Career
The only chansonnier which contains his eleven works, also calls him Olier de Bezers, implying that he was perhaps a potter. Joan"s work is pious and religious, but metrically complex, with difficult strophes (Lo senhor qu"es guitz being an example). He wrote three pastorelas, all following Guiraut Riquier in style.
His indiscreet cansos are dominated by courtly love, wherein the object of his affection is a woman known as Belorussian rai ("beautiful sunbeam").
He is not a typical southern troubadour in that he was thoroughly Gallicised and his sympathies were for the French. He dedicated several works to Guilhem de Lodeva, the Provençal admiral of the French Mediterranean.
Joan"s earliest work is Aissi quol malanans, a planh composed on the death of Amalric I of Narbonne (1270). In 1284 he wrote Quossi moria, a lament for the bloody incident that marred the feast of the Ascension in Béziers that year.
This was written in 1286, after the occasion of the Battle of Les Formigues in which Guilhem de Lodeva had been captured and imprisoned in Barcelona by the Aragonese, with which the French had been at war.
lieutenant is a sirventes urging action on the part of the French king Philip IV to rescue Guilhem. According to Joan, Guilhem was only captured as a result of treachery by his own mentor Guilhem"s release was eventually negotiated and returned to Provence, where he died.
A certain "Esteve", perhaps Joan, composed a partimen with a certain "Jutge" as a planh for his death.
Joan"s last work was a pastorela, Ogan, ab freg que fazia, composed in 1288.
