belonged to Le Grand Condé, the great seventeenth-century general, is now kept at the Musée Condé in
Chantilly, to the north of Paris. Its southern origins are well attested by its contents: besides the pieces in
honor of Gaston Fébus, there are several dedicated to Jean, the Duke of Berry, whose court, located in the
city of Bourges, rivaled Gaston’s in magnificence. (Jean’s fantastically sumptuous breviary or prayer
book, known as the “Très riches heures” after the “hours” of the Office, is a well-known testimony to that
magnificence; see Fig. 9-6.)
The poet-composer most closely associated with Jean’s court, it appears, was a man named Solage,
whose dates and even whose first name are unknown, but all ten of whose surviving works are found in
the Chantilly codex. Seven of the ten are ballades (three of them making reference to the patron), but
Solage’s best known work is a bizarre rondeau called Fumeux fume (“Smoky smoke”; Ex. 9-23). It stands
out from the whole ars subtilior repertory for the way its composer makes a tour de force out of
chromatic harmony (or musica ficta causa pulchritudinis) with the same exploratory intensity that drove
his contemporaries to their recondite mensural caprices.
Such outlandish chromaticism (as observed in chapter 8) was another legacy of Machaut, whose style
Solage seems deliberately to have copied in several works. The “smoke” connection was another link,
albeit an indirect one, with the earlier master. The fumeux were a sort of waggish literary guild or club,
presided over by none other than Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s self-designated poetic heir. According
to Deschamps’s biographer Hoepffner, this society of whimsical eccentrics met at least from 1366 to
1381, striving to outdo one another in “smoky”—recondite or far-out—fancies and conceits.
FIG. 9-6 “The Adoration of the Magi,” from the Très riches heures du duc de Berry (1416).
Solage, with his smoky harmonies and smokier tessitura, may have outdone them all. Note, as one
particular subtilitas that distinguishes this droll composition, that the accidentals drift flatward (“fa-
ward”) in the first section and sharpward (“mi-ward”) in the second. The question of mode is altogether
to laugh. The music begins on a concord of G, ends on F, with a middle stop on a ficta note, E-flat
—“smoky speculation” indeed!
EX. 9-23 Solage, Fumeux fume (rondeau)