Ciconia’s patron, had shone. By 1420, when he was about 23, Du Fay was employed by the Pesaro branch
of the notorious Malatesta family, the despots of the Adriatic coastal cities of east-central Italy. He joined
the papal choir in 1428, and evidently formed a close relationship with Gabriele Cardinal Condulmer,
who in 1431 became Eugene IV, the second pope to reign over the reunited postschismatic church.
Du Fay wrote three grandiose motets in honor of Pope Eugene. The first, Ecclesie militantis Roma
sedes (“Rome, seat of the Church militant”), was composed shortly after the pope’s election, at a very
precarious moment for the papacy. That motet, expressive of the political conflicts that beset the new
pope, is a riot of discord, with a complement of five polyphonic parts (three of them texted), and a
sequence of no fewer than six mensuration changes. The second motet for Eugene, Supremum est
mortalibus bonum (“For mortals the greatest good”) is a celebration of a peace treaty between the pope
and Sigismund, the Holy Roman Emperor. It is an epitome of concord, employing only one text and using a
novel, sugar-sweet harmonic idiom of which (as we will see in chapter 11) Du Fay may have been the
inventor. Near the end the names of the protagonists of the peace are declaimed in long-sustained
consonant chords—concord concretized.
The third motet Du Fay composed for Eugene, Nuper rosarum flores (“Garlands of roses,” of which
the dazzling close is shown in Ex. 8-8), is the most famous one because of the way it manipulates
symbolic numbers. In 1434, the pope, exiled from Rome by a rebellion, had set up court in Florence. In
1436, the Florence cathedral, under construction since 1294, was finally ready for dedication. A
magnificent neoclassical edifice, crowned by a dome designed in 1420 by the great architect Filippo
Brunelleschi, it was dedicated, under the denomination Santa Maria del Fiore, to the Virgin Mary. Pope
Eugene IV, resident by force of circumstances in Florence, performed the dedication ceremony himself,
and commissioned a commemorative motet for the occasion from Du Fay. This was to be the musical
show of shows.
Nuper Rosarum Flores is cast in four large musical sections, plus an “Amen” in the form of a
melismatic cauda. The layout is remarkable for its symmetry. The first and longest section begins with an
introitus for the upper (texted) voices lasting twenty-eight tempora. The Gregorian cantus firmus, the
fourteen-note incipit of the introit antiphon for the dedication of a church (Terribilis est locus iste,
“Awesome is this place”), now enters, carried by a pair of tenors that present it in two seven-note groups,
answering each to each as in biblical antiphonal psalmody.
Each of the succeeding sections presents the same 7 + 7 disposition of the tenor, and the same
balanced alternation of duo and full complement (28 + 28 tempora, or 4 times 7 + 7). As in Ciconia’s
motet, the pair of tenors is written out only once, with directions to repeat. And again as in Ciconia’s
motet, each tenor statement is cast in a different mensuration: and (the part given in Ex. 8-8) . These
mensurations stand in a significant proportional relationship to one another. A breve or tempus of O
contains six minims; a breve of has four. The line through the signature halves the value of the tempus,
so that a breve under contains three minims as sung by the texted parts running above, and a breve under
contains two. Comparing these signatures in the order in which Du Fay presents them, they give the
durational proportions 6:4:2:3. As anyone trained in the quadrivium would instantly recognize, these are
Pythagorean proportions. In musical terms they can easily be translated from durations into pitch, for they
describe the harmonic ratios of the most consonant intervals. Given a fundamental pitch X, Du Fay’s
numbers represent the octave (2X), the compound fifth, or twelfth (3X), the double octave (4X) and the
twice-compound fifth (6X), as shown in Ex. 8-9.
EX. 8-8 Guillaume Du Fay, Nuper rosarum flores, mm. 141–70