ABSTRACT
In discussions of poetry in sixteenth-century Italy, verse could be seen by men of letters as intimately linked with the human voice, in particular with the singing voice, and as all the ner when the two were combined. Giovanni Pietro Capriano, for instance, argued that the voice is the most beautiful of sounds, that its well-used articulation ‘almost pierces our spirit with sweetness’, and that delight comes from listening to texts as well as reading them.1 Pomponio Torelli called poetry ‘this sweet siren who with sound and song lulls our spirits’.2 There is abundant evidence that composers, for their part, sought out Petrarchan poems in order to turn them into song. But to what extent were Italian poets of the Cinquecento concerned with the pairing of verse and voice in practice when they used the lyric forms sanctioned by Petrarch’s Canzoniere? How far did they have the sung performance, or at least the performability, of their verse in mind, and how far did they leave musical setting to the initiative of others? Such questions have importance for two reasons. First, the ways in which poets conceived and composed verse that was likely to be performed must have been inuenced by the need to attend to a listening audience’s appreciation of it. Second, the use of sung performance would have added a further, social, strand to the processes through which their verse was circulated to others.
