Autobiography in the Songs of Hugo Von Montfort and Oswald Von Wolkenstein

Almut Suerbaum Paradoxes of performance: Autobiography in the songs of Hugo von Montfort and Oswald von Wolkenstein 1 Performance and its status in medieval lyric has been the subject of lively scholarly debate in the last few years.1 From a position in which literary interpretations were solely concerned with the transmitted words as texts, scholarly consensus of the last decade has shifted towards regarding words as mere dry bones, highlighting that music and gesture were an integral part of the poetic oeuvre. Yet the centrality of the non-linguistic elements of such works poses methodological problems, and any assessment of the status of courtly lyric within a semi-oral culture is difficult,2 because much about the external circumstances remains unknown and perhaps irrevocably unknowable. Some facts about the works with which we are concerned here can nevertheless be stated: courtly love lyric in Germany was, for the most part, ‘performed’ in the literal sense, at least initially, so that we are dealing with texts intended to be sung, and indeed performed, to an audience. They were therefore, it seems, conceived as an ensemble of words and music, realized by a singer in front of an aristocratic audience. At the same time, most courtly love lyric employs a lyric ‘I’ which is not normally named or identified, thus offering a generic ‘I’ which is in principle open to all listeners, while at the same time _____________ 1 For the debate in Germany, the volume ‘Aufführung’ und ‘Schrift’ in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, ed. by Jan-Dirk Müller, Stuttgart 1996, remains central; cf. Timo Reuvekamp- Felber, ‘Fiktionalität als Gattungsvoraussetzung. Die Destruktion des Authentischen in der Genese der deutschen und romanischen Lyrik’, in Text und Kultur. Mittelalterliche Kultur 1150-1450, ed. by Ursula Peters, Stuttgart 2001, pp. 377-402, for a review of positions. Mireille Schnyder, ‘Minnesang (um 1200)’, in Literarische Performativität. Lektüre vormoderner Texte, ed. by Cornelia Herberichs, Christian Kiening, Zurich 2008, pp. 121-136, notes that in this debate, visual phenomena have been neglected, and argues for the significance of visualization in assessing elements of self-staging in courtly loves songs from around 1200. 2 The term ‘semi-oral’ to describe the characteristic feature of medieval textuality was introduced by Paul Zumthor, La lettre et la voix: De la littérature médiévale, Paris 1987; cf. Reuvekamp-Felber (n. 1), pp. 377 f. DOI 10.1515/9783110222470.2.143, © 2018 Almut Suerbaum, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. 144 Almut Suerbaum maintaining a distance from a collective form of identity, often through acts of overt criticism of the audience. This strategy of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion necessitates a complex negotiation between singer and listener on the one hand, and between author and implied audience on the other. German courtly love lyric nevertheless poses a specific problem: for most of the poets of the thirteenth century, melodies do not survive, so that we depend on the metrical construction of the strophes as a reminder of their musical shape. This does not, however, change the theoretical requirement to consider them as set in their performance situation, just like their Romance counterparts and models.3 Recent studies of performance and performance situation have often referred to the methodological dilemma of having to consider a cultural context about which we know so little, particularly with respect to crucial details such as the shape of the melody, the nature of the musical performance, and the relationship between author and performer. Yet this is where a concept of the ‘performative’ may be useful, because performance in the sense of Austin is more than just the musical realisation of a song.4 Performatives are intrinsically linked to acts of speech, and it is through these that a transformation of listeners into singer takes place. Hence, elements of ritual are embedded in the very language of courtly poetry, and it is these linguistic elements which will be the focus of the present study. In asserting the singer’s intention of offering love service to the lady, courtly love songs can be seen as an illocutionary act: in the singing of the song, they perform the very service they declare. More importantly, though, courtly love songs incorporate textual signals which, in asserting the singer’s intention of offering love service to a lady, perform that very service. Statements of singing are therefore by their very nature not constative or declarative, but performative: they constitute the very action to which they refer. If understood in this sense, the significant aspect of courtly love lyric is not its hypothesized link with actual performance, but rather its interpretation of the poetic as a ritual act.5 _____________ 3 On the relationship between words and music as a formal construction, cf. Robert Guiette, ‘D’une poésie formelle en France au moyen âge’, in Questions de littérature, ed. by Robert Guiette, Ghent 1960, pp. 9-18; Paul Zumthor, ‘De la cricularité du chant (à propos des trouvères des XIIe et XIIIe siècles)’, in Poétique 1 (1970), pp. 129-140; Michel Zink, ‘Musique et subjectivité. Le passage de la chanson d’amour à la poésie personelle au XIIIe siècle’, in Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 25 (1983), pp. 225-232. 