Guillaume de Machaut

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(b ?Reims, c 1300; d there, ?13 April 1377). French composer and poet. Probably educated in Reims, he entered the service of John of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia, as a royal secretary,c 1323. The king helped him to procure a canonry in Reims, which was confirmed in 1335; Machaut settled therec 1340, although he continued in royal service until the king's death (1346). He then served various members of the French high nobility, including John, Duke of Berry, his later years being dedicated to the MS compilation of his works.

With his prolific output of motets and songs, Machaut was the single most important figure of the French Ars Nova. He followed and developed the guidelines of Philippe de Vitry's treatise Ars nova and, in particular, observed Vitry's unprecedented advocation of duple time in many of his works, even in his setting of the Ordinary of the Mass. Only in some of his lais and virelais and the Hoquetus David did he consistently adhere to 13th-century rhythmic patterns and genres. His own rhythmic style is novel in its use of variety and motivic interest, particularly through syncopation, and in his development of isorhythmic techniques (which he often extended to all voices): all but three of his 23 motets, and four of the movements of the Messe de Nostre Dame, are isorhythmic. The mass is one of the earliest polyphonic settings of the Mass Ordinary; the four isorhythmic movements are based on Gregorian tenors, while the Gloria and Credo are freely constructed. In secular music, Machaut set a wide range of poetic forms, all of which are illustrated in his long narrative poem, the Remede de Fortune (probably an early work). While the relationship between text and music is most closely observed in the monophonic lais and virelais, a highly flexible approach is adopted in the three-voice motets so that the subtle treatment of the text avoids the symmetricality of complete isorhythm. His inventive approach to isorhythm resulted in freely-constructed introductions to five of his Latin motets. More progressive features of Machaut's style - an increased awareness of tonality, the use of unifying rhythmic motifs - are found in his polyphonic settings of rondeaux and ballades, while melodic considerations are to the fore in his virelais. Typical of Machaut's compositional flair and imagination is the rondeau Ma fin est mon commencement in which the text provides the key to an ingenious canon.

works:
Sacred music

• Messe de Nostre Dame
• 23 motets
• Hoquetus David, double hocket

Secular music

• 42 ballades
• 22 rondeaux, incl. Ma fin est mon commencement
• 33 virelais
• 19 lais
• 1 complainte
• 1 chanson royal

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(b ?Reims, c. 1300; d ?13 April 1377). French composer and poet. He was the most prolific and inventive poet and composer of his day. His texts and manuscripts characterize the taste of the royal court in mid-14th-century France. From c. 1323 to 1346 he was in the service of John of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia, after which he served members of the French royal family, among them Jean, Duc de Berry. Despite a peripatetic career, Machaut's chief home was in Reims, where he finally became a canon in 1337, and where the Dauphin, the future Charles V, had him sought from his house during a visit to the city in 1361.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

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Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300-1377) was the greatest French composer of his century, the creator of the first complete polyphonic Mass setting, and a renowned poet.

Guillaume de Machaut was born in the village of Machault in Champagne, near Reims. He became a cleric, and in 1323 he joined the household of King John of Bohemia as a secretary. John was the son of one German emperor and the father of another; his ancestral castle was Luxembourg. He was also the brother-in-law of one French king and later became the father-in-law of another, and his closest associations were with the French court. One of the most traveled noblemen of Europe and involved in numerous military campaigns, John took his secretary with him to Bohemia, Prussia, Poland, Lithuania, and Italy.

Later John settled Machaut at Reims with a canonicate. There Machaut lived from about 1340 on, quietly and peacefully, except for frequent trips to Paris and hunting expeditions; he was joined by his brother in 1355 and by his student, the poet Eustache Deschamps, who may have been his nephew. Machaut always kept in close touch with the royal family, and his last patron was Jean de France, Duke of Berry, the grandson of King John and brother of King Charles V of France. The Duke of Berry was one of the greatest art patrons of all time. The most beautiful of the five manuscripts that contain all Machaut's works was written for the duke under Machaut's personal supervision. Because of this "complete edition," Machaut's output reaches us fully and is the most voluminous of any composer before the 15th century.

In 1374 Machaut's brother died, and in April 1377 Guillaume followed him. Two poems written by Deschamps in May commemorate his death; shortly thereafter they were set to music by a composer of the younger generation, Andrieu, and they constitute the earliest such "complaint" about a poet or composer.

