Guillaume de Machaut

French poet, musician, and composer

• Born: c. 1300
• Birthplace: Machault, near Reims, France
• Died: Possibly April, 1377
• Place of death: Reims, France

Generally acclaimed as the most important figure of the French ars nova, Machaut was among the first to compose polyphonic settings of the fixed forms of medieval poetry (ballade, rondeau, virelay), to write songs for four voices, and to compose an integrated setting of the entire Ordinary of the Mass.

Early Life

Guillaume de Machaut (gee-yohm deh mah-shoh) was born most likely in the village of Machault in the Champagne region of France, not far from the cathedral city of Reims. Some music historians surmise that he may have been born in Reims itself, but as practically nothing is known of his early life, such speculations remain mere guesses; one scholar, however, has traced the existence of a Wuillaume Machaux who may have been the poet’s father at Reims around 1310. The little information available indicates that Machaut was educated by clerics in an ecclesiastical venue, probably in Paris and Reims, and that he eventually earned a master of arts degree, although he never took holy orders.

Sometime around 1323, Machaut joined the entourage of John of Luxembourg , the blind king of Bohemia, a well-admired ruler and exemplar of chivalry and courtesy and a lover of war and the battlefield. For the next several years, Machaut’s life involved constant travel primarily because John involved himself in various military campaigns, although much of the travel was simply for entertainment to places such as France, Lithuania, Poland, Prussia, and Silesia. One of Machaut’s earliest known works, Bone pastor Guillerme (1324; good shepherd William), a Latin motet celebrating the installation of Guillaume de Trie as the new archbishop of Reims, was written during his early years in King John’s service. Another work, Le Jugement dou Roy de Behaingne (The Judgment of the King of Bohemia, 1984), although undated, was almost certainly written during the years Machaut spent with John. As clerk, personal secretary, and general assistant to King John, Machaut frequently benefited from the king’s influence on Popes John XXII and Benedict XII: In 1330, he was named canon at Verdun; in 1332, he became canon at Arras; and in 1337, he was awarded a more desirable canonicate in Reims. Machaut appears to have settled in Reims in the late 1330’, leaving that city only to accompany King John on occasional journeys. After the king’s heroic suicide in the Battle of Crécy in 1346, Machaut continued his association with the royal family through King John’s daughter, Bonne of Luxembourg, who later became the wife of John II of France. He also maintained close ties with other nobles, among them Charles of Navarre, Jean de France, the future Charles V of France, and Amadeus VI of Savoy.

Life’s Work

Although Machaut remained linked with the royal courts of Europe, he spent the rest of his life as a canon at Reims Cathedral, having relinquished his other canonicates. Evidence points to the probability that the Reims canons who were either tonsured clerics, as Machaut probably was, or priests who had taken holy orders functioned as choristers for cathedral services. As churchmen, they were bound by innumerable rules of behavior and dress: They were required to dine together at the refectory on certain days of the week as well as certain holy days, they had to reside within the city walls of Reims, and they had to sing a minimum of thirty-two masses during the year. Although this restrictive and semicloistered life in a cathedral city was markedly different from the exciting years of foreign travel with King John, it provided Machaut with both the time and the artistic environment in which to write poetry and compose music.

Machaut’s Remède de Fortune (the remedy of fortune; English translation, 1988) a long poem generally considered an early work, although it is difficult to assign specific dates to much of Machaut’s output is a didactic narrative in which a lover passionately delineates the physical and moral beauty of the lady he adores and asserts that his love for her has instilled in him all the virtues. A collection of examples of both the lyric forms he favored (ballade, lay, rondeau, and virelay) and older forms (complainte and chanson royale) which he used only in this work, the Remède de Fortune is something of an anthology of fourteenth century lyric forms. Many of the individual forms look back to trouvère (court poet) compositions of the thirteenth century with their occasional reliance on the old rhythmic modes and stanzaic forms and in their three-voice structure, which suggests French polyphony of the age preceding that of Machaut; the ballades, however, have four voices a decided innovation although the fourth voice may have been intended as an alternate to one of the other three.

La Fonteinne amoureuse (written between 1360 and 1362; The Fountain of Love, 1993) has attracted critical attention for its treatment of the story of Paris of Troy and his judgment of the three goddesses. In this poem, the narrator overhears a young nobleman lamenting his unrequited love. The two men discuss at length the fountain of love from which the nobleman has drunk, and then they fall asleep. They both dream that Venus appears and recounts Paris’s story and then produces the lady whom the nobleman loves. The lovers exchange rings, the dream fades, and the two men awaken. On the nobleman’s finger is the lady’s ring, and he vows to spend his life serving Venus and building a temple in her honor. Although this poem has traditionally been seen as a flattering portrait of Jean de France on the eve of his marriage, recent scholarship refutes that theory by indicating that the poem is, in reality, a critical look at the results of a nobleman’s devoting himself to love instead of to the responsibilities of his position as a member of the nobility.

Around 1364, Machaut completed his La Messe de Nostre Dame (Machaut’s Mass, 1990), a complex work and the first complete surviving polyphonic setting of the Ordinary of the Mass. In the following century, such settings would become common, but in Machaut’s day, his achievement was monumental. The mass is in four voices and without instrumentation, although in its performance an organ may have doubled the tenor part in some sections. Machaut broke from the custom of his predecessors in using more ornamentation and contrary motion between voices, ensuring that the text was emphasized and therefore heard. Pope John XXII, who had been responsible for Machaut’s comfortable position at Reims, had in his bull of 1324-1325 required that the text of the Mass be clearly heard and not submerged in the music.

Machaut’s most interesting and most famous work is probably Le Livre dou Voir-Dit (1365; The Book of the True Poem, 1998), a nine-thousand-line romance that features different meters, forty-six letters in prose, and several lyric poems, some of them set to music. The work is particularly interesting to medieval scholars because it supplies much biographical information about Machaut, not only concrete facts but also commentary on his psychological state during specific incidents. In the piece, Machaut, then in his sixties, describes in some detail his love affair with a seventeen-year-old noble lady whose identity has long occupied scholarly interest. Initially thought to be Agnes d’Evreux, sister of Charles the Bad of Navarre, Toute-belle (Machaut’s name for his lover) is now generally held to be Peronne d’Unchair, dame of Armentieres, a wealthy heiress from Machaut’s home province of Champagne. The Book of the True Poem contains one of the famous correspondences of literary history in its series of letters between the narrator and the young lady, who insists that he publicize their affair in songs and poems, some of them supposedly of her own composing. It is clear from the letters that the lady enjoys the notoriety of her affair with a celebrated poet, as she alternately teases her elderly lover and chides him for being afraid to visit her. Machaut’s narrator is a decided departure from the typical courtly lover in that he describes himself as aged, gouty, blind in one eye, and undignified. Such a lover would become common in later narrative poetry, much of it influenced by Machaut’s works.

As a composer, Machaut produced a body of work that is larger than that of any other fourteenth century musician and noteworthy for its range of form and style. Early in his career he had concentrated on traditional forms such as the motet, but he became more and more interested in secular song and polyphony, combining the two traditions in his ballades and rondeaux, many of which were incorporated into his long narrative poems, such as Remède de Fortune and The Book of the True Poem.

In his later years, Machaut seems to have devoted his time to supervising the production of his works in elaborately illuminated and very expensive manuscripts for some of his royal patrons, among them Amadeus of Savoy and Jean de France. Machaut died sometime in 1377 in Reims, where he had produced so much of his best work.

Significance

As master of Reims, Machaut enjoyed fame and prestige during his lifetime and remained a major figure for some time after his death. His real contribution, however, lies in his influence on other, later poets, not only in France but also in England. Not a true innovator (the fixed forms he favored had evolved in the work of others), he took the literary heritage in which he had been educated and adapted and reworked it, thus creating a synthesis of past and present. In one way or another, Machaut was indirectly responsible for several of the major developments in the verse narrative of the Middle Ages; his corpus of work includes early examples of the judgment poem, the poem of complaint against Fortune, the consolation poem, the Marguerite poem, the poem containing classical exempla, and the poem with an elderly man as narrator. He helped to introduce into lyric verse some elements the woman’s point of view, the psychology of dreams, the combination of allegory and autobiography that would become commonplaces in the poetry of later eras. Yet many of his works represent nearly perfect manifestations of older genres that fell into disfavor soon after his death; among these are the lay, virelay, motet, and dit amoreus.

