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.
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.
Bear in mind that the deliberate rule-breaking of this genre must not be corrected: parallels that would count as errors in a madrigal belong here to the popular tone. Check the edition for whether an editor has smoothed things out. The villanella spread quickly northward; Lasso, too, wrote such pieces. Its texture with parallel fifths was deliberately regarded as rustic.
Check whether the edition offers a version for solo voice with accompaniment, because this practice is historically documented and changes the character of the pieces.
Also check whether the edition has added accidentals, because the sources often do not write them out.