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Le Voir Dit and La Messe de Nostre Dame: aspects of genre and style in late works of MacHaut

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2008

Daniel Leech-Wilkinson
Daniel Leech-Wilkinson
Affiliation:
University of Southampton
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Extract

Le Voir Dit is one of the most fascinating of the works left by the celebrated poet-composer Guillaume de Machaut (d. 1377), and at the same time, as John Stevens has said, ‘one of the most curious documents of the [fourteenth] century’. Through 9000 lines of narrative, sixty-two lyrics in all the main forms (nine of them set to music), and forty-six letters which include comments on the character of the songs and on the business of producing poetry, music and manuscripts, we seem to take a guided tour of Machaut's emotional and professional life over three years of his old age. For more than a century it has proved a rich source of revealing quotations, sustaining many varied arguments. The story it tells of Machaut's literary and emotional affair with a young girl, Peronne, has been read at times as autobiography, at times as fiction; and the incidental comments on composition, performance and copying have been interpreted in studies ranging far beyond Le Voir Dit as evidence of fourteenth-century professional practice. None the less, the constituent parts of the text as they survive in manuscripts from Machaut's circle are disordered, the poem lacks an adequate published edition, and even its music – in size, at least, the most manageable of its components – has yet to be considered as a whole.

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Articles
Information
Plainsong & Medieval Music , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , April 1993 , pp. 43 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

1 Scheduled to appear in the next issue of Plainsong and Medieval Music.

2 For further discussion see Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel, Machaut's Mass: An Introduction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)Google Scholar, Section 2.3.3.

3 Bar references are to Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel, ed., Guillaume de Machaut: La Messe de Nostre Dame (Oxford, 1990Google Scholar), also published in Leech-Wilkinson, Machaut's Mass.

4 Bar references for the motets are to Schrade, Leo, ed., The Works of Guillaume de Machaut, Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century III (Monaco, 1956)Google Scholar. Christopher Page has kindly drawn my attention to the similarity of these examples to lower-voice progressions in Machaut's Ballade 26, Donnez, signeurs (presumably written during the fifties or early sixties), whose cantus style also approaches that of the Voir Dit ballades. It may be that a grouping of those songs not in MS C (and thus presumably after c. 1350) but stylistically ‘between’ the latest C pieces and the Voir Dit songs is within reach.

5 Markstrom, Kurt, ‘Machaut and the Wild Beast’, Acta Musicologica, 61 (1989), 12–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Leech-Wilkinson, , Machaut's Mass, p. 94.Google Scholar

7 It is obviously important for this study that the datings offered by Le Voir Dit for its compositions should be approximately accurate. This is not to say that the story surrounding them need necessarily be true. The larger question of the veracity of the poem is addressed at the end of the article and in the introduction to its second part, ‘Le Voir Dit: a Reconstruction and Guide’ (hereafter ‘Reconstruction’).

8 Paris, Paulin ed., Guillaume de Machaut: Le Lime du Voir-Dit (Paris, 1875; Geneva, 1969), p. 42Google Scholar. The date is provided by her response, letter V (ibid., p. 47; here from MS A, f. 227r): ‘J'ay receu vos lettres des le iuedi devant noel’ which in 1362 fell on 22 December. The year was convincingly established by Armand Machabey, Guillaume de Machault, 1307–1377: La Vie et L'Œuvre Musical (Paris, 1955), vol. I, pp. 57f.

9 See ‘Reconstruction’, notes to ‘[July 1362]’, for this date.

10 Paris, Le Livre, 1. 114. All references and dates in Le Voir Dit may be traced and contextualized via the outline presented in ‘Reconstruction‘.

11 [TEXT n] references are to the extracts from Le Voir Dit dealing with compositions which are collected at the end of ‘Reconstruction‘.

12 The English translation comes from Little, Patrick, ‘Three Ballades in Machaut's Livre du Voir-Dit’, Studies in Music (University of Western Australia), 14 (1980), p. 55Google Scholar.

13 Although Machaut is always anxious that Peronne should get to know the music he sends, this is the only occasion on which he asks her to ‘aprendre’ – to learn it. For Ballade 33 he asks only that she ‘daigniez oir et savoir la chose’, for Rondeau 17 'sachiez vostre rondel sil vous plais’ and for? Rondeau 18 ‘si le weilliez savoir’. It would be interesting to know whether the different words expected different achievements, ‘aprendre’ to be able to perform, ‘savoir’ simply to be familiar with the sound of.