His Works

In his poetry and in his life Machaut shows himself conscious of his lowly origin but also of his worth. He is dignified, but he can be rollicking and rustic; he is realistic and honest rather than formal. Machaut describes nature as he saw it, responds to the events of his day as a poet-historian, and gives a very honest account of his last love affair, that with Peronne, a girl of 18 or 20, with whom he fell in love during his early 60s; elsewhere he records the names of some eight other girls he had loved. But the majority of his poetry deals with love in the manner of the trouvères, whose style he sought to revive. In fact, he was the last composer outside of Germany to write monophonic songs like those of the trouvères.

Machaut's works can be divided into four categories. The first consists of larger poetic works: seven historical poems (dits); Le Remède de fortune, in part a textbook of poetry; Le Veoir dit (1362-1365), the story of his last love; La Prise d'Alexandrie (ca. 1370), chronicling the sack of Alexandria by the king of Cyprus in 1365; and seven others. Several of these works contain poems set to music. The second group comprises his shorter poems: La Louange desdames, some 270 poems in praise of women; and about 50 complaints and other poems. The third category includes poems set to his own music: 19 lais; 23 motets, with 2 texts each; and 101 pieces in the standard forms of the period (formes fixes) - ballade, virelai, and rondeau. The fourth group consists of two large musical works: the hocket David and a Mass. Many of these works reappear in manuscripts other than the five of his "complete edition," proving the composer's widespread fame. They are all available in modern editions.

Musical Technique

Machaut's musical technique represents the ars nova, or new music, of the 14th century, championed by Philippe de Vitry in the preceding generation. It employs duple meter alongside the previously explored triple meter; the triad; isorhythm, that is, a lengthy rhythmic pattern applied to changing melodic phrases; and complex, often syncopated rhythm. Machaut also seems to have introduced such artifices as reading a melody backward; and his accompanied songs - a melody accompanied by two instruments - are the first of the genre to reach us, since those of Philippe de Vitry are lost.

In his Remède de fortune, Machaut teaches several form types, among them the lai, the complaint, the chanson royale, and the formes fixes. His lais are in 12 stanzas, each subdivided into two or four pairs of lines, sung to the same melody; all line pairs differ in length and rhythm, and therefore melodically, except that the last stanza is sung to the music of the first one. Of Machaut's 25 lais 19 are set to music, monophonically (for one unaccompanied voice only), but in two of them monophonic stanzas alternate with canonic ones (of the type of the modern round, then called a chace).

The complaint is a poem of many (30-50) stanzas of 4X4 lines each. When sung - only one of some 15 by Machaut is set to music (monophonically) - all stanzas are sung to the same music, each stanza falling into two repeated sections.

The chanson royale is a poem of 5 stanzas of 8-11 lines and a refrain of 3-4 lines. Only one of Machaut's eight chansons royales is set to music (monophonically).

Ballade, virelai, and rondeau are related forms, all derived from the dance, though only some rondeaux were still connected with dancing at the time. All involve a refrain which is repeated in all stanzas and may comprise 6-20 lines or more. Most of these poems are set to music: 20 of the 21 rondeaux, each for one sung part and one to three instrumental parts; 32 of 38 virelais, most of them monophonically, but some for voice plus one or two instruments; and 42 ballades, mostly for voice and one or two instruments.

To these types must be added the motet, the hocket, and the Mass. The motet, created shortly before 1200 as a liturgical work, soon became the chief type of serious secular art music. Machaut's motets are among the most artful of the century. Whereas isorhythm appears infrequently in the ballades and rondeaux and not at all in the other form types described above, it is ubiquitous in the motets. They are all written for two sung parts - sung to different texts, two, indeed, to one French and one Latin text simultaneously - and either one or two instrumental parts. The majority are secular, but some are liturgical.

The hocket David is one of the last works, and the longest, of a type created during the 13th century. In a hocket two parts alternately give out snatches of a melody, here above an isorhythmic cantus firmus (preexisting melody).

