The afterlife of Jaufré Rudel

Mind how you go

2012-02-01T05:45:00.000-08:00

I don't know how things were going for the police force in 1889, but The Illustrated Police News was just getting properly started as a proto-tabloid, after their sensationalist coverage of the Jack the Ripper murders the previous year. But on 21 December 1889, its readers were - for some reason - treated to a homily on chivalry*. Exhibit A was the legend of 'the most noble Lord Geoffrey de Rudel, Prince of Blaye'.

The paper's account of the legend has an infelicity or two: Rudel's sickness is blamed on an 'infectious disease' breaking out on board the ship; and the writer insists 'This is no troubadour's tale; it is a simple excerpt from history'. I think you'd have to call this 'unreliable testimony'.

The article then contrasts this paragon of chivalry with the 17th-century story of Thomas Inkle, a shipwrecked English trader who was rescued by a Barbadian maiden named Yarico but subsequently sold her into slavery in order to recoup his losses (The story became the basis for Inkle and Yarico, a comic opera that was a smash hit in the late 18th century). The story is probably as apocryphal as that of Rudel, but there we are.

Image right: 'By heavens! A woman', illustration from the libretto of Inkle and Yarico.

* A note at the end suggests that the text may first have appeared in the Daily Telegraph.

Princess Daisy?

2012-01-05T05:34:00.000-08:00

Alphonse Mucha wasn't the only visual artist to go to work on the Rudel legend. The French-Russian designer and artist Romain de Tirtoff (1892–1990), better known as Erté, produced a number of limited-edition prints towards the end of his life, one of them entitled La Princesse Lointaine (right).

There seems to be no information as to whether he had the Rostand play in mind or something more generic, either for this or for an earlier print with the same title (printed in 1970).

However, an art auction site lists a couple of costume designs by Erté for a production of La Princesse Lointaine, dating from 1929 (below right: 'Costume design for Second Mariner'). This suggests that there was a revival of it that year, though it seems a bit unlikely.

The 1984 print is a throwback to Erté's Art Deco heyday, to the extent that his princess rather resembles a 1920s flapper. Incidentally, the wikipedia e ntry for 'Princesse lointaine' -- the 'stock figure from literature' -- makes reference to Daisy Buchanan, Jay Gatsby's inamorata, as a 20th-century example. So maybe Erté's 'Princesse' approximates how Gatsby imagined Daisy.

An ad for The Pilgrim of Lurve

2011-12-01T00:04:00.000-08:00

In amongst a few nuggets uncovered in a trawl of online newspaper archives: several advertisements for John Graham's epic poem, Geoffrey Rudel; or, the Pilgrim of Love (see my previous entry). This one appeared in The Morning Post, Tuesday, May 10, 1836. Another ad in the same paper a month of so later features the endorsement: 'He has exhibited a mastery over the Spenserian stanza'. Which is nice.

Dugué's Rudel opus: Chapter 1

2011-11-22T02:48:00.000-08:00

Having done a bit of digging on Ferdinand Dugué, the illustre inconnu of 19th-century French literature, I took it upon myself to translate a bit of his two-volume novel, Geoffroy Rudel (see my previous post). It's heavy on the florid sighing and, as one might expect from a dramatist, stuffed with monologues. But not without interest.

'Chapter 1: Le premier mai' in parallel French / English text is available as a PDF.

Don't mention it.

Concerning Tripoli (no, the other one...)

2011-11-02T10:53:00.001-07:00

There are two cities called Tripoli; the Rudel legend is concerned with the less famous of the two. This Tripoli is now the largest city in northern Lebanon. I recently came across a website with plenty of information on its history and images of its architecture, including some examples from the Crusades era.

The site also has a section on Jaufré Rudel and the treatment of the legend by the Lebanese/French writer Amin Maalouf in his libretto for the opera L'Amour de Loin (mentioned in an earlier post). Included is the complete text of the libretto.

