CHAPTER 9

Machaut and His Progeny

MACHAUT’S SONGS AND MASS; MUSIC AT THE PAPAL COURT OF AVIGNON; ARS SUBTILIOR

MAINTAINING THE ART OF COURTLY SONG

Guillaume de Machaut may not have been the most prestigious French poet and musician of his time. In

terms of contemporary renown, he may have been outshone by Philippe de Vitry. He is certainly the most
important to us, however, and the most representative, owing to the extraordinary fullness of his legacy, a
fullness that stands in stark contrast to the meagerness of Vitry’s. Certain aspects of Machaut’s legacy,
moreover, lived on for a century and more in the work of later poets and musicians who definitely saw
themselves as his creative heirs.

The first half of Machaut’s long life was spent in service, chiefly as secretary to John of Luxembourg
(1296–1346), a son of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII, who succeeded his father-in-law Wenceslaus
as king of Bohemia in 1310. Machaut, who like his patron was born around the turn of the century, came
from the environs of the ancient cathedral town of Reims in the north of France, not far from Luxembourg.
There is actually a town called Machault about twenty-five miles from Reims, but there is no evidence to
support the tempting assumption that it was the poet’s birthplace.

FIG. 9-1 Illumination from the largest of the “Machaut manuscripts” showing the poet composing Les nouveaus dis amoureus
(“New Poems in Honor of Love”).
He was in the peripatetic John’s service by 1323 and traveled widely with him on campaigns across
northern and eastern Europe, including Silesia, Poland, Prussia, and Lithuania, as well as the Alpine
areas of Lombardy and Tyrol, which John briefly ruled. After his patron’s spectacularly violent death,
tied blind to his horse on the battlefield of Crécy, Machaut returned to Reims and lived out his last three
decades as a tonsured cathedral canon, with few official duties beyond singing some minimum number of
Masses and Offices each year. He was in effect a wealthy man of leisure, free to pursue his artistic
callings. He died in 1377, remarkably aged for a man who lived during the century of the great plagues.

As his reputation as a poet grew, Machaut was commissioned by several kings and dukes to write
dits, lengthy allegorical poems, in their honor. For these patrons and others, Machaut also supervised the
copying of his complete poetical and musical works into rich manuscripts, several of which survive,