Faidit, Gaucelm

(b Uzerche, nr Limoges, ? c1150; d ? c1220). French troubadour. He was from the Limousin region of southern France. His vida tells that he received the protection of Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat. Boniface succeeded his father as marquis in 1192, was chosen as leader of the fourth crusade in 1202 and died in battle in 1207. Gaucelm dedicated a number of poems to Boniface and so was probably in his service before 1200. It would appear that Gaucelm came under the patronage of the marquis only after a period of 20 years wandering on foot without recognition; it has been suggested that the composer’s travels took him as far as Italy and Spain.

The vida further records that Gaucelm was a middle-class son who became a joglar only because he lost all his property at dice. (The existence of a notice to the effect that he sold a field to the Abbey of Obazine as late as 1198 would seem to cast doubt on this, however; vidas of the troubadours are often more fanciful than factual.) Though known to have been a poor singer (‘cantava peiz d’ome del mon’) he nevertheless wrote excellent poems and melodies. It is said that he was inordinately fond of eating, with the result that he became fat ‘beyond measure’ (‘oltra mesura’, which may be taken as a musical pun on the contemporary Latin term ‘ultra mensuram’). He married a prostitute named Guillelma Monja, who evidently became as fat and rude as her husband. In addition there are a number of other hints of intrigues and affairs involving Gaucelm, including his affair with Maria de Ventadorn (d 1222), a noble troubadour poet to whom the composer addressed a number of his poems.

No fewer than 68 poems have been attributed to Gaucelm, including 14 with music. Of these Al semblan, Chant e deport, Cora que·m, Fortz causa, Lo rossignolet, No·m alegra, Si anc nuls hom, S’om pogues partir and Tant si sufert are of the oda continua variety: generally long strophes with a melody that is either through-composed or contains only one melodic repetition. However, the repetition of smaller motives provides formal unity in many cases, creating what Rossell Mayo has termed a ‘melodic structure’. Among these oda continua is the celebrated planh on the death of Richard the Lionheart in 1199, which has raised the possibility that Gaucelm was at the time in the service of Richard. This song, Fortz causa, is extant in 20 sources, four of them with music; it is valuable as one of the two planhs to have survived with music. The remaining songs employ some variety of canso form, with paired repetition of the first two to four lines. The melody of Si anc nuls hom bears a striking resemblance, at least at the beginning, to Bernart de Ventadorn’s celebrated Quan vei la lauzeta mover (Labaree). As Falvy has noted, a distinctive feature of Gaucelm's melodies is their descending opening line: all but two begin this way.

WORKS

Editions:Der musikalische Nachlass der Troubadours: I, ed. F. Gennrich, SMM, iii (1958) [complete edn]Les poèmes de Gaucelm Faidit, ed. J. Mouzat (Paris, 1965) [complete edn]Las cançons dels trobadors, ed. I. Fernandez de la Cuesta and R. Lafont (Toulouse, 1979) [complete edn]The Extant Troubadour Melodies, ed. H. van der Werf and G. Bond (Rochester, NY, 1984) [complete edn]Mediterranean Culture and Troubadour Music, ed. Z. Falvy (Budapest, 1986) [complete edn]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

U. Sesini: Le melodie trobadoriche nel Canzoniere provenzale della Biblioteca Ambrosiana (Turin, 1942), 154–79

J. Boutière and A.-H. Schutz: Biographies des troubadours (Paris, 1964), 167–95

J. Mouzat: Les poèmes de Gaucelm Faidit (Paris, 1965)

Z. Falvy: Mediterranean Culture and Troubadour Music (Budapest, 1986)

R. Labaree: ‘Finding’ Troubadour Song: Melodic Variability and Melodic Idiom in Three Monophonic Traditions (diss., Wesleyan U., 1989), 274, 281

V. Pollina: ‘Word–Music Relations in the Work of the Troubadour Gaucelm Faidit: Some Preliminary Observations on the Planh’, Miscellanea di studi in onore di Aurelio Roncaglia, ed. R. Antonelli and others (Modena, 1989), 1075–90

V. Pollina: ‘Structure verbale et expression mélodique dans Mon cor e mi du troubadour Gaucelm Faidit’, Contacts de langues, de civilisations et intertextualité: Montpellier 1990, ed. G. Gouiran (Montpellier, 1992), 669–78

A. Rossell Mayo: ‘Aspects mélodiques et structurels dans les chansons du troubadour limousin Gaucelm Faidit’, AnM, xlvii (1992), 3–37

For further bibliography see Troubadours, trouvères.

ROBERT FALCK/JOHN D. HAINES