The photograph (from Wikimedia Commons, taken by 'Heretiq') shows a view of the Citadel from the Nahr Abu Ali river.

Ferdinand who??

2011-10-03T05:43:00.000-07:00

A two-volume novel, Geoffroy Rudel, published in 1837, announced the arrival on the French literary scene of Ferdinand Dugué, who became best known as a dramatist (William Shakespeare and Le juif de Venise being his most famous plays).

Well, 'famous' is a relative term. Wikipedia has nothing about Dugué; no survey of 19th-century French literature I've come across even mentions him. And yet, judging by a rather fawning article in La Presse in 1913 (when Dugué had just turned 99!), he could be described as 'the doyen of our playwrights ... and probably of all the playwrights in the world' without, one assumes, prompting guffaws from the reader.

An advert in the same paper, back in 1838, described Geoffroy Rudel as 'a book that everyone can read and everyone can love'. It goes on:

Readers ... will find charming characters and poetry, and a tight plot leading through vivid and moving scenes to a dénouemement of great originality.

How greatly original? Geoffroy pulls through and marries the princess? Maybe I'll translate and upload a few choice passages in due course.

No mistaking the tradition Dugué writes in, though; when asked in 1913 which poets he most admired on the contemporary scene, he replied 'Jean Richepin most of all... then Edmond Rostand'.

Dugué's Geoffroy Rudel is now, inevitably, available online at the Internet Archive: Volume One and Volume Two.

The articles from La Presse (of which there are several more, and a few on La Princesse Lointaine, too) can be found at the Gallica digital library, a Bibliothèque nationale de France joint.

I am but a singer of chawwnsawwwn

2011-08-11T05:00:00.000-07:00

Now, here's an oddity for you. The French singer Alain Barriére, during a fairly brief spell in the limelight, wrote and recorded a song in the late 1960s entitled 'Princesse Lointaine'. It was the b-side of his single, 'Tout Peut Recommencer' (1968) and also appeared on an album that year. It's pretty clearly an hommage to Rostand and Rudel, with references to taking the cross and dying of love. Here are a few of the lyrics:

Princesse lointaine
Qu'ils sont longs les jours
Si tu files ta laine
Moi je me meurs d'amour

Chevaliers mes braves
Je m'en vais en voyage
Je m'en vais par les âges
Retrouver mes amours

Continuer la guerre
Point sera la dernière
Creusez vos cimetières
Je me rends à l'amour

There are a few songs by Barriére on youtube, but 'Princesse Lointaine' isn't one of them, sadly.

Lointaine in Translation

2011-08-04T02:38:00.000-07:00

La Princesse Lointaine in English, anyone? An 1899 translation by Charles Renaud of Edmond Rostand's 1896 play about the Rudel legend is available at the Internet Archive.

It's in blank verse, which, if you ask me, is cheating.

The singer and the songs: new book on Jaufré

2011-07-22T00:36:00.000-07:00

Books about Rudel come along even less frequently than conferences about him, but there's a new one just published.

Chansons pour un amour lointain: Jaufré Rudel, by Roy Rosenstein, Professor of Comparative Literature and English at The American University of Paris, features new translations - into modern French - of Rudel's surviving lyrics (by the poet Yves Leclair), with notes and commentary by Professor Rosenstein.

A Rudel conference

2011-07-06T01:03:00.000-07:00

Just over a week ago, Blaye hosted an academic conference on Jaufré Rudel - a rare occurrence, it's safe to say. I'm ashamed to say that I couldn't make it, but I hear it was a success. I hope none of the delegates fell mortally ill on the journey there and died in the arms of the, er... Mayoress?

Thanks to Roy Rosenstein for telling me about it.

Rostand-related visuals

2010-12-10T00:52:00.000-08:00

Rostand's La Princesse Lointaine has, not surprisingly, accumulated more visual material than the rest of the Rudel renditions combined, thanks to the involvement of Alphonse Mucha and several other artists. The holdings of the Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire in Strasbourg include many bits of Rudeliana, images of which are usefully collected on an Alphonse Mucha fansite (French). Costume sketches, stage jewelry, photographs, that sort of thing.

