Because Adam’s collected work is so readily available in the retrospective manuscript described
above, it was published in an edition by the French musical antiquarian Charles-Edmond-Henri de
Coussemaker as early as 1872. “Le trouvère de la Halle,” as he was called there, thus became the earliest
medieval musician whose work was comprehensively recovered in modern times. Performances of Le jeu
de Robin et Marion (usually harmonized in a contemporary fake-medieval style), billed as “the world’s
first opera,” enjoyed a big vogue in all the capitals of Europe. There was a particularly successful revival
in St. Petersburg’s “Antique Theater” in 1907, with harmonizations by the local conservatory
musicologist, an Italian named Liberio Sacchetti. It was produced by the same team that later brought
“Russian ballet” to Paris and made musical and theatrical history. Thus it is a striking instance of the
interest musical modernists have often shown in “early music” and the inspiration they have drawn from it
—another theme to be pursued in later chapters.
GEOGRAPHICAL DIFFUSION
The earliest written vernacular repertories in several other European countries are traceable to the
influence, both artistic and ideological, of the troubadours and trouvères. The troubadour influence went
south, as we have seen, into the Iberian peninsula and Italy. That of the trouvères went east into Germany.
CANTIGAS
In some parts of what is now Spain, especially the eastern part (then Aragon, now Catalonia), the
presence of troubadours stimulated the rise of a latter-day Provençal school, of little interest to music
history. On the western side, however, and especially at the northwestern court of Castile and León, the
troubadours were emulated in the local literary vernacular, Galician-Portuguese. This brief efflorescence
left a major musical monument in its wake, the Cantigas de Santa Maria, compiled over a period of as
much as thirty years (1250–80) under the supervision of King Alfonso X (el Sabio, “The Wise”).
The word cantiga (or cantica) is the equivalent of canso: a courtly song in the vernacular. Alfonso’s
collection of courtly songs expressed loving devotion to the Virgin Mary, and once again blurred the line
we now insist on drawing between the sacred and the secular. (Sometimes the blur is finessed by using
the word “paraliturgical”—“outside the liturgy” yet still somehow sacred—to cover it up; the belief that
demons and fractious categories can be exorcised by naming them is indeed an old superstition.) In its
most comprehensive sources, Alfonso’s book of cantigas comprises over four hundred pious love lyrics,