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TONUS PEREGRINUS in a mediaeval love story charting the passionate affair between the 14th Century’s most celebrated poet and composer, Guillaume de Machaut, and a young fan known as Péronelle d’Armentières. Their poetry, their letters, and Machaut’s extraordinary music come together in a unique semi-staged multi-media experience in mediaeval French and modern English.
Saturday 7 June 2008 20:00
OPERA FRINGE
Down Arts Centre, Downpatrick, Northern Ireland
more info & bookings: http://www.operafringe.com/
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Guillaume de Machaut (c.1300-1377)
Seven hundred years ago a boy grew up in the Diocese of Rheims infused with the mediaeval liturgy of the Church. That boy was to become a composer ahead of his time, adorning both Rheims Cathedral and the courts of kings and nobility with sounds that are still new today. Guillaume de Machaut’s music has a similar effect to the huge rose windows in his home cathedral: it stuns with intense harmonic colour, and intrigues with melodic detail and rhythmic chicanery. Machaut was also one of the finest poets of the 14th Century: his musical experimentation grew from his experience of poetic form and wordplay in the most refined environments of court and cathedral.
the road to Rheims…
Guillaume de Machaut was born, as far as we can tell, around 1300 and very probably in the little village of Machault, which is about a day’s walk from the cathedral town of Reims (French spelling). We know very little of Machaut’s early life, but in 1323 he became secretary to John of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia and spent many stimulating years in John’s service, travelling as far as Lithuania and Italy. In around 1340, Machaut returned to Rheims to take up the position of canon, along with his brother Jean.
besieged by an admirer…
In 1359 the English attempted to lay siege to Rheims – a crucial prize in the Hundred Years’ War because of its significance as France’s coronation city (since the baptism of Clovis in 496). Two years after the unsuccessful siege Machaut entertained the heir to the throne and in 1364 witnessed the coronation of Charles the Fifth. But the early 1360s were exciting and fruitful for Machaut for other reasons: he began a lengthy and involved correspondence with a young female admirer, and documented their friendship in a book which he called the “true story”, Le Livre du Voir Dit. The book contains over 9000 lines of poetry, and includes their letters, the love-poems and songs that they sent to each other. The accuracy of the narrative of events that Machaut sets down in his “true poem” – perhaps his finest work (and the ultimate 14th-century multimedia presentation) – is difficult to establish, but there is a ring of veracity in the haphazard and occasionally even contradictory sequence of recollections. The narrative in Le Voir Dit doesn’t really come to a satisfactory ending, happy or otherwise (another sign of its being mired in reality), and Machaut simply sums up his relationship with the “All-Beautiful” by leaving both their full names entwined as an anagram in the final lines of the poem. Rather like carving lovers’ names on a tree in the forest, he hopes they will still be there after a long, long time...
my end is my beginning…
Fortunately for us as well as for his own reputation, Machaut seems to have spent the last decade of his life supervising the copying of his complete works into several lavish manuscripts. That he did so makes him by far the most well-represented composer of the 14th Century. Machaut’s words and music come together in a number of different forms: the four most common are the ballade, the rondeau, the virelai and the lay. Each of them has a repetitive structure of music and verse – within which Machaut sets up the most unexpected counterpoint of sounds and ideas.
When Machaut died in 1377 he was mourned by poets and composers across Europe:
“War and love, knights and ladies,
Priests, musicians, poets,
All wits, all poems,
All you with sweet voices,
or who sing with instruments,
and cherish the gentle art of music:
wear mourning now, and weep; it is time.
Machaut, the noble poet, is dead.”
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