DUFAY, GUILLAUME
(Du Fay, Du Fayt; 1397–1474). Composer, musician, and cleric. During a career that
spanned over fifty years, Dufay produced some of the finest music of the late Middle
Ages. Contemporary esteem for Dufay and his music was matched only by the reputation
of his contemporary Gilles Binchois.
Dufay’s life and peripatetic musical career have been outlined to an extent matched by
no other 15th-century composer. There are hundreds of surviving documents relating to
his career, and gaps in the documentary record are often filled by evidence from the
occasional works he composed. According to recent discoveries by Planchart, Dufay was
born near Brussels, the illegitimate son of a priest, on August 5, 1397. The earliest
documents regarding his musical career date from 1409, when he is listed as a puer
altaris at Cambrai cathedral. By 1414, he had risen to the rank of clericus altaris and had
been granted a chaplaincy at Cambrai. His precise whereabouts are unknown over the
next few years, but it is likely that he was at the Council of Constance, possibly in the
entourage of Pierre d’Ailly, bishop of Cambrai.
During the early 1420s, Dufay was in northern Italy. Two of his earliest datable works
were written for the Malatesta family. He returned to France for a time, from 1423 or
1424 until 1426, probably with an eye toward securing prebends in the area of Laon. His
rondeau Adieu ces bons vins de Lannoys (1426) bade fond farewell to Laon, as he
returned once more to Italy. Dufay was in Bologna by early 1426, serving as secretary to
Cardinal Louis Aleman, under whom he was ordained in 1427 or 1428. From 1428 until
1433 or 1434, Dufay served popes Martin V (d.1431) and Eugenius IV in the papal
chapel, where he was associated with some of the best composers of the day, among them
Arnold de Lantins and Johannes Brassart. His output included occasional motets in
celebration of Eugenius IV.
Dufay traveled extensively over the next few years. During 1434–35, he was in the
employ of the court of Savoy and made at least one extended visit to Cambrai. At Savoy,
Dufay met Gilles Binchois for the first time; it was probably this meeting that is
documented in Martin Le Franc’s Champion des dames. He returned to Italy in 1435,
rejoining the entourage of Eugenius IV in Florence. Dufay composed the motet Nuper
rosarum flores in 1436 for the consecration of Florence cathedral by Eugenius. By 1437,
he had returned once again to the court of Savoy, composing one of his last isorhythmic
motets, Magnanimae gentis (1438), in celebration of a peace treaty between Louis, duke
of Savoy, and Louis’s brother, Philippe, count of Geneva.
By 1439, Dufay had settled once more in Cambrai, although he was frequently absent
throughout the rest of his life, both on cathedral business and on a few freelance
excursions. Dufay’s activities at Cambrai included a wide variety of musical and clerical
duties: supervising choir-boys and petits vicaires and overseeing the revision and editing
of the cathedral’s choirbooks. Throughout the 1440s, Dufay maintained an unofficial
though familiar relationship with Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, and some of
Dufay’s liturgical music of this period, including a sizable number of Mass Proper
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