Trouvères' songs constitute an extraordinary corpus of poems and melodies, clearly defined and listed, abundantly explored and studied by musicologists for more than a century, but still very little interpreted. The appearance, in France at the beginning of the 12th century, of the song genre, that is to say of the strophic poem sung in monody, is a fundamental event in our artistic history. In line with the first troubadours, the trouvères exercised their art from the 1160s. The trouvère song is the archetypal artistic expression of this very particular moment in our history which is called feudalism. Courtly love is the main subject. In the 12th century, very favorable economic, social and climatic conditions gave rise to a new art of living and strong amorous aspirations. Courtly love then plays the role of a sort of social game, of course reserved primarily for aristocratic circles. The courtly game allows a certain social control of the bubbling impulses of young nobles, since the lady of the courtly lover is inaccessible, being of a higher social rank.

Our program addresses some of the jewels of this repertoire of courtly love songs, in an aesthetic interpretation that we think is close to that of the trouvères themselves: a cappella or with accompaniment by a single instrument very close to the monodic material of the melody of the singer, with a flexible declamation of the text trying to respect as faithfully as possible the prosody and the pronunciation of this magnificent langue d'oïl, young and vigorous language, ancestor of our modern French.