Troubadour Song as Performance: A Context for Guiraut Riquier’s “Pus sabers no’m val ni sens”

Abstract

The songs of the troubadours present the fundamental challenge of understanding poetry as music. Although the Old Occitan lyric corpus was a sung tradition from its origins in the twelfth century, we do not know exactly how it sounded; the poetry and musical notation of troubadour song are only skeletal vestiges awaiting completion by the imagination. Miniature biographies of the troubadours known as vidas, which combine elements of fact and fiction, describe some poets as performers who sang and played instruments, while others apparently did not. (1) Most manuscript sources of troubadour song lack musical notation; the few chansonniers that do include it provide the pitches and text underlay for one strophe of melody, with the remaining strophes of text laid out in prose format. The absence of music from so much of the written transmission of the corpus can be attributed to factors such as predominantly oral transmission of the melodies (resulting in their loss as the tradition waned) and the circumstances of compilation, which favored the presentation of the songs as poems. (2) The repertory travelled in the thirteenth century to northern France, Italy, the Iberian peninsula and beyond through the movement of poets, singers, patrons, and not least, the formation of the manuscript tradition. As Marisa Galvez notes, the very concept of a troubadour corpus as an authorial tradition emerged from the chansonniers. The constitution of poetic personae in these manuscripts stands in for the construction of poetic agency and voice that would have occurred in performance (2012: 59-64). Many nonmusical, nonverbal components of performance that are now irrecoverable were as much part of the song as the melody and text, and were probably embedded in its early reception: the performers' appearance and gestures, their relationship to the audience, their present or absent patrons. (3) The framework of performance and reception takes on particular significance in the analysis of Guiraut Riquier's Pus no'm val ni sens, a song whose unique structure invites close attention to its novel combination of music and text. Studies of Riquier (c. 1230-c. 1300) note his innovative assemblage of his songs into a self-referential in chronological sequence (Bossy 1991; Bertolucci Pizzorusso 1978, 1994). As the only coherently ordered autobiographical collection created by a troubadour, Riquier's book emblematizes the performance of the self that is central to the troubadour tradition. (4) In the context of Riquier's book, Pus sabers performs the construction of a persona through lyric conventions and the deployment of the troubadour's agency as a historical subject; it also exploits the possibilities of musical and poetic form to the fullest, drawing attention to the roles of singers, listeners, and readers in the performance of the song. Although oral performance is often imputed an unquestioned primacy, literate modes of reception (as attested by the chansonniers) also had a formative role in the tradition that Riquier inherited (Gaunt 2005; Haines 2004). Audition, reading, and singing are overlapping actions: singer and audience may both know the song aurally, and a reader must reconstruct a song while viewing its written record on the manuscript page or in modern transcription. (5) As most sources of troubadour poetry do not contain melodies, their musical dimension must be conjured from memory or the imagination. Even songs with preserved melodies are typically notated only for the first strophe of the text; thereafter, the relationship between melody and text must be reconstructed for each successive strophe. Joining melody to text using the manuscript page is itself an act of performance that establishes a verbal and sonic profile. A modern singer using the manuscript record of a troubadour song must determine the pronunciation of words, the duration of syllables, the notes to sing to each syllable (when the manuscript leaves doubts about this juncture) and the length of each note. …