Guillaume de Machaut

Guillaume de Machaut was born around 1300 in Champagne, probably in the village of Machault near Reims. From a modest background, he studied to the rank of master and around 1323 entered the service of John of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia, as secretary and almoner. This chivalrous, ever-restless prince took him across Europe: Machaut followed him to Bohemia, Silesia, Poland and as far as Lithuania on military campaigns.

Through his patron he obtained several church benefices and in 1337 became a canon of Reims Cathedral, where he settled for good. After John of Bohemia was killed at the Battle of Crécy in 1346, Machaut served other great lords: John’s daughter Bonne of Luxembourg, King Charles of Navarre, Duke John of Berry and then the future King Charles V. In Reims he lived through the great ordeals of the century: the Black Death of 1348–49 and the English siege of the city in 1359–60.

Machaut was as much a poet as a musician. He wrote long narrative poems, the “dits”, such as the Judgement of the King of Bohemia, the Remedy of Fortune and the Book of the True Story, which tells, late in his life, of a love correspondence with a young admirer, Péronne. These texts mix prose, poetry and musical pieces and made him the model for court poets from Christine de Pizan to Geoffrey Chaucer.

His musical output is the largest of his century: more than 140 pieces. He practised every genre of the Ars nova: isorhythmic motets, lais, virelais such as Douce dame jolie, and polyphonic ballades and rondeaux. The rondeau Ma fin est mon commencement is a musical riddle: one voice is sung backwards relative to another. Machaut fixed the “formes fixes” of French song that dominated secular music until the fifteenth century.

His sacred masterpiece is the Messe de Nostre Dame, composed around 1360–65 for Reims Cathedral. It is the oldest complete polyphonic mass written by a single known composer: the six parts of the Ordinary, from Kyrie to Ite missa est, form a unified whole in four voices. Machaut apparently wished it to be sung in memory of his brother Jean and of himself.

In his polyphonic songs Machaut invented a new manner: an upper voice, the cantus, carries the poem and the main melody, while the lower voices, tenor and contratenor, often played on instruments, form an accompaniment. This “accompanied song” became the model of European secular music for more than a century. His monophonic virelais, by contrast, stay close to dance and popular song, with refrains that are easy to remember. His ballades, such as De toutes flours or Dame, de qui toute ma joie vient, unfold long, ornate melodies over sometimes daring harmonies in which dissonances resolve with refinement. Machaut also reflected on his art in the Prologue to his works, where Nature and Love present their children to inspire him: a rare testimony of a medieval composer speaking about his own work.

Mindful of his legacy, Machaut personally supervised the copying of his complete works into magnificent illuminated manuscripts arranged by genre, which allowed his music to survive the centuries. He died in Reims in April 1377. The poet Eustache Deschamps and the composer François Andrieu paid tribute to him in a lament, a sign of the admiration he inspired.