chansonnettes

Just as the comedian usually wishes to play Hamlet and the man of tragic mien thinks he could be a comedy star, the singer who could make a fortune at interpreting chansonnettes usually wishes to sing operatic rôles, and the singer with a deep and heavy voice is longing to inflict baby songs on a long suffering public.

Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing Enrico Caruso 1897

Loud voices sang lusty English choruses and French chansonnettes, and Neapolitan songs tried to assert themselves whenever the uproar ceased for a moment.

Stories by English Authors: Africa (Selected by Scribners) Percy Addleshaw 1891

These "sainctes chansonnettes" became at once the rage; courtiers and princes, lords and ladies, ever ready for some new excitement, seized at once upon the novel psalm-songs, and having no special or serious music for them, cheerfully sang the sacred words to the ballad-tunes of the times, and to their gailliards and measures, without apparently any very deep thought of their religious meaning.

Sabbath in Puritan New England Alice Morse Earle 1881

Colonel Ibbetson could do a little of everything -- sketch (especially a steam-boat on a smooth sea, with beautiful thick smoke reflected in the water), play the guitar, sing chansonnettes and canzonets, write society verses, quote De Musset --

Peter Ibbetson George Du Maurier 1865

At the time, Bourget was a popular composer of chansons and chansonnettes comiques.

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