Messe de Nostre Dame [for] Mixed Voices (review)

Guillaume de Machaut. Messe de Nostre Dame [for] Mixed Voices. Edited by Lucy E. Cross. New York: C. F. Peters, c1998. Note, 1 p.; score, 36 p.; performance notes, p. i-x. Edition Peters No. 67574. $10.95.]

The Messe de Nostre Dame of Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300-1377) is one of the most frequently performed and recorded works in the medieval repertory (for a list of recordings, see Lawrence Earp's Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research, Garland Composer Resource Manuals, 36 [New York: Garland, 1995], 423-26). Although it belongs within an ongoing tradition of polyphonic compositions for the Mass Ordinary by fourteenth-century French composers, Machaut's Mass is the earliest surviving complete setting known to be by a single composer. Once associated by scholars with the coronation of Charles V of France in 1364, the Messe de Nostre Dame is now believed to have been composed early in the 1360s for the Saturday Mass for the Virgin, and to have been sung repeatedly at the oratory in the cathedral of Reims known as the Rouelle (see Anne W. Robertson, "The Mass of Guillaume de Machaut at the Cathedral of Reims," in Plainsong in the Age of Polyphony, ed. Thomas Forrest Kelly, Cambridge Studies in Performance Practice, 2 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992], 100-39). Both Machaut and his brother Jean were canons at the cathedral, and both contributed substantially to the endowment that supported the Saturday Marian Masses. After the death of Jean in 1372, the Mass became in effect a Requiem for the repose of his soul and later for that of his brother. It was included in all the manuscripts of Machaut's complete works except the early manuscript C, and also in a now-lost book along with Masses by two of his contemporaries (Earp, review of Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Machaut's Mass: An Introduction [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990], in Journal of the American Musicological Society 46 [1993]: 296). The only other known source is a Paduan manuscript (Biblioteca Universitaria, 1475), which transmits the Ite missa est-Deo gracias in fragmentary form.

Earp's invaluable Guide to Research lists no fewer than nine complete editions of the Mass (p. 345), but for purposes of comparison, this review will consider only three--namely, Friedrich Ludwig and Heinrich Besseler (Musikalische Werke, vol. 4 [Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1954], 1-20); Leo Schrade (The Works of Guillaume de Machaut, Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, 3 [Monaco: L'Oiseau-Lyre, 1956], 37-64, reprinted as Œuvres complètes [Monaco: L'Oiseau-Lyre, 1977], 1-28); and Daniel Leech-Wilkinson (Machaut's Mass: An Introduction [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990; paperback ed., 1992], with a new edition of the Mass on pp. 183-212--an enlargement of the score provided in the monograph published separately as La Messe de Nostre Dame, Oxford Choral Music [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990] with a one-page introduction summarizing the book's main points on accidentals, plicas, voices, tuning, pronunciation, and tempo in lieu of a critical apparatus).

Ludwig's edition, transcribed in 1903 from the manuscript known as Vg (copied ca. 1370), was completed in the 1930s by Heinrich Besseler and published after World War II. The extensive critical apparatus gives variants for manuscripts A (early 1370s) and G (later but closely related to A), but not for B (copied from Vg) and E (a late source). Note values are reduced to one quarter of the original, the scale followed in the other editions discussed here, but retention of the old C clefs may pose a hurdle to modern singers. Thanks to its detailed critical notes, however, and a layout that clearly displays the structure of isorhythmic movements, Ludwig's edition is still valuable for study.

Manuscript A, the main source for Schrade's edition, was prepared in the early 1370s, perhaps at Reims. An inscription heading the original index ("Vesci l'ordenance que G. de Machau wet qu'il ait en son livre...