Villanella
An Italian strophic song of the Renaissance.
What it means
The villanella is an Italian strophic song of the sixteenth century, mostly in three or four voices, with a simple, predominantly chordal texture and rustically coloured, often jesting texts. The name refers to the rustic. Characteristic is a deliberately plain, at times intentionally rule-breaking setting — parallel fifths, for instance, do not count here as an error but belong to the popular tone.
Musical use
The genre stands in deliberate contrast to the artful madrigal: where the latter interprets the text down to the last detail, the villanella relies on catchiness, clear periods, and dance-like rhythm. The melody lies in the top voice, the text is set syllabically, the stanzas repeat the music. It thus belongs to the same family as the frottola and the canzonetta, and counts among the popular song genres that achieved wide circulation through music printing. Historically it shows that, alongside learned vocal polyphony, a simpler, melody-focused practice always existed as well. The early villanellas are mostly set in three voices. The genre arose in Naples, spread rapidly to the north, and Lasso, too, wrote such pieces.
Performance practice
Keep the texture light and transparent, and sing with moderate vibrato; fullness and pathos are out of place here. Watch for shared, syllable-precise declamation and for dance-like rhythm. Shape the stanzas differently, because the music repeats. Consider performance with a solo voice and accompanying instrument, as is historically documented. Do not take the plain texture as carelessness but as a stylistic feature, and do not smooth it out. The deliberate rule-breaking must not be corrected: check whether an editor has smoothed it or added accidentals, because the sources often do not write them out, and whether a version for solo voice with accompaniment is offered, since this practice is historically documented and changes the character of the pieces.