OCCITAN NIGHTS
—
The
music of the troubadours is the subject of many questions, the first of
which concerns the importance of music in the troubadour tradition,
given that this tradition was both the mirror of a society as well as
one of its most refined poetical expressions. What remains from almost
two centuries of troubadour art is limited to a few manuscripts, some of
which date from much after the time of the troubadours: a few even date
from the 15th century. These manuscripts contain approximately two
thousand five hundred poems, of which only some three hundred and fifty
had been assigned melodies.
Before being poets or musicians, the
troubadours — and the term dates from the same period as the troubadours
themselves — were lovers, knights or minstrels; their origins were
extremely diverse and they came from every social class, from a baker's
son to the scion of a noble family. They almost all followed the same
path notwithstanding, a journey that would lead them to express their
love and longing for an unattainable beloved. The lives of the most
famous among them are recounted in the Vidas, accounts that
describe their origin, career, patrons, the women who inspired their
passion, the passionate reserve that characterises their poetry and,
last of all, the circumstances of their death — be it in the Crusades or
shut away in a monastery or abbey.
Ali this took place in a
region situated south of the Loire river, between the Alps and the
Pyrenees, it inducted Provence, Languedoc, Périgord and Aguitaine,
stretching as far north as the Poitou region and as far south as the
Spanish peninsula, to Catalonia and to Castile where the troubadours
often found shelter. They also travelled further, sometimes to northern
France and even to England, if they were not required to travel with
their patrons to the Crusades or to battle. Despite the great diversity
of their origins, they all spoke the same language, the langue d'Oc,
which is the ancestor of the 0ccitan that can still be heard today in
various regions of southern France.
Although the greatest part of the troubadours' poems are canso that describe the joys and the sorrows of fin amor, other genres also appeared that concerned themselves with political or historical event such as the sirventes (satirical or moralising songs), the planh (laments) and the songs of the Crusades. Love was also discussed in other genres, including the partimen, (a troubadour debate on love and all that goes with it), the pastourelle that often presents happier view of the amorous contacts between a troubadour and a shepherdess, and the alba that describes the sadness of the lover's departure at daybreak.
Nuits Occitanes
is devared to songs about love and the usually vain search for it; this
is always at the primary level of physical love, except for the less
frequent songs in which the lovers are reunited, only to be separated
again at daybreak.
The canso are always written in verses that
always have the same number of lines: 6, 7, 8, 9 and 11 in the works
recorded here. In each case the verses are subjected to a very strict
application of rhyming technique in that there are differences in the
way that the various rhymes follow or alternate with each other. A short
envoi or tornada follows the verses, of which there are
between 5 and 7; this is generally a description of the messenger whose
task it is to bring the poet's declaration of love to the beloved
object, whether he be a real messenger such as the enigmatic Papiols in Rassa tan creis or the God to whom the troubadour opens his heart in Lo clar temps.
We should also note that references to religious faith occur with great
frequency in the texts; the Virgin Mary is frequently evoked and asked
to intercede between the lover and his beloved.
The alba
also follow the same formal rules of verse construction and rhyming; one
particularity of the form is that the last line of each verse is either
always the same, as in Reis glorios 'Et ades sera l'alba' or concludes, as in S'anc fui bela, with the word 'alba'. Several characters can appear in the poems. Reis glorios
is an exception in this regard, as it seems that the most important
part of the text (six verses in all) is not spoken by the beloved object
but by someone keeping watch; the lover is heard only in the seventh
and final verse. On the other hand, in S'anc fui bela the text is
divided between the beloved and a person on watch whose task it is to
wake the lovers at daybreak. This image of the watcher was a common
figure in the tradition of courtly love; a late example of it is the
character of Brangäne in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.
Even
though the poems of the troubadours by definition are expressions of
masculine emotions, there are nonetheless a few texts in which the
singer is a woman. There were also several women who wrote such tents,
the most renowned of these being the countess Beatriz de Dia, the wife
of Guillaume de Poitiers; she nurtured an ardent passion for Raimbaut
d'Orange. Of the four poems written by her, only one — A chantar m'er — is associated with an original melody. The envoi of this canso
is particularly moralising in tone, “What is more, let this
message tell you that too much pride is the downfall of many”.
The
great majority of these texts are set outside in Nature's domain; it is
described in all its variety and richness, from the hope of spring with
its green shoots and first bird calls to a description of winter and
its chills that, as we read in Lo clar temps, do not prevent the troubadour from being happy, for his heart bears the hope of happiness within it.
The
interpretation of the troubadours' monodies raises many questions. For
the songs that do not have a particular melody assigned to them, it is
necessary to search amongst others that have survived to find ones that
could suit them the best or, in the worst possible scenario, to create
new ones based on the style of the surviving pieces. Some of these
melodies came from other sources, as is the case with the melody for Lo vers comens which was a contemporary borrowing of a piece called De ramis cadunt folia from the Tropaire of St. Martial of Limoges.
