Stanzaic Forms

Abstract With their history in Dante’s oda continua, one would expect stanzaic forms to be more common than they are. But in fact this is the form of one of the most famous songs of the century, Dufay’s Se la face ay pale. The German tradition seems to begin very late in the century, with our view hindered by the shortage of German poetry sources from these years. The occasional Italian examples lead to a major discussion of the strambotto, its poetic history reaching back well into the fourteenth century but its musical manifestation starting hardly before 1475. The single example credited to a non-Italian, Consumo la mia vita by Denis Prioris, with a text credited to Serafino dall’Aquila, may well also be the earliest musical strambotto. The chapter ends with Isaac’s Alla battaglia, in three massive stanzas.