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A Mediæval Triptych - Concert 3:The Grail, the Knight and the PoetThe Mediæval Perceval LegendMusical Reflections on the ‘Perceval/Parzifal’ Story
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 Concert Details |
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Sequentia
Benjamin Bagby, director
Katarina Livljanić voice
Benjamin Bagby voice, harp
Elizabeth Gaver vielle, rebec
Norbert Rodenkirchen
flutes
This event in cooperation with the UBC School of Music is also supported by the Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies at UBC.
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Tuesday, January 26, 2010 | This project was made possible through the generous support of Elaine Adair |
| Pre-Concert Introduction by Benjamin Bagby at 7:15 | Concert at 8:00 pm | ||
| UBC Recital Hall | ||
| 6361 Memorial Road, UBC campus | directions |
for information on Ticket Prices and Seating Plans.
Tickets for this concert at $33 (students & seniors $3 discount) are available on-line, or by phone from the office of Early Music Vancouver, and also from Sikora’s Classical Records, from Kestrel Books, or from Tickets Tonight: 604 684-2787 or www.ticketstonight.ca.
Rush Seats for Students with valid ID on sale for $10, at the door only, from 7:00 pm on the evening of the concert.
This concert is included in our “Bring a Youth for Free” programme.
| Programme |
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Translations of the sung/recited texts will be video-projected during the performanceVrou Herzeloyd diu rîche (scene from Parzival, ca. 1210)
Wolfram von Eschenbach (ca. 1170 - ca. 1220)
Der Ritter [instrumental piece]
Lors vit devant lui en un val (scene from Perceval, ca. 1190)
Chrétien de Troyes (fl. late 12th century)
Atressi con Persevaus (troubadour canso)
Rigaud de Berbezilh (fl. late 12th century)
Kievrefuel [instrumental piece]
Alrêrst nu âventiurt ez sich! (scene from Parzival, ca. 1210)
Wolfram von Eschenbach
Mit iamer ûf den toten (scene from Jüngerer Titurel, ca. 1270)
Albrecht von Scharfenberg (fl. late 13th century)
Lasse! fait el, malaüreuse (scene from Perceval)
Chrétien de Troyes
Künec Artûs [instrumental piece]
Welt ir nu hoeren war sî komn Parzivâl der Wâleis? (scene from Parzival)
Wolfram von Eschenbach
Chanter m’estuet ireement (trouvère chanson)
Gace Brulé (ca. 1160 – ca. 1215)
Dilectus meus candidus et rubicundus (from the Song of Songs)
Anonymous (Regensburg, 13th century)
Ich lobe ein wîb (Tanzleich / dance-lay)
Tannhäuser (late 13th century)
| Programme Notes |
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Introduction
The powerful story of the Knight and the Grail probably has its roots in the indigenous cultures of mediæval Europe, where it lived in oral tradition until being set in verse – during the late 12th century – as the story of the naive boy/knight Perceval. In his quest to become a chevalier, Perceval visits the suffering Fisher-King but neglects to ask the meaning of the silent procession he witnesses: a magnificent vessel called the Grail and a bleeding lance. This pivotal moment, this question left unasked, was first captured in French verse by the poet Chrétien de Troyes, writing at the illustrious court of Marie de Champagne, and started a literary tradition of adaptations and sequels – most notably by the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach – which continued throughout the Middle Ages and into our own time. The principal images of this story: the suffering of women in a society of warriors (the death of Perceval’s abandoned mother Herzeloyde and the lament of Sigune, a dead knight’s lover); the Grail, the bleeding lance and the unasked question; and Perceval’s deep contemplation of his beloved’s face in the form of three drops of blood fallen on fresh snow, are found reflected in poetry and song throughout the 13th century.
Our programme presents performances – in recitation and chant – of key scenes from the romances Perceval ou le conte du Graal, by Chrétien de Troyes, and the slightly later German re-telling of the same story, Parzival, by Wolfram von Eschenbach. These will be interspersed with solo song and instrumental music from the same period. The accompanying songs, performed in mediæval French, German, Latin and Occitan, amplify and reflect on the story’s themes.
Notes on the pieces
Our programme begins with the famous scene from Wolfram’s Parzival, Vrou Herzeloyd diu rîche, in which the innocent boy Parzival – who has been kept by his mother from learning about chivalry and fighting – meets three armed knights in the forest. Thinking they must be gods, he asks how he can become like them, and is instructed to visit King Arthur. The boy’s mother, Herzeloyde, already having lost her husband and two other sons to knightly combat, is determined to protect Parzival from any contact with chivalry. But now he is determined to depart on his quest, and as he leaves home his mother dies of a broken heart.
The instrumental music in this programme is reconstructed using instrumental structures and modal models (both German and French) of the period. In the pieces Der Ritter, Kievrefuel and Künec Artûs, we hear the instrumental sounds of bowed strings (fiddle), plucked strings (harp) and winds (flutes), well-known to minstrels of the late 12th century.
In a central scene from Perceval, Lors vit devant lui en un val, Chrétien describes young Perceval’s encounter with the mysterious Grail and the bleeding lance, carried in solemn procession before the young warrior when he is received in the castle of the ailing Fisher-King. Thinking it rude to question his host, Perceval neglects to ask about this mystery, a simple question which would release the king from his suffering. The subsequent evening of polite conversation and delicious food & drink – interrupted by the Gail and lance again passing by – will be regretted by Perceval for years to come. In the following canso by the trobador Rigaud de Berbezilh, Atressi con Persevaus, the poet makes reference to this famous scene, only now it is the lover, lost in thoughts of the beloved’s beauty, who forgets to speak. This song contains the first datable mention of the Grail and the lance, proof that the story has existed in oral tradition before Chrétien’s masterful retelling was created in ca. 1190.
In the next scene, from Wolfram’s version of the story (Alrêrst nu âventiurt ez sich!), Parzival has left the Fisher-King’s castle and deep in the forest comes across a beautiful young woman, sitting in a linden tree and cradling the body of a dead knight. She sings a lament (Mit iamer ûf den toten) for her dead lover, Schionatulander. This lament of the girl, Sigune, is found in Albrecht von Scharfenberg’s monumental Jüngerer Titurel, one of the many later ‘continuations’ of the Parzival/Perceval story which proliferated in France and Germany. The melody, added to the manuscript by a later hand, is the only known notated tune for such a romance (the other sung scenes are reconstructions).
After her lament concludes, Perceval and the girl begin to talk (Ensin son doel de ce menoit) and she inquires about his evening with the Fisher-King. In a sharp dialogue, she learns that he did not ask about the Grail and the lance, and she berates him, revealing that his name is not Perceval le Gallois but Perceval l’Infortunté, and that she is in fact his cousin. She predicts that misfortune will come to him and to others.
In another important scene from the story (Welt ir nu hoeren war sî komn Parzivâl der Wâleis?), Parzival is riding alone through the forest and must spend the night outside in a snowstorm. In the morning, he sees how a stray falcon attacks some wild geese, causing one wounded bird to shed three drops of blood on the freshly-fallen snow. As he contemplates the drops of blood, Parzival falls into a trance and sees there the face of his beloved Cundwîrâmûrs (conduire amours): flushed cheeks and a full red mouth, set in a perfect white face.
The image of the beloved’s face and body, expressed through the erotic power of the colors red and white, has long been used in love poetry. One of the Champenois trouvères, Gace Brulé (who may have known Chrétien at the court of Marie de Champagne) often used this imagery in his chansons (Chanter m’estuet ireement); and in Germany we find a strong tradition, even within the church, of singing surprisingly erotic texts from the Song of Songs, such as Dilectus meus candidus et rubicundus (from the cathedral of Regensburg). Parzival’s reverie in the snow is the ultimate expression of the chivalric ideal of love-service and devotion, finding its spiritual reflection in the Latin version of King Solomon’s great canticle of physical desire.
On a more mundane level, the Parzival story – having become popular and widespread throughout Europe by the end of the 13th century – entered the ranks of all great romances in history. In a lighthearted dance-lay, Ich lobe ein wîb, the German poet Tannhäuser includes Parzival, Blanchiflur, Gawan and other Arthurian characters in a crazily distorted catalogue of great lovers in history, such as Venus, Helena, Dido and Isolde, and culminating with the poet’s own charming girlfriend. It is interesting to note that the melody to this lay is found in the same German manuscript as the Song of Songs settings heard previously.
From his roots in indigenous oral tradition, Perceval made a long journey via the pens of Chrétien and Wolfram and their many followers, eventually finding himself on a Bavarian dance-floor. And 600 years later his name would become famous again in Bavaria, on the operatic stage at Bayreuth.
Sources: The texts of the romances are taken from the standard editions of Chalres Méla (Perceval), Karl Lachmann (Parzival)
and Kurt Nyhom (Jüngerer Titurel).
Musical reconstructions of the romances by Benjamin Bagby and Katarina Livljanic.
Instrumental reconstructions by Benjamin Bagby, Norbert Rodenkirchen and Elizabeth Gaver.
Atressi con Persevaus (melody): Paris, BNf. f. fr. 20050, fol 85. Text edition: Martín de Riquer.
Mit iamer ûf den toten: (melody and text) Wien, Nationalbibl. Hs. 2675, fol. 1v.
Chanter m’estuet ireement (melody): [RS 687] Paris, BNf. f. fr. 845, fol. 87. Text edition: S.N. Rosenberg.
Dilectus meus candidus et rubicundus (meoldy & text): München, Bayr. Staatsbibl., clm 5539, fol. 53v.
Ich lobe ein wîb (melody):München, Bayr. Staatsbibl., clm 5539, fol. 161. Text edition: Johannes Siebert.
Thanks to Prof. Richard Trachsler for assistance with the pronunciation of Old French.
| The Artists |
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Sequentia
Sequentia (www.sequentia.org) is one of the world’s most respected and innovative ensembles for mediæval music. It is an international group of singers and instrumentalists – united in Paris under the direction of Benjamin Bagby – for performances and recordings of Western European music from the period before 1300. The size and disposition of the ensemble is determined by the repertoire being performed, and ranges between an instrumental/vocal duo to a large vocal ensemble. Based on meticulous research, intensive rehearsal and long gestation, Sequentia’s performances seek to confront the listener with a timeless emotional connection to our own past musical cultures.
Founded by Benjamin Bagby and the late Barbara Thornton, Sequentia can look back on more than 30 years of international concert tours, performing throughout Europe, North and South America, India, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Australia. Sequentia has brought to life over seventy innovative concert programmes that encompass the entire spectrum of mediæval music, in addition to the creation of music-theater projects such as Hildegard von Bingen’s Ordo Virtutum, the Cividale Planctus Marie, the Bordesholmer Marienklage, and Heinrich von Meissen’s Frauenleich (several of which were filmed for television). The work of the ensemble is divided between a small touring ensemble of vocal and instrumental soloists, and a larger ensemble of men’s voices for the performance of Latin liturgical chant and polyphony. Sequentia has inspired new generations of young performers, many of whom were trained in professional courses given by Benjamin Bagby and other members of the ensemble. After 25 years based in Cologne, Germany, Sequentia’s home has been in Paris since 2002.
Sequentia’s comprehensive discography of more than thirty recordings spans the entire Middle Ages (including the complete works of Hildegard von Bingen), and the ensemble’s recordings have received numerous prizes, including a Disque d’Or, several Diapasons d’Or, two Edison Prizes, the Deutscher Schallplattenpreis and a Grammy nomination. Recordings made by Sequentia have been integrated into the soundtracks of several major films.
The past years have seen a growing corpus of Sequentia recordings centered on the importance of oral tradition, story-telling, and the earliest musical documents of mediæval Europe: In 2002, Sequentia released an acclaimed 2-CD set of sung tales from mediæval Iceland: The Rheingold Curse: A Germanic Saga of Greed and Vengeance from the Mediæval Icelandic Edda, on the independent Marc Aurel Edition label. Other recent programmes, such as Lost Songs of a Rhineland Harper (released on the BMG Classics/DHM label in 2004), and Chant Wars, (SONY-BMG / 2005, a co-production with the Parisian ensemble Dialogos, dir. Katarina Livljanic) have received wide international critical acclaim. The most recent recording, Fragments for the End of Time, featuring apocalyptic songs from early mediæval Germany, Saxony and Aquitaine, was released on the Raumklang label in 2008.
Vocalist, harpist and scholar Benjamin Bagby has been an important figure in the field of mediæval musical performance for almost 30 years. After musical studies in the USA (Oberlin Conservatory and Oberlin College) and Switzerland (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis), he and the late Barbara Thornton formed Sequentia in 1977 in Cologne, Germany, where the ensemble was based until Mr. Bagby moved the ensemble to Paris in 2001. The years since 1977 have been almost uniquely devoted to the work of Sequentia. Mr. Bagby was instrumental in the creation of more than 70 innovative concert programmes – and 30 recordings – of mediæval music and music drama.
Apart from the research and ensemble work of Sequentia, Mr. Bagby devotes his time to the solo performance of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic oral poetry; an acclaimed performance of the Beowulf epic is an ongoing project, with performances given yearly worldwide, and a DVD production released in 2007 (www.BagbyBeowulf.com).
Benjamin Bagby writes on performance practice and teaches performance courses worldwide. He is currently on the faculty of the Université de Paris Sorbonne - Paris IV, where, together with Katarina Livljanic, he teaches in the master’s programme for mediæval music performance.
Elizabeth Gaver (mediæval fiddle) began performing with Sequentia in 1992 and was a core member of the ensemble for many years. She has participated in over a dozen recordings with the ensemble, along with several music-drama productions.
She now lives in Oslo, where she has performed and recorded with Modus, Pro Musica Antiqua Oslo, Barokkanerne, and The Norwegian Baroque Orchestra. She is a member of the Swedish trio, Ulv, interpreting traditional ballads and songs with a mediæval perspective. She plays hardingfele with the Norwegian traditional music ensemble Feleboga that has performed concerts and taught dance workshops in Germany, Iceland, Poland, Thailand and the US. In addition, she plays old-time fiddle with the band Apple Blossom.
She has earned degrees from Stanford University, The Juilliard School and the University of Oslo, and studied mediæval performance practice with Thomas Binkley at Indiana University.
For Sequentia’s Edda project, Ms. Gaver commissioned and collaborated on the design of a 4-string fiddle (from a drawing found in an English psalter, ca. 1050) reconstructed by instrument-builder Richard Earle (Basel).
Katarina Livljanić, singer and musicologist, specializes in mediæval chant performance. Born on the Adriatic coast of Croatia, she decided to become a mediæval music performer at a very early age, training at the Zagreb Music Conservatory before moving to France to study voice and musicology. She directs the vocal ensemble Dialogos (www.ensemble-dialogos.org), specializing in mediæval chant and liturgical theatre of the Glagolitic tradition. For her work in this field, she was decorated for cultural achievement in 2002 by the president of Croatia.
Katarina Livljanić obtained a Ph.D. at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, based on research of mediæval chant manuscripts of Southern Italy. She is currently Maître de conferences in mediæval music at the Sorbonne University in Paris where she co-directs a mediæval music performance master’s programme. Previous to this, she spent a semester as visiting lecturer and directed a Gregorian chant schola at Harvard University, and in 1998 she founded a chant performance programme at the University of Limerick in Ireland. She is regularly invited to numerous universities in Europe, in the United States and Canada as a teacher and resident artist. She has emerged as an important international speaker about mediæval chant performance and publishes articles in specialized reviews wordwide. In 2002 she was a guest artistic advisor at the Early Music Festival in Utrecht, Netherlands. With Benjamin Bagby, she was awarded a Cornille Visiting Professorship at Wellesley College (USA) in 2007.
Among her most important solo projects, a musical theatre production entitled Judith, based on the masterpiece by the 16th-century Croatian poet Marko Marulić.
Norbert Rodenkirchen (www.norbertrodenkirchen.de), who studied flute with Hans Martin Mueller and Günther Hoeller at the Staatliche Musikhochschule Köln has been the flute player of Sequentia since 1996 and also works regularly with the French ensemble Dialogos directed by Katarina Livljanic. Together with Sabine Lutzenberger he founded the ensemble per – sonat. With all three ensembles he has been invited to numerous international festivals. He is also much in demand as a composer of music for theater and film as well as a producer for CD projects, most of them in coproduction with the WDR/ West German Radio. Since 2003 Norbert Rodenkirchen is the artistic director of the concert series “Schnuetgen Konzerte – Musik des Mittelalters” in the mediæval museum of Cologne. Additionally he has given workshops on mediæval instrumental improvisation at the Mozarteum Salzburg, at the festivals of Vancouver and Ambronay as well as at the conservatories of Lyon and Liege. In 2009 he released his second solo CD Flour de Flours / Guillaume de Machaut / Lais & Virelais on the Marc Aurel Edition label.