The same site reproduces Mucha's Ilsee in its entirety, in a more user-friendly format than the site I mentioned previously.

The root of it all

2010-11-26T00:29:00.000-08:00

It was Easter 1993 when this whole thing kicked off. I was leafing through an old tome in my parents' house - a book acquired by my grandfather called History of the ancient Ryedales, and their descendants in Normandy, Great Britain, Ireland, and America, from 860 to 1884 (yes, it's been put online) by one GT Ridlon of New Hampshire. And I came across this:

Galfridus Ridel, eldest son of Galfridus, obtained the principality of Blaye, upon his father's entering the church, and was one of the most celebrated of the troubadour poets. His history illustrates in a most striking manner the age of chivalry in which he lived. He was the favorite minstrel of Geoffrey de Plantagenet Bretagne, and during his residence at the court of England, where he lived in great honor and splendor, caressed for his talents and loved for the gentleness of his disposition, he heard continually the praises of the Countess of Tripoli, — whose fame, in consequence of her munificent hospitality to the Crusaders, who, when returning from the plains of Asia, wayworn, sick, and disabled, were relieved and entertained by her, had spread throughout Christendom, — which praise of her beauty and benevolence, constantly repeated by the returned Crusaders, in their enthusiasm of gratitude, fired the heart of Ridel (sometimes spelled "Rudel") the poet to such an extent that, without having seen her, and unable to bear the torments of absence longer, he undertook a pilgrimage to visit the unknown lady.

'Caressed for his talents'... That beats Arts Council funding any day, I reckon. Not sure where Ridlon got the notion that Rudel spent time at the English Court. But for that matter, the book's evidence of a proper lineage from Blaye to my clan is pretty ropey.

Jaufré Rudel in 'literary paradigm' shock

2010-10-27T05:34:00.000-07:00

You know you've arrived when someone writes a scholarly paper about you (OK, that's open to discussion of course). And you know you're in tune with the Zeitgeist when the paper uses you to investigate an aspect of online culture.

You'll need to know your Spanish for this one, though. Sadly I don't. You may also need to be working in academia to access the paper, I'm not sure. But here it is:

Jaufré Rudel's 'love from afar' and distant love via chat; a metaphorical approach (2006) by Pau Gerez Alum, Tutor for Medieval Romance Literature at the Open University of Catalonia.

Part of the abstract reads:

Love for an unknown person in a distant location has featured spectacularly throughout the history of literature. One of the emblematic authors who dealt with falling in love in such a blind fashion was the troubadour Jaufré Rudel, to the extent that he may be considered to be a literary paradigm.

Get you, Jaufré, with your literary paradigm and everything.

[...] it is impossible to escape a comparison with the type of amorous relationships that can be established via chat [...]. In addition to the mystery, related to a high component of idealisation, we believe that there are other comparative links from a metaphorical perspective, such as distance, the identity of the participants and the specific nature of the code used.

Anyone who's tried online dating might find this rings a few bells.

Right princess, wrong Frenchman

2010-10-05T04:36:00.000-07:00

On display at the Macklowe Gallery in New York: A French Art Nouveau bronze sculpture, 'Princess Lointaine', by Marius Mars-Vallett (presumably this fellow).

Described on the web page as 'depicting Sarah Bernhardt in the role of Gustave Flaubert's La Princesse Lointaine (The Faraway Princess)'...

Flaubert, eh? Crossed wires somewhere.

Hillier covers Jaufré

2010-08-12T01:06:00.000-07:00

Paul Hillier, co-founder of the Hilliard Ensemble and general early music bloke, recorded the six surviving and uncontested songs of Jaufré Rudel on an album for Harmonia Mundi called Distant Love.

