Critical and Historical Essays, Edward MacDowell [fun to read .txt] 📗

as a wonderful tree of gold and silver, spreading into eighteen large, leafy branches, on which were many birds made of the same precious metals. By some mechanical means, the birds sang and the leaves trembled. Naturally such a court, particularly under the reign of Haroun-al Raschid (the Just), who succeeded Almamon, would attract the most celebrated of those Arabian minstrels, such as Zobeir, Ibrahim of Mossoul, and many others who figure in the "Arabian Nights," real persons and celebrated singers of their times. We read of one of them, Serjab, who, by court jealousy and intrigues, was forced to leave Bagdad, and found his way to the Western caliphates, finally reaching Cordova in Spain, where the Caliph Abdalrahman's court vied with that of Bagdad in luxury. Concerning this we read in Gibbon that in his palace of Zehra the audience hall was incrusted with gold and pearls, and that the caliph was attended by twelve thousand horsemen whose belts and scimiters were studded with gold.

We know that the Arabian influence on the European arts came to us by the way of Spain, and although we can see traces of it very plainly in the Spanish music of to-day, the interim of a thousand years has softened its characteristics very much. On the other hand, the much more pronounced Arabian characteristics of Hungarian music are better understood when we recall that the Saracens were at the gates of Budapesth as late as 1400. That the European troubadours should have adopted the Moorish el oud and called it "lute" is therefore but natural. And in all the earlier songs of the troubadours we shall find many traces of the same influence; for their albas or aubades (morning songs) came from the Arabic, as did their serenas or serenades (evening songs), planhs (complaints), and coblas (couplets). The troubadours themselves were so called from trobar, meaning to invent.

In the works of Fauriel and St. Polaye, and many others, may be found accounts of the origin of the Provençal literature, including, of course, a description of the troubadours. It is generally admitted that Provençal poetry has no connection with Latin, the origin of this new poetry being very plausibly ascribed to a gypsy-like class of people mentioned by the Latin chroniclers of the Middle Ages as joculares or joculatores. They were called joglars in Provençal, jouglers or jougleors in French, and our word "juggler" comes from the same source. What that source originally was may be inferred from the fact that they brought many of the Arab forms of dance and poetry into Christian Europe. For instance, two forms of Provençal poetry are the counterpart of the Arabian cosidas or long poem, all on one rhyme; and the maouchahs or short poem, also rhymed. The saraband, or Saracen dance, and later the morris dance (Moresco or Fandango) or Moorish dance, seem to point to the same origin. In order to make it clearer I will quote an Arabian song from a manuscript in the British Museum, and place beside it one by the troubadour Capdeuil.

Arabian Melody [Figure 39]

Pons de Capdeuil [Figure 40]

The troubadours must not be confounded with the jougleurs (more commonly written jongleurs). The latter, wandering, mendicant musicians, ready to play the lute, sing, dance, or "juggle," were welcomed as merry-makers at all rich houses, and it soon became a custom for rich nobles to have a number of them at their courts. The troubadour was a very different person, generally a noble who wrote poems, set them to music, and employed jongleurs to sing and play them. In the South these songs were generally of an amorous nature, while in the North they took the form of chansons de geste, long poems recounting the feats in the life and battles of some hero, such as Roland (whose song was chanted by the troops of William the Conqueror), or Charles Martel.

And so the foundations for many forms of modern music were laid by the troubadours, for the chanson or song was always a narrative. If it were an evening song it was a sera or serenade, or if it were a night song, nocturne; a dance, a ballada; a round dance, a rounde or rondo; a country love song, a pastorella. Even the words descant and treble go back to their time; for the jongleurs, singing their masters' songs, would not all follow the same melody; one of them would seek to embellish it and sing something quite different that still would fit well with the original melody, just as nowadays, in small amateur bands we often hear a flute player adding embellishing notes to his part. Soon, more than one singer added to his part, and the new voice was called the triple, third, or treble voice. This extemporizing on the part of the jongleurs soon had to be regulated, and the actual notes written down to avoid confusion. Thus this habit of singing merged into faux bourdon, which has been discussed in a former chapter. Apart from these forms of song, there were some called sirventes-that is "songs of service," which were very partisan, and were accompanied by drums, bells, and pipes, and sometimes by trumpets. The more warlike of these songs were sung at tournaments by the jongleurs outside the lists, while their masters, the troubadours, were doing battle, of which custom a good description is to be found in Hagen's book on the minnesingers.

In France the Provençal poetry lasted only until the middle of the fourteenth century, after the troubadours had received a crushing blow at the time the Albigenses were extirpated in the thirteenth century.

