Guillaume Dufay

Guillaume Du Fay (or Dufay) was born around 1397, probably at Beersel near Brussels, the illegitimate son of a priest and a certain Marie Du Fayt, who later moved to Cambrai. It was in that city, then one of the great musical centres of Europe, that he grew up. In 1409 he was admitted as a choirboy at the cathedral, where he learned singing, composition and Latin from renowned masters. Cambrai remained his anchor throughout his life.

As a young man Du Fay left for Italy, like many northern musicians. Around 1420 he served the Malatesta family at Rimini and Pesaro, writing occasional works for them, such as the song Resvellies vous et faites chiere lie, composed in 1423 for a princely wedding. After a stay in Bologna, where he was ordained priest, he joined the papal chapel in Rome in 1428. There he mixed with the best singers of the day and composed motets for great papal occasions.

In 1433 he became choirmaster at the court of Savoy, under Duke Amadeus VIII, one of the most brilliant courts in Europe. He then returned to Pope Eugene IV, then residing in Florence. There in 1436 he composed his most famous work, the motet Nuper rosarum flores, for the consecration of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and its dome designed by Brunelleschi. Musicologists long believed that the proportions of the music reproduced those of the building; today it is seen rather as a reference to the Temple of Solomon described in the Bible, but the work remains a symbol of the union of music and architecture.

From 1439 Du Fay settled again in Cambrai as a canon of the cathedral. He spent most of his last decades there, with a long stay in Savoy in the 1450s. Admired throughout Europe, he received distinguished visitors and kept up links with the Medici in Florence and the court of Burgundy. His house in the heart of the city held a rich library. He also supervised the copying of the cathedral’s choirbooks, in which his music was regularly sung.

Du Fay practised every genre of his time. His eighty or so French songs, often rondeaux, are among the most refined of the century. His motets range from the learned isorhythm inherited from Vitry to a freer, more lyrical style. But it was in the mass that he made history: he made the cyclic mass, unified by a single underlying melody, the great genre of the Renaissance. The Missa Se la face ay pale is built on his own song; the Missa L’homme armé uses a famous martial popular song that dozens of composers would take up after him.

His music also responded to great events. After the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 he composed a Lament for the Holy Church of Constantinople, perhaps sung at the Feast of the Pheasant held by the Duke of Burgundy to call for a crusade. His last years were devoted to large-scale works such as the Missa Ave regina caelorum, in which he reached a new richness of sound in four voices.

Du Fay died in Cambrai on 27 November 1474. In his will he asked that his motet Ave regina caelorum, into which he had slipped a personal prayer — “Miserere tui labentis Dufay”, “have mercy on your dying Du Fay” — be sung at his bedside. There was no time, so it was sung at his funeral instead. Called by his contemporaries “the moon of all music”, he links the waning Middle Ages to the golden age of Franco-Flemish polyphony.