For reasons I won't go into here, Hillier was a guest at my wedding in Bloomington, Indiana back in 1998, and during a lull in the small talk, mentioned that he'd just recorded the Rudel songs. I jumped in eagerly to contribute my recollection that a French ensemble had structured an album around the Jaufré legend and included some of his songs.

'Oh, well I won't bother with mine then,' said Hillier. There followed the kind of awkward atmosphere that you only get when you put two shy Englishmen in a foreign setting and leave them to make conversation. I think he was joking rather than offended, but I guess I'll never know...

A prelude to 'La Princesse'...

2010-08-05T04:34:00.000-07:00

Among the handful of composers to have had a bash at the Rudel legend (besides the previously-blogged-about Kaija Saariaho) is the Russian composer Nikolai Tcherepnin (1873-1945). I think you'd have to call him one of the minor late Romantics, on a par with someone like Anatoly Lyadov or Vasily Kalinnikov.

Tcherepnin (not to be confused with his son Alexander or his grandson Ivan, both also composers but of a very different stripe) studied composition with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov at the St Petersburg Conservatory. While still a student he was commissioned to write an orchestral prelude for Rostand's Rudel drama, La Princesse Lointaine (1896). According to the Tcherepnin family's website, 'Tcherepnin later observed that his concept of professionalism owed much to the experience of writing and exhaustively rewriting his Prélude pour la Princesse Lointaine, Op. 4, under Rimsky's guidance'.

Inevitably, you can listen to the piece on youtube. It's quite floaty and tone-poem-esque.

Update, 6 August 2011: No you can't - it's been removed.

Bernhardt bombs

2010-07-12T00:57:00.000-07:00

The great French actor Benoit-Constant Coquelin (1841-1909) (left), who created the role of Cyrano de Bergerac in Rostand's play, described to the American writer and artist Eliot Gregory (1854-1915) a meeting with Rostand and Sarah Bernhardt at which Rostand read his Rudel play, La Princesse Lointaine, aloud for the first time.

'I shall remember that afternoon as long as I live! From the first line my attention was riveted and my senses were charmed. The great actress ... accepted the play then and there.'

La Princesse Lointaine closed after 31 performances, and Bernhardt made a loss of 200,000 Francs. Monsieur Coquelin had a fairly clear impression of the production's failings:

'Between ourselves,' continued Coquelin, pushing aside his plate, a twinkle in his small eyes, 'is the reason of this lack of success very difficult to discover? The Princess in the piece is supposed to be a fairy enchantress in her sixteenth year. The play turns on her youth and innocence. Now, honestly, is Sarah, even on the stage, any one's ideal of youth and innocence?' This was asked so naively that I burst into a laugh, in which my host joined me. Unfortunately, this grandmamma, like Ellen Terry, cannot be made to understand that there are roles she should leave alone, that with all the illusions the stage lends she can no longer play girlish parts with success.

Ouch. But never mind the aging actress: as in the legend, so in this tale, it's the tender poet who suffers the worst, as Coquelin went on:

'The failure of his play produced the most disastrous effect on Rostand, who had given up a year of his life to its composition and was profoundly chagrined by its fall. He sank into a mild melancholy, refusing for more than eighteen months to put pen to paper.'

But the play Rostand came back with was Cyrano de Bergerac. Which only goes to show.

Poetry in the distance

2010-06-14T03:27:00.000-07:00

The troubadours' theme of Amor de lonh, or distant love, has inspired more than its share of tiresome pining (cf Rostand's La Princesse Lointaine), but the American poet Sarah White uses Rudel's song Lanquan li jorn son lonc en mai as a starting point for an illuminating essay on 'the impact of far love on her own vocation, life, and poetry'. Her book, The Poem Has Reasons, is a beguiling mix of memoir, poetry and... I suppose you'd call it literary non-fiction. It's definitely worth a look; I'd go so far as to say that it's the most rewarding Rudel-related work I've come across. There's a downloadable PDF of it on the website of its publisher, Proem Press.