Machaut's Mass is probably the outstanding musical work of the entire 14th century. It is a polyphonic setting of the entire Mass Ordinary (the portions sung at every Mass except at the Requiem Mass, the Mass for the Dead), consisting of six sections: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, and Ite Missa Est (the last section is rarely set by other composers). Only one such complete setting, the Mass of Tournai (ca. 1300), compiled from various composers, antedates Machaut's, and it is artistically not comparable. Machaut's Mass may have been composed for the Marian Feasts at a chapel served by the Machaut brothers in the 1350s (but it was not, as is often said, written for or sung at the coronation of King Charles V in 1364). The long texts of the Gloria and Credo are set simply in chordal style, each followed by an elaborate Amen. All the other sections are composed in the style of the isorhythmic motet. Almost the entire work is written in four melodic lines, for voices and instruments, and all the sections are unified by a pervasive motif, a technique not employed before or within the following 60 years or so.

There was no one in France during the second half of the 14th century and the first quarter of the 15th to even remotely approach Machaut's musical eminence. In fact, all composers followed his lead and adopted his style, developing it only with respect to an increasingly mannered complexity, which parallels the late Gothic, or mannered, style of architecture prevailing during the period.

Further Reading

The fullest account in English of Machaut's life is in Siegmund Levarie, Guillaume de Machaut (1954), and of his works in Donald Jay Grout, A History of Western Music (1960). All of Machaut's music is available in modern transcriptions and much of it on records.

Machaut, Guillaume de or Guillaume de Machault (c.1300-1377). A prolific writer of both lyric and narrative poetry, Machaut was also an important composer. His works were admired and imitated both inside and outside France. In his youth Machaut served as personal secretary to John of Luxembourg, king of Bohemia. In the course of his career he also enjoyed the patronage of Bonne, John's daughter and wife of the dauphin; Charles le Mauvais of Navarre; and Jean, duc de Berry. In 1337 he received a canonry at Reims, which he held until his death. Most of his poetry dates from after this time.

While Machaut's compositions were occasionally copied independently, they are for the most part transmitted in anthology manuscripts of his collected works. Most of these are richly illuminated. Machaut exercised a supervisory role in the preparation of manuscripts, the precise extent of which is not known; at the very least he was probably involved with codex organization and with the design of illustrative programmes. Machaut's role in book production is linked to his interest in establishing a poetic identity powerful enough to unify his entire literary and musical œuvre. His important position in the evolution of French literature is reflected in Eustache Deschamps's ballade commemorating Machaut's death, in which Machaut is designated as ‘poète’: the first known application of this term to a vernacular author.

While Machaut did not invent the lyric formes fixes, his work helped to establish these forms as canonical. The hierarchy of forms is nowhere so clear as in the Remède de Fortune (c.1341), which contains an example of each with musical accompaniment. The pieces are arranged in descending order of poetic complexity—from lai to rondeau—and in ascending order of musical complexity, moving from monody to polyphony. In the anthology manuscripts of Machaut's collected works, lyric pieces are grouped according to verse form. A group of poems without musical accompaniment is transmitted under the title La Louange des dames.

Machaut's narrative dits are in the tradition of the Roman de la Rose. He employs first-person narrative; the subject is love, including both the representation of love experience and the didactic exposition of proper behaviour in love; and he frequently makes use of the dream-vision format and of allegorical personification. Machaut may present himself as lover, as in the Dit du Vergier (before 1340), the Remède de Fortune, and the Dit de l'Alerion (before 1349); or he may act as witness and recorder of another's love, as in the Dit du Lyon (1342) and the Fonteinne amoureuse (c.1361). In all of these poems Machaut presents an intellectualized vision of love, one largely separated from erotic desire. Love provides inspiration for literary and musical composition, and is the basis for a cheerful optimism sustained by contemplation of the lady's many virtues.

The Jugement du roy de Behaingne (c.1340), written for John of Luxembourg, presents a debate in love casuistry, in which it is determined that a man whose lady has betrayed him has suffered more than a lady whose lover has died. Its sequel, the Jugement du roy de Navarre (1349), written for Charles le Mauvais, reverses the judgement after a lengthy debate in which the narrator is accused of defaming women. An interesting forerunner of the 15th-c. Querelle des Femmes, this pair of dits provided an important model for Christine de Pizan's debate poetry.

Machaut's most enigmatic and most self-reflexive work is the Voir Dit (True Tale), written near the end of his career. In it he portrays himself, an elderly and ailing poet, carrying on a love-affair with a teenage girl. The affair consists largely of poetry and prose epistles exchanged between the lovers and reproduced in the text. The Voir Dit is quite literally the story of its own day-by-day composition, and includes such details as the poet's complaint that he cannot reconstruct the proper order of the earlier love letters, which do appear in an illogical order. This state of affairs has led to debate concerning the veracity of the Voir Dit, which most scholars now regard as fictional.