4 John L. Austin, How to do Things with Words: The William Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955, ed. by J. O. Urmson, Oxford 1962, pp. 14 f. 5 For a discussion of the connection between courtly love lyric and ritual, cf. Jan-Dirk Müller, ‘Ritual, pararituelle Handlungen, geistliches Spiel. Zum Verhältnis von Schrift und Autobiography in the songs of Hugo von Montfort and Oswald von Wolkenstein 145 Such connections between courtly love lyric and ritual emphasize the openness of the speaker’s role, in that like most ritual acts, courtly love songs rely on establishing a sense of collective.6 This changes with the introduction of autobiographical elements into a form which, at least in the German literary situation of the thirteenth century, had been regarded as inherently collective. Autobiographical elements, referring to an identifiable and unique ‘I’ outside textual reality, require radically different forms of negotiating and staging the self, since they allow for tension between the collective ‘I’ of courtly lyric on the one hand, and autobiographical subjectivity on the other. 2 When considering late medieval German poetry, it looks at first sight as if the situation were radically different from that prevailing in the thirteenth century, in that for poets like Hugo von Montfort or Oswald von Wolkenstein, we possess not only a textual transmission which is close to the authors, but also manuscripts containing the actual melodies. The transmission therefore suggests that these were seen as songs composed for musical performance in the literal sense, and although we know very little about the actual audience or indeed the performance practice of these songs, they are presented as texts in which it is possible to analyse music and words as mutually complementary structures, as texts moreover in which both authors exercise close control over the material form in which the ensemble of music and words is transmitted in manuscripts.7 _____________ Performanz’, in Audiovisualität vor und nach Gutenberg. Zur Kulturgeschichte der medialen Umbrüche, ed. by Horst Wenzel, Winfried Seipel, Gotthart Wunberg, Vienna 2001, pp. 63-71, esp. pp. 65 f.; cf. Thomas Cramer, ‘Waz hilfet âne sinne kunst’? Lyrik im 13. Jahrhundert. Studien zu ihrer Ästhetik, Berlin 1998, esp. pp. 9-48. Yet this association with ritual practice is not unproblematic, as it downplays the degree to which lyric texts consciously play with variation, thus reflecting on the stylized nature of literary texts in a way that cultural rituals do not; see Reuvekamp-Felber (n. 1), pp. 379 f., for a critical review of the use of ‘ritual’ or ‘para-ritual’ in the context of courtly love lyric. 6 Rainer Warning, ‘Lyrisches Ich und Öffentlichkeit bei den Trobadors: Wilhlem IX. von Aquitanien “Molt jauenz, mi prenc en amar”’, in Rainer Warning, Lektüren romanischer Lyrik. Von den Trobadors zum Surrealismus, Freiburg i. Br. 1997, pp. 45-84, analyses the significance of this in early Provencal lyric; cf. Reuvekamp-Felbert (n.1), pp. 386 f., on the same song. Both authors highlight the fact that here, as in other songs by Guillaume IX, the use of a variety of differentiated first-person roles signals that these are not reflections of ‘authentic’ speech, but highly stylized and inherently fictional in nature. 7 Both aspects are obvious in the manuscript transmission; the main manuscript of Hugo’s oeuvre (Heidelberg UB, Cod. pal. germ. 329) was commissioned by the author himself, whose crest is inserted in the manuscript on f. 54r; cf. Hugo von Montfort, Das poetische Werk. Texte, Melodien, Einführung, ed. by Wernfried Hofmeister, Berlin, New York 2005, 146 Almut Suerbaum Voice, as the trace of the body within language, is still not tangible to us immediately, yet the manuscript transmission at least contains a written reminder of its presence.8 In Hugo von Montfort’s oeuvre, elements of staging a self within the text of the songs are prominent. He refers to his own life as an amateur poet: so han ich vil geticht in weldern und in awen und dartzu geritten; disbuchhanichgemachen den sechßten tail wol ze rosesn, darum sol nieman lachen, ob es ist als gentzleich nicht beslossen, als ob ich es hett mitt sitten aussgemessen und wer gesessen an ainem bett: so hett ich zwar dest minder ichts vergessen. (31, 147-156)9 I did much composing of poetry while riding through fields and woods. More than a sixth of this book was composed on horseback, which is why no one should laugh if it is not as polished as if I had properly arranged it sitting on a bed—in which case I might have overlooked fewer mistakes.

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