14 Robertson, Anne Walters, ‘The Mass of Guillaume de Machaut in the Cathedral of Reims’, in Plainsong in the Age of Polyphony, ed. Thomas Forest Kelly (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 100–39.Google Scholar

15 Machabey, , Guillaume de Machault, vol. II, p. 164.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., vol. I, p. 57.

17 Paris, Le Livre, letter XXXII. There are problems with the dates of this and the following letter (see the notes to them in ‘Reconstruction’); but for the present argument it is sufficient that letter XXXII answers letter XXXI.

18 Reaney, Gilbert, ‘Towards a Chronology of Machaut's Musical Works’, Musica Disciplina, 21 (1967), p. 89Google Scholar. In mitigation it should be said that Paris's text adopts a crucially misleading variant from MS E, ‘mais je lavoie autrefois eu’ (‘but I have already had it’ – my italics).

19 See below, and in ‘Reconstruction’ the summary of letter XLIII and TEXT 33.

20 Cf. bar 1 in each piece.

21 Cf. Ballade 32 bar 4 and Ballade 33 bar 14, Ballade 32 bar 5 and Ballade 33 bars 2–3 (with their many repetitions in each piece), Ballade 32 bars 13–14 and Ballade 33 bar 24, and Ballade 32, bars 39–41 and Ballade 33 bars 33–5.

22 Cf. Ballade 32 contratenor bar 10 and Ballade 33 tenor bar 2 (and many similar instances in each piece), Ballade 32 bars 11–12 and Ballade 33 bars 28–9, Ballade 32 contratenor bar 27 and Ballade 33 bars 34–5, and Ballade 32 tenor bars 35–6 and Ballade 33 contratenor bars 15–16.

23 Cf. Ballade 32 bars 40–46 and Ballade 33 bars 33–43, noting how Ballade 32 bar 42v (i.e. bar 42, fifth pitch) to 43ii reappears as Ballade 33 bars 40ii–41i, Ballade 32 bars 43iii–44i relates to Ballade 33 bars 41ii–2, and Ballade 32 bars 44ii–6 relates to Ballade 33 bars 39–40i

24 That ‘nouviaus’ has (positive) connotations of originality is clear throughout Machauf s work. Cerquiglini draws attention to a particularly interesting use of the word in the ‘king who never lies’ episode, where Jubal, in inventing the art of music, ‘Fist tons. et sons. et chans nouviaus / Et notes. et les ordenances / De musique. et les concordances’ (Jacqueline Cerquiglini, ‘Un Engin si south’: Guillaume de Machaut et Vicriture au XIVe siècle (Paris, 1985) p. 213; quoted here from MS A, f. 271r). See also Pichoche, Jacqueline, Le Vocabulaire psychologique dans les Chroniques de Froissart, vol. I (Paris, 1976), pp. 155–6.Google Scholar

25 Machaut uses it again to describe Rondeau 17 as ‘douce a oir’ (sweet to hear) – see letter XXXV below.

26 Little, ‘Three Ballades’, p. 50.

27 Diller, George T., ed., Froissart: Chroniques (Geneva, 1972), p. 883.Google Scholar

28 Facsimiles in MGG 6, cols. 225–6 and 9 Tafel 28.

29 Page, Christopher, ‘German Musicians and their Instruments: A 14th-Century Account by Konrad of Megenberg’, Early Music, 10 (1982), p. 198.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 Another passage in Le Voir Dit may be relevant to the Res d'Alemaigne. Towards the end of Machauf s first visit to Peronne, probably during the second week in May 1363, he remarks ‘Et cest la guise dalemaingne / Quon garist la gent par paroles / On laprent par tout aus escoles’ (Paris, Le Livre, 11. 2490–92, MS A f. 244r, MS £ f. 181 v, MS F f. 154v). (‘And it is the guise d'Alemaigne that one heals people by words. One learns it everywhere at the schools.’) Machauf s choice of words in letter X, ‘et a la guise dun res dalemangne’, seems likely to refer to this apparently common saying; but whether there is any connection at the level of meaning is far harder to decide.