Rudel by Mucha

2010-05-13T06:41:00.000-07:00

In 1897, the Czech artist Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) was commissioned to illustrate an edition of the Rudel legend written by Robert de Flers, to coincide with the production of La Princesse Lointaine, Edmond Rostand's play starring Sarah Bernhardt. The result, Ilsee, has become one of Mucha's most celebrated works. In 2007, a two-volume set of proofs for the book, hand-watercolored by Mucha, were put up for auction. Getty has two press images of the volumes.

A Czech website is selling individual pages as prints, and has the whole book online in low resolution (terrible navigation though).

Also online are a set of images from a (rather cheaply done) Dover Publications collection of artwork from Ilsee, with the text removed.

Rudel sails again (via Hyderabad)

2010-02-26T03:46:00.000-08:00

Obscure and lengthy retellings of The Rudel legend, Part Three.

First we had John Graham, then Étienne-François de Lantier; now I bring you Nawab Sir Nizamat Jung Bahadur (1871-1955). This servant of the British Empire was born Nizamuddin Ahmed in Hyderabad State, south-central India, read Law at Trinity College, Cambridge, and worked in London from 1892 to 1895. A passionate reader of Shakespeare and the Anglo/European canon in general, he probably came across Rudel via Heine's rendition. He began writing poetry while living in London.

He returned to India in 1896 and served in various judicial posts in Hyderabad, then received the title of Khan Bahadur Nawab Nizamat Jung in 1905 and became Home Secretary (of Hyderabad, I assume) in 1909.

'Rudel of Blaye', a work of some 100 stanzas published in Hyderabad in 1926, was described less than glowingly by AR Chida (in An Anthology of Indo-Anglian Verse, 1930) as 'good enough in its way' and 'better than his sonnets'. Chida goes on: 'His mediaeval rhyming dictionary and an excess of the sedate and sombre manner of writing have ruined his poetry'. He also chastises the poet for favouring European subject matter and encourages him to compose 'epics and ballads dealing with our national history'.

Here's a snippet, rather reminiscent of John Graham's Rudel effort:

Immortal Beauty! Be thou still the theme
Of the heart's worship and its fervent song.
Still let the soul, by Faith and Love made strong,
See in God's works, though as a transient gleam,
The mystic light that veils thy form supreme!
Still let thy fleeting images that throng
Before the mind their magic spell prolong
Until man's life on earth becomes a heavenly dream!

I've gathered these biographical details (and the image) from Life's Yesterdays (1945) by Zahir Ahmed, which is available in somewhat badly scanned form (at the present time) at the Internet Archive. I have yet to find a complete text of 'Rudel of Blaye', but AR Chida's anthology, also online, includes selections from it. If I figure out how, I'll put up a pdf of the relevant pages for download.

Jaufré Rudel on youtube

2010-02-02T10:56:00.000-08:00

In case you wondered what Rudel's music might have sounded like...

Two very different renditions of 'Lanquan li jorn':

A live performance by an ensemble called EVO...

...and a studio recording by the Medieval Babes...

'Ah!' etc: Lantier's 19th-century Rudel epic

2009-12-22T01:03:00.000-08:00

Étienne-François de Lantier (1734-1826) served as a cavalry officer before moving to Paris and becoming a writer. According to The Oxford Companion to Literature (a dusty old 1959 edition, edited by Sir Paul Harvey and JE Heseltine), 'He was called "l'Anacharsis des boudoirs" after his pseudo-antique romance Les Voyages d'Anténor en Gréce et en Asie (1798), a gay, very superficial imitation of Barthélemy's Voyage du jeune Anacharsis'.

Lantier was quite the success in his day; Voyages d'Anténor was translated into most European languages. He also wrote L'Impatient (1778), a one-act comedy in verse, Le Flatteur (1780), Les Travaux de Monsieur l'abbé Mouche (1784) and Les Rivales (1798). His epic treatment of the Rudel legend, Geoffroi Rudel ou le Troubadour, poème en huit chants (1825) runs to over 300 pages and begins with the word 'Ah!', which is a fair indication of how the rest of the poem pans out.

