HMR Project: History of Music & Modern Recording

Bernart de Ventadorn

Born circa 1135 in France, Bernart de Ventadorn (Ventadour) is a good example of the troubadour (itinerant musician). Troubadours had begun plying their craft about the cusp of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and were popular until about the mid-fourteenth century. Troubadours were among the earliest instances of secular music apart from the Church, being poets and singers for whom courtly love was the large topic. As the original popular singers minus record companies, they differed from traveling jugglers and minstrels in that they sought patronage from kings and queens rather than only lords, ladies and anyone else with a purse. Indeed, the first troubadour on record was a count with no need to sing for coins, Guillaume IX, born 60 or so years before Bernart.

Bernart is exemplary of the canso, French at the time for song, variations of which were canco, canzo, canson and eventually chanson in modern French. The canso in Italy was the canto, that is, to chant (sing). What it was in other languages matters not here, since at Bernart's time and for a few centuries to come, to speak of Europe was to refer en large to either Italy or France. Norman (French) rule of England since 1066 was replaced by the even more powerful French family, the Plantagenets, when Henry II was crowned King of England in 1154 during Bernart's youth. The Plantagenets would reign in England until Henry IV, an English Lancaster, in 1399.

Born about the same year as Bernart was the poet, Chrétien de Troyes, the first of the trouvèr(e)s or, troubadours of northern France. The trouvères would form a genre of love song developed by troubadours in Occitan (southern France) called the grand chant, grande chanson courtoise or chanson d'amour. The trouvere enjoyed a status generally more elevated than that of the everyday troubadour. It was also during Bernart's lifetime that trobairitz emerged, that is, female troubadours.

Born in Ventadour, Bernardt's authorship is estimated to range from 1147 to 1180. The same sources have him writing his first poems for the wife of Eble III of Ventadorn, Marguerite de Turenne, making him about age twelve at the time. Bernart eventually fell in love with his patroness. But she a viscount's wife, wisdom persuaded him to leave Ventadour, first for Montluçon, then Toulouse, then England. He was later employed by Count Raimon V of Toulouse. Yet later, Bernart entered a monastery in Dordogne, where he likely died about 1195.

Albeit 45 texts and 19 melodies by Bernard yet exist, his compositions aren't easy to date. Titles below are thus stacked alphabetically. As Bernart spoke Old French of the 8th to 14th centuries he isn't readily translatable while at once variously written. Titles below are per incipits at Trobar by Leonardo Malcovati [below]. Find beneath two widely different interpretations of 'Can vei la lauzeta mover' ('When I see the lark beat his wings') written about 1150 when Bernart was perhaps fifteen.