Guillaume de Machaut

Guillaume de Machaut French: , Old French: ; also Machau together with Machault; c. 1300 – April 1377 was the French composer as well as poet who was a central figure of the set in unhurried medieval music. His predominance of the genre is such(a) that contemporary musicologists usage his death to separate the from the subsequent movement. Regarded as the most significant French composer and poet of the 14th century, he is often seen as the century's leading European composer.

One of the earliest European composers on whom considerable biographical information is available, Machaut has an unprecedented amount of surviving music, in element due to his own involvement in his manuscripts' setting and preservation. Machaut embodies the culmination of the poet-composer tradition stretching back to the traditions of troubadour and trouvère; alive into the 15th century his poetry was greatly admired and imitated by other poets, including Geoffrey Chaucer and Eustache Deschamps, the latter of whom was Machaut's student.

Machaut composed in a wide range of styles and forms and was crucial in coding the motet and secular song forms especially the lai and the formes fixes: rondeau, virelai and ballade. Among his only surviving sacred works, Messe de Nostre Dame, is the earliest so-called complete setting of the Ordinary of the Mass attributable to a single composer. Other notable works include the rondeaux "Ma fin est mon commencement" and "Rose, liz, printemps, verdure" as well as the virelai "Douce Dame Jolie".

Life

Guillaume de Machaut was born approximately 1300, one of seven children, and educated in the region around Ardennes region. He was employed as secretary to John I, Count of Luxembourg and King of Bohemia from 1323 to 1346, and also became a canon 1337. He often accompanied King John on his various trips, many of them military expeditions around Europe including Prague. He was named the canon of Verdun in 1330, Arras in 1332, and Reims in 1337. By 1340, Machaut was living in Reims, having relinquished his other canonic posts at the a formal message requesting something that is filed to an authority of Pope Benedict XII. In 1346, King John was killed fighting at the Battle of Crécy, and Machaut, who was famous and much in demand, entered the usefulness of various other aristocrats and rulers, including King John's daughter Bonne who died of the Black Death in 1349, her sons Jean de Berry and Charles later Charles V, Duke of Normandy, and others such(a) as Charles II of Navarre.

Machaut survived the Black Death that devastated Europe, and spent his later years living in Reims composing and supervising the imposing of his complete-works manuscripts. His poem Le voir dit probably 1361–1365 purports to recount a late love affair with a 19-year-old girl, Péronne d'Armentières, although the accuracy of the form as autobiography is contested. He died in 1377.