Le Dit dou Vergier (translated as part of the collection The Fountain of Love . . . and Two Other Love Vision Poems, 1993) is generally considered, on the basis of its style and allusions, to be Machaut’s first long narrative poem. In the Prologue, Machaut describes his theory of poetry: Because poetry is language ornamented with rhyme and meter, it is allied to both music and rhetoric; its function should be lyrical, allegorical, didactic, and personal. Machaut clearly believed that poetry and music belonged together. Eustache Deschamps, the self-proclaimed disciple of Machaut (probably his nephew), re-elaborated Machaut’s ideas in his L’Art de dictier (1392, art of the composer; English translation, 1994), in which he illustrated the interrelationship of music and poetry and the idea of poetry as song.

Praised by many medieval poets in various countries, Machaut was a major influence on Jean Froissart, Christine de Pizan, and certainly Geoffrey Chaucer, whose The Book of the Duchess (c. 1370) clearly derives in part from at least seven of Machaut’s narrative poems, as well as from a few motets and at least one lay.

Bibliography

Brownlee, Kevin. Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machaut. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984. An in-depth analysis of Machaut’s prologue and his seven long narrative love poems, with special attention to Machaut’s development of a distinct poetic identity. Includes informative notes to each chapter and a select bibliography.

Butterfield, Ardis. Poetry and Music in Medieval France: From Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Explores the world of poets, musicians, and composers in the time of Machaut, looking at song and the written record, song and performance, song and poetry, and sources of song. Includes an extensive bibliography and an index.

Caldwell, John. Medieval Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. A straightforward historical overview of Western music from about 950 to 1400. A chapter on fourteenth century French music provides a good introduction to Machaut’s musical milieu and devotes several pages to a detailed discussion of Machaut’s work, especially his handling of polyphony.

Calin, William. A Poet at the Fountain: Essays on the Narrative Verse of Guillaume de Machaut. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1974. A series of essays examining the narrative verse of Machaut.

Cosman, Madeleine Pellner, and Bruce Chandler. Machaut’s World: Science and Art in the Fourteenth Century. New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1978. A collection of essays covering such topics as scientific thought, paper manufacturing, and Gothic architecture, all in the context of the fourteenth century that Machaut knew. The most valuable group of essays specifically discusses Machaut as a poet in the modern sense of the word, rather than as simply a poet-composer.

Davis, Steven. “Guillaume de Machaut, Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, and the Chaucer Tradition.” Chaucer Review 36, no. 4 (2002). Discusses Machaut’s influence on Chaucer, especially in Chaucer’s writing of The Book of the Duchess.

De Looze, Laurence. Pseudo-autobiography in the Fourteenth Century: Juan Ruiz, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and Geoffrey Chaucer. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997. Looks at Machaut in the context of autobiographical writings by his contemporaries in the Middle Ages.

Ehrhart, Margaret J. The Judgment of the Trojan Prince Paris in Medieval Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987. A study of several medieval versions of the story of the Trojan prince Paris, his judgment of the rival goddesses, and the consequences of that judgment. Included in the study is a detailed analysis of Machaut’s La Fonteinne amoureuse.

Huot, Sylvia. “Guillaume de Machaut and the Consolation of Poetry.” Modern Philology 100, no. 2 (November, 2002): 169-196. A scholarly presentation of Machaut’s work that argues that his literary work is modeled on that of the poet Boethius, but Machaut’s writing uses a female allegory for Hope and consolation instead of Boethius’s philosophy as consolation.

Robertson, Anne Walters. Guillaume de Machaut and Reims: Context and Meaning in His Musical Works. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Historical look at the connections between Machaut’s work and the influences of Reims. Includes an extensive bibliography and an index.

Wilkins, Nigel. Introduction to La Louange des Dames, by Guillaume de Machaut. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1973. Precedes a collection of Machaut’s lyric poetry and musical settings. This introductory material, which is in English, contains valuable information on Machaut, including a good short biography, a bibliography of selected secondary sources, a chronology of Machaut’s works and manuscript sources, and brief essays on Machaut’s lyrics and his poetic form.