Guillaume De Machaut Historical Account

Guillaume De Machaut

Historical Account of the Life and Works of Guillaume de Machaut

Medieval France was Guillaume de Machaut was one of the first composers who left substantial information behind about his life and music. This paper provides an account of Machaut's biography, followed by a discussion of his major musical achievements. A summary of the research and salient findings are presented in the conclusion.

The France of the mid-14th century represented an extension of the trends that had begun in the 13th century in virtually all aspects of social life, but as Hughes and Abraham (1960) emphasize, these trends also represented a decline,.".. If only in the sense of a descent from a peak, in the arts. For the thirteenth century was a peak, a classic epoch of medieval music, art, sculpture, and architecture" (1). It was also during the mid-14th century that the anonymous Ovide moralise and Pierre Bersuire's Ovidius moralizatus, which were extensions of longstanding medieval traditions concerning Ovid manuscripts, integrated allegorizing and moralizing interpretations of myth together for use by the clergy to help communicate somewhat nebulous concepts in the process (Chance 1990). For instance, Chance reports that, "Drawing on such compilations, poets like Guillaume de Machaut had paved the way for courtly applications of classical myth. The long interpretive history that lay behind the medieval understanding of classical myths made them valuable repositories of meaning for use in the allegorical tradition stemming from the Roman de la Rose, a tradition that Machaut applied to his role as court poet" (1990, 125).

In many ways, Machaut appears to have been the right man in the right place at the right time, both in terms of enjoying a rich tradition upon which to draw for his own works as well as being a period in which he represents one of the sole composers about which much is known today. For instance, according to Hughes and Abraham, "The centre of music had shifted northwards from Paris, with the music of Fauvel to Picardy, with Philippe de Vitry and Guillaume de Machaut to Champagne. We have little information about the musicians of this period, with the exception of Vitry and Machaut" (Hughes & Abraham 1960, 2). This point is also made by Grout and Palisca (2001), who report that during this period in history, "Musicians consciously struck out in a new direction. The French composer, poet, and bishop of Meaux, Philippe de Vitry (1291-1361), is named by one author as the 'inventor of a new art' -- an ars nova. Several manuscripts of a treatise from about 1322-23 end with the words 'this completes the Ars nova of Magister Philippe de Vitry.' The term ars nova fit so well that it came to denote the French musical style during the first half of the fourteenth century" (98).

In their compilation of Machaut's works, Roberge and McComb report that, "A series of carefully prepared illuminated manuscripts, undertaken for members of the French royalty, preserve his complete artistic output. Along with these major sources, various pieces are duplicated in scattered sources throughout Europe. His life and work are thus extremely well-preserved for the period, and his position as the most distinguished composer of the century has never wavered" (2007, 2). Born around 1300 and dying around 1377 (Grout & Palisca 2001, 101), the encyclopedic entry for Guillaume de Machaut shows that he was a French poet and composer who studied theology and took holy orders. During his tenure in the service of King John of Bohemia, de Machaut journeyed throughout Europe on various chivalric adventures and during his period of service to King Charles of Navarre, he penned the lengthy narrative poems, Confort d'ami and Le Jugement du roi de Navarre (Guillaume de Machaut 2004). According to Grout and Palisca, "After King John died in the battle of Crecy in 1346, Machaut entered the service of the French court and eventually ended his days as a canon at Rheims. Machaut was famous not only as a musician but also as a poet. His musical works, written in most of the genres then current, reveal a composer of mingled conservative and progressive tendencies" (2001, 101).

The poet/composer was recognized and lauded for his abilities during his lifetime and received a number of papal benefices; in addition, Machaut was canon at Reims from 1340 until his death (Guillaume de Machaut 2004). According to this biographer, "In Le Livre du voir dit (1361-65) he wrote a long poem of courtly love with musical interpolations. Considered the greatest French musician of the 14th century and the exponent of ars nova in France, he wrote lais, motets, ballads, rondeaux, virelais, and one mass. He contributed to the secularization of the motet by using French texts of courtly love instead of Latin liturgy" (Guillaume de Machaut 2004). Likewise, Grout and Palisca note that, "The leading composer of the ars nova in France was Guillaume de Machaut" (2001, 101).

