Alba

(Provençal) Term for a troubadour poem in which lovers part at dawn after a furtive nocturnal meeting. Among the few such poems that survive only two have music, by Giraut de Bomelh and Cadenet.

Examples of this medieval lyric genre usually exhibit a popularizing tone, with relatively unsophisticated versification and the use of a refrain containing the word alba (dawn). They combine affective and narrative elements: there may be a narrator and one or more speakers, and the passage of time is crucial since the song is a response to dawn, when lovers must separate. The earliest known example is a macaronic text from Fleurysur-Loire. The Occitan corpus is difficult to define; 18 examples are collected by Martin de Riquer (1944), but only nine plus a further four possible ones in B. Woledge's contribution to Eos: An Inquiry into the Theme of Lovers' Meetings and Partings at Dawn in Poetry (ed. A. T. Hatto, 1965), Woledge's criteria being more stringent and his collection correspondingly more homogeneous. Even so, the character of the alba varies widely: though many are anonymous, others are attributed to well-known troubadours; and though most are resolutely secular, there are several whose main tonality is religious, the most famous being that by Giraut de Bornelh. As a result, the origins of the genre are surrounded in controversy: is it clerical, and closely related to dawn hymns, or popular, and connected with other quasi-narrative lyric genres? The alba was clearly most successful in Occitania. There are five Old French examples in Woledge, and the form was also exploited in other languages.

[Sarah Kay]

The Scottish Gaelic and Modern Irish name for Scotland; see also ALBU.

Bibliography

• T. F. O'Rahilly, “‘On the Name Alba’”, in Early Irish History and Mythology (Dublin, 1946), 385–7

[AHL-bah] An important wine town of about 30,000 people situated in the wine-producing area south of Turin in Italy's piedmont region. Several Italian docs use Alba in their name-barbera d'alba, dolcetto d'alba, nebbiolo d'alba and Dolcetto di Diano d'Alba. The well-known DOCGs of barolo and barbaresco are also near Alba. In addition to red wines, the area around Alba is also known for its white truffles.

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