The jongleurs played on an instrument called the vielee which was great-grandfather to our violin. The short pieces played before the songs and accompanied by dances, were the first pieces of instrumental music in the Middle Ages. The combination of song, instrument and dance was called balerie or ballada from which comes our dance ballet. There was also a piece called rounde, rota, or rondo, composed so that different voices and the instrument came in at different points, each singing or playing the same tune, but arranged so that the parts sounded well together. Perhaps you know Frère Jacques or Scotland’s Burning or Three Blind Mice. These are rounds.
One of the most beautiful rounds in existence is an English song which dates from 1250, the period of all this “gay science,” and it is looked upon as a masterpiece. It is supposed to have been written either by John Forsete, a monk, or by Walter Odington. It was written in the old square neumes on a six line staff. The name of this “Six Men’s Song” or round for six voices, is Summer is icumen In.
One of the best known trouvères was Adam de la Hale who wrote Robin et Marion, said to be the very first comic opera. It was performed at the court of Naples in 1285.
The trouvères collected tales of Normandy, Brittany, and of Charlemagne’s reign, and so preserved valuable musical and literary material.
So these troubadours and trouvères made the age of Chivalry romantic and beautiful to us who came long after them, in spite of much unpleasantness, prejudice, war, massacre and hardship.
Minnesingers
Along the river Rhine in Germany near that part of France where the trouvères sang, lived the Minnesingers. They sang love songs,—minne was the old German word for love. Like the troubadours the minnesingers were of the nobility, but they rarely hired jongleurs or anybody to perform their songs; they sang them themselves, playing their own accompaniments on lutes or viels (viols).
Many songs expressed adoration of the Virgin, and others praised deeds of chivalry. Differing from other minstrels, they made songs about Nature and Religion full of feeling, fancy and humor, but the minnesongs were not so light-hearted or fanciful as those of their French neighbors. They had marked rhythm, beauty of form and simplicity, and were more dramatic, telling the exploits of the Norse heroes in many a glorious story.
Their story was far more important to them than the music which for a long time was like the stern plain song of the Church. “We should be glad they were what they were, for they seem to have paved the way for the great Protestant music of the 16th century,” says Waldo Selden Pratt in his History of Music.
You can get an excellent idea of the minnesong in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Oh Thou Sublime Sweet Evening Star, which Wagner wrote in the spirit of the ancient minnesingers in the opera Tannhäuser. Tannhäuser was a real minnesinger, taking part in a real song contest, held by the Landgraf (Count) of Thuringia, 1206–7, who offered his daughter Elizabeth’s hand to the winner, whatever his rank. We find Elizabeth also in Wagner’s Tannhäuser, so when you hear it you will know that it is history as well as beautiful music! How remarkable that, in the days of feudalism, when the nobles practically owned the so-called common people, talent for music and verse stood even above rank! After all there is no nobility like that of talent. Even in the 13th century this was understood, and to either commoner or peer winning the song tournament, the lady of rank was given in marriage.