Pierre De Ronsard

Poet Pierre de Ronsard spent almost his entire life as a courtier, thanks to his canny father who set him up early on as a page of the dauphin François. From there it was fairly smooth going and Ronsard went on to great fame in his lifetime. In 1536, after the death of François, he found employment with Charles, Duke of Orléans, and was later sent to Scotland as part of the retinue of the Duke's sister, Madelaine. Madelaine wed James V in January 1537, only to die in June of that same year. Ronsard stayed on in Scotland to attend James' next marriage in 1538. By 1539, he was back in France, where he enrolled at the Collège de Coqueret, temporarily withdrawing from the courtly life to take up Greek and Latin studies under Jean Dorat. Among his peers was the remarkable Jean Antoine de Baïf. With his fellows at Coqueret, Ronsard formed a vangardist literary group under the name the Pléaide. Du Bellay's Défense et illustration de la langue française was the group's first manifesto, but it was Ronsard's contributions that ultimately had the most-lasting literary value. These were his collections of Odes, in five volumes, and his Petrarchan sonnets collected in Les Amours. The renown these earned for Ronsard brought his work to the attention of composers across the continent. By the year 1600, the same year Claude Le Jeune died, 15 years after Ronsard's own death, well over 200 settings of Ronsard existed. The Odes and Amours proved among his most popular for use in music, but his witty Folastries and his pastoral Bocage weren't neglected either, nor was much of his output. The first edition of Amours, in fact, already contained nine four-voice settings of his work by well-known composers, most notably Clément Janequin. It certainly helped that he deliberately crafted the metrical schemes of his poems to make them suitable for music. In the wake of multiple successes, Ronsard found himself brought back from Academia into the comfort of the courtly fold. Charles IX and his sister, Marguerite, offered him an annual stipend and brought him the fought-for luxury of benefices. He returned to their court in the 1560s and exploited the many valuable opportunities he found there for collaboration with musicians. Of the many publications in his lifetime that featured settings of his work, most telling of his fame is probably the anthology Premier livre d'odes de Ronsard. Among the composers who used his poems is Orlando di Lasso himself. Charles died in 1574 and Ronsard became thereafter less and less involved in life at the court. Despite this -- which likely led to a decrease in income -- his youthfulness, at least in art, seems to have remained. In 1578, aged 54, he published a book of new love poems, his Sonnets pour Hélène. When he died in 1585, the occasion of the funeral was considered important enough by musicians that Jacques Mauduit composed a new requiem mass for the occasion.
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