PERSONAL PRAYER
These Marian antiphon settings sound a conspicuously personal note that we have not previously
encountered in liturgical music. That is another aspect of “middling” tone; but it accords well with the
votive aspects of Marian worship, the component of the Christian liturgy that in those days was most
intensely “personal.” That, too, was something that could be thematized by a knowing composer,
especially a knowing churchman-composer. The supreme case in point for a fifteenth-century motet is the
third and most splendid setting Du Fay made of the Marian antiphon Ave Regina coelorum, copied into the
choirbooks of Cambrai Cathedral in 1465. It is as impressive a motet as Du Fay or anyone ever
composed, but it is impressive in an altogether different way from his earlier large-scale motet settings.
Where the isorhythmic Nuper rosarum flores (Ex. 8-8) had impressed by its monumentality, Ave Regina
coelorum impresses with an altogether unprecedented expressive intensity—unprecedented, that is,
within the motet genre.
The personal and votive aspect of this motet are epitomized in a moving set of tropes that Du Fay
interpolated into the canonical text of the antiphon, representing a prayer for his own salvation that he
wanted sung at his deathbed, and that he wanted to go on being recited after his death in perpetuity, for
which, a rich man, he provided an endowment in his will: