Guillaume de Machaut

Guillaume de Machaut (c.1300-1377), pre-eminent French composer of the late Medieval period of early music, and a leading poet. He was the chief exponent of the musical modernizing movement known as the Ars Nova. Born in Machaut in the Champagne district, he was clerk of the diocese of Reims and served as secretary to John of Bohemia, and then, after the latter’s death at Crécy in 1346, to different princes of France and of Navarre. He ended his days as a canon of Reims Cathedral.

Although Machaut wrote during the terrible events of the Hundred Years’ War, he would not have considered the war a proper subject for poetry. Instead, like his poet contemporaries, he wrote in the tradition of Le Roman de la Rose: allegories, moralizing dissertations, fabulous dreams, love ballads, and evocations of Venus, the goddess of Love. Unlike his contemporaries, he was capable of great originality, notably in his handling of metrical forms (see Versification). He established the musical and poetic rules for the lai, the virelai, the chant royal, the rondeau, and the ballade, all forms which survived robustly into the next century and beyond, finding their highest expression in the works of the 15th-century poet François Villon.

An interesting example of Machaut’s metrical innovation can be found in Le Remède de Fortune, a didactic poem of over 4,000 lines, into which are inserted lyrical interludes, set to music by the poet. One such insertion, a ballade sung by Hope, to comfort the poet, is in 12-lined verses (itself an innovation, much copied by later poets) with a mixture of lines of 3 and 7 syllables. Centuries later, the poet Paul Verlaine made this uneven-syllabled line a striking feature of his poetic manifesto. Marchaut’s ballade, with its simple but ingenious use of only two rhymes and its gentle refrain “un coeur d’ami, un coeur d’amie” (“the heart of a lover, the heart of his love”), reveals the poet at his most charmingly musical. Indeed, although his contemporaries acknowledged his supremacy as a poet, it is as a musician that he is now largely honoured.

The most conservative form in which Machaut wrote was the lai, which had been cultivated by the troubadours and trouvères since about 1200. Although 4 of Machaut’s 19 lais are polyphonic, with two or three voices singing independent parts, the remainder are monophonic, with a single, perhaps unaccompanied, vocal line. There is no fixed poetic form, and this freedom is mirrored in the music, with successive sections using different metres and melodic material, giving the impression of a large through-composed structure rather than a strophic one. Of the 33 virelais Machaut set to music, 25 are monophonic. The strong rhythm, open melody, and short, clearly defined verses of a virelai such as Douce Dame Jolie suggest the origins of the form in dance. The later 2-part virelais (and one, Tres Bonne et Belle, in 3 parts) are more complex rhythmically as well as harmonically, but they are still characticerized by their melodic strength and regular phrase-lengths.

The graceful polyphonic ballades and rondeaux were also influential in setting European secular song style for the next century: a high, sung melody accompanied by two or three lower parts, which may have been instrumental or vocal. Some ballades are clearly intended for all-vocal performance, since each line is set to a separate text, a feature that reached fruition in the motets. The ballades often feature elaborate syncopation, and the word-setting is more melismatic than in the virelais. The rondeaux are conservative in poetic form, but the rhythmic grace, melodic freshness, and harmonic sophistication of a rondeau such as Rose, Liz, Printemps, Verdure make them among Machaut’s most delightful works.

All of his 23 motets, for 3 or 4 voices, are sung to 2 or 3 different texts simultaneously: 6 have all-Latin texts, often of liturgical origin, while 3 are to entirely French texts, generally Machaut’s own, and 14 are bilingual (all but one having two French and one Latin text). The subjects of the texts are often subtly related, with, for instance, the French verse addressing a beloved lady while the Latin text speaks of devotion to the Virgin Mary. The Latin tenor parts, and often the other parts, are isorhythmic in structure—that is, they are based on independent and overlapping melodic and rhythmic cycles, creating a complex texture of interlocking parts. Machaut’s four-part Messe de Notre Dame (he was the first composer to write for a four-voice texture) is the earliest known complete polyphonic setting of the mass by a single composer (earlier mass cycles still surviving in manuscript are each by groups of composers whose individual movements were assembled by the scribes copying the manuscript). Also isorhythmic, it is monumental and austere, with driving rhythms and clashing dissonances, held together by the consistent use of plainsong melodies in the tenor parts, and a recurring melodic motif used as a bridge between sections.