UMS Concert Program, October 22, 1979: The Waverly Consort --

Season: 101st
Concert: Fifteenth
Power Center For The Performing Arts Ann Arbor, Michigan

THE UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
The Waverly Consort
Monday Evening, October 22, 1979, at 8:00
Power Center for the Performing Arts
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Le Roman de Fauvel
Musical Direction: Michael Jaffee
Music Research and Scoring: Kay Jaffee and Michael Jaffee
Costumes: Robert Pusilo Masks: Ralph Lee
Stage Design and Lighting: John Wright Stevens
Stage Direction: Philip Minor Stage Manager: Carder Vaughn
Technical Director: Cynthia J. Hawkins
Master Carpenter: Edward Kenestrick
Spoken text edited and translated from the original manuscript
by Kenneth C. Ritchie Rhymed versifications of Fauvel's speeches by Nicholas Kepros
CAST Narrator..............Peter Johnson
Musicians at the Courts of Fauvel and Fortune:
Julianne Baird, Soprano Patrick Romano, Tenor
Kimball Wheeler, Mezzo-soprano Albert de Ruiter, Bass
Glenn Billingsley, Baritone
Wendy Gillespie: Medieval fiddles
Kay Jaffee: Recorder, rauschpjeije, psaltery, harp
Michael Jaffee: Oud, psaltery, saz, hurdy-gurdy, bagpipe
Sally Logemann: Shawm, recorder, gemshorn, rebec
Benjamin Peck: Slide trumpet, straight trumpet
Fauvel...............Allen Fast,
Countertenor
Fortune.............Kimball Wheeler
Vain Glory.............Julianne Baird
Vices......Wendy Gillespie, Kay Jaffee, Michael Jaffee,
Sally Logemann, Benjamin Peck
Virtues .... Julianne Baird, Kimball Wheeler, Patrick Romano,
Glenn Billingsley, Albert de Ruiter
101st Season -Fifteenth Concert
Ninth Annual Choice Series
Le Roman de Fauvel is an enormous collection of poetry, music, and visual art which survives as one of the most remarkable documents of the 14th century. Significant for its musical content alone, it sums up the monophonic and polyphonic styles of the 12th and 13th centuries and intro?duces outstanding examples of the then current ars nova school of composition. In all, the collection contains some 160 pieces of music, including plainsong, conductus, motets, lais, proses, rondeaux, and ballades--in short, nearly every type and style of music, both old and new, that contributed to the musical language of France in the early decades of the 14th century. The verses, which number around 6,000, recount the adventures of an ass, Fauvel, whose name is an acronym derived from the names of various vices and who appears in the drama as an allegorical figure representing the greed and villainy rampant in the church and monarchy of the times. The complete collection is housed in the Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris.
Exposition--The World, called Microcosme
Omnipotens Doming (Motet)--Ensemble
Almighty God, our sovereign Father, one in three, rain down thy mercy, cleanse the world with the flood of thy grace. Paschal Lamb, who, suffering, reigned in peace, cast off the reign of Fauvel.
Favellandi vicium (Motet)--Instruments; Ensemble
Greed and flattery obtain within these halls. Bribes court favor and further reward. Law is in bondage, had only for a price. The infection spreads, swelling and puffing up the mighty. Voices of flattery ascend even unto God. Deceit reigns over the just. God of mercy, give counsel.
Quare jremuerunl (Motet)--Patrick Romano and Glenn Billingsley
Why do the nations clamor and quarrel Eyes have not seen such monsters; ears have not heard such squabble of old and young, of kings and princes, all for Fauvel and his brood.
The Adoration of Fauvel--Fauvel's Court
Clavus pungens acumine (Conductus)--Albert de Ruiter and ensemble
The nails pierce deep the wounds of Christ, and for us is poured out the blood of salvation. Those iron keys to the kingdom of heaven, once more as nails, split wide the wounds of Christ. You who turn those keys, who drive those nails, throw them down. The flock is become a pack of wolves who lust for the blood of the Lamb.