In one city alone (that of Beziers), between 30,000 and 40,000 people were killed for heresy against the Pope. The motto of the Pope's representatives was "God will know His Own," and Catholics as well as Albigenses (as the sect was called) were massacred indiscriminately. That this heresy against the Pope was vastly aided by the troubadours, is hardly open to doubt. Such was their power that the rebellious, antipapal sirventes of the troubadours (which were sung by their troops of jongleurs in every market place) could be suppressed only after the cities of Provence were almost entirely annihilated and the population destroyed by the massacre, burning alive, and the Inquisition.

A review of the poems of Bertran de Born, Bernart de Ventadour, Thibaut, or others is hardly in place here. Therefore we will pass to Germany, where the spirit of the troubadours was assimilated in a peculiarly Germanic fashion by the minnesingers and the mastersingers.

In Germany, the troubadours became minnesingers, or singers of love songs, and as early as the middle of the twelfth century the minnesingers were already a powerful factor in the life of the epoch, counting among their number many great nobles and kings. The German minnesingers differed from the French troubadours in that they themselves accompanied their songs on the viol, instead of employing jongleurs. Their poems, written in the Swabian dialect, then the court language of Germany, were characterized by greater pathos and purity than those of the troubadours, and their longer poems, corresponding to the chansons de geste of the north of France, were also superior to the latter in point of dignity and strength. From the French we have the "Song of Roland" (which William the Conqueror's troops sang in their invasion of England); from the Germans the "Nibelungen Song," besides Wolfram von Eschenbach's "Parzival" and Gottfried von Strasburg's "Tristan." In contradistinction to the poetry of the troubadours, that of the minnesingers was characterized by an undercurrent of sadness which seems to be peculiar to the Germanic race. The songs are full of nature and the eternal strife between Winter and Summer and their prototypes Death and Life (recalling the ancient myths of Maneros, Bacchus, Astoreth, Bel, etc.).

After the death of Konrad IV, the last Swabian emperor of the House of Hohenstaufen, minnesinging in Germany declined, and was succeeded by the movement represented by the meister or mastersingers. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when Germany was broken up into countless small duchies and kingdoms, many of the German nobles became mere robbers and took part in the innumerable little wars which kept the nation in a state of ferment. Thus they had neither time nor inclination to occupy themselves with such pursuits as poetry or music. In the meanwhile, however, the incessant warfare and brigandage that prevailed in the country tended to drive the population to the cities for protection. The latter grew in size, and little by little the tradespeople began to take up the arts of poetry and music which had been discarded by the nobles.

Following their custom in respect to their trades, they formed the art companies into guilds, the rules for admittance to which were very strict. The rank of each member was determined by his skill in applying the rules of the "Tabulatur," as it was called. There were five grades of membership: the lowest was that of mere admittance to the guild; the next carried with it the title of scholar; the third the friend of the school; after that came the singer, the poet; and last of all the mastersinger, to attain which distinction the aspirant must have invented a new style of melody or rhyme. The details of the contest we all know from Wagner's comedy; in a number of cases Wagner even made use of the sentences and words found in the rules of the mastersingers. Although the mastersingers retained their guild privileges in different parts of Germany almost up to the middle of the present century, the movement was strongest in Bavaria, with Nuremberg as its centre.

Thus we see that the mastersingers and the minnesingers were two very different classes of men. The mastersingers are mainly valuable for having given Wagner a pretext for his wonderful music. Hans Sachs was perhaps the only one of the mastersingers whose melodies show anything but the flattest mediocrity. The minnesingers and their immediate predecessors and successors, on the other hand, furnished thought for a great part of our modern art. To put it in a broad manner, it may be said that much of our modern poetry owes more than is generally conceded to the German mediaeval romance as represented in the works of Wolfram von Eschenbach, Gottfried of Strasburg, and the unknown compilers of the "Nibelungenlied" and "Gutrune." Music owes more to the troubadours, for, from what we know of the melodies of the minnesingers, they cannot compare in expressiveness with those of their French confrères.

In closing this consideration of the minnesingers, I will quote some of their verses and melodies, giving short accounts of the authors.

The best known of the minnesingers were Walther von der Vogelweide, Heinrich Frauenlob, Tannhäuser, Nithart, Toggenburg, etc. We first hear of Walther von der Vogelweide in 1200, as a poet attached to the court of Philip of Hohenstaufen, the German Kaiser, and shortly after to that of his successors Otto and Friedrich. He accompanied Kaiser Friedrich to the Crusade of 1228, and saw him crowned in Jerusalem. He died in Würzburg, Bavaria. In accordance with his dying request, food and drink for the birds were placed on his tomb every day; the four holes carved for that purpose being still visible. The pictures in Hagen's work on the mastersingers were collected in the fifteenth century by Manasses of Zorich, and have served as the basis for all subsequent works on the subject. The picture of Von der Vogelweide (page 21) shows him sitting in an attitude of meditation, on a green hillock, beside him his sword and his coat of arms (a caged bird on one side and his helmet on the other), and in his hand a roll of manuscript. One of his