trouvère, any of a school of poets that flourished in northern France from the 11th to the 14th century. The trouvère was the counterpart in the language of northern France (the langue d’oïl) to the Provençal troubadour (q.v.), from whom the trouvères derived their highly stylized themes and metrical forms. The essence of trouvère rhetoric lies in the combination of traditional themes and the use of established forms in which to express them. The audience gained pleasure from familiarity with these clichés rather than from the poet’s originality. It is thus perhaps the least characteristic trouvères, such as Rutebeuf (flourished 1250–80), generally considered the last and greatest of the trouvères, who are most appreciated today.
Communication between northern and southern France was facilitated and encouraged by the Crusades, and a number of trouvères, such as the Châtelaine de Coucy and Conon de Béthune, took part in them. The trouvères, however, developed a lyric poetry distinct from that of the troubadours, and, unlike the latter, they did not prize obscurity of metaphor for its own sake. Their poetry is sometimes satirical and sometimes (as in the case of Colin Muset) concerned with the pleasures of the good life; but the basic theme remains that of courtly love, in which the poet describes his unrequited passion for an inaccessible lady.
Trouvère lyrics were intended to be sung, probably by the poet alone or with instrumental accompaniment provided by a hired musician. Although originally connected with feudal courts, around which the trouvères traveled looking for patronage, their poetry was not just popular with aristocratic circles, and they tended increasingly to find their patrons in the middle classes. Half the extant trouvère lyrics are the work of a guild of citizen poets of Arras. Many of the trouvères, such as Gace Brûlé (late 12th century), were of aristocratic birth; Thibaut de Champagne (1201–53) was king of Navarre. But others, including Rutebeuf, were of humble origin. See also jongleurs.
The songs of the trouvères were monophonic (consisting solely of melodic line). Their exact mode of performance is not known. The form of the instrumental accompaniment is unknown, but it almost certainly included preludes, postludes, and interludes.
The trouvères used a variety of musical forms, some for any of several of the various poetic categories and some linked to the type of the verse. Four broad categories can be discerned: musical forms based on multiple repetitions of a short phrase, as in a litany; dance songs with refrains; songs based on pairs of repeated lines; and through-composed songs (i.e., using no repetition).
Compositions with no repetition within the stanza include the vers and the chanson. In the chanson, however, a short initial section is repeated, and a piece of the opening section may recur at the end. Most surviving trouvère music is written in a notation that indicates the pitch of the notes but not their relative duration or accentuation, an omission that has given rise to much debate as to rhythmic interpretation in the edition of the songs for modern performance.