Adam de la Halle

Adam de la Halle or Adam le Bossu , c.1240-1287, French dramatist and poet-musician, one of the great trouvères . Many of his songs and polyphonic motets are preserved, as is the pastoral comedy with music Le Jeu de Robin et Marion (c.1283). Another work, Jeu d'Adam ou de la feuillée (1262), was one of the earliest forerunners of comic opera.

Adam de la Halle [ Adam de la Hale, Adam le Bossu] (b Arras, c.1245; d Naples, ?1288 or in England after 1306). Fr. trouvère, poet, and composer. Wrote in all genres current in 13th cent., both monophonic chansons and polyphonic motets. Few biographical facts known. Probably studied in Paris, returning to Arras c.1270. His Le jeu de Robin et de Marion, probably written for Fr. court at Naples, anticipated the genre of opéra-comique.

Adam de la Halle (c.1245–c.1288), French trouvère, nicknamed ‘le Bossu (Hunchback) d'Arras’, and one of the few medieval minstrels about whom anything is known. He was the author of Le Jeu de la feuillée (c.1276). Bawdy, satirical, and anti-clerical, it marks the beginning of lay, as distinct from ecclesiastical, drama in France. For the Court of Robert II, Count of Artois, Adam wrote also a pastoral, Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion, which, by virtue of its music—for Adam was a composer as well as a poet—is now considered by some the first French light opera. First printed in 1822, it was played in a modernized version in Arras in 1896.