The Role of Music in Guillaume de Machuat's "Remede de Fortune"

I wrote this for Elizabeth Eva Leach's prelims course on the music of Guillaume de Machaut. This was definitely the course that first got me interested in medievalism--especially the questions of manuscript materiality and interpolation that would later influence my work on George Banjamin's Written on Skin so heavily.

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According to James L. WImsatt, Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune (cure for bad luck) is ‘probably the most important French love poem of the fourteenth century’. It is usually thought to have been written before 1349, but is yet to be conclusively dated.[1] It appears in some manuscripts without music, but is fully notated and most elaborately illuminated in manuscript C (folio 23r to 58 v), Mauchaut’s earliest complete-works compilation (dated circa 1350-56).[2] Sylvia Huot points out that this quality of illumination suggests that ‘the skilled Master …, whose work in [manuscript C] is limited to this text, was evidently commissioned specially to illustrate this important piece’ and that this is an indication of ‘its importance in Machaut’s eyes’.[3] It is one of eight long narrative dits written by him, and gives a first-person narrative account of ‘the narrator’s youthful initiation into love’.[4] It is multimedia in presentation: its scheme is of octosyllabic rhyming couplets and there are nine lyrical insertions, with music provided for seven of them. These are in each of the formes fixes and appear in the following order:

           

            Lais

            Complainte

            Chanson roial

            Baladelle

            Balade

            Virelais

            Rondelet

Wimsatt describes the story of Remede as ‘hardly complex’.[5] Lines 1-44 constitute a prologue in which the narrator looks back on his ‘youthful love apprenticeship’ in a ‘clerkly-didactic voice’.[6] He prepares the reader for a transition (lines 45-134) through which the first-person narrator is presented as a courtly lover (l’Amant). He secretly composes poems for his lady, which include the lay, Qui n’aroit autre deport (lines 431-680), ‘fleeing in despair’ without taking proper leave when she asks who the lay, which he had to sing for her, was written by (lines 681-782).[7] This leads to a second scene of sorts: The park of Hesdin, a walled garden. In it, l’Amant ‘bewails his fate to fortune’, singing a long complaint (lines 905-1480): Tels rit au main qui au soir pleure. In response to this, Esperence (Hope) arrives as an allegorical woman figure and defends Love in her chanson royal (Joie, plaisance et douce norriture) before revealing her identity. She explains that Fortune is cyclical, and sings her baladelle (En amer a douce vie, lines 2857-2892), which consoles l’Amant, who leaves the park after singing his balade (Dame, de qui toute ma joie vient, lines 3013-36). He then returns to court, but at the sight of the lady’s chateau finds himself unable to gather the courage to speak to her. Hope and Love return and he performs an unnotated Prière (prayer- Amours, je to lo et graci, lines 3205-3348) to them. There is then an ‘outdoor courtly festivity’ of singing and dancing where the lover finally sings a virelay to his lady (Dame, a vous sans retollir, lines 3451-96), before declaring his love (which she accepts) to her at her chateau (lines 3517-3872).[8] They exchange rings in Hope’s presence and l’Amant sings the rondelet (Dame, mon cuer en vous remaint, lines 4109-16). In spite of this, the ending is ambiguous, and not altogether optimistic as the narrator begins to find the lady’s attentions lukewarm after returning from his travels (lines 4117-4258).

Huot describes the lyrico-narrative poetics of the Remede as ‘an important crystallization of the large-scale poetics of Machaut’s oeuvre’ and the illuminations as ‘a visual mapping out of poetic process’.[9] In this way, the manuscript forms which the Remede takes are ‘an oral performative medium’ that embodies text, object and act.[10] That the Remede is a work to be experienced reflects much of what the text exemplifies, as a direct result of the juxtaposition of its didactic and lyrical natures, and Huot sees the miniatures as a ‘crystallization of experience’.[11] The Prologue of the Remede presents itself as a didactic, experiential exemplar from the outset, referring to the Aristotelian concept of the tabula rasa (that the innocent mind, unsullied by experience, can be consciously inscribed upon by ‘meekly received instruction’) when the clerkly narrator states that

[one] should seek [wisdom] at an early age, before his heart turns to wickedness through too much experience; for the true state of innocence is like the white and polished tablet that is ready to receive the exact image of whatever one wishes to portray or paint upon it.[12]

The parallels between tabula rasa sentiment and Machaut’s act of compiling manuscripts of blank parchment which is literally written on, notated, and ‘painted upon’ by scribes, ‘receiving the exact image’ of what Machaut wished to portray, imply a much more physical realm of the Remede’s didacticism, which is lost when its performance is conceived of as sonic alone.[13] This is why Huot posits that ‘the repetition of the word lire (to read) in both rubric and text stresses the fact that the lay is indeed written’.[14] In the case of the lay, there is a meta-act of writing in the form of illumination 3: “how the lover composes a lay about his sentement” (figure 1) in manuscript C, showing l’Amant in the act of writing on hugely long scrolls in ‘solitary inspired composition’.[15] The mise-en-page of this is significant: it is directly followed by the notation of the lay, and then by illumination 4: “How the lady has the Lover read the lai he’d composed” (figure 2).[16] Huot then sees the written musical text, straddled by these two ‘crystallized experiences’ of illuminations, as ‘the link between the two moments of solitary inspired composition and public performance’.[17]

Figure 1. “How the lover composes a lay about his sentement” followed by lay, Remede de Fortune, B.n. fr. 1586, fol. 26r

Figure 2. “How the lady has the Lover read the lai he’d composed”, Remede de Fortune, B.n. fr. 1586, fol. 28v.

