The question of post-première revision acquires significance when the première itself is understood as establishing a decisive moment in the relationship between the work and its audience. The première is more than simply a first performance. It is a formal handing over of the work from the composer to the audience (the patron). Any change to it after that event constitutes perturbation of a publicly established relationship. For this situation to occur, the musical work must be held under a certain nexus of conditions:
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(1) authorship: it should be the product of a named composer;
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(2) patronage: it should be written at the bidding of a patron (meaning that the work becomes in some sense the property of the patron);
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(3) work identity: it should be intended to have a fixed and finished form;
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(4) première: it should be launched into performing life on a specific occasion.
On the face of it, at least two of these conditions – authorship and identity – fail to correspond to medieval music in the ways in which it is commonly conceived. The vast majority of medieval music was disseminated anonymously, even when the composer was a figure widely known (Pérotin, Pierre de la Croix and Philippe de Vitry were well-known composers in their day whose activities are attested in a variety of sources but whose works were wholly transmitted anonymously); and it existed within a culture in which textual stability of transmission was neither given nor expected and where much in the content of a certain performance was defined specifically for it by the performer. Performers might have added their personal inflections in the act of performing, particularly where the music was transmitted orally; but even for written compositions, scribes might have changed details in the copying process. The textuality of music had a degree of openness similar to that in literature characterized by Paul Zumthor under the term mouvance: ‘the nature of the work (before the era of the book) that, as such, results from a sort of abstraction, the tangible texts that produce it appearing as a constant vibration and a fundamental instability through the play of variants and reworkings’.Footnote 8 The idea of post-première revision poses no problems here, since the first performance was never intended as anything other than the beginning of a process of continual reinvention and had no superior status in the chain of musical events that it had initiated.
There is no need to challenge these understandings for medieval music in general; neither, though, is there any reason to grant them universal validity. My purpose here is to propose that Guillaume de Machaut (c.1300–1377) worked in a way that accorded significance to the idea of a première as a decisive stage in the history of a composition, which therefore raises issues of post-première revision in instances where there have been demonstrable compositional changes after that point. The significance of post-première revision arises in this case from a specific relationship between musical thought and writing.
(1) Authorship
There can have been no artist more obsessed with his authorship than Machaut. He signalled this in his poetic works through anagrams and allusions to his authorial presence and identity.Footnote 9 His creative output itself became part of that identity. In his pseudo-autobiographical narrative poem Le voir dit, he revealed that he collected his works into a book (‘le livre ou je met toutes mes choses’ – hereafter the ‘Book’).Footnote 10 This in turn served as an exemplar for manuscript copies of his work.Footnote 11 Such copies became sought-after accoutrements for aristocratic libraries during the latter decades of his life. Those that survive are known as the Machaut manuscripts.Footnote 12 In them, he is identified as the author in no uncertain terms. The Prologue that he added to his works late in life, together with the index that is given in MachA (from the 1370s), consolidated his explicit control of the authorship of his output as an oeuvre.Footnote 13
Machaut’s achievements as a poet and musician were widely recognized beyond the pages of his manuscripts. He was referred to as an authority in theoretical treatises on music and poetry; his position as an accomplished artistic figure was acknowledged through citation in poems and songs.Footnote 14 Yet transmission of his work beyond the Machaut manuscripts was highly selective and usually anonymous, in keeping with the conventions of the day. Machaut’s obsession with his own authorship was something that obtained within the milieu of his work but did not much affect reception in the culture beyond. It was what he intended for reception of his work, but it went against the grain of contemporary culture.
(2) Patronage
For the first half of his career, Machaut worked in courtly circles, successively as clerk, almoner, notary and secretary to John, count of Luxembourg and king of Bohemia. Machaut himself indicated that he held this service for more than 30 years, suggesting that it began in some capacity in his mid-teens.Footnote 15 After John’s death at the battle of Crécy in 1346, Machaut seems to have taken up semi-retirement as a resident secular canon of Reims Cathedral;Footnote 16 but he retained contact with courtly circles and devoted much of his time to writing poetry and music for them. He lived and worked in the service of aristocracy and enjoyed its company. Most of his creative output relates to the courtly milieu; but there is a question as to the degree to which this was a function of patronage. A career such as his did not depend on artistic creativity. His brother Jean enjoyed a very similar career, but there is no evidence that he was engaged in the composition of poetry or music.Footnote 17 Although Machaut as a creative artist benefited in a general sense from his participation in the courtly world, he did not depend on its appreciation of his artistic output for his living, and it may be inferred that he had a fair degree of autonomy in the matters of whether and how he exercised his artistry.
