What was music drama in the Middle Ages? It’s clear that narrative balladry, lyric monologues and even staged music dramas were a regular part of culture. We know that improvisation and instrumental accompaniment were likely – but in what form, and using what methods?
In a way, the fact that so much remains unknown is a boon for performers. Adam de la Halle’s Le Jeu de Robin et Marion (c.1282), one of the earliest extant music dramas, appears in manuscripts as what looks like a play with singing: spoken dialogue with occasional songs. But what Ensemble Micrologus do to bring Adam’s music drama to life is a complete riot of invention.
Interleaving several of Adam’s other multi-part motets, which quote lines from Robin et Marion, the monophonic songs are given gregarious, semi-improvised accompaniments, from the raucous to the contemplative, utilising a fleet of instruments: vielle, harp, transverse and double flutes, fifes, shawms, bagpipe, long trumpets, drums, even cymbals and triangle. Adam’s drama is one of yearning and nostalgia, designed for a French-speaking court of Anjevins in Italy, dressing up as shepherdesses and knights, singing of a France of their imagination. It is a gesture recapitulated eight centuries later.
Adam’s three-part motets are themselves riots of words and colour, as poetic turns of phrase pile one upon another, the harmony never stabilising completely. Micrologus’ instruments, particularly the winds, are tuned in such a way that thirds are dissonances. Indeed they seem to have completely internalised the feeling of Adam’s harmony, such that they can easily improvise an added part to a monophonic song.
Micrologus perform Robin et Marion largely from memory, which gives it even more of a feeling of recovered folk music. The plot is classic: shepherdess Marion is snatched from her love Robin by a gang of dastardly knights, before escaping again. To her disappointment, Robin fails to rescue her, but he redeems himself by rescuing one of her sheep from a wolf, and all is resolved. The final song is a wedding dance, and bagpipe, one-handed fife and tambourine dance around, before the trumpets blow heavenward.
Earlier in the evening, German ensemble Per-Sonat performed a programme that also hinted at music drama – but that of the troubadours rather than staged drama. The performance was framed primarily with several 11th-century settings of Horace’s Odes, poems of love, drinking, full of pagan imagery. With mostly women’s voices accompanied by harp, cithara and citole, these odes are doubly imaginary: pagan antiquity as seen by the Christian Middle Ages, reinterpreted again in the present.
Per-Sonat placed these odes in largely Christian surroundings, beginning with a Gregorian chant and later interposing several haunting two-voice organum from the Winchester Troper, the earliest extant polyphonic music of England. Dating from prior to the Norman conquest, this music is unlike virtually any other medieval music: dwelling frequently on major second dissonances, which sometimes move together in parallel. Reconstructed from ambiguous notations of the c.1020s, it seems magical and quite difficult to believe that the music could have truly been like this. Maybe it’s appropriate such music requires a leap of faith.
Per-Sonat’s performance was marred in my view by the inclusion of Peter Abelard’s Dolorum solatium, an imagined lamentation by David for the defeat of Judah by the nation of Amalek. In 2023 Benjamin Netanyahu explicitly identified modern Palestinians with the Amalekites, adding that Israel’s government was “committed to completely eliminating” them. Given these parallels, whatever the musical value of Abelard’s composition, the inclusion of this work in the programme was unfortunate.
Lawrence’s press trip was funded by Laus Polyphoniae, AMUZ Antwerp
