Canzone napoletana  

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Canzone Napoletana, sometimes referred to as Neapolitan song, is a generic term for a traditional form of music sung in the Neapolitan language, ordinarily for the male voice singing solo, and expressed in familiar genres such as the lover's complaint or the serenade. It consists of a large body of composed popular music—such songs as O sole mio, Torna a Surriento, Funiculì, Funiculà, Santa Lucia and others.

The Neapolitan song became a formal institution in the 1830s due to an annual song-writing competition for the Festival of Piedigrotta, dedicated to the Madonna of Piedigrotta, a well-known church in the Mergellina area of Naples. The winner of the first festival was a song entitled Te voglio bene assaie; it is traditionally attributed to the prominent opera composer, Gaetano Donizetti, although an article published in 1984 by Marcello Sorce Keller shows there is no historical evidence in support of the attribution. The festival ran regularly until 1950, when it was abandoned. A subsequent Festival of Neapolitan Song on Italian state radio enjoyed some success in the 1950s but was eventually abandoned as well.

The period since 1950 has produced such songs as Malafemmena by Totò and Carmela by Sergio Bruni. Although separated by some decades from the earlier classics of this genre, they have now become Neapolitan "classics" in their own right.

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History

Many of the Neapolitan songs are world-famous because they were taken abroad by emigrants from Naples and southern Italy roughly between 1880 and 1920. The music was also popularized abroad by performers such as Enrico Caruso, who took to singing the popular music of his native city as encores at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in the early 1900s. Caruso is therefore responsible for the fact that operatic tenors since then have been required to know these songs. This has led to such recent phenomena as The Three Tenors - three opera singers performing, at least in part, popular songs from Naples. One of them, Plácido Domingo, has recorded a full CD (Italia ti amo) of traditional and some more modern Neapolitan and Italian songs. Important performers of Neapolitan songs in the last few decades include Roberto Murolo, Sergio Bruni, Giuseppe di Stefano, Renato Carosone, and Mario Maglione. Murolo is known not only as a singer, but as a scholar and collector of the music; his collection of twelve LPs, released in the 1960s, is an annotated compendium of Neapolitan song dating back to the twelfth century and is the "Bible" for those interested in performing or simply learning more about the music. Representatives of different veins, but nevertheless leading the continuing tradition of song in Neapolitan are the jazz-rock singer-songwriter Pino Daniele and the folkloric group Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare.

Andrea Bocelli recorded an album in 2009 dedicated to the style, entitled Incanto.

An important factor in defining what makes a Neapolitan song is the matter of language. All these songs are written and performed in the Neapolitan dialect (Napulitano). The matter of dialect has not prevented a few non-Neapolitans from writing dialect versions of Neapolitan songs. The most famous example of this is "'A Vucchella" by Gabriele D'Annunzio.

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List of songs

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Noted figures

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Recording artists

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Composers

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See also


Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Canzone napoletana" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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