Pain Sung In Quiet

Peter Abelard, from his Planctus David super Saul et Jonathan* (trans. found in: Helen Waddell, The Wandering Scholars (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1927), 196-7): 

              Low in thy grave with thee
                    Happy to lie,
        Since there’s no greater thing left Love to do,
              And to live after thee
                    Is but to die,
        For with but half a soul what can Life do?

              So share thy victory
                    Or else thy grave,
        Either to rescue thee, or with thee lie;
              Ending that life for thee,
                    That thou didst save,
        So Death, that sundereth, might bring more nigh.

        Peace, O my stricken Lute!
            Thy strings are sleeping.
        Would that my heart could still
            Its bitter weeping!

*This is part of one hymn out of six that Abelard composed, about which we read the following in Adalbert Podlech’s Abælard und Heloisa; oder, Die Theologie der Liebe (Munich: Piper, 1990), 231ff: (trans. mine):

These Songs/Laments of Distress (Lieder der Not), already mentioned above as his first attempt to break the bars of the spiritual cage into which he had locked his soul, to tear down the walls within which he had immured Heloïsa in his soul—these Songs of Distress place him among the great figures of literary and musical history. . . .

The verses of the Latin hymn measure only long and short syllables; in translations, according to the sensibility of our own language, these are replaced by stressed and unstressed syllables. Yet already in the Carolingian period a new linguistic sensibility began to assert itself: it broke through the metrical rigidity of the ancient measure and created a new form in the sequence [Lat. sequentia]. Whereas the classical hymn was composed as verse and then set to music, the sequence is governed by the melody, which accounts for its name: versus sequens neumata—verses that follow the notes. . . .

No longer is there any adherence to a fixed metre; it is the stress of the syllables, rather than their length, that determines the verse. “The principle of measuring syllables is replaced by one that emphasises meaning, that weighs the syllables” (Th. Spoerri). This makes possible an intimate fusion of word, meaning, and melody. This union appears for the first time in Abælard’s Planctus. In literary history, they represent the breakthrough to the later sequence, “which, drawing on the verses of the hymns, above all on the component phrases of the trochaic fifteen-syllable line, continually invents new strophic variations, and thus becomes the true germ cell of modern poetry. With the Stabat Mater and Dies Iræ in the middle of the thirteenth century, the later sequence made its entry into world literature” (Th. Spoerri). . . .

Between the older and the later sequence stand Abælard’s Planctus: thematically poetic, they are hopeless situations taken from the Old Testament; poetically, songs in a continual alternation of lengths and rhythms; musically, the most intimate union of word and melody that the Middle Ages had achieved up to that time. . . .

One must read these Lamentations (Klagelieder), and then hear them, and imagine how they were sung by Heloïsa’s nuns at the Paraclete, accompanied by instruments: how the staccato rhythm drives verse and melody onward as death approaches, and how the pain is sung in quiet, almost motionless tones—a pain that refuses to end, frozen in place. We do not know whether the laments were composed and set to music for Heloïsa, or whether Abælard was, in them, breaking open the cage within himself, as it were, without any outward purpose, effecting a liberation from within. After he had given Heloïsa the Paraclete, he sent these songs to her and to her nuns, and they must have been performed there.