Guillaume de Machaut

Lore & Background

His surname most likely derives from the nearby town of Machault, 30 km northeast of Reims in the Ardennes region. He often accompanied King John on his various trips, many of them military expeditions around Europe (including Prague). Machaut survived the Black Death and spent his later years living in Reims composing and supervising the creation of his complete-works manuscripts.

Reader's Guide

Machaut's significance lies in his unprecedented amount of surviving music, in part due to his own involvement in his manuscripts' creation and preservation. He embodies the culmination of the poet-composer tradition stretching back to the troubadour and trouvère. His poetry was greatly admired and imitated by other poets, including Geoffrey Chaucer and Eustache Deschamps, well into the 15th century. He composed in a wide range of styles and forms and was crucial in developing the motet and secular song forms (particularly the lai and the formes fixes: rondeau, virelai and ballade). Among his only surviving sacred works, Messe de Nostre Dame is the earliest known complete setting of the Ordinary of the Mass attributable to a single composer. Whether the mass is truly cyclic is contested; after lengthy debate, musicologists are still deeply divided, though there is consensus that it is at best a forerunner to later 15th-century cyclic masses. At the end of his life, he wrote a poetic treatise on his craft (his Prologue), reflecting his preoccupation with ordering his oeuvre.

Did You Know?

• Machaut's surname most likely derives from the nearby town of Machault, 30 km northeast of Reims.
• His Messe de Nostre Dame is the earliest known complete setting of the Ordinary of the Mass attributable to a single composer.