Porchier miex estre ameroie (Rondeau)--Patrick Romano and instruments
Better the pigsty than Fauvel's courts. I care not for his gold and riches. Better be fleeced than curry Fauvel.
The Courtship--Fortune's Court, called Macrocosme
Overture (Fauvel's love songs)--Instruments
Grant despitJ'ai fait nouvelelementLa mesnie jauveline (Motet)--Fortune, Fauvel, and Observer
(JULIANNE BAIRD)
Grant despit: In contempt I hold Fauvel, who comes in vain to take me for his wife, but I will tell him plainly, I will show him as clearly as shines the moon, that I am a lady.
J'ai fait nouvelelemenl (Motetus): I've a new love and I'll declare to her my intent, though I'm fearful of her noble rank. It is Fortune who afflicts me and I scarcely dare reveal my heart to her, lest I know her wrath. But I'll go right to her, since I've found her kind and gentle. I want her for my wife, however much she is honored in the world. By me she'll be much loved.
La mesnie jauveline (Triplum): Fauvel's faithful cling faster to him than to doctrine, art or learning. To please their master, they incite him to court Dame Fortune. Popes, dukes, kings cheer him on. He spins to the top. How can Fortune resist his fame and charm Flattery gives him courage. The courage of folly.
A touz jours sanz remanoir (Rondeau)--Fauvel and instruments
To ever serve, steadfast in my heart, is my wish. I wish no more than to behold her who, blameless, has caught my desire.
Douce dame debonaire (Ballade)--Fauvel, Fortune and instruments
Fauvel: Sweet lady, may I tell-Fauvel: Lady, say what I should do!
Fortune: What do you wish, Fauvel Fortune: Try--a jump or two!
Fauvel: To give you all my heart. Fauvel: Up to your face so fair
Fortune: You'll miss it, for a start. Fortune: You'll find no pleasure there!
Fauvel: You'll have it not then, say! Fauvel: Then in the other direction!
Fortune: Away, vile thing, away! Fortune: No way to my affection!
Fauvel: What shall I do, my dove Fauvel: What shall I do, my dove
Fortune: Do what you will, without my love. Fortune: Do all you will, but without my love.
Talant que j'ai d'obeir (Lai fragment)--Fauvel and saz
Well disposed am I to her command and pleasure. All my being desires to serve her with unfailing heart.
Fauvel, cogita (Prose)--Fortune and instruments
Think, Fauvel, on the shape of the world in its brief course. Blackened as a hollow gourd, its form fades as a waxen image. Do you not know the low price and meanness of mere human hope As the world spins all to death and the Lord's habitation, you, condemned with all your seed, herald the antichrist.
Pour recouvrer alegiance (Lai)--Fauvel and instruments
To lighten my sorrow in parting from her, beloved of this loyal heart, I sing to her memory this lyric plaint: since youth I've been love's willing prey. To her delight I loved her over self. Alas, be gentle with me now: I die of love.
INTERMISSION
The Wedding Feast--Paris, near the Saint Chapelle
Trumpet fanfare
Buccinate in neomenia tube (Verse)--Voices
Sound the bright trumpet and proclaim throughout the kingdom a joust for this auspicious day of solemn rites.
Estampies--Instruments
Familiam custodi (Prose)--The Virtues
Watch over thy faithful, O Christ, who, born of sweet Mary, hast by thy death redeemed the world, that the works of the Creator be known on earth.
Simulacra eorum; Generacio eorum perversa; Qui cogitaverunt; C-ustodi nos, Domine; Deleantur de libro (Verses)--The Virtues
Their idols are silver and gold; their banquet food is the bread of the poor; their wine a vintage of Sodom, nigh Gomorrah's barren fields. Their wicked generation shall be held in contempt by their own faithless sons. They hold evil in their hearts and daily do us battle. Keep us from the hunter's snare; spare us the enemy's guile. Let them be blotted from the book of the living; let them not be gathered with the just.