This is not to deny the powerful influence on his work of the noblemen and women whom he knew: a number of the narrative dits refer (sometimes overtly, sometimes obliquely) to aristocrats of his acquaintance – John of Luxembourg, his daughter Bonne and her husband the future John II of France, their sons Charles V of France, John, duke of Berry, and Philip ‘the Bold’ of Burgundy, as well as their son-in-law Charles ‘the Bad’ of Navarre and Pierre I de Lusignan.Footnote 18 Such influence is acknowledged in certain lyric poems too. Relationships of this sort played an important role in occasioning works and seem to confer upon the respective aristocrats something of the role of a patron, albeit of a passive kind.Footnote 19 The most extended instance of a patronage relationship of this sort is that narrated in Le voir dit. The patron in this case is a young lady referred to as Toute Belle, who admires Machaut’s work. She writes to him and encourages him to send her poems and songs, which, during their exchange of letters, he does. Among them is the song Dix et sept (rondeau 17), wherein her name (Peronne) is turned into a numerical anagram and thus inscribed indelibly into the work itself. Patronage and art are here inextricably intertwined.
Toute Belle of Le voir dit may have been an imagined person;Footnote 20 and even if she was a real individual, the way in which she is configured in a narrative that plays on the boundaries between truth and fiction subsumes her into the author’s imaginative realm. Machaut tended to go beyond the patron as a real individual. His work inhabited an imaginary world; and in the Prologue he identified Nature and Love as his patrons. He depicted them commanding him to write, endowing him with the means to do so and receiving his praise in turn. He went thereby over the heads of real patrons, allegorizing the command for his work and effectively issuing it himself. In his domain of courtly love, one lover could stand for another, meaning that, ‘The same poem may be addressed to different individuals, and new patrons and new loves take the place of former ones.’Footnote 21 In this case, then, where one patron can function as well as another, patronage serves only a minimal determining role, akin to that of an audience in a general sense.Footnote 22
Moreover, by recognizing in the assembly of his works an oeuvre with a unity and identity over and above particular occasions and individuals, Machaut reneged on the contract of patronage. If, as Douglas Kelly put it, ‘Machaut’s “livre ou je mets toutes mes choses” contains works that belong to others’, clearly Machaut did not cede possession.Footnote 23 This raises – perhaps for the first time in music history – a tension between the patron’s ownership of the work through its presentation and the artist’s ownership of the work as testament to his or her growing body of creative endeavour and achievement. The relationship between the artist and the patron was an oblique one for Machaut. He strove to control it by allegorizing it in his work. Nonetheless, the role of the patron, even if merely symbolic, was crucial in Machaut’s thinking as focusing the audience: the patron issued the request for the work and was the first recipient of it.
(3) Work identity
Reinhard Strohm’s recognition that the musical work-concept ‘remains a historical phenomenon like others, subject to the possibility of divergent, parallel, intermittent and contradictory manifestations’ challenges attempts to delimit it to the recent historical past.Footnote 24 Instead, it appears as a facet of the Western tradition of composed music with a long and complex history. This is the context for understanding Machaut’s achievement in musical composition. His music was typically notated with a high degree of finesse. The fourteenth-century notational system was not very different from that of the present day in its capacity to convey rhythm and pitch with precision and to facilitate the coordination of sophisticated and varied musical textures. Machaut made ample use of these provisions. Moreover, they enabled him to articulate a finished written form of the composition. He indicated in Le voir dit that he liked to hear a composition performed before he regarded it as finished;Footnote 25 and once it was finished, he wished it to be played exactly as written, without additions or omissions.Footnote 26 The statement implies that the fixity of compositions as he conceived them stood in contrast to the freer relationship to text that operated within the performing tradition at large.
Full and precise notation, a completed compositional process and a clear edict for textual fidelity in performance offer a recipe for a strong work identity for individual compositions. The contribution of each piece to a growing (and ultimately completed) oeuvre represented by the Book reinforces the fixed differential identity of individual items within it. Each piece was clearly and uniquely conceived, was different from the others, and was intended to last because of its place within the enduring output.
(4) Première
Little is known about the circumstances of performance of Machaut’s music. Any comments on the première as an event would be perforce speculative. For the present discussion, though, it is the significance of the première in the life of the work rather than the details of an event that are relevant.
The notion of the première was manifestly central to occasional works.Footnote 27 Bone pastor (motet 18) is probably one of Machaut’s earliest surviving compositions. Its texts apostrