Guillaume de Machaut
Machaut (at right) receiving
Nature and three of her children,
from an illuminated Parisian manuscript
of the 1350s
born c. 1300, Machault, Fr.
died 1377, Reims
French poet and musician, greatly
admired by contemporaries as a master of
French versification and regarded as one
of the leading French composers of the
Ars Nova musical style of the 14th
century. It is on his shorter poems and
his musical compositions that his
reputation rests. He was the last great
poet in France to think of the lyric and
its musical setting as a single entity.
He took holy orders and in 1323
entered the service of John of
Luxembourg, king of Bohemia, whom he
accompanied on his wars as chaplain and
secretary. He was rewarded for this
service by his appointment in 1337 as
canon of Reims cathedral. After the
King’s death, he found another protector
in the King’s daughter, Bonne of
Luxembourg, wife of the future king John
II of France, and in 1349 in Charles II,
king of Navarre. Honours and patronage
continued to be lavished by kings and
princes on Machaut at Reims until his
death.
In his longer poems Machaut did not
go beyond the themes and genres already
widely employed in his time. Mostly
didactic and allegorical exercises in
the well-worked courtly love tradition,
they are of scant interest to the modern
reader. An exception among the longer
works is Voir-Dit, which relates how a
young girl of high rank falls in love
with the poet because of his fame and
creative accomplishments. The difference
in age is too great, however, and the
idyll ends in disappointment. Machaut’s
lyric poems also are based on the
courtly love theme but reworked into a
deft form with a verbal music that is
often perfectly achieved. His
influence—most significantly his
technical innovations—spread beyond the
borders of France. In England, Geoffrey
Chaucer drew heavily upon Machaut’s
poetry for elements of The Book of the
Duchesse.
All of Machaut’s music has been
preserved in 32 manuscripts,
representing a large part of the
surviving music from his period. He was
the first composer to write
single-handedly a polyphonic setting of
the mass ordinary, a work that has been
recorded in modern performance. In most
of this four-part setting he employs the
characteristic Ars Nova technique of
isorhythm (repeated overlapping of a
rhythmic pattern in varying melodic
forms).
Machaut’s secular compositions make
up the larger part of his music. His
three- and four-part motets (polyphonic
songs in which each voice has a
different text) number 23. Of these, 17
are in French, 2 are Latin mixed with
French, and 4, like the religious motets
of the early 13th century, are in Latin.
Love is often the subject of their
texts, and all but 3 employ isorhythm.
Machaut’s 19 lais (see lai) are usually
for unaccompanied voice, although two
are for three parts, and one is for two
parts. They employ a great variety of
musical material, frequently from the
popular song and dance. Of his 33
virelais (see virelai), 25 consist
solely of a melody, and they, along with
the bulk of his lais, represent the last
of such unaccompanied songs composed in
the tradition of the trouvères. The rest
of his virelais have one or two
additional parts for instrumental
accompaniment, and these are typical of
the accompanied solo song that became
popular in the 14th century. The
polyphonic songs he wrote, in addition
to his motets, consist of 21 rondeaux
and 41 of his 42 ballades. The wide
distribution of his music in
contemporary manuscripts reveals that he
was esteemed not only in France but also
in Italy, Spain, and much of the rest of
Europe.
