Die Idee der Verbindung von Musik und Poesie im Frankreich des 16. Jahrhunderts

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.