The Shivaree
Sottes Chansons--Ensemble
The Tournament--A field near Saint-Cerman-des-Pres
Filie Jherusalem (Antiphon)--A Virtue (Julianne Haiku) with bells
Daughters of Jerusalem, be not afraid. Tomorrow, in your going forth, the Lord will be with you. Be faithful, and you shall behold the power of the Lord upon you. Glory be to the Father. . . .
Floret jex favellea (Conductus)--Glenn Billincsley, voices and instruments
The world is returned to the ways of beasts; the courts are then unbending and Fauvel is exalted. Today, the poor are held in contempt. Man, formed in the image of Christ, is damned. This is now a place of scoundrels. Faith is buried and truth is chased away.
Virgines egregie (Prose)--Ensemble
Rise up, virgins, receive the crown prepared by your spouse; raise up an eternal song to the Lord. Your lily purity has pleased the Lord, as you have desired to be a temple to the Holy Spirit.
Heu, quid destructio est! (Verse)--The Virtues
Alas, such an end is his! Better far for man that he had not been born. Habilacio autem vestra (Verse)--Glenn Billincsley
Your dwelling place is now in Zion.
Parata est sentencia (Verse)--Patrick Romano
The sentence is given, and Fauvel is condemned, as was condemned the prince of demons, to eternal suffering.
Concluding antiphons and Gloria Patri--The Virtues with handbells
But now in haste (the Virtues) come forth rejoicing, lifting up their standards. You gave forth a scent as of the most costly myrrh, holy Mother of God. It is fitting that we praise you, holy Virgin. Give us strength against your enemies. Our Lord Jesus Christ placed a ring upon us as he crowned us his bride. They are pledged to serve on high with the angels, whose beauty endures with the sun and the moon. Blessed be the name of God in eternity and beyond. The mercy of the Lord is at hand, and thereafter his redemption. Gloria Patri. . . . Finis
MUSIC SOURCES
Leo Schrade, ed. Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, vol. 1 (Monaco, 1956).
G. Harrison, Jr. The Monophonic Music of the "Roman de Fauvel." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation
(Stanford University, 1963).
Estampies from Pierre Aubry, Estampies et Danses royales (Paris, 1907).
Unpublished transcriptions of polyphonic versions of Clavus pungens acumine and Floret fex favellea
(Florence, Biblioteca Medicea, Pluteus 29.1) provided for this production by Edward Roesner.
The straight trumpet and medieval bells are on loan from New York University's Noah Greenberg Collection of Musical Instruments.
The Waverly Consort had its beginnings fifteen years ago at New York University where Michael Jaffee and his future wife Kay decided to perform early music on reproductions of period instruments. Naming their consort after Waverly Place, which runs by the University's Washington Square campus, they and other selected musicians performed at various places in the city and soon six performers made up the group's regular concert ensemble. Their repertoire now includes programs of Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music utilizing more than fifty unusual instruments of those periods. In addition to their concerts in New York City, fifteen in all this season, the Consort tours regularly throughout the country. Tonight's fully staged production of Le Roman de Fauvel marks the Consort's second appearance in Ann Arbor.
Columbia and Vanguard Records.
COMING ATTRACTIONS
Solomons CompanyDance.........Wed. Oct. 24
James Gal way, Flutist..........Thurs. Oct. 25
with Marisa Robles, Harpist; Milton Thomas, Violist
Boston Camerata............Sun. Oct. 28
Chinese Acrobats and Magicians........Sat. Nov. 3
Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, Taiwan..... . Sun. Nov. 4
Martha Graham Dance Company......Mon.-Wed. Nov. 5-7
Dresden Staatskapelle Herbert Blomstedt .... Sun. Nov. 11
Wagner: Overture to Die Meistersinger; Beethoven: Symphony No. 8;
Strauss: "Ein Heldenleben." New World String Quartet.........Wed. Nov. 14
("Bonus" concert for Chamber Arts Series subscribers)
Fred Waring Show............Fri. Nov. 16
Syntagma Musicum...........Tues. Nov. 20
Handel's "Messiah"...........Fri. Sat. Sun.
