Peter Abélard – Planctus Jephta, Planctus David (2000)

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Peter Abélard – Planctus Jephta, Planctus David (2000)

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Peter Abélard (1079-1142) was a French philosopher, poet and musician of Breton origin. After studying philosophy in Paris, he taught dialectic at the cathedral school. His love affair with Heloise, the young niece of Canon Fulbert, brought him fame as a musician. However, after they had secretly married in 1118 Fulbert had Abélard castrated. Heloise became a nun and he became a monk at St Denis. His highly original scholastic method and his restless and blunt nature aroused opposition to his teaching; principal among his opponents was Bernard of Clairvaux. After condemnation by the Council of Sens in 1140, Abélard found support from Peter the Venerable, Benedictine Abbot of Cluny.

Abélard’s songs are few beside his numerous theological and philosophical writings. Heloise’s testimony suggests that his love songs must have been important from both a literary and a musical point of view. In a later letter (probably revised by Abélard) she declared that he had ‘the gift of poetry and the gift of song’; he ‘composed quite a number of metrical and rhythmic love songs. The great charm and sweetness in language and music, and a soft attractiveness of the melody obliged even the unlettered’. These songs, presumably in Latin, have all been lost: they have not been identified among the anonymous repertory.

Some time after 1130 Abélard composed a hymnbook for Heloise, who was by that time Abbess of the convent of the Paraclete. While Bernard of Clairvaux was having a hymnal composed for the Cistercians from the traditional material, Abélard was creating one which was totally new and homogeneous in style. He grouped the hymns by metre, and thus managed with only a few melodies. The hymnbook was not widely used and only one of the melodies has survived: that of the splendid hymn of Saturday, O quanta qualia. It is in the Dorian mode and in AAB form, yet it is shaped in wide-ranging melodic arches. The verse is iambic, but the placing of melismas is as irregular as is usual in hymns of the period.

The six planctus, written after 1130, mark the climax of Abélard’s poetic and musical work. All are based on biblical themes. They are conservative in use of rhyme, often employing only assonance, and yet in rhythm and musical structure they show a highly original style. Formally these songs are linked with the intermediate sequence form (see Sequence (i)) by their rhymed lines and parallel strophes. Abélard extended this parallelism by three- and fourfold repetition. Internal rhyme and musical repetition are used to make smaller phrase-units within a line. (See also Planctus.) The form was imitated in the French Lai, partly by means of direct contrafactum: thus the Lai des pucelles, a French love song from the end of the 13th century, adopted the verse structure and melody of Abélard’s Planctus virginum.