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Arondeau (French:[ʁɔ̃do]; plural:rondeaux) is a form ofmedieval andRenaissance Frenchpoetry, as well as the corresponding musicalchanson form. Together with theballade and thevirelai it was considered one of threeformes fixes, and one of the verse forms in France most commonly set to music between the late 13th and the 15th centuries. It is structured around a fixed pattern of repetition of verse with arefrain. The rondeau is believed to have originated in dance songs involving singing of the refrain by a group alternating with the other lines by a soloist.[1] The term "Rondeau" is used both in a wider sense, covering older styles of the form which are sometimes distinguished as thetriolet androndel, and in a narrower sense referring to a 15-line style which developed from these forms in the 15th and 16th centuries.[2] The rondeau is unrelated to the much later instrumental dance form that shares the same name in Frenchbaroque music, which is more commonly called therondo form in classical music.
The older French rondeau orrondel as a song form between the 13th and mid-15th century begins with a full statement of its refrain, which consists of two halves. This is followed first by a section of non-refrain material that mirrors the metrical structure and rhyme of the refrain's first half, then by a repetition of the first half of the refrain, then by a new section corresponding to the structure of the full refrain, and finally by a full restatement of the refrain. Thus, it can be schematically represented as AB aAab AB, where "A" and "B" are the repeated refrain parts, and "a" and "b" the remaining verses. If the poem has more than one stanza, it continues with further sequences of aAab AB, aAab AB, etc.
In its simplest and shortest form, therondeau simple, each of the structural parts is a single verse, leading to the eight-line structure known today astriolet, as shown in "Doulz viaire gracieus" byGuillaume de Machaut:
Doulz viaire gracieus, | A | Sweet gracious face, |
In larger rondeau variants, each of the structural sections may consist of several verses, although the overall sequence of sections remains the same. Variants include therondeau tercet, where the refrain consists of three verses, therondeau quatrain, where it consists of four (and, accordingly, the whole form of sixteen), and therondeau cinquain, with a refrain of five verses (and a total length of 21), which becomes the norm in the 15th century.[1] In therondeau quatrain, the rhyme scheme is usually ABBA ab AB abba ABBA; in therondeau cinquain it is AABBA aab AAB aabba AABBA.
A typical example of arondeau cinquain of the 15th century is the following:[3]
In the medieval manuscripts, the restatement of the refrain is usually not written out, but only indicated by giving the first words or first line of the refrain part. After the mid-15th century,[4] this feature came to be regarded no longer as a mere scribal abbreviation, but as an actual part of the poetry. As the form was gradually divorced from the musical structure and became a purely literary genre, it is often not entirely clear how much of the refrain material was actually meant to be repeated.[1] Arondeau quatrain in which the first refrain interjection (lines 7–8, rhymes AB) is preserved in full, while the final restatement of the refrain is reduced to a single line (A) or again just two lines (AB), ends up with a total of 13 or 14 lines respectively. This form is usually defined as the "rondel" in modern literary compendia.
Another version has the refrains shortened even further. Both restatements are reduced to just the first two or three words of the first line, which now stand as short, pithy, non-rhyming lines in the middle and at the end of the poem. These half-lines are calledrentrement. If derived from the erstwhilerondeau quatrain, this results in a 12-line structure that is now called the "rondeau prime", with therentrements in lines 7 and 12. If derived from the erstwhile 21-linerondeau cinquain, the result is a 15-line form with therentrements in lines 9 and 15 (rhyme scheme aabba–aabR–aabbaR). This 15-line form became the norm in the literary rondeau of the later Renaissance, and is known as the "rondeau" proper today. The following is a typical example of this form:[4]
A large corpus of medieval French rondeaux was collected, catalogued, and studied byNico H.J. van den Boogaard in his dissertationRondeaux et refrains du XIIe siècle au début du XIVe: Collationnement, introduction et notes (Paris: Klincksieck, 1969).
Like the other formes fixes, the Rondeau (in its original form with full refrains) was frequently set to music. The earliest surviving polyphonic rondeaux are by thetrouvèreAdam de la Halle in the late 13th century. In the 14th and 15th centuries,Guillaume de Machaut,Guillaume Dufay,Hayne van Ghizeghem and other prominent composers were prolific in the form. Early rondeaux are usually found as interpolations in longer narrative poems, and separatemonophonic musical settings survive. After the 15th century, the musical form went out of fashion and the rondeau became a purely literary form.
The musical rondeau is typically a two-part composition, with all the "A" sections of the poem's AB-aAab-AB structure set to one line of music, and all the "B" parts to another.
Although far rarer than the French usage, theItalian equivalent, therondello was occasionally composed and listed among the Italian forms of poetry for music. A single rondello appears in theRossi Codex. In addition, several rondeaux in French appear entirely in sources originating in Italy, theLow Countries, andGermany, suggesting that these works (includingEsperance, qui en mon cuer) may not have a purely French provenance.[5]
Later, in theBaroque era, the labelrondeau (or the adjectival phraseen rondeau) was applied to dance movements in simple refrain form by such composers asJean-Baptiste Lully andLouis Couperin.
Arnold Schoenberg'sPierrot Lunaire sets 21 poems byAlbert Giraud, each of which is a 13-line poetic rondeau.
The French rondeau forms have been adapted to English at various times by different poets.Geoffrey Chaucer wrote two rondeaus in therondeau tercet form, one of them at the end ofThe Parliament of Fowls, where the birds are said to "synge a roundel" to a melody "imaked in Fraunce":[6]
In its classical 16th-century 15-line form with arentrement (aabba–aabR–aabbaR), the rondeau was used byThomas Wyatt. Later, it was reintroduced by some late 19th-century and 20th-century poets, such asPaul Laurence Dunbar ("We Wear the Mask"). It was customarily regarded as a challenge to arrange for these refrains to contribute to the meaning of the poem in as succinct and poignant a manner as possible. Perhaps the best-known English rondeau is the World War I poem,In Flanders Fields by CanadianJohn McCrae:
A more complex form is therondeau redoublé. This is also written on two rhymes, but in five stanzas of four lines each and one of five lines. Each of the first four lines (stanza 1) get individually repeated in turn once by becoming successively the respective fourth lines of stanzas 2, 3, 4, & 5; and the first part of the first line is repeated as a short fifth line to conclude the sixth stanza. This can be represented as - A1,B1,A2,B2 - b,a,b,A1 - a,b,a,B1 - b,a,b,A2 - a,b,a,B2 - b,a,b,a,(A1).
The following example of the form was written from the point of view of one of the RAF officers carrying the coffin ofDiana, Princess of Wales to the plane that was to carry it to England.
