2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25
In medieval literature there are various genres, each of which is distinguished by its form, metrics and purpose. One of the specific genres of that era is the canzone, which will be discussed in this article.
What is a canzone in literature?
Canzone or canzoneta is a term from among the troubadours. Perhaps this is the most universal and widespread literary genre in their work, later divided into many additional subgenres. Initially, the canzone is a song dedicated to courtly love. It existed in the environment of the knightly-feudal lyrics of Provence, from there it migrated to Italy, where it was given features more suitable for the Italian dialect.
Meaning of the word
What does the word canzone mean? It comes from the noun from the Provencal dialect - canso, which literally translates as "song". This word sounds almost the same in Italian and Catalan, in which the canzone genre was also widely used.
Provencal Canzona
Probably, originally a canzone is a choral song, which by XIIcentury passed into the literary work of the troubadours. The Provencal canzone consisted of five or seven stanzas and ended with several shortened stanzas - tornadoes (from the Provencal "turn"). They contained a request addressed to a person initiated into the secret, to convey a message-canzone and an indication of the person to whom, in fact, the canzone was addressed. But the name of the latter was usually not called for secrecy, but a nickname was used.
The addressee of this lyrical song could be a beautiful lady, or the patron of a troubadour, or a close friend who is privy to a love secret. The themes for the canzones were usually the following: repaying the praise of love, a story about the feelings that bloom against the backdrop of spring renewal, the coldness of a lady or the praise of an object of love, sadness from the upcoming separation from a lady.
The structure of the canzone was quite rhythmic, because, like all troubadour poetry, it was designed to be performed to instrumental music. Otherwise, except for the theme and metrics, this genre is very heterogeneous. The rhymes for each song were purely individual. In addition to the monologue, there is also a canzona-dialogue, built either on a conversation between the author of the song and the Beautiful Lady, or between two troubadours. There is also a pastoral variety of canzona called pasturel.
Italian canzona
As already mentioned, in Italy, the canzone is a transformation of the Provençal canzone, which the Italians remade in accordance with the norms of their language. Among famous authors,working in this genre, we can recall Dante, Guinicelli, Petrarch, Cavalcanti. Italian canzones are distinguished by their philosophical and abstract character.
The laws according to which the works of this genre should be built were first formulated by Dante, and he considered the canzone precisely as a text-musical genre. The second part of the treatise "On Folk Eloquence" is devoted to this topic. In it, the poet mainly talks about the specifics of the construction of the work - it should consist of an introductory and main part, which, in turn, can be divided into smaller ones. Dante says almost nothing about the necessary rhymes, the number of stanzas and rhythm, so in Italian literature you can find a variety of canzones, but the most common were songs with an eleven-syllable meter. The stanzas in both the Italian and the Provençal version follow each other without the use of refrains and refrains - this feature is characteristic of older song genres.
Two offshoots of the canzone genre appeared in Italy - the sextine, the inventor of which is considered to be the troubadour Arnaut Daniel, and the sonnet, which appeared in Sicily in the 13th century and was developed in the works of Dante and especially Petrarch.
The further fate of the canzona
The canzone genre gradually disappears from use when the traditions of chivalry begin to leave, and the subject matter of the works becomes irrelevant. The canzone received its last revival in the work of the Petrarchists of the 16th century and after that it freezes for a long time.
In the 20th century interestto this literary genre reappears in connection with the emerging interest in the work of troubadours. Then their poetry was no longer viewed through the prism of romanticism, trying to study the spirit of courtly lyrics. During this period, Russian poets of the Silver Age, for example, Valery Bryusov and Vyacheslav Ivanov, began to turn to the stylization of canzones, but the genre did not take root due to the fact that it did not correspond too much to the surrounding reality.
Canzone in music
In addition to the definition of the word canzone in literature, there is such a genre in music - it existed in Italy in the 16th century as a polyphonic piece intended for an ensemble of instruments or solo. Initially, these were transcriptions of French polyphonic songs, then original Italian works began to appear.
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