'Quena fésta e o día', a song from medieval Spain with a great beginning

I have very varied musical tastes. Among them is medieval music, which has quite a few gems in Spain.

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Many years ago I bought a record containing some of these gems, entitled "Caballeros" (Knights), released in 1998 (if you are interested, you can still buy it on the website of their record label) and performed by a group led by Eduardo Paniagua García-Calderón, an architect and musician born in Madrid in 1952 who has specialized in medieval music, having already released 163 CDs of that type of music.

Much of Paniagua's recordings have been made through the label he founded, Pneuma, and have been about the "Cantigas de Santa María" by Alfonso X El Sabio, a collection of 417 compositions in Old Galician (or Galician-Portuguese) written by the King of Castile in the second half of the 13th century and dedicated to the Virgin Mary. If you've ever wondered if you'd understand the medieval version of the language you speak, these cantigas make it clear: I speak Galician and Spanish, and I confess that it's difficult to understand what these cantigas are saying, even when I have the lyrics in front of me.

Cantiga 195 is titled "Quena fésta e o día" (you can see the transcription of the original text here). On the aforementioned Paniagua album, it is the third track, titled "El Torneo". The song was recorded with period instruments and has a spectacular opening with battle horns. You can listen to it here:

The lyrics of the song tell of a knight who remained single because he was a very lustful man. One day he meets a beautiful maiden whose father was poor. Eager to gain wealth, the latter offers his daughter to the knight, but not as a wife, after being dazzled by her promises. The girl, seeing that she is about to be dishonored by the knight, prays to Saint Mary for help. The knight hears the girl praying and then repents of the vile thing he was about to commit, and decides to leave the young woman in an abbey before leaving for a tournament.

During the tournament, the knight dies and is buried in the grass without any honor. The girl watches time pass, waiting for the knight's return to the abbey. One night, the Virgin Mary appears to the girl in a dream and tells her that the knight has died and that she must find his tomb, marked with a rose, to give him a proper burial. The maiden tells the abbess, but she doesn't believe her and calls her a "liar." Finally, the girl leaves the abbey and does what the Virgin Mary ordered.

In addition to Paniagua's excellent recording, I found this other version of the same song published in 2013 by PerKelt, a London-based band specializing in Celtic music, on their album "Dowry of a Troll Woman"n. Unlike Panigua's version, this British recording only includes the refrain of the original poem:

P.S.: The image at the top of this article is an illustration from the Codex Rico of the Cantigas de Santa María, dated between 1270 and 1284 and kept at the Monastery of El Escorial. The illustration refers to the Battle of San Esteban de Gormaz (975), which ended in a Christian defeat. The illustration accompanies Cantiga 63, in which a knight spends the entire battle listening to mass, and when he goes to apologize to his lord, the latter is surprised because he had seen him in battle, even being wounded. Many thanks to Isabel Sánchez Gil for this valuable information.