Gautier de COINCY. Les Miracles de Notre-Dame
English liner notes

LES MIRACLES DE LA VIERGE
(Gautier de Coincy)

The 13th century marks a crucial stage in the spiritual evolution of Western Christianity, and if spectacular architectural achievements could be witnessed in the cities, the same influence could only be detected to a very small degree in musical creations of any great importance.

There is however no comparison to be made between the impressive though nevertheless fragile thrust of architecture towards the heavens, and music that was pious but devoid of any visionary greatness.

To sum up the parallel proportions between religious thought and architecture, we only see those strict and well thought-out scaffoldings, which the mind carries along in the conquest of God, existing in architecture: they consolidate the grace and transparency of the interior space — that haven of the soul in effusion — supported by the logical forest of buttresses, only visible to those on the outside of the building (that is to say, to those who are not in dialogue with divinity); these scaffoldings do not seem to have interested the musicians of this period.

In the Northern provinces, the art of the Trouvères developed out of the music and poetry of the Troubadours; they inherited the delicate themes of daily life that are to be found in the sculptures around cathedral entrances. The same kind of smile, slightly sneering, passed from the cathedral of Reims into the couplets of Robin et Marion. Psychology revealed itself and dragged the stones from their sleep, from their state of inert symbolism ; it allowed itself to be caught in the trap of musical description.

Thus we will have to wait for the coming of Machaut and Dufay before finding the musical equivalent of the complicated, solid outlines of the Gothic buildings.

If in fact we make a survey of the music composed during this period, it is curious to find that the official faith, after the bloody suppression of the heresy of the Cathares, only inspired a small amount of music, a production which seems to have sacrificed any speculative developments to the urgent need of an immediate consumption, the ideological intentions of which are not hidden: an art which was accessible to as many people as possible, and thus it was based on forms which were already known to a wider proportion of society, and were suitable for carrying a unifying message. The message was the rooting of the faith of the people in the true church, individual morality confronted by the agonies of this world in general, and by the upheavals of the Christian world in particular. The mind had gone on a crusade against all unbelievers, including the personal revolt of each and every man of those times.

In this light, it appears less mysterious to reveal that between the last organum fleuri and the far-off Messe de Tournai, the only religious works to have been written were the chansons à la Vierge and the Laude franciscaine. Gautier de Coincy, that champion in praising the Virgin Mary, that energetic diffuser of propaganda on the subject of the Miracles of Notre-Dame, was only versed in the art of composition to a mediocre extent, even if he played a musical instrument. He possessed just what was necessary in order to choose sounds and melodies to which he could suitably adapt and sing a text, since in his opinion, the text was of paramount importance.

***

Who was this Gautier de Coincy whose pious enterprise has saved him from oblivion, and to whom a whole disc has been devoted for the first time? A lively restitution of thirteen Chansons à la Vierge out of the nineteen titles which have been conserved is offered here.

We have taken the doubtful and parsimonious details of his life from Jacques Chailley's edition.

Born in 1177 or 1178 in Coincy-l'Abbaye, situated near Château-Thierry, Gautier entered the monastery of Saint-Médard, in Soissons, at an early age under the abbé Bertrand. At 36 he was prior of Vic-sur-Aisne. Then he returned to Saint-Médard with the title of “grand prieur claustral” on June 19 th 1233, and it was here that he probably died on September 25th 1236. The biography is slender but the essential details are provided, the rest being abandoned to the quibblings of specialists since, unlike the Troubadours, we do not possess those highly precious vidas. Slight clues in these texts allow us to think that Gautier could have studied at the University of Paris. But what is more important here than the silhouette of a man who escapes us and whose life must not have suffered any great upheavals, is the contents of his work, a work which was confined to a small geographical area: this native of the Soissons area, a land fertile in Trouvères who spoke the langue d'oil like the neighbouring territories of Champagne and Picardy. Conon de Béthune, Gace Brulé, Colin Muset and many others were his contemporaries. However he remained apart from them since the subject matter of his inspiration was no longer to be found in the amorous lyrical poetry of his colleagues. Obsessed, he devoted himself to an enormous degree — some 30,000 lines — to facts, maxims and miracles concerning the person elect among women, being at the same time virgin and mother, and whose function as co-redemptress in the business of soul-buying was beginning to establish itself in peoples' minds. It was a powerful weapon against the Troubadours, singers of a heresy whose spiritualist intentions rejected the theory of Incarnation: if Christ only took on the appearance of man, only the Holy Spirit could have created him. We can see that against such deviations, it was imperative to maintain and to fortify the soul of the average man by means of the most sensitive image, the orthodoxy of a religion that was closely bound to its own civilization and in which the slightest breach would have been a fatal risk of disturbance for the whole established order. At a time when “each mass is a combat lead by the priest” (Heer), the work of Gautier became a lesson and turned from symbolism to allegory : the Virgin was the very emblem of catholicism.

The poets of the South made woman a nostalgic ideal, inaccessible, far above man who was deliberately suppressed in a state of chivalrous servitude. Rehabilitated, but in another sense excluded.

The adoration of the Virgin is another aspect of the rehabilitation of womankind, unanimously condemned by the old writing, the Fathers of the Church, just like the pagan writers, and which the Occitan civilization had formulated.

Gautier de Coincy took an active part in this change of attitude, changing it round in order to serve the faith against the sentiment. Under the protection of allegory, he finally proposed a reassembly of he scattered, straying conscience: from Eros to Agape, the chaste ritual of the adoration of woman was concentrated on a single image whose intercession and permanent gift dispensed remission, reparation, consolation and accession to a world of redemption. Woman was in fact and simply seduction: in the all too human beauty, Satan was lying in wait.

Immediately, Gautier establishes his opinion by discrediting this theory:

Love, (you) who know how to charm,
You make several (people) sing such a song
But now the souls sing something else. (1)

and he follows on with a new allegiance:

I do not wish to sing such a song,
But however sing a new song
Which the angels sing.
(“Amours qui bien...”, no 1.)

It is strange to witness an evolution of the mind, which, in the course of a few years, short as far as history is concerned, created not only a new idea of the social status of woman, but here and there the possession of a power to purify. In both cases, i.e.. the “body” and the “mind”, the soul darted forth towards the luminous union and a land beyond, possible because it was promised. For Gautier however, this duality remained in its entirety and supposed a radical choice:

(Whereas) Eve by her sin
Will lead us au to an death.
Mary will deliver us
By her we are all redeemed.
(“Talenz m'est pris...”, no 4.)

In this instance, «forfait» (sin) has a meaning which warns against a more up-to-date disobedience...

It is not without utility either to see that at the other end of the horizon, or on the lower part of the tympanum of church entrances, this same woman, now bestowed with a harmful power which the deteriorated substance of mediaeval life helped to spread ; the figure of the sorceress, less menacing than tradition had created her, sketching her image in the shadows of pain and oppression. Darkness, the exact opposite of virginal whiteness, the negation of all redemption, was dispensing her derisive balm in the charred thatching; she is the proof that the life of the people in those times was a game of trickery.

But this would lead us far away from the sublime grazing fields where Gautier invites the simple man of the 13th century to feed on grace and to shed his fears and anxiety.

For scarcely a century now (middle of the 12th century), the cult of the Virgin, partly due to the influence of Saint Bernard, progressed to an astonishing degree. The poetry of Gautier de Coincy, and his great work, these Miracles de Notre-Dame, represent the first stone of a literary monument which was to be embellished by many masterpieces up until the Marienleben of Rilke and Hindemith, describing the tender image of a woman who watches and intercedes.

Gautier's “Miracles” appear as stories in verse often inspired by Latin models, interspersed with lyrical poems, songs of devotion and of prayer. The form is narrative and not dramatic; this came later. In fact the Miracles that were “staged” (and, unlike the religious drama, separated from the religious service) were only to emerge later on, taking up once more and dramatizing Gautier's texts. They found a posterity in Rutebeuf and above all directly influenced the famous Cantigas de Santa Maria by Alfonso X, El Sabio, king of Castille, poet, scientist and musician. Just as with the latter, the musical contribution of Gautier de Coincy often limits itself to the contrafacta of already existing timbres, adding a few lines of descant called-for by his sensibility rather than his technical ability.

The musical contribution of the poet, in agreement, operates successfully, with the play of the rhythms, a mnemonic arsenal held in high esteem, the calambours even, the groups of consonances, the rhythm of the syllables which cleverly weave variations on a repetitive theme which is somewhat spoilt by the faded imagery in the manner of the school of Saint-Sulpice.

***

The refinements of religious thought, the incomparable achievements in architecture, religious and architectonic, which were reserved for an intellectual elite, hid from a distance the true state of a world in which the miracle seemed to be the last weapon in face of the cruelties of a determined and divided world.

Franz Hellens wrote: “Only children and the desperate believe in the miracle.” In this popular childlike belief, where both archaic and Christian elements co-existed, in this social, arbitrarily fashioned order eaten away by moral and material insecurity, the notion of the miracle integrated itself quite naturally into daily life, conceived as it has too often been said according to divine patterns.

It would no doubt be wrong to see only literary artifice in the choice of Gautier de Coincy. The Miracles de Notre-Dame are the metaphors, the undeniable alchemy of the artist, beginning with the concrete need for a redeeming mediation, the ever deceptive expectancy of a Celestial Jerusalem, with the radiating virgin concentrating beneficial power in the same way as a mirror concentrates solar energy.

Unlike the too-frequent idea of this age of Faith, the nostalgic glitter of a lost state of balance, the believer in the Middle Ages was left with little hope of reaching the opposite bank without risk of damnation. If we are to believe the Franciscan Berthold of Regensurg, the chances of salvation in the 13th century were 1 to 100,000. How then in a society which was on guard against the lack of reality of things, against the lies of the visible world where a taste for the marvel held authority, was it possible not to make a bid for the worker of miracles who brought at the same time the assurance of resurrection? The woman appeared like a light in the mysterious, cruel night where one survived, like so many terrorized blind men.

“In the 13th century, people lived in terror of death (...). For how many men did entering the church, kneeling before the cross, touching the relics, saying the formulas, carrying-out the ritual gestures, signify anything else than fortifying oneself against the anxiety of dying?” (Georges Duby).

For death without promise is worse than life without hope. We do not know to what extent the convinced if not convincing art of Gautier de Coincy helped to sweep away the shadows of a tableau, the tragic elements of which we are in danger of betraying with anachronic comparisons.

But for ourselves, who, most often bleat out our anxiety with insipid chanting, the simple cunning in Gautier's art, the sureness of his methods — whether we adhere to his original intentions or whether he leaves us indifferent — remains a source of youth of which we can say that the fact that this art has reached us from so distant a past is not the slenderest of Miracles, from those forgotten shadows of an age when man, already, was looking for a spark of hope in the supernatural.

Michel BERNARD,
translated by Charles WHITFIELD.

(1) The French word is “déchanter” (descant) ; thus a play on words is probably intended.




NOTE ON THE MUSIC OF THE MIRACLES

Gautier de Coincy, like many other Trouvères, was not a composer in the modern sense of the word. Above all a poet, and according to the general practice of the age, he did not hesitate to delve into the creations of his colleagues in order to find musical inspiration. Using the thorough study of Jacques Chailley on the subject of his chansons as a basis, it appeared interesting to recreate a “généalogie” and to attempt to bring Gautier's inspiration once more to life, more than the accuracy of his texts, which vary in any case according to different manuscripts.

The origin of the melodies, when they exist, is to be looked-for in the various musical forms of the 12th and 13th centuries. The source is often to be found in the popular music known as “refrains”; this is the case of “Qui que fasse”, nº 2; “Quant ces floretes”, n° 6; “D'une amour quoie et serie”, nº 9; and “Ya pour Yver” n° 11. These refrains were known to all; pretexts for dancing, improvisation, they gave the musicians (instrumentalists) the opportunity to add to the piece they were accompanying with préludes, intermèdes and estampies; it thus became possible to create a suite of pieces with the same common refrains; the chanson n° 9 is thus associated with a motet found in the Montpellier manuscript.

Sometimes Gautier contented himself by simply extracting one of the parts of a polyphonic piece. There are two examples here : “S'amour dont sui espris”, n° 7, and “Hui matin” nº 10, one of which is to be found in two conduits of the Ecole Notre-Dame and the other in a motet itself extracted from a three-part organum, the two being written on a Gregorian tenor: “Benedicamus domino”.

The origin of the chanson nº 5 would also appear to be polyphonic. The melody of “Efforcier m'estier” has been too much altered for us to be sure of the exact source, but the tenor “Domino” fits without difficulty, which indicates its relationship to the Clausula given as an introduction.

A remark must be made concerning the conduit “Entendez tuit ensemble”, nº 13; if the melody is that of the conduit “Beatus Vicera” by Perotin, the second part is only to be found in the manuscripts of the Miracles. Thus Gautier seems to have been the composer of the descant.

All that has been said shows the particular interest of these chansons. In a single work, they resume and bring together all the musical forms used by the Trouvères and the Ars Antigua composers.

© ARION PARIS 1976. All rights reserved for all the world, including U.S.S.R.

EDITOR'S NOTE

The Ensemble Guillaume de Machaut de Paris: Jean Belliard (counter-tenor), Bernard Huneau (recorder), Julien Skowron (viéles), Elisabeth and Guy Robert (lutes); The Ensemble consists of one singer and four instrumentalists who, as much by the choice of their instruments as their own personal taste, are particularly interested in the performance of mediaeval music, without neglecting however that great period of polyphonic music, the Renaissance.

The Ensemble is most careful to devote its attention to the total fusion between words and music in the Middle Ages, and sets itself the task of bringing to life once more the profound source of inspiration in the poetry which, more so than the refined sounds, governed the development of all musical composition in those times.