Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician (review)

Few medieval artists lend themselves so well to a vie romancée as Guillaume de Machaut. He offered plentiful materials for it in his narrative poems, in which historical fact and erotic fiction seem inextricably mingled, especially in the later works, where his poetic persona treads increasingly into the foreground. Elizabeth Eva Leach’s impressive book presents an effort to separate fiction from fact and at the same time to reach a closer understanding of the life, themes, ethics, and aesthetics of this intriguing poet-composer. Her aim is to establish the study of Machaut’s music as an integral aspect of his oeuvre. The book is organically composed. An inventory of what remains of Machaut and an account of his ‘resurrection’ in modern scholarship and the concert hall are followed by thematic studies of creation, hope and love, adversity and death as they are treated in his narratives, lyrics, and musical settings. It closes with Machaut’s afterlife and slowly fading renown in the works of later poets and composers. A glossary has been added to enable the non-musicologist to follow the analyses of the music.

In the first chapter, ‘Life: Guillaume de Machaut’s Living’, Leach gives a brief conspectus of Machaut’s complete-works manuscripts and scrutinizes the few facts of his life as they can be deduced from archival materials. It is doubted whether Machaut bore the title magister (p. 32). This does not preclude, to my mind, the possibility that he attended university; how else could he have acquired the profound knowledge of the most modern speculations on music theory and notation that manifests itself throughout his works? Leach then considers what could hypothetically be interpreted as reflections from historical reality in his texts. Here, she is extremely reticent: trying to obtain factual information from fictional works is, in her opinion, problematic at best.

Chapter 2, ‘Resurrection: Dismembering Machaut’, presents a survey of the gradual scientific rediscovery and reappreciation of Machaut’s works since the late eighteenth century up to the present state of research. Leach discusses the agendas of the different modern disciplines. Like those of Orpheus to whom she compares him, Machaut’s ‘limbs’, the various aspects of his oeuvre, seem to have been torn apart by academic specialism. She advocates an interdisciplinary approach to ‘re-member’ Machaut, emphasizing the need to incorporate the musical part of his oeuvre—too much neglected in Romance studies—as an essential element. Leach’s book is ‘heavily reliant’ on Lawrence Earp’s admirable Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research (New York, 1995) and at times ‘will read like a lyricization of Earp’s ever-useful narrative’ (Introduction, p. 5). Since she cites and reviews much recent literature from the disciplines that deal with different aspects of the Machaut codices—historical, literary, musicological, art-historical—her book is a welcome update on Earp’s bibliography. It is only to be regretted that so little literature from modern musicology is reviewed, especially about the subject on which she focuses most, the interaction of text and music (such as studies by Wolfgang Dömling, Ursula Günther, and Wulf Arlt, among others).

Throughout this study the reader is impressed by the author’s familiarity with Machaut’s works, his obsession with their ordering, and the fine nuances of his artistic language in which the musical setting often guides the listener by clarifying the words and the emotion they convey. In chapters 3 to 6, Leach manages to capture the various aspects of his main literary topics as they appear in the longer narratives and in a choice of songs, lays, and motets.

Under the heading ‘Creation: Machaut Making’, Leach discusses the importance of the index and Prologue that Machaut added to his complete works in and in which he emphasized the role of music in his poetics. A key concept in the Prologue is the veracity and joyfulness of poetic and musical creation: composing should be...