Die Idee der Verbindung von Musik und Poesie im Frankreich des 16. Jahrhunderts Fakultät für Geschichts- und Kunstwissenschaften - Digitale Hochschulschriften der LMU

In 1552 Pierre de Ronsard’s collection of sonnets, Les Amours, was published with a musical supplement: nine four-part chansons from four different composers – among them Clément Janequin, Pierre Certon and Claude Goudimel. This supplement has often been cited as a symbol for the efforts of French humanists in the 16th century to realize a close union between music and poetry derived from the antique ideal of musiké. It arose from the ideas of the Pléiade, a French group of poets that led French Renaissance humanism to its climax in the mid 16th century.
The French Renaissance humanists drew their inspiration from the classical antiquity. The Italian example played an important role in the confrontation with the antique ideal. The Italian impact taught the French amongst other things a new awareness for their own identity and language. They tried to enrich the French language and defined very early certain tasks and problems: The poetry and poetics of the time are imbued with the idea of a union of music and poetry. The aim was to reproduce the union of music and poetry of the classical Greek verse, musiké.
The realization of a new union of music and poetry often stayed very vague. This has to be seen in context with another problem the solution of which had been identified as a promising cure-all in the further development of the French language: If poetry in the vernacular language should be of equal value as the antique poetry, it should be capable to reproduce its rhythm. This rhythm has been seeken in the quantities of the French syllables: The French have been convinced for a long time that the rhythm of poetic language could be found via identifying the exact length of syllables of French words.
A promising idea to unite music and poetry seemed to be Jean Antoine de Baïf’s "vers mesurés à l’antique", which he set to "musique mesurée" together with Joachim Thibault de Courville in his "Académie de Poésie et de Musique" (1570). His solution was ultimately doomed to failure by betraying the principles of French language and French verse.
As a high expression of the efforts to unite poetry and music appears the musical supplement to Ronsard’s "Amours". The addition of music to an edition of poetry is very particular, and very special too is the directions to exchange the text against other poems of the same form, based on Ronsard's concept of "vers mesurés à la lyre". Nevertheless we see that the chansons of the musical supplement are no simple models but highly complex compositions reflecting the individuality of their original text.