Only two dits topics other than love. The Confort d'ami (1357) offers advice and consolation to Charles le Mauvais, and includes numerous mythological exempla. The Prise d'Alexandrie (after 1369), Machaut's last major composition, recounts the exploits of Pierre I de Lusignan, king of Cyprus.

Machaut's contributions to French literature include a complex blend of amorous and learned registers; a strengthening of the concept of vernacular poetic authority; and a humorous ironizing of the first-person narrator. His poetry is highly mannered, ornamental, and self-conscious. While building on the example of the Roman de la Rose and exploring the conventions of courtly poetry, Machaut proved himself a brilliant and original poet.

— Sylvia Huot

Bibliography

• W. Calin, A Poet at the Fountain (1974)
• K. Brownlee, Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machaut (1984)
• J. Cerquiglini, ‘Un engin si soutil’: Guillaume de Machaut et l'écriture au XIVe siècle (1985)

• Period: Medieval (1-1449)
• Country: France
• Born: ca. 1300 in Machaut, France
• Died: April 13, 1377 in Rheims, France
• Genres: Choral Music, Vocal Music

Biography

Generally acclaimed the greatest composer of the fourteenth century is Guillaume de Machaut, born in Champagne around 1300. In the early 1320s he entered the service of John, Duke of Luxembourg and King of Bohemia, who secured for Machaut various ecclesiastical posts, documented in a series of papal bulls. One of the most important was a canonry at Rheims Cathedral, although there is no evidence that Machaut was ever a practicing clergyman or even particularly pious; indeed, most of his music is secular. He remained in John's service until the latter's death at the Battle of Crécy in 1346, after which his continuing association with high nobility enabled him to travel freely. Around 1350 Machaut found a new patron in Charles, King of Navarre and pretender to the French throne.

Like so many other medieval composers, Machaut was both musician and poet. His works are preserved to a degree astonishing for the fourteenth century: there are manuscripts for hundreds of poems and some 145 musical works. The poems are particularly fascinating for the light they shed on Machaut's own life and times; they record such events as the Black Death, which ravaged Europe in 1348 and 1349, and the Siege of Rheims in the early part of the Hundred Years' War. On a happier level his poetry reveals a love of falconry, riding, and the beauties of the French countryside. In some respects a conservative who built on existing traditions, such as the isorhythmic motet and even the monophonic trouvère song, he was, however, a composer of rare versatility whose music covers a range much wider than that suggested by his most famous work, the Messe de Nostre Dame (Notre Dame Mass).

The fame of that work has tended to obscure Machaut's secular works; his songs are his most characteristic pieces. Lyrical in spirit, with a new emphasis on melody in the top or cantus line, they nevertheless contain considerable subtleties in their manipulation of musical and verbal refrains. One of the most popular of the so-called formes fixes of the day was the virelai, a principal feature of which is that words and music have refrains that do not coincide with each other. Most of Machaut's virelais are monophonic, showing the continuing influence of the trouvères. These represent the most approachable side of his art, particularly in as happy an example as the delightful "Foy Porter." Two other song forms Machaut cultivated were the rondeau and the ballade. A particularly striking example of the latter is "Dame, de qui toute ma joie vieni," a song of infectious rhythmic vitality in praise of the poet's lady. Set polyphonically for four voices, this ballade, like the virelai mentioned above, has three strophic stanzas. The musical form of this and other ballades is A-A-B-C, the last section being a verse refrain.

The celebrity of the Messe de Nostre Dame probably owes much to its place in musical history as the first extant complete mass setting by a single composer. It is however possible that (as with Bach's Mass in B minor) its individual sections were not composed with a view to complete performance, a supposition supported by the work's diversity of styles and absence of thematic unity. Complex isorhythms are applied to all four parts in the shorter-texted sections (Kyrie, Sanctus and Agnus Dei), while the Gloria and the Credo are monosyllabic. The title, incidentally, refers not to Notre Dame in Paris, but the great cathedral of Rheims, the coronation place of the kings of France and, as already mentioned, the location of Machaut's canonry.

~ Brian Robins, All Music Guide

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