Often thought of as the foremost form of this period, the lay is referred to by Deschamps as ‘a long item, difficult to make and invent’.[18] As a form, the lay is clearly valued by Machaut in that he put his lays at the beginning of all of his post-C manuscripts and that they are the only items outside of the Remede which are illuminated in manuscript C. As a monophonic form and ‘the closest … at this period to being through-composed’, Elizabeth Eva Leach describes it as ‘the ideal vehicle for the secretive lover’, writing that

the lay offers a composer—and a singer—a large canvas on which to develop musical ideas unencumbered by the shortness and repetition of fixed forms on the one hand or the distractions of polyphony on the other.[19]

As illumination 3’s rubric suggests, the lay is an expression of the lover’s sentement of desire, and this is musically conveyed. For example, in stanza 5 there is an augmented G-C sharp interval outlined by a line break from the first line of poetry to the next, setting the text detailing ‘the grief of desire’. The C sharp is only locally resolved to a D, with the rest of the phrase heading down to A. This contour conveys the dissatisfaction, even pain, in which a prolonged state of desire leaves the lover.

The dissatisfaction of desire is even more explicitly stated in the complaint, where the lover is shown to be at Fortune’s mercy. Another illumination (5), taking up nearly half of a page in manuscript C, shows the lover in the act of composition again, and is accompanied by a depiction of the wheel of Fortune (figure 3). The musical setting of the complaint uses just one stanza of music for all 36 stanzas of poetry, as if each stanza is one rotation of the wheel. This cyclicism is reflected by text such as ‘he laughs in the morning, who in the evening weeps…. Fortune devours all this when she turns…; she does not rest, but turns, turns again, and inverts it.’[20]

Figure 3, MS C, 30v.

The complainte is written in ars antiqua (old style) notation, with mostly longs and breves. The form of each stanza is binary, with open and closed endings for each repetition of parts A and B. This rigidity of this form, in contrast with the lay’s relative through-composition, could reflect the narrator’s feeling of a lack of autonomy in his subjection to lady Fortune’s blind (literally: in the illumination she is blindfolded) rotation. Leach writes that ‘the complaint seems intended to be ridiculous’ and ‘deliberately tedious’, but that a more ‘ethically focused artistic culture’ of the Middle Ages would have valued this for its didacticism, especially within the Remede’s larger form.[21]

In response to the complaint, Hope, personified as an allegorical woman, shows the lover how to ‘develop a poetic discourse that will foster cheerful and optimistic sentiments and a serene disposition’.[22] These are noble courtly values emphasised in the Prologue by the didactic/lyrical dichotomy: ‘she forbade me to speak frivolously; she ordered me to speak measuredly’.[23] This is written in terms of the lover’s lady as ‘a mirror and exemplar for desiring and doing all that is good’ and teaching ‘as the master teaches the child’.[24] However, it is Hope who carries out this didacticism in the Remede proper, and this consequently raises questions of whether Hope could be seen to be an allegorical embodiment of the lady, or perhaps this constitutes a general elevation of noble women; Huot points out that in the fourteenth century, Hope could be represented by either gender. The chanson royale and baladelle could consequently be heard as a feminine voice of reason and consolation—not quite of philosophy as in the Boeotian model—but of Hope. That the lover must memorise Hope’s song and reproduce it, ascribes her this sovereignty.

The culminating virelais, the narrator’s first effort of reintegration into court after leaving the garden is a dance: “My lady, to you without reservation I give my heart, thought, desire, body, and love”. The illumination shows the lover joining hands in proper decorum with his lady, who in all previous illuminations has been cut off from him by some form of physical barrier. The virelay is an explicitly social dance form, and acts here as a temporal vehicle and ‘sonic souvenir’ which hints at the hope of a future of merci.[25] The song’s monophonicism reflects this content, social camaraderie of men and women physically joining hands in dance. The virelais therefore an enactment and expression of a sustained condition of Hope, elevated above teleological Desire as a satisfactory end in itself, learned through didacticism, expressed through Natural sentement, and preserved in time on parchment.

Figure 4; MS C, fol. 51r.

Bibliography

Earp, Lawrence. Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research, (Taylor & Francis, 1995).

Huot, Sylvia. From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry, (Cornell University Press, 1987).

Leach, Elizabeth Eva. Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician, (Cornell University Press, 2011).

Machaut, Guillaume de. Le Jugement du roy de Behaigne and Remede de Fortune, James I. Wimsatt and William W. Kibler eds. (University of Georgia Press, 1988).

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[1] Wimsatt et al 1988, 32.

[2] Earp 1995, 76.

[3] Huot 1987, 249

[4] Ibid.

[5] Wimsatt et al 1988, 36.

[6] Leach 2011, 140.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Huot 1987, 250.

[10] Ibid, 251.

[11] Ibid, 252.

[12] Machaut: Wimsatt et al 1988, 168.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Huot 1987, 251.

[15] Ibid: Wimsatt et al 1988, 206.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Huot 1987, 251.

[18] Leach 2011, 141; “Une chose langue et malaisiee a faire et trouver”; see Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi, ed., Eutache Deschamps’ L’Art de dictier (East Lansing, 1994), 94, ll. 570-71. Cited in ibid.

[19] Ibid, 143.

[20] Wimsatt et al 1988, 218.

[21] Leach 2011, 229.

[22] Huot 1987, 170.

[23] Wimsatt et al 1988, 180.

[24] Ibid 176; ibid 178.

[25] Leach 2011, 164.