Motets of the Manuscrit du Roi

Could we imagine that, in the Middle Ages, lovesickness was a disease, a real disease? That lovers died of this sweet malady of Melancholy? No, we cannot and do not want to believe it; we prefer to read poems and love songs from the 13th century with the tender smile provided by the adolescent freshness of their so « naive » love affairs… However, these poems conveyed the deep pain of the struggles that the poets waged for their survival. For “Loving” was a terrible pain to them that only the magic of lyric poetry could transcend.

So why, today, do we remain deaf to the depth of what is told there? Do we therefore prefer to forget that we have not yet finished with Love so that we cannot recognize this agonizing grip of the amorous tumult which descends and relentlessly gnaws at all our poets?

Thus, whether they were Oc or Oïl speakers, troubadours, trouvères, clerics or lay people, they put their pain into words and they said it in music, in the monody of cansò or in the polyphony of vernacular motets. Their works were collected in sumptuous manuscripts where we still find evidence of their distress today.

Le Chansonnier du Roi (Bnf fr.844), copied in the Arras area during the second half of the 13th century, compiles a large sum of pieces by our poets. Love songs feature prominently. This is where we have taken most of our songs to make this program the echo of their speech. It is a secret discourse, told to the melodies of goldsmiths, which is whispered with modesty in the intimacy of lovers…