Henri Phlippet, le vert me fais porter 3v · Anonymous
Appearance in the group of related chansonniers:
*Leuven ff. 80v-81 »Henri phlippet le vert me fais porter« 3v · Edition · Facsimile
This page with edition as a PDF
Text: Rondeau quatrain, full text in Leuven:
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Henri Phlippet, le vert me fais porter Car tu n’es pas home pour refuser, Henri Phlippet, le vert me fais porter Couvertement, sans nul samblant monstrer, Henri Phlippet, le vert me fais porter |
Henri Phlippet, you make me wear green For you are not a man to turn down, Henri Phlippet, you make me wear green Covertly, without showing anything, Henri Phlippet, you make me wear green, |
1) Line 2, “... vir que que je vis ...” (error)
2) Line 11 has one syllable too many, “Fortune” must be said as two syllables (4+6 syllables)
Comments:
A later hand added this unique rondeau to the Leuven chansonnier on empty pages after the manuscript was finished and bound. The copying was done without errors, and it probably happened during the last quarter of the fifteenth century – maybe closer to 1500 than to 1475.
The poem is a declaration of love to a man named Henri Phlippet (possibly a variant of the more common family name Philippet). Its tone is intimate. The name of the speaker’s beloved is mentioned, which in itself is highly unusual for a courtly poem; moreover, his name is exposed as the poem’s opening words and repeated twice with the recurring refrain. He is all the way through addressed in an informal way as “tu” instead of the formal “vous” – obviously, the speaker and the beloved were close and of similar social standing. However, in form and language the poem keeps to the prescripts of the Rhétoriqueurs, the rondeau form with a strict adherence to the internal caesura after four syllables, the rich rimes and the appearance of an allegorical figure, the unpredictable Fortune. (1) Its spelling of French is like the name of the beloved, Phlippet, strongly influenced by Picard dialect.
The music is for male voices with an upper voice ranging from g to c’’ that forms a duet with the tenor (B-flat - e’-flat) and occasionally crosses below it (bb. 15 and 18). They are accompanied by a low contratenor (G-c’), which keeps below the tenor except for a few crossings above (bb. 7, 24-25 and 35-36). The voices are quite agile with many leaps and often traversing most of their ranges. The descending fifth ending the opening motive (f’ - b-flat) reappears at different positions (a’-d’, d’-g) lending a feeling of coherence to the first half.
The setting is varied: The first line is a canon at the octave between superius and tenor (bb. 1-12) with the characteristic opening motive skilfully handled by both voices; in the second line (bb. 13-23) the tenor “fakes” a pre-existing tune in slow triple time, rising up a fifth and slowly sinking back to its point of departure, with the outer voices functioning as counter voices in cantus firmus setting. The second section is more subdued, all voices more in stepwise motion, with the superius in the front as an almost hymn-like melody floating on the polyphonic web of the lower voices, which often move in parallel thirds and drive the motion forward by chains of syncopated dissonances. The setting of the words is also quite careful. Except for the introductory canon and the mostly lively polyphony towards the end, it is possible to have the core voices pronounce the syllables simultaneously. It is remarkable how well short phrases and note repetitions in the contratenor fit the text, see for example the second line bars 15-23.
In spite of the composer’s careful fulfilment of the requirements for setting a rondeau with much variation, setting of the words and contrast between the two sections, his creation does not sound as a rondeau in the courtly tradition.
The copying of the song was very careful, but it lacks any marking of the medial cadence, an important feature in a rondeau destined for performance with the repeated couplets. More significant, the first section keeps stubbornly to endings on G, and twice imperfecting the cadences by letting the contratenor go to the third below the finalis – the prolonging of the cadence to G in bars 20-23 does not add to the excitement. Only in the second section a movement towards B-flat comes into play and with it a stronger tonal colouring. A full performance of the rondeau would be in danger of becoming a bit boring.
The style of this setting seems more like a small three-part motet of the type found in French provincial music during the decades where four- or five-part motets had become the norm in the leading musical centres. Examples of three-part provincial motets can be found in the French music collection of c. 1520 in the Royal Library in Copenhagen, MS Ny kgl. Samling 1848 2°. (2)
It has been proposed that an owner of the Leuven chansonnier might be female, and that this owner was also the author and composer of “Henri Phlippet”. (3) The composer may very well be the person who made the careful copy of the song, but then it is remarkable that he left out the signum congruentia or the fermata, which normally indicates the medial cadence. The composer was surely a professional musician with some experience from sacred music, and he might have been entrusted with the setting of the words of a female poet. But something is not quite right. The name, the intimate approach, the motet-like style, the sound of the male singers’ voices – all seem to indicate that this is a male love song or – possibly – an elaborate male joke at somebody’s expense, and that the owner recognized the unusual character of the song and therefore wanted it added to the chansonnier.
Parts of this text are included in my publication The unica of the Leuven chansonnier – a portfolio of songs by an ambitious young musician, August 2024.
PWCH April 2024
1) The poem has been commented on in two recent articles as being in a female voice and “bawdy” (Honey Meconi, ‘Text and Context in the Leuven Chansonnier’, p. 31) and showing “a peculiar mixture of courtly and popular registers” (Sigrid Harris, ‘Fortune and Injustice in the Leuven Chansonnier’, p. 50; both articles appeared in Journal of the Alamire Foundation 13 (2021), pp. 12-32 and 33-52 respectively). The “bawdy” and “popular” stem from a misreading of the word “vir” (voir – sight, appearance} in the poem’s second line as “vit” (cock).
2) Cf. P. Woetmann Christoffersen, French Music in the Early Sixteenth Century. Studies in the music collection of a copyist of Lyons. The manuscript Ny kgl. Samling 1848 2° in the Royal Library, Copenhagen I-III, Copenhagen 1994 (http://www.pwch.dk/Publications/PWCH_Cop1848.pdf), vol. I, pp. 278 ff.