Bernart de Ventadorn

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Bernart de Ventadorn was a troubadour from the Occitan-speaking region, a poet and composer, who lived from about 1130 to about 1200. According to an old source he was the son of a baker at the castle of Ventadour in the Corrèze in France. There he learned singing and poetry from Viscount Eble III, and he wrote his first poems for the viscount's wife, Marguerite de Turenne. When that love came to light, he had to leave. He wandered through Montluçon and Toulouse, according to his own verses followed Eleanor of Aquitaine to the English court, later worked for Raimon V of Toulouse and probably went at the end of his life to a monastery in the Dordogne.

Music and breakthrough

Of his 45 known poems, 18 have survived with music. That is more than for any other twelfth-century troubadour, and so we know more about his melodies than about those of almost all his contemporaries. His work probably dates from the years between 1147 and 1180. He wrote mainly cançons, love songs in the style called trobar leu, a clear and accessible way of writing poetry. His songs are monophonic: one singing voice, sometimes with an accompaniment that we now find difficult to reconstruct.

Influence

Bernart is regarded as the most important troubadour, in words and in music. His melodies were widely sung in northern France and the first trouvères seem to have followed him. In this way he belongs to the roots of the love song in Western popular music, the song of longing that a singer addresses to one person.

Listening

Discography

Studio albums

• 2020Chantador de joi d'amour, Six Songs by the Troubadour
• ?Troubadours