How often have we heard recently of a student/teacher affair which ends in pregancy and loss of student status for her and sacking and disgrace for him? I don’t know if it was the first documented episode, but that’s just what happened a thousand years ago to the charismatic, brilliant philosophy teacher Peter Abelard and his brilliant and much younger student Heloise. Today, we don’t castrate the teacher physically, which is what happened to Abelard, but we also don’t often hear what happens later to the protagonists.
In Heloise & Abelard, Friday night’s concert given by the Medieval Women’s Choir, music director Margriet Tindemans and scriptwriter Judith Suther devised a program following the lives of these two people based on letters written to each other in the height of their affair, and others written later when each had attained distinguished positions. Abelard continued as an increasingly renowned scholar and teacher within the religious community, Heloise became a professed religious, ending up as a Benedictine abbess overseeing seven affiliated foundations. After ten years apart, they became colleagues by letter for the rest of their long lives.
To create her script, Suther, professor emerita of French and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, used the letters known to exist but, in an interview with choir member Joyce Brewster, says she also used historical resources to create an appropriate fictional setting, recreating Abeland’s and Heloise’s lives as they might well have been: much in the same way dinosaur skeletons are recreated from just a few bones which give clues to the rest of the animal.
All of it, Suther says, was to create a framework to serve the music for the Medieval Women’s performance.
Some of the music and some of the texts were written by Abelard himself, while at lest one text was written by Heloise. Other texts and music came from early manuscripts, some were matched up appropriately by Tindemans, herself a notable scholar of the era, and some settings she wrote herself. The whole was tied together by Suther’s narrative, which was read in between songs by choir member Tjitske Van der Meulen in the character of Heloise’s bursar at the convent.
This may seem a long preamble to a concert review, but this was a performance which could best be appreciated after assimilating the extensive notes and interview. As such, it was a resounding success, well attended even on a glorious night and receiving prolonged applause at intermission and the end.
All of the music save one piece was sung by the choir in unison, either antiphonally, or with more or fewer singers, sometimes with two choir soloists. Marian Seibert and Ann Glusker. Tenor Eric Mentzel sang Abelard, and soprano Amanda Jane Kelley as Heloise replaced a sick Anne Azema at very short notice, though one would never have guessed that from her polished performance. Instruments included two medieval fiddles, medieval harp and percussion, mostly bells.
Love songs began the program, and anyone thinking the 12th century was unsophisticated should hear them. The words, in Latin, are far more expressive than much of what we hear today in love songs, and the music is hypnotically beautiful. Some were in plainsong, others rhythmic.
Tindemans’ setting of “Hebet sidus leti visus,” possibly by Abelard, written in the style of the time and sung by Mentzel, rose perhaps to higher notes and with more melismatic runs that some of the other songs, but the result was musically gorgeous, and moving.
Most of the time, the choir was exactly together and absolutely on pitch, the tone warm light and easy, the words so clear they were easy to follow in the program. Only once, when the two halves of the choir were physically distant and processing away, did they begin to sound like an echo of each other.
The program remained absorbing throughout. Near the end, Tindemans set an emotional letter concerned with grief, written by the mature Heloise, in three parts and a frankly modern style. It was a startling change of pace, in some ways a welcome change enhancing what had gone before, but almost too different, a bit jarring. The program ended with a lament, or Planctus by Abelard, sung by Mentzel and set by Tindemans in medieval style so well that what she wrote likely could not be identified as written today by any scholar.
I hope the Medieval Women’s Choir and Tindemans will repeat this program. The fascinating content, tight structure and excellent performance made for a most rewarding concert.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Just to set the record straight:
At the beginning of the second half Eric Mentzel sang Planctus David, the only one of the Abelard laments for which Abelard’s music is preserved.
At the end of the program Amanda Jane Kelley sang Planctus Dine, a text by Abelard, for which I wrote the music.
Margriet Tindemans