direct musical effect, the Trouvères helped to shape and direct the great school of composition in Flanders and England that became conspicuous after 1400 (see sec. 43).
The region of the Trouvères included all of northern France from
Tours and Angers on the Loire to Arras in the north and also down the
valley of the Moselle to the Rhine. Since the interchange between
France and England was close, the art spread readily across the Channel.
Paris was a natural centre, as it had been the capital of the kings of
France since about 1000, and boasted a royal musical establishment—the
Royal Chapel.
To this region belonged many of the theoretical writers already named
(sec. 36). In the 12-13th centuries Leoninus, Perotinus, Robert de Sabilon
and Petrus de Cruce were successively choirmasters at Notre Dame in
Paris, and all contributed to the advancing art of polyphonic writing for the
Church.
The best-known of the Trouvères proper was Adam de la Hâle (d. 1287), born at Arras in 1240, at first employed in church music, but later attracted to a roving life, living at Paris and finally at Naples. His genius was shown in lyric songs in Trouvère style, in polyphonic rondeaux and motets, and in several song-plays, chief of which was Robin et Marion (Naples, 1285), which is often called the first comic opera. His works are most interesting as representing the complex styles of the period that presaged the era of the Netherlanders.
40. The Minnesinger.—Soon after the rise of the Troubadours in France a somewhat similar movement began in Germany, though whether the two were directly connected is disputed. Perhaps they were simply parallel expressions of the spirit of the time. The poets of this order were called Minnesinger (love-singers, from minne, love). It is thought that their art was much more an expansion of the mediæval adoration of the Virgin as the ideal of womanhood than in the case of the Troubadours, but it was also an expression of the spirit of chivalry, for their verses were full of the same fanciful gallantry, though their objects were not so constantly married women.
The leaders and patrons of this school of poesy and song were of noble
rank, notably all the Hohenstaufens from Barbarossa (d. 1190) to Conradin
(d. 1268), with Wencelaus I. of Bohemia (d. 1253) and many
princes of eastern Germany generally.
The Minnesinger flourished chiefly in the region of southern Germany included in a triangle whose base extends eastward from Strassburg or Basle on the Upper Rhine to Vienna on the Danube, the apex being in Thuringia or Franconia. Celebrated headquarters were Freiburg in the Breisgau on the west, Vienna in the east, and several points in Thuringia.
