By the time he set it, Christine’s poem was already an old and famous one, composed on the death of
her husband, Etienne Castel, a notary in service to the king of France, in 1390. Christine remained a
quasi-official French court poet and a partisan commentator on the Hundred Years War. Her “Letter
Concerning the Prison of Human Life” (L’Espistre de la prison de vie humaine) was intended in the first
instance as a consolation to the widows left behind by the fallen heros of France on the battlefield of
Agincourt, and at the end of her life Christine wrote “The Tale of Joan of Arc” (Le Ditié de Jeanne
d’Arc), the earliest encomium to the intrepid Maid of Orléans, and one of the most authoritative, since it
was the only one that dated from its subject’s lifetime.
It is a bit ironic, then, to find in Binchois’s setting of Christine’s early ballade (Ex. 11-27) a gorgeous
epitome of the contenance angloise, the English-influenced style that testified so eloquently, if obliquely,
to the ascendancy of France’s enemy. It is a veritable orgy of F-major “euphony,” opening with
arpeggiations of the F-major triad in both cantus and tenor, sonorously supported by a pair of droning
contratenors on the final and the fifth above. When the tenor reaches its high A at the end of the word
angoisseux, the harmony sounding is the most brilliant possible spacing of an F-major triad: over the
final.
This ravishing four-voice texture is the “big band” sound of the day, achieved by replacing the
contratenor in a three-part version of the song (itself achieved by providing a contratenor to add
harmonious sonority to a self-sufficient structural pair) with a pair of complementary contratenors to
amplify the sonority. The lowest voice in the transcription could still function correctly as a contratenor
by itself. It regularly makes its cadences by octave leap: see mm. 11–12, 21–22, 25–26, 28, 34–35, 44–45
(= 11–12), 53–54 (= 21–22), the final pair of cadences recapitulating the first pair since this is a
“rhymed” or “rounded” ballade, in which the ending of the “B” section quotes the ending of the “A.” The
presence of the fourth voice makes it possible to complete the triad at each cadence by adding a third to
the obligatory octave of cantus and tenor and the obligatory fifth of the contratenor.