31 On the common phrase ‘oster ne mettre’ and its associations of ‘authenticity’ see Cerquiglini, , Un Engin, p. 48.Google Scholar

32 Chapter 3.

33 Bars 21, 35, 36, 55 in Leo Schrade's edition (see note 3), pp. 124–7; reprinted as Guillaume de Machaut: Œuvres complètes (Monaco, 1977), pp. 57–60.Google Scholar

34 Ibid., bars 47, 34, 63.

35 Ibid., bars 18–19 and 42–4 respectively.

36 In the mid-cadences, for example, Machaut's assigning of pitches to the tenor and contratenor must have begun from the conventional need to place the cadential descent f–g–e in the tenor (bars 28–9). Therefore the preceding a has also to be given to the tenor. The bottom d in bar 27, first beat, is only essential in the second-time ending, but Machaut adopts it the first time as well, and therefore has to reach the following a from that d which is therefore dotted. As a consequence of this arrangement in the first-time ending, in the second-time ending the tenor has to leap (bar 30) in order to take its conventional cadential role in bar 31. Although this seems a very straightforward example, it should be borne in mind that the lower-voice pair is not wholly self-explicable: the contratenor in bar 28, reached by a seventh leap, depends upon cantus II, while the tenor syncopation of bars 27–8 answers that in cantus II in bars 26–7. The juggling of harmony, rhythm and part-writing, which must have occupied Machaut throughout the detailed composition of the parts, is particularly clear here.

37 Cerquiglini, (Un Engin, pp. 35–9) shows that similar recurrences can be found in the text, again across passages in different forms (ballade and octosyllabic couplets).

38 The music of Ballade 32 was one and a half to two years old when Ballade 36 was written; but Machaut had already been working with one of its most prominent melodic figures (bar 5 etc.) in the (presumably) earlier Ballades 26, 27 and 28, albeit in very different contexts. If dates for these pieces were available they would provide a better measure for the rate at which Machauf s late style developed.

39 Paris, Le Livre, 11. 6866 ff.

40 This translation is partly indebted to that of Little, Three Ballades’, p. 57.

41 Ibid., pp. 58–9.

42 See Machaut's Mass, Example 22, as discussed above.

43 A fourth, the unnamed virelai received by Peronne from Machaut's secretary on 8 December 1362, cannot at present be identified. None of Machauf s virelais outside MS C (and thus plausibly from the latter part of his life) has a text entirely suitable to the circumstances; and there is none of the surrounding detail which normally accompanies a song written especially for Peronne. It seems likely, therefore, that this was one of Machaut's existing compositions.

44 See especially letters VII, XVII, XXVI, XXVIII and XXXII.

45 Rondeau 18 has been proposed, above, as the older cantus to which Machaut adds new lower voices and which Peronne proves to have known already [TEXTS 21 and 22]. Rondeau 13 and Lai 13 are discussed below.

46 Ballade 36 is an exception only because Machaut has broken off communication with Peronne at the time of its composition. The story of its composition, and Peronne's reaction, is no less plausible than those of the other apparently new works.

47 See especially Kelly, Douglas, Medieval Imagination: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Courtly Love (Madison, 1978).Google Scholar

48 Paris, Le Livre, p. 167.

49 For details of these dates see ‘Reconstruction’, from Narrative, 11. 3151 ff. to letter XXVIII.

50 The most recent such study is Cerquiglini, Un Engin. Most influential in establishing the current view of Le Voir Dit as fiction was Calin, William, in A Poet at the Fountain: Essays on the Narrative Verse of Guillaume de Machaut (Kentucky, 1974Google Scholar), Chapter 9, who in turn relied crucially upon Hanf, George, ‘Ueber Guillaume de Machauts Voir Dit’, Zeitschrift fur romanische Philologie, 20 (1898), 145–96Google Scholar. Many of Hartf's assumptions, particularly concerning the impossibility of producing a coherent order of events for the story, are questioned in ‘Reconstruction’. His demonstration of the identity of style between the letters of Peronne and Machaut was contradicted in Musso, Nöel, ‘Comparaison statistique des lettres de Guillaume de Machaut et de Peronne d'Armentière dans Le Voir Dit’, in Guillaume de Machaut: Poite et Compositeur, no ed., Actes et Colloques, 23 (Paris, 1982), pp. 175–93Google Scholar. For immediate, and differing reactions to Musso's paper by Calin and Paul Imbs, see ibid., pp. 215–20.

51 See especially Williams, Sarah Jane, ‘An Author's Role in Fourteenth-Century Book Production: Guillaume de Machauf s “Livre ou je met toutes mes choses”’, Romania, 90 (1969), 433–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.