making him, along with the much less prolific Adam de la Halle, one of the earliest musical literati
whose works come down to us in what amounts to an authorized collected edition.
Like the trouvères, his most kindred antecedents, Machaut belongs as much or more to literary as to
musical history. He is universally regarded by today’s literary historians as the greatest French poet of his
age; his poetry is studied alongside that of Chaucer (whom he knew and influenced) and Dante, even if,
unlike theirs, Machaut’s literary output no longer enjoys a wide general readership. He is best known to
today’s connoisseurs for his music, not his poetry; since the revival of performing interest in “early
music,” he has come to enjoy a place in the concert hall and in recordings somewhat comparable to
Chaucer’s on the bookshelf.
His longest and most impressive works are nevertheless works of verbal art: extended narrative
poems, much prized and cited in their day, in which the lyric compositions we now prize served as
occasional interpolations. The earliest of these grand narratives, Le Remède de Fortune (“Fortune’s
remedy”), composed around 1349, has been compared to an ars poetica, a didactic treatise or
compendium on lyric poetry, since it contains exemplary specimens of all the main genres, placed within
a story that defines their expressive content and social use.
The poem’s very plot is motivated by poetry. The poet anonymously composes a lai in honor of his
lady, who discovers it, bids him read it to her, and asks who wrote it. Embarrassed, he flees her presence
and addresses a complainte to Love and Fortune. Hope, fortune’s remedy, appears and comforts him with
two ballade-type songs in praise of love: a chanson royal and a baladelle (the latter a poem in what
much later was known as “binary form,” with a stanza in two repeated sections with complementary
rhyme schemes). The poet expresses his gratitude in a standard ballade. He seeks his lady out, finds her
dancing, and accompanies her movements with a virelai. He confesses authorship of the lay, she receives
him as her lover, and, after a day spent together at her chateau, they exchange rings and he expresses his
joy in a rondeau.
This narrative followed and amplified the typical blueprint of a troubadour (or trouvère)vida of old.
With it, Machaut deliberately gave the moribund art of the knightly poet-lover a new birth, distinguished
in part—specifically, in the baladelle, the ballade, and the rondeau—by the use of polyphonic music in
the latest style. The fact that these were the sections so favored points to an important difference between
Machaut’s courtly poetry and that of the trouvères. While operating on as lofty and aristocratic a plane as
the knightliest trouvères, as a composer he preferred the “fixed forms”—that is, the dance songs with
refrains. These, we may recall, had originally come into their own when the courtly art of the trouvères
had moved from castle to city and became the property of the guilds. Machaut reinvested the urbanized,
“popular” genres of fine amours with privileged (now we’d call it “chic”) refinement.
REDEFINING (AND RE-REFINING) A GENRE
That reinvestment was accomplished not by a stylistic revival but a thorough stylistic renovation.
Machaut was able to reelevate and recomplicate the style of courtly love poetry, even while retaining its
more popular forms, because he possessed a polyphonic craft that went far beyond the attainments of any
previous courtly or urban love-singer. Where Adam de la Halle’s polyphonic rondeaux were cast in as
simple and straightforward a polyphonic texture as could be—that of the syllabic versus or conductus
setting—Machaut’s were subtle, ornate, and full of a very recondite lyricism that made telling decorative
use, as we have seen, of musica ficta “causa pulchritudinis.”
We have already inspected one of Machaut’s motets (Felix virgo/Inviolata/AD TE SUSPIRAMUS, Ex. 8-
6 ) and seen how fully he had mastered the craftsmanly and constructive techniques of the Ars Nova. Ars