CANZONCINA DEVOTA. — A brief lyrical composition in honor of God, the Virgin Mary, and the saints, or a didactic composition for the religious education of the people, successor to the lauda, whose production came to an end at the close of the fifteenth century, although in the following century there was no shortage of good reworkings, as in Serafino Razzi. Unlike the canzone or canzonetta, which generally treats a frivolous subject in an erotic or elevated spirit, the c., inspired by religious sentiment, has remained extremely vigorous in the Italian literary tradition.
Until today, however, it has remained almost unknown to scholars. While at least 200 collections of laudi are known, originating from every region of Italy, several of them in rigorous editions, there is not a single bibliographical survey, indeed not even an anthology, of the c., which are extremely numerous and often by no means devoid of artistry. The lieder and cantiques have had better fortune: among the Germans, the collections of Kaspar A. von Mastiaux and F. Schlosser, among others, are well regarded; for the French, A. Gastoué’s repertory, although incomplete, is noteworthy. With folkloric studies in decline and the journals of popular literature having died out, the c., which has four centuries dense with life behind it, still awaits its diligent explorer. The results of systematic investigations along the lines of G. Pitré and M. Barbi would be no less significant than those yielded by popular song, revealed as a marvelous phenomenon in the publications of F. Liuzzi.
The c. is the descendant of the liturgical hymn, from which derived the lauda of St. Francis, the oldest spiritual poet in the vernacular. From the Ambrosian iambic dimeter it took the agility of its rhythm, and from the laudesi the ardor and simplicity of its diction, indulging in sonorous rhymes for musical notation. It had regular stanzas with an identical order of verses, predominantly heptasyllabic, but not always the same name. Born in the Renaissance climate, it flourished in the seventeenth century and even more during the period of the Arcadia. It underwent the influence of the crude seventeenth-century style and of the style of Metastasio, without ever losing its popular character: the decline of form was compensated for by clarity of thought. In this respect, the c. may be regarded as a precursor of healthy Romanticism.
At first the title “laudi spirituali” predominated, especially in the compilations prepared in Rome and Naples by the disciples of St. Philip Neri, an energetic pioneer in this field. G. Animuccia published two volumes of polyphonic and homophonic laudi (1563 and 1570), suitable for the gatherings of the Oratory and for pious walks. In 1586 Verovio brought out the Diletto spirituale: canzonette; in 1588 Soto di Langa collected the spiritual laudi in three volumes. Later Pier Matteo Petrucci, faithful to the customs of the Filippo Neri tradition, printed the Poesie sacre e spirituali (Macerata 1675; Florence and Iesi 1680), among which Lodate Maria — o lingue fedeli has remained celebrated. Coferati entitled his verses Canzoni e laudi spirituali (Florence 1675), and the Apulian Camerota (d. 1644) Odi spirituali rustiche.
Eighteenth-century authors employed a greater variety of titles, particularly in anonymous publications disseminated by rural missionaries. Patrignani, or Presepio Presepi, called his poems Cantici (1700) and Ventaruole (1712), F. Pantaleoni Canzoni divote, Marchese Canzoni e sonetti, and Castellani Cantici scritturali. One also encounters: Scelta di alcune laudi spirituali (Rome 1718); Raccolta delle laudi ed altre orazioni (there 1728); Arpa di sacre laudi e divozioni (4th ed., Naples 1749); Canzoni spirituali ad uso delle missioni (Trent 1754); Canzonette ed ariette sacre e morali (Vicenza 1786); Sacre Canzoncine (Naples 1788); Raccolta di sacre poesie italiane più usate a recitarsi ed a cantarsi (Rome 1789); etc., to confine ourselves to an informative sample. St. Alfonso, through his ascetical books, which spread prodigiously, popularized the name c., which he first called “devota” and from 1750 onward “spirituale,” encompassing both the monastic and the popular type. Various poets imitated him in the nineteenth century as well, including Caione, De Vivo, D'Ambrosio, and Del Buono. Among these Mattia del Piano stands out: although he had placed on the title page of his collection Il freno della lingua ovvero laudi spirituali
composed in the Tuscan and Neapolitan idiom for the people, at the top of every page he wrote Canzoncine spirituali. The title has now entered the domain and usage of the people.
A significant group is constituted by communal poetry, inspired for the most part by the Teresian tradition. The mystical subject is treated with unadorned poetic images, which not infrequently call to mind the vibrant canticles of St. John of the Cross. Amid the faded miscellany there are ingenious and graceful passages, as in the unpublished Canzoniere of the venerable Sister M. Celeste Crostarosa, where the history of divine love in the soul is sung with candid ardor. The other c., which form an immeasurable treasure, are genuinely popular, composed spontaneously, without artistic pretensions, in response to an immediate need of the uneducated masses, even in dialect. Arising among and for the humble people, they were composed essentially to be sung in unison, to new melodies in an extremely simple style or to melodies already in vogue, as in Sicily or along the Tyrrhenian coasts. Famous are the Sette canzonette in aria marinarresca sopra le 7 principali feste di Nostra Signora (Milan 1738) by Fr. G. Tornielli. Missionaries among the crowds, including Franciscans, Jesuits, Lazarists, Pious Workers, and Redemptorists, made use of them as a school, employing the c. for catechization, moral exhortation, and prayer. The first two elements were ordinarily fused; the third then burst forth in isolation in joyful exclamations and supplications of an elegiac tone. Thus devotional poetry, learned in church during a course of preaching and carried into families, floated through the streets and fields, supplanting profane canzonette. Through song it helped the memory retain a mystery of Christ, a prerogative of the Madonna, and recapitulate an entire sermon on the last things. For this reason Fr. Segneri (d. 1694) synthesized the principal notions of Christian doctrine in a Laude spirituale. Fr. Innocenzi (d. 1697), evangelizer of the Tuscan countryside, rendered the entire catechism in verse, with effective simplicity, and had it printed in Macerata in 1681.
In appendices to devotional and doctrinal books distributed by missionaries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one discovers the Creed, the Decalogue, the Sacraments, the Pater, the Ave Maria, and the mysteries of the Rosary set out in stanzas. Among the liturgical antiphons, the “Salve Regina” received various poetic paraphrases, one of them widely disseminated in the south by St. Francesco de Geronimo (d. 1716): Dio ti salvi, o Regina...; another by Fr. D'Ambrosio: Salve, del ciel Regina, still repeated by the people.
In Italy the c. existed before Protestantism, which exerted a broad influence on the popular religious songs of the northern countries. It seems to have reached its apogee among us in the eighteenth century, not through academic poets (Savioli, Vigorelli, etc.), but through the merit of zealous apostles, whose rhymes survive in the modern flowering, despite the silence of literary historians. Among them the c. of St. Alfonso M. de' Liguori are clearly distinguished by spontaneity, freshness, and ardor of feeling; connoisseurs regard them as small masterpieces of popular poetry. O bella mia speranza, often set to music and always sung in May, enjoys national renown; Tu scendi dalle stelle is world-famous. These chaste verses, disparaged by G. Rossetti as metrical ejaculations, were duly appreciated by G. Gezelle, master of Flemish poetry, and imitated by S. Di Giacomo, who in Canzoni e ariette nove (Naples 1916) echoes Alfonsian rhythms and meters.
If the criticism of these compositions is to be conducted according to the canons of modern aesthetics, only one prepared to understand religiosity and pious sentiment can evaluate their art and poetic content