Musical virelai
The virelai as a song form of the 14th and early 15th century usually has three stanzas, and a refrain that is stated before the first stanza and again after each. Within each stanza, the structure is that of the bar form, with two sections that share the same rhymes and music (''Stollen''), followed by a third (''Abgesang''). The third section of each stanza shares its rhymes and music with the refrain. Thus, it can be schematically represented as AbbaA, where "A" represents the repeated refrain, "a" represents the verse set to the same music as the refrain, and "b" represents the remaining verses set to different music. Within this overall structure, the number of lines and the rhyme scheme is variable. The refrain and ''Abgesang'' may be of three, four or five lines each, with rhyme schemes such as ABA, ABAB, AAAB, ABBA, or AABBA. The structure often involves an alternation of longer with shorter lines. Typically, all three stanzas share the same set of rhymes, which means that the entire poem may be built on just two rhymes, if the ''Stollen'' sections also share their rhymes with the refrain. "Virelai "ancien" and "nouveau"
From the 15th century onwards the virelai was no longer regularly set to music but became a purely literary form, and its structural variety proliferated. The 17th-century prosodist Père Mourgues defined what he called the ''virelai ancien'' in a way that has little in common with the musical virelais of the 14th and 15th centuries. His ''virelai ancien'' is a structure without a refrain and with an interlocking rhyme scheme between the stanzas: in the first stanza, the rhymes are AAB AAB AAB, with the B lines shorter than the A lines. In the second stanza, the B rhymes are shifted to the longer verses, and a new C rhyme is introduced for the shorter ones (BBC BBC BBC), and so on. Another form described by Père Mourgues is the ''virelai nouveau'', which has a two-line refrain at the beginning, with each stanza ending with a repetition of either the first or the second refrain verse in alternation, and the last stanza ending in both refrain verses in reversed order. These forms have occasionally been reproduced in later English poetry, e.g. by John Payne ("Spring Sadness", a ''virelai ancien''), and Henry Austin Dobson ("July", a ''virelai nouveau'').See also
*References
Further reading
* * {{authority control French poetry Western medieval lyric forms Medieval music genres Renaissance music