L’Amor Cortese: from Provençal poets to Ars Nova composers

Music from the Middle Ages, concert Ensemble Trobadores, ensemble winner of the “Urbino musica antica 2020” national competition

The concept of amor cortese first appeared during the 12th century in the poetry of Provençal lyricists, but it would also have its fortune in 14th-century French literature and survive through the new cultured music of the Ars Nova. Amor cortese is an ambivalent feeling based on the coexistence of erotic desire and spiritual tension. This ambivalence is called ‘mezura’, i.e. the right measure or distance between suffering and pleasure. The characteristic elements of this almost ‘adulterous’ love are the worship of women, the submission of the lover to the will of the woman, unfulfilled love, but also joy and to some extent the conflict between love and religion. The courteous man must be endowed with many qualities to be defined as such: distinction, youth, good manners, skill in the art of chivalry, but it is above all the way of loving that characterises him. For the love of a woman, almost always already committed, whose paladins and vassals one declared oneself to be, one did great deeds and only by making oneself a slave of love for her beauty did one rise to a rank of nobility of heart. Women, on the other hand, always appear as the engine that drives man’s soul and it matters little whether it is hell or heaven where they lead. This concert, which will be interspersed with short narrated interludes, is intended to highlight and shed light on the major poets and musicians who have portrayed this way of loving.