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15. Suer douce a-mi-e.

The second musical line here serves for thirteen successive text lines with continuous rhyme—another example of this most ancient method of cantilation.

We must now pass on to the development of the love song, which seems to have been the special task of a gifted and celebrated race of knighthood, the glorious post-musicians called Troubadours and Trouvères in France, and Minnesinger in Germany.

IV

The Troubadours and Trouvères (so called from trobar or trouver—to find) were, in sharp contrast to the vagrant professional musicians, noble knights, who practised the graceful arts as gifted amateurs, primarily in the impassioned praise of woman and for the sole prize of her favor, with such zeal and superior intelligence that they soon outstripped in skill their meaner colleagues, who now became their servants. France was, it will be recalled, at this time, linguistically divided into two sections. The langue d’Oc was spoken in the south and the langue d’Oïl in the north. In the south, in Provence and Languedoc, the so-called Troubadour movement had its inception. ‘That glorious land, endowed with all the charms of sunny skies, which surpassed all other European provinces in culture, prosperity, and spiritual contentment, was the cradle of this chivalry, with which are associated supreme sensual enjoyment, a passion for splendor, and the worship of women, thus uniting all the conditions of poetic art.’[76] Chivalry spread rapidly beyond the limits of these provinces, however, and across the Pyrenees, where lay the three Christian kingdoms of Castille-León, Navarre, and Aragón. Counts, dukes, and kings extended their patronage to this knightly poet-band and vied with each in attaching to their courts a brilliant assemblage of singers. The counts of Provence especially, Raimon Berengar III and his successors, the counts of Toulouse, Anjou, and Poitou, the kings of Aragón, Castille, and León, the margraves of Montferrat and Este, the French royal court where Eleonore of Poitou was queen, and the court of England under Henry II, the second husband of Queen Eleonore, provided rallying centres. Even the sovereigns themselves were ambitious for the favor of the Muses. The earliest Troubadour of prominence was Guillaume, count of Poitiers (1087-1127). Contemporary with him was Robert, duke of Normandy, the son of William the Conqueror, who, after returning from the Crusade (1106), was till his death a prisoner of his brother Henry I of England in the Castle of Cardiff, where he is said to have attained the rank of a Welsh bard.

This remarkable and sudden flowering of lyric poetry among the knighthood of the eleventh century, continuing for two centuries and more the record of which stands brightly emblazoned upon the shield of musical history, has never been satisfactorily explained. Riemann thinks that the education of the young nobility in the monasteries certainly had a refining influence. The familiarity with old Breton and British literature, the legend of King Arthur’s Round Table, the old Celtic narrative poems and romances, especially the legend of Tristan and Yseult, which were known through old French adaptations, likewise had an influence.

By their own testimony, however, the Provençal poets found their immediate suggestions in folk song itself, as interpreted by the jongleurs. The latter’s entire repertoire of classic and mediæval chronicles was adopted by the Troubadours, whose own experiences in the Crusades later caused them to substitute recent chivalric deeds for antique subjects. The forms of the jongleurs’ art we find again in the Troubadour creations, but refined in style, governed by definite laws of poetry, more exalted in sentiment, so that, without sacrifice of spontaneity, they have gained distinction and variety and have become conscious works of art. As we are concerned here only with their musical significance, which, indeed, has been generally ignored by literary historians and underestimated by musicians, we shall have little to say about these forms; for, great as is the variety of their content, we fail to find parallel distinctions in their musical settings. It should not be overlooked, however, that certain poetic devices and ingenuities gave rise to more advanced musical forms, i. e., the repetition of a phrase on two rhyming verses at the beginning of a song, followed by a variant, which is the elementary form of the Lied.

The so-called vers gives a starting point for Troubadour lyrics. This was the name given to a strictly normal composition in a measure of eight syllables, with probably an amplification of the more sporadic, uneven verse forms of the jongleurs. The chanson is a more sophisticated form, consisting of alternating verses of different lengths. Girant de Borneil (1175-1220) is known as its first exponent. Then we find again the familiar narrative form in the guise of chansons de geste—epics recounting deeds of valor—the sirventes, employed in a lover’s address to his mistress as well as in satire (which is an early prototype of the famous terza rima later adopted by Dante and Petrarch), and the tenson, a controversial song in which the same subject is treated by rival poets, real and fictitious, in alternating verses. The Breton narrative or lai, of melancholy character, as represented in the ‘Tristan’ legend, was also adopted by the Troubadours; other lyrics are variously designated as canson, canzona, soula (a merry song), romance (more characteristic of the Trouvères), alba (aubade), a morning song, serena (serenade), an evening song, and pastourelle, the favorite form already mentioned, which is the richest in popular elements—dance rhythms, refrains, etc.