Google Books has, inevitably, put Geoffroi Rudel ou le Troubadour online.

The Laughing Troubadour...?

2009-12-02T04:46:00.000-08:00

The Lycée Jaufré Rudel in Blaye celebrated its 150th anniversary in 1992, and as part of their publicity they produced this poster. Alphonse Mucha it ain't... Still, nice to see the old fellow looking so well. Could this be how the story turns out in a parallel universe?

Jaufré fetches up in Barsetshire

2009-11-27T02:44:00.000-08:00

A novel by Angela Thirkell (1890-1961), writer of genteel novels mostly set in Anthony Trollope's fictional Barsetshire, confirms the impression that the Rudel legend was part of the English 'classical education' around the turn of the century (see also Madeleine Bassett's dreamy waxing in PG Wodehouse's Code of the Woosters). Northbridge Rectory (1941) features a conversation about Rudel in which Thirkell has polite fun with a few troubadour clichés. Click on the image for the two relevant pages (pardon the ancient photocopy - and I hope nobody gets too worked up about copyright, but if so, let me know and I'll remove it).

Epic treatment

2009-11-19T04:48:00.000-08:00

Back in 1993, I was hunting down a lengthy treatment of the Rudel legend by an obscure 19th-century poet named John Graham (a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford), and finally found a copy in the British Library. I ordered the whole, epic thing on microfiche. That was what you had to do back then.

I reproduced a few stanzas in the Outremer anthology and thought about transcribing the whole thing at some point. Good thing I didn't, because Jaufré Rudel or, The Pilgrim of Love is now online at openlibrary.org. All 137 pages of it. It isn't all that bad, in fact. Some nice imagery and turns of phrase. It's just very long.

Carducci and Leopardi on Rudel

2009-11-16T02:21:00.000-08:00

The Italian poet and academic Giosué Carducci (1835-1907), winner of the 1906 Nobel Prize for Literature, lectured on Rudel. He also wrote his own treatment of the legend. If your Italian's up to it (sadly mine isn't), you can check out both on this site.

'Consalvo', a poem by another Italian, Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), is also believed to be inspired by the Rudel story. You can find 'Consalvo' in the original Italian over at wikisource.

Rudel goes opera

2009-11-13T05:12:00.000-08:00

The Rudel legend got a fairly limp treatment from Edmond Rostand (La Princesse Lointaine preceded his Cyrano de Bergerac by two years); it's also the subject of an opera, L'amour de loin, by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho (premiered in 2000), which I understand suffers from some of the same faults. For an idea, read a very nicely done review on this chap's blog.

Let's face it, Jaufré is no action hero. Which could explain why, despite the scores of renditions of the Rudel legend by some of literature's big hitters, he's still not all that well known.

The Book

2009-10-31T07:04:00.000-07:00

So back in the day, I edited and published Outremer, an anthology of prose, verse and drama on the Rudel legend by the likes of Robert Browning, Heinrich Heine, PG Wodehouse, AE Swinburne and Edmond Rostand. You can order copies of the book from me, or from Amazon marketplace (also me, effectively).

I've also put up a website with some - but not all - of the material featured in the book, along with some of the beautiful illustrations by Marcus Sedgwick.

Feel free to email me for more info on the book.

To begin with...

2009-10-31T06:56:00.000-07:00

I stumbled across the legend of Jaufré Rudel nearly two decades ago (long story - another time) and, despite having moved on from the obsessive phase of Rudel-chasing, I still keep my eyes peeled for glimpses of my spurious ancestor in story, song and full-scale opera.

Who knows - this blog may take off and become a much-frequented niche, or it might only be maintained and visited occasionally. So be it.

If you want, get up to speed on Rudel with the wikipedia entry.