Canzone

Canzone, in poetry, a short lyric poem that developed in Provence, France, and became popular in Italy during the Middle Ages. The subject of canzoni (Italian, “songs”) was usually love, nature, or feminine beauty. In form a canzone was composed of stanzas of equal length and closed with an envoy, a shorter stanza. The number of lines in the stanzas varied from 7 to 20. The most famous writers of canzoni were the 14th-century Italians Dante and Petrarch.

In music, a canzone (or, usually, canzona) was a 16th-century multipart vocal setting of a literary canzone and a 16th- and 17th-century instrumental composition. At first based on Franco-Flemish polyphonic songs (chansons), later independently composed, the instrumental canzona influenced the fugue and was the direct ancestor of the sonata.