The
question of the rhythms to be employed is also highly sensitive, for
the musical notation that had been used to set these pieces down on
paper since the 13th century gave almost no rhythmic indications
whatsoever. This question has been the cause of long and frequent
arguments between musicologists and philologists; the dispute between
Jean Beck and Pierre Aubry at the start of the 20th century is the most
familiar example of this, certain sources going so far as to regard the
uncertain cause of Jean Aubry's death in 1910 with some suspicion. The
theory held and debated by these two specialists was based on the use of
rhythmic modes in the first polyphonic works composed at the beginning
of the 13th century. Today the question must remain open: various
attempts at a solution go from rhythmic systems in which the scansion of
the text is dominant, these being closer in spirit to Gregorian chant,
to more purely rhythmical interpretations that inevitably come to
resemble dance music. This second practice is vouched for by the
description of ballades or estampidas. One particular example drawn from this recording: our performing version of Rassa tan creis
makes use of both techniques: a scansion of the text inspires the metre
of the sung sections, whilst a more rhythmical realisation enlivens the
instrumental sections, which can as a result be compared to estampies.
The
problem of how to accompany this music and with what instruments has
existed for as long as people have sought to perform these works; the
proofs provided by the Vidas and by the texts themselves that
from time to time describe the instrument that was the troubadour's
confidant naturally allow us to imagine how the accompaniments sounded.
Our decision to begin this CD with a solo voice was not an accident:
everything lies in choosing the most likely instruments and, an even
more delicate task, in imagining how they could have been used according
to performance practices current at the time. It is not impossible that
various polyphonic effects were used; we should realise that the
troubadours were clearly in contact with the ecclesiastical authorities,
as can be seen from the references to the Crusades and from the abbeys
and the monasteries in which they often found shelter at the end of
their lives. It was during the time of the troubadours that the first
traces of polyphonic style began to appear in many ecclesiastical
centres, especially in the towns situated on the route to Compostela;
these included the ison (notes sustained like a drone on the bagpipes or
the hurdy-gurdy) that accompanied the Gregorian chant as well as the
first attempts at singing with several parts in parallel or otherwise
that the theoreticians of the time called symphonia and diaphonia.
The
art of the troubadours did not die out at the beginning of the 13th
century. It travelled as far as Galicia in northern Spain, continued to
the different regions of northern France with the trouvères and
stretched as far as the Germanic lands with the Minnesänger. The
spirit of courtly love remained an inexhaustible fount of inspiration
for European poetry; it was after all in Avignon in the Vaucluse, the
heart of troubadour country, that Petrarch fed the source of his Canzoniere with the passion that he felt for Laura de Noves.
JÉRÔME LEJEUNE
A moving Fin'Amor
Occitania,
troubadour, the Middle Ages... these words transport us into a world of
courtly chivalry that despite its savagery and wildness also knew
moments of extreme refinement.
Such words inflame the imagination
immediately, as they cast a spell to which I in particular am highly
susceptible. After a long period of thought, this programme was the
result; it is in three sections and is based on the theme of night.
The
first section, which could be called “Before nightfall”, describes the
coming twilight and the disquiet that it can engender. “During the
night” all sorts of amorous battles and erotically-charged dreams
unfold: the night acts a frame for all things said in confidence and for
the release of passions too long held in check. The albas or dawns and the songs that depict them, given that they deal with le Joy, defined by René Nelli in his L'érotique des troubadours
as the joy of desiring and the pleasure of being in love, are naturally
found in the final section of this nocturnal trilogy, “After the
night”.
As we gradually got rid of certain Romantic clichés
traditionally connected with such works, our greatest difficulty was not
to harm the evocative power of their texts.The idea of the wandering
troubadour and lutenist is merely a small part of a musical and poetic
art that was not only extremely complex but also of unequalled quality.
Given that they included rich and settled lords, women who penned
poetry, clerks who were more or less secularised and merchants, the
troubadours and the trobairitz were representative of an entire society
that was full of life and variety. Much as we might like to do so, it is
nonetheless impossible to sum them all up in one brightly-coloured
image.
Our intention was to develop the ideas that lie behind the word trobar
— to invent, to seek, to offer — as we developed our own musical
language with the invaluable support provided by our researchers — the
musicologist Christelle Chaillou-Amadieu, research assistant at the
Collège de France, as well as the philologists Federico Saviotti,
researcher at the Collège de France and Marco Grimaldi of the Università
degli Studi di Trento.
It is for this reason that we have
heightened several chansons with instrumental sections; in the some
manner and depending on the text concerned, we have also inserted simple
polyphonic lines at certain points to emphasise a word or an idea
present in the text.
As musicians, our greatest concern was to
reflect the emotions that we had experienced when we first read these
songs and poems. Real men and women of flesh and blood are described in
these songs, with a touching use of the names and Senhals (poetic
nicknames) Papiols, Bel Senhor and Rassa as well as N'Audiartz and
Golfier de la Tor. Their underlying and almost palpable presence makes
this music even more alive and moving.
It is highly likely that
certain troubadours, once their poem was written and set to music,
rolled the parchment into a scroll so that they could be transported to
the lady or lord for whom they were intended. Today this procedure has
been replaced by CD technology, which now perpetuates the troubadours’
sublime message in its turn.
PAULIN BÜNDGEN
