The only type of troubadour love song that emphasized the joy of consummation was the thrilling genre
known as the alba, or “dawn-song.” The lovers, having passed a clandestine night together in oblivious
bliss, are aroused—by the sun, by singing birds, by a watchman’s cry, or by a confidant—to the breaking
day and to the peril of discovery. The most famous alba was Reis glorios by Guiraut de Bornelh, a
contemporary of Bernart and, like him, a commoner whose skill found favor with the noble audiences (Ex.
4-1). Where Bernart’s stanza (or cobla, to use the Occitan word) had consisted, in Can vei la lauzeta, of
eight different phrases, each corresponding to a line of poetry, Guiraut’s is regularized by an initial
melodic repetition (or pes)—as in the Salve Regina melody discussed in the previous chapter—and by a
concluding refrain as in, say, a Frankish Kyrie. The resemblance of Guiraut’s melody to that of the Kyrie
verse Cunctipotens genitor (Ex. 2-14b) has been noted.
EX. 4-1 Guiraut de Bornelh, Reis glorios (first verse)The higher the style of a troubadour melody, the more likely were its chant affinities. Comparison of
Bernart’s or Guiraut’s melodies with those of the late Frankish chant discloses a great similarity of style.
Like Salve Regina or Kyrie IX, they are exemplary “first mode” melodies according to the rationalized
concept of mode studied in chapter 3. (The composers probably picked up the style by ear on the basis of
the chants they heard sung.) There are even instances that show the influence of late chant poetry on
troubadour diction and sentiment. A familiar Provençal dictum—fin’ amors, fons de bontat, “courteous
love is the source of all goodness”—echoes in close cognates the tenth-century Kyrie verse Fons
bonitatis. (Its third-mode melody, shorn of the verse but still sporting the incipit as a title, can be found in
modern chant books as “Kyrie II.”) The hypothesis that the music of troubadour song—the performance
medium of a liturgy of aristocratic mores—aped the actual liturgical music of its time has been gaining
strength as more is learned about actual twelfth-century chant. Quite near William the Ninth’s seat at
Poitiers was Limoges, another Aquitanian town and the site of the Benedictine abbey of St. Martial, the
greatest center for the production of Latin versus on which the troubadours modeled their vers (to use the
Provençal word for poetry-with-music).
Rhythmically and formally, Latin versus (or conductus as it was called in northern France) was just
as various and almost as virtuosic as troubadour songs. Actual Provençal words occasionally appear in
versus from St. Martial. Most striking of all, there are subgenres of versus that, like the most elevated
troubadour genres, straddle the nebulous line between the sacred and the secular. Some of them have
actual troubadour parallels, for example the planctus (=planh). St. Martial manuscripts contain a
celebrated planctus for Charlemagne and an even more illustrious song called planctus cigni (“The
lament of the swan”), a moving metaphor of exile, in which a swan, caught in a storm over the sea,
laments the loss of its verdant homeland. The famous theologian Pierre Abelard (1079–1142), an exact