petrarch was the great master of the canzone, modifying the formal requirements recommended by Dante to permit greater flexibility and expressiveness. Of all the poets, Petrarch’s canzoni have been most widely imitated (particularly by the 16th-century poets Pietro Bembo, Annibale Caro and Bernardo Tasso), and they were perhaps the most important source of serious madrigal texts during the 16th and early 17th centuries.
(5) In opera the word is used primarily for items presented as songs sung outside the dramatic action, for example Count Almaviva's serenade ‘Io son Lindoro’ in Paisiello's Il barbiere di Siviglia, or Cherubino's ‘Voi, che sapete’ in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro – although the composer called it simply ‘arietta’. In some editions of Mozart's Don Giovanni the serenade ‘Deh vieni alla finestra’ is described as a ‘canzonetta’. Rossini used the term for ‘Nessun maggior dolore’ in his Otello; Verdi applied it to arias in Rigoletto, Un ballo in maschera (twice) and Otello.
D. Harrán: ‘Verse in the Early Madrigal’, JAMS, xxii (1969), 27–53
F. Sumner: ‘The Stylized Canzone’, Essays on the Music of J.S. Bach and Other Divers Subjects: a Tribute to Gerhard Herz, ed. R.L. Weaver (Louisville, 1981), 165–80
F. Schmitz-Gropengiesser: ‘Canzone, Canzonetta’ (1997), HMT