His most significant contribution was the expert use of rhythm with counterpoint, a feature that made his music highly popular during his day; in fact, his mass, the first complete polyphonic version, remained in use in the 16th century and resulted in the great masses of Josquin Desprez and Palestrina (Guillaume de Machaut 2004, 29378). According to Grout and Palisca, "Most of Machaut's twenty-three motets followed the traditional texture in which an instrumental liturgical tenor supports two upper voices with different texts. Like other motets of the time, Machaut's were longer, more secular, and more rhythmically complex than earlier examples. Some are panisorhythmic -- that is, the isorhythmic structure involves all three voices" (2001, 101).

As noted above, Machaut is one of the few composers from this period in history that left behind a significant amount of information concerning his work. In this regard, De Looze (1997) reports that Machaut left behind a large body of works that have provided historians and scholars with some insights into the composer's frame of mind and thought processes at the time. For instance, De Looze reports that, "The great complete works codex of Guillaume de Machaut's writings, B.N. f.fr. 1584, almost certainly copied under Machaut's direction late in his life, is a justly celebrated manuscript. Its first words -- the rubricating that precedes the table of contents -- are famous for the way in which they speak of an authorial ordering within the manuscript" (1997, 66).

The commentary provided by Machaut reads as follows: "Vesci l'ordonnance que G. de Machaut wet qu'il ait en son livre.' This can be translated either as 'Here is the ordering G[uillaume] de Machaut wishes that there be in his book' or as 'Here is the ordering G[uillaume] de Machaut wishes that he have in his book'" (De Looze 1997, at 66). This author-control over the presentation of his works carried with it some benefits for Machaut as well. According to Leach, "One effect of Machaut's control over his works is the use of ordering to promote relationships between adjacent lyrics. In his collected lyrics without music, the Loange des dames, poems linked by a combination of adjacency and shared lexis, rhymes, and/or versification create the illusion of a background narrative supporting the lyric moments" (2).

When asked, Winston Churchill stated that history would be kind to him because "he intended to write it himself" (which he went on to do in several volumes). Likewise, it appears to have been Machaut's intention to have history view him in a comparably favorable light: "Guillaume de Machaut portrays himself as occupying the center spot with his noble patron -- supposedly the better to serve his lord -- in a substantial series of narratives. In the end, he does away with this subservient position and concentrates his last and greatest courtly narrative, the Voir-Dit, on his own supposed love affair" (De Looze 1997, 9).

In reality, Machaut appears to have possessed some truly expert and sublime qualities as a poet and composer and his celebrity was not without some justification. For example, in her essay, "Patience in Adversity: The Courtly Lover and Job in Machaut's Motets 2 and 3," Huot (1994) reports that, "Guillaume de Machaut has long been recognized for his intellectualization of love poetry. In his oeuvre, love is a rarefied and sublimated meditation, in which sexual consummation plays but a minor role. Machaut's narrative poetry in particular has been studied for its treatment of love as the paradigmatic human experience, a vehicle for moral teachings of larger implications" (222).

This biographer's review of Machaut's work shows that despite the recent resurgence of interest in his works, there remains a paucity of analytical investigations concerning his lyric poetry. For instance, she reports that, the Remede de Fortune.".. has been analysed as a recasting of Boethian philosophy in the guise of the Roman de la Rose; the Fonteinne amoureuse and Jugement dou roy de Navarre have been linked to the tradition of the speculum principum. Less attention, however, has been paid to the literary analysis of Machaut's lyric poetry" (Huot 1994, 222). What has been determined to date is Machaut's masterful use of language and syntax to help amuse and entertain his intended audiences, and in an era absent the Internet, cable television and the popular press, it is not surprising that his works were well received. For instance, as De Looze points out, "Guillaume de Machaut gravitates toward equivocal signs: insomnia, colors that can have diametrically opposed meanings, plays on words, and so on" (1997, 13). This point is also made by Leach, who reports that Machaut was titillating without being vulgar about it: "In middle French courtly lyric the word merci signifies a broad range of favors that the lady may grant her lover; its meaning overlaps with 'pity,' but it also carries the sense of remuneration, reward or even salary -- the pay-off in the economy of noble love. Within Machaut's usage it has a specific resonance and range of meanings. In his last major long poem, the Voir Dit, Machaut defines merci twice: once for Toute Belle in a letter; later for the reader in the narrative just before the erotic climax of the dit" (2003, 2)