Folquet de Marseille (EN)

Folquet de Marseille, * ca. 1155 Marseille (?), †25 December 1231, Provençal troubadour. He spent his youth in Marseille; he is listed as Fulco Anfos in the 1178 register of Marseille’s burghers. Initially, he was involved in trade, continuing the business of his father, a wealthy merchant from Genoa. At the same time, he maintained extensive contacts with court circles in southern France, where he presented his songs in person or through minstrels. After 1195, he abandoned his secular career, entering the Cistercian monastery at Thoronet-en-Provence along with his wife and two sons, where he was appointed Abbot around 1201. In 1205 he was appointed Bishop of Toulouse and founded the university in the city. At that time, he met Johannes de Garlandia, an eminent music theorist and, from 1229, a lecturer at the University of Toulouse, who mentioned Folquet in his poem De triumphis Ecclesiae. Manuscripts contain 24 works by Folquet de Marseille, including two chansons de croissade, one cobla, one plank and one partimen. The main body of his work consists of love songs, 13 of which have survived with musical notation. Folquet de Marseille employed a highly refined poetic language; the versification of his songs is characterised by precision and the regularity of its rhymes. The melodies, however, do not exhibit a stable character; they lack a fixed formal principle and represent a type described by Dante as the “oda continua”.

Literature: B. Stäblein Zur Stilistik der Troubadour-Melodien, “Acta Musicologica” XXXVIII, 1966; J. Kłobukowska Zagadnienia wersyfikacji i rytmu w pieśniach trubadura Folqueta de Marseille, “Muzyka” XIII, Warsaw 1968; J. Kłobukowska Contribution à l’étude de la versification et du rythme dans les chansons de Folquet de Marseille, in: Actes du 5e congrès international de langue et littérature d’Oc et d’études franco-provençales. Nice, 6–12 septembre 1967, «Publications de la faculté des lettres et des sciences humaines de Nice», vol. 13, Nice 1974.