Dufay returned to Cambrai in 1423 or 1424 because his mother’s protector, Jehan Hubert, was dying. He took up residence in Laon so that he might collect his benefice of St. Géry in absentia. He sang in the Laon cathedral, but several songs of this period are worldly: Je me complains, Ce jour le doibt, and Adieu ce bon vins. The last song marked his departure from Laon in 1426.

Dufay was widely known and admired throughout Europe for much of his life. His reputation remained high after his death, and over 70 manuscripts found all over Europe have preserved his music for us. But never has his music been so accessible as it is in the CD era

The mature years

The year 1426 begins the familiar chronicle of Dufay’s career. He met Robert Auclou, the curate of St. Jacques de la Boucherie in Paris (only the bell tower of the church still stands in the middle of Paris). He composed the motet Rite majorem for St. James, running Auclou’s name through the text as an acrostic. He then went with him into the service of Cardinal Louis Aleman, the papal governor of Bologna. The plenary Mass, Missa Sancti Jacobi, must have been written at this time, for the church of San Giacomo il Maggiore, Aleman’s church in Bologna, is the only church from which Dufay could have taken the texts of the Mass Propers for St. James. He had been ordained a deacon, probably in Cambrai or Laon before he left for Italy. He was then ordained a priest in Bologna in 1427 or 1428.

In 1428 Cardinal Aleman was driven out of Bologna by an uprising. Dufay left Bologna with him and by December had entered the papal choir in Rome. He wrote the motet Ecclesie militantis, his most ambitious isorhythmic work, for the coronation in 1431 of Pope Eugene IV, who succeeded Martin V. He wrote another motet, Balsamus et munda cera, for a papal ceremony shortly after. Supremum est mortalibus was written in 1433 for the peace of Viterbo, marking the end of conflict with the emperor and his coronation by the pope in May of that year.