Micrologus; Guillaume Dufay

82-01 GUILLAUME DUFAY: CHIEF ORNAMENT OF HIS AGE

The great Franco-Flemish composer Guillaume Dufay was born about the year 1400 possibly as early as 1397 and probably near Cambrai- which is close to the present-day Franco-Belgian border- He spent his early years as a choirboy at the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Cambrai- Then he began the first truly cosmopolitan career of any composer in our culture: He traveled first to Switzerland and then on to Italy. In Italy he did a degree in Canon Law (i.e, church law) at the University of Bologna- and entered the priesthood serving throughout most of the 1430's as a singer in the Papal Chapel. He went back to Cambrai for the 1440's and then to the court of the Duke of Savoy in Chambery for the 1450's- then back to Cambrai where he lived out the rest of his long and very productive life, dying in 1474.

Dufay was called by one of his contemporaries— in fact by Antonio Squarcialupi, organist to Lorenzo Il Magnifico de Medici — "the chief ornament of our age." And while Dufay's fame was based primarily on the music he wrote for the church- his chansons are so near and dear to my heart that as I put the program together I couldn't resist spending at least one complete half hour on them alone. So I will have to save the sacred works for a later program.

The first piece of his that we are going to listen to is "Par droit je puis bien complaindre et gemir.” It is a rondeau, certainly the most popular form for secular pieces in France at that time and it is a very interesting and unique piece besides being hauntingly beautiful. There is a canon between the upper two parts (the two vocal parts) while the instrumental parts have no real melodic interest of their own: they serve merely to add harmonic and rhythmic interest to the texture of the canon in the vocal parts. The performance is by the Early Music Consort of London directed by David Munrow.

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Most of the chansons written by Dufay and his contemporaries in fact dealt with love in a rather melancholy way, and most of the ones we will hear today are no exception to that generality. For all their conventional points of view, however, Dufay's chansons stood apart as magnificent pieces of music.

The next one we are going to listen to is a ballade. "Je me complain piteusement" (l am woefully lamenting my lot). The performance is by countertenor Jeffrey Gall with Pomerium Musices directed by Alexander Blachly.

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I mentioned that Dufay spent some time in Italy, so it is not surprising to find that he wrote some pieces with Italian texts--there are about seven or eight of them preserved and presumably because he spent about twenty years there he must have written others but unfortunately they have not survived The one we are going to listen to “Quel fronte signorille" (When I behold that noble brow in Paradise) is probably the best known of his Italian chansons, sharing that honour with "Vergene bella." It is a beautiful piece in spite of the fact that it is apparently a contrafactum--contrafactum is simply a piece which has a new text set to old music- in other words Dufay wrote a chanson in French and at a later date set it to an Italian text. This is a classic performance by the Studio der Frühen Musik, our old friends, directed by Thomas Binkley. I should note that the birds heard in the background of this performance are not in Dufay's scoring although I think they enhance the performance.

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I mentioned that “Quel fronte signorille" was a contrafactum. The original text which Dufay set to that music (a chanson entitled "Craindre vous vueil") contains an acrostic--a text puzzle extracting the first letter only of each poetic line produces the message: Cateline Dufay. Since Dufay's mother's name was Marie, this is a curious circumstance for a man of the cloth to be in. In fact the affair received a tantalizing twist in 1981 when the great Dufay scholar Alejandro Planchart discovered in Bologna a passport for the year 1426 made out to "Guillaume's Catherine.” Indeed, we know that Dufay had left his homeland for Italy that very year, since he composed and dated a song of farewell, “Adieu ces bon vins de Lannoy." Is it possible that a woman named Catherine accompanied him? What was their relationship? Did it have any bearing on Dufay's entering the priesthood just one year later? We may never know the details of this 15th century soap opera. At this point, we can only listen to the music Dufay wrote at the time and wonder. The performance is by Harlan Hokin with the Elizabethan Enterprise directed by Lucy Cross.

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Perhaps it is not surprising, after all, that we do not have very many Dufay chansons preserved with Italian texts, because French was quite a prominent language among the nobles of northern Italy at that time, In fact, we have a piece from the 1420's which Dufay wrote for the wedding of Carlo Malatesta and Vittoria Colonna when he was in the service of the Malatesta family, and it is written in French. The title is "Resvellies vous" (Arise and celebrate every lover who loves gentility. Revel, flee sadness, and do not hold back in your service).

Usually pieces commissioned for a specific occasion at this time were written in the form of motets--that is very large ceremonial pieces in a rather grand style which among other things featured a very florid upper part and sometimes some block chords to emphasize very important words. The chanson we are going to hear now includes some of these features: there is a very florid upper part played by a portative organ; and there are block chords at the end of each verse which state the text "Charles gentil" (Noble Charles). The work must have impressed at least somebody in the bride's family- because not too long after the wedding and the performance of this piece we find Dufay entering the Papal service as a singer and composer. The bride's uncle was the Pope himself.

[MUSIC: "Resvellies vous" a ballade by Guillaume Dufay, performed here by Musica Mundana- directed by David Fallows]

For those of you who pay particular attention to sopranos singing early music, you may be interested to know that that was a very early recording of Judith Nelson. No survey of the chansons of Dufay would be complete without the next chanson we are going to listen to, the justly famous "Se la face ay pale" (If my face looks pale, the chief fault lies with love; indeed so much pain does it give me that I could drown myself in the sea as the fair one that I serve well knows I can neither know any joy nor live without her).

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This performance ends this edition of Micrologus which has featured chansons by the great 15th century composer Guillaume Dufay.