Nov. 30, Dec. 1 & 2
Nina Beilina, Violinist...........Tues. Dec. 4
Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker" Ballet.....Thurs.-Sun. Dec. 13-16
Les Grands Ballets Canadiens........Sun. Jan. 20
Alfred Brendel, Pianist..........Tues. Jan. 22
Music of Haydn, Beethoven, and Bartok. Concord String Quartet..........Sun. Jan. 27
Featuring world premiere of George Rochberg's String Quartet No. 7
with Voice, Leslie Guinn, Baritone.
Glinka Chorus of Leningrad.........Tues. Jan. 29
The Feld Ballet..........Fri.-Sun. Feb. 1-3
Orpheus Ensemble............Fri. Feb. 8
Leontyne Price, Soprano..........Sat. Feb. 9
UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY
Burton Memorial Tower, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109 Phones: 665-3717, 764-2538
PROGRAM NOTES
Le Roman de Fauvel, an enormous collection of poetry, music, and visual art, survives as one of the most remarkable documents of the 14th century. Significant for its musical content alone, it sums up the monophonic and polyphonic styles of the 12th and 13th centuries and introduces outstanding examples of the then current "ars nova" school of composition. In all the collection contains some 160 pieces of music, including plainsong, conductus, motets, lais, proses, rondeaux and ballades--in other words, nearly every type and style of music, both old and new, that contributed to the musical language of France in the early decades of the 14th century.
Fauvel was first conceived as a literary work. In 1310 Gervais du Bus, a notary in the Royal Chancellery at the French court of Philip the Fair (1268-1314), brought forth some 1200 rhymed couplets protesting, in the tradition of the allegorical fable of the earlier Middle Ages, the widespread abuses of the church and monarchy. But before his literary and historical incarnation at the French court, Fauvel existed as word and abstraction in the popular and literary languages of France. Since the 12th cenutry, jauve (tawny or yellow-brown), by association with the word jaus (false) , had been the color of deception and ruse. A straw-colored she-mule named Fauvain was bred for the allegorical tale of Renart le Nouvel (1288) , acqucmart Gelee's contribution to the enormously popular Reynard the Fox cycles of fabliaux tradition. This animal figuration of wicked hypocrisy accompanied the resourceful fox Reynard through his 8,000-line adventure as a rogue who outwitted King Noble the Lion and look for himself the crown. Typical of the many other branches of the Reynard cycle, Renart le Nouvel used fable and allegory to salirie court and church. If the animal portraits of nobility and clergy were not always edifying, at least the fox's attributes of cunning and survival instinct were not wholly unflattering to the 12thand 13th-century French kings, who had only recently forged national unity out of the rivaling dukedoms and principalities of feudal France.
The new beast conceived at the French court as a he-mule, Fauvel, replaced the fox as the crowned animal. Fauvel suggested inferior status in the animal kingdom as a "fake calf" or as an impossible cross between chrval (horse) and mulct (mule). The name further suggested a false or deceptive veil masking hypocrisy and fans veil, a cover-up for bad faith or ill will. The then current French expression estriller or clicvauchier fauvain--in saddle, mount, or groom a she-ass, took an alternate form in torcher Fauvel--to wipe, clean, comb, or curry a he-ass. The beast Fauvel would soon put in a brief appearance in William Langland's didactic 14th-century poem, Piers Plowman, only to revert back to feminine guise in Book IV of Rabelais' Pantapjuel in the 16th century. Fauvel exists for us today in the English expression "to curry favor," from "to curry favel."
The years from Renart le Nouvel to Philippe "le Bel" and the Roman de Fauvel saw great changes in the power of the French monarchy in its relationship to the papacy. The newly centralized and dominant power of (he rown surrounded itself with professional legalists and bureaucrats who pushed the influence and wealth of the monarchy beyond the expectations of the French provinces and the church. Blackmail swelled the court's wealth, and forgery and perjury determined legal settlements in favor of the king. The nation was especially vulnerable to such fleecing after the great confidence won for royal rule in earlier reigns, so that the corruption of Philip the Fair's rule only gradually eroded the people's faith in royal justice. The squabbles between Philip and the popes over the division of temporal anil spiritual authority led to the virtual blackmail and eventual defeat of a weakened papa y. with Philip's diplomacy moving the papacy from an unstable Rome to Avignon, at
that time outside the French royal domain, yet well within Philip's influence.
Though Philip's reign was one of the most sordid in French history, the king's actual role in all the extortion and bribery has never been determined. He was as elusive a figure to his contemporaries as he is to historians. His famed good looks bestowed nothing on his observers beyond a blank stare, earning for him (he title King Owl. No one seemed to know whether the enigmatic king was master or tool of his flourishing bureaucracy. The bland tones and mute lethargy of Fauvel thus gained wide success as the monarchy's new animal metaphor.
Le Roman de Fauvel's popularity demanded further adventures, and in 1314, the final year of Philip's reign, Book II appeared. Criticism of monarchy and papacy continues strong, but the ass Fauvel retains a certain courtly charm, and it is a handsome if hollow ass that, in the expanded Book II, presumes to court Dame Fortune, an improvised allegorical figure for Mother Church.
In 1316, Chaillou de Pestain elaborated on Du Bus' story and compiled, with Philippe de Vitry and other Parisian composers, the musical interpolations that were grafted onto the expanded, final textual version. Some of this musical material seems newly composed, while other compositions, pre-existent and apparently well-known at the time, appear with new text appropriate to the Fauvel story. The bitingly satirical intent of these contrafacta is unmistakable, and for the 14th-century listener the choice of musical items, many of them familiar in a liturgical context or as compositions associated with specific occasions, must have carried an especially penetrating irony.
The additional verses carry Fauvel past his courtship of Fortune into an apocalyptic wedding and tournament. Fauvel is now identified less with the personage of Philip the Fair than with a monstrous allegorizalion of power-crazed kingship, an antichrist who has confused the separate crowns of temporal and spiritual rule. Papacy and kingdom are joined in a grotesque union of powers that centuries of medieval political evolution had sought to keep separate. The last days seemed at hand, as a horrified Christendom looked upon the church as the harlot of the antichrist.
In its final, illuminated and musically interpolated version (Paris, Bibliothcque Nationale f. fr. 146) , Le Roman de Fauvel reveals spiraling tendrils of politics, history, liturgy and allegory, intertwined with grafted stocks of text and music. Though the political and theological roots of this luxuriant growth were not lost on the 14th-century audience, their impact then, as for us now, was of secondary importance. The rise and fall of the beast Fauvel gave the work a drama and personality that impressed by its very human character, character not consistently individualized or evenly drawn psychologically, as modern drama has trained us to expect, but character fleshed out as a living, evolving metaphor for men who lived on multiple levels of creation--animal, spiritual, historical, and eternal. Fauvel played true for medieval men precisely because he leaped so capriciously but inexorably from abstraction to word, to historic personage, to apocalyptic figure. Medieval theatre mounted spiritual truths in a dramatic overlay of liturgical solemnity and earthly farce; it drew human character and predicament in transparent shapes of animal allegory and personified abstraction, in dynamic modulation from bestial lowliness to epic majesty.
In the Roman de Fauvel, the crowned beast's progress from stable to court, from throne to apocalyptic wedding, intends no irreverent mimicry of the gospel's King, who entered his earthly kingdom in lowliness and raised it to immortal glory in a union of flesh anil spirit, of history and eternity. Fauvel's reign as animal, courtly lover and king reveals in rich ironic inversion the image of lhe true Kingdom. In his presumption, Fauvel calls down eternity to his service. He forgets that when eternit) entered time, it delighted in a humble maid and left the throne lor the manger.
Kenneth C. Ritchie, Queens College, City University of New York