Following two systematic transcriptions of his music and a multitude of fundamentally descriptive studies, in recent years, Machaut research has taken a significant leap forward. This improvement is especially due to the perspicacious study of his musical language by Sarah Fuller and Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, the latter the author of an important book about his famous Mass (Oxford, 1990). Everything that had been said about Machaut until very recently is condensed in Lawrence Earp’s Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research (New York & London, 1995). This was the last significant contribution to Machaut scholarship until the appearance of the present book by Anne W. Robertson, Professor of Musicology at the University of Chicago and the recipient of the Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America.

Robertson begins with the well-conceived idea that the context of a composer’s life must be reflected to some degree in his works. In 1337 Machaut, who is thought to have been educated at the Reims Cathedral, was appointed canon of the cathedral that he would be associated with for the rest of his life. Considering that it was in Reims that French monarchs were crowned, it can be presumed to have been rich in many aspects, including the liturgical-musical, which Robertson studies in detail in the first chapter. Given the characteristics of the centre and the composer’s juvenile career, the author limits the scope of her study to his 23 motets, the Mass and the Hoquetus David, leaving aside his output of songs.

In Chapter 2 Robertson discusses two of Machaut’s motets in Latin, numbers 18 and 19, the former dedicated to Guillaume de Trie, Archbishop of Reims from 1324 to 1334, and the latter to St. Quentin, comparing their respective plots. This represents the book’s first revelation.

The second, which is much more signficant, concerns motets 1-17, discussed in the next four chapters of the book. Their text is in French, except numbers 12 and 17, which are bilingual (the upper voice is in Latin and the motetus in French) and number 9, which is in Latin. Beginning her discussion with the careful selection of the melodies used as the basis for the motet tenors, Robertson’s cleverly relates them to books about the mystical tradition dating from the late Middle Ages, in particular Enrique Suso’s Horologium Sapientiae, which was very well known during its time (around 1333). Respecting the order in which each motet was copied in the manuscripts Machaut supervised, the author demonstrates the close relationship between key words of the tenor, its glosa in the upper voices, and the steps followed on love’s journey towards union with the beloved, in this case absolute Wisdom. The struggle with sin appears in the middle of the journey in the form of arrogance and envy, as in the storyline of motet no. 9, whose symmetrical position with respect to the six previous motets and the six motets that follow seems to be more than mere coincidence.

For the moment, the repercussions of Robertson’s thesis, which ultimately considers Machaut’s motets 1-17 as a unitary cycle, are unforeseeable, but in years to come it should certainly be taken into account in both studies about the composer and the medieval motet.

The last three chapters of the book are devoted to the study of motets 21-23 respectively, representative of Machaut’s late style, the Hoquetus David and the Messe de Notre Dame. While the relationship between this group of motets with the Hundred Years War and the siege of the city of Reims by English troops in 1359-60 is not new, her approach to the Hoquetus is original and thought provoking. Robertson maintains that the piece was composed for the coronation of Charles V in 1364. She bases her theory on the symbolic relationship between the prophet David and the French monarch and on that between the number three (which is central to the work’s form) and the fleur-de-lis, a symbol of the Holy Trinity and the emblem of French royalty since the twelfth century. Her discussion of the Mass is also attractive as she uses convincing arguments to support the widely known hypothesis that it was composed to be performed at the cathedral of Reims in memory of its constructor and his brother John, a beneficiary of the cathedral since 1343.

Anne W. Robertson’s book is simply brilliant and undoubtedly one of the most important studies of the music of the late medieval era in recent years.
Maricarmen Gómez

Context and Meaning in his Musical Works
Anne Walters Robertson
Cambridge University Press, 2002
ISBN 0 521 41876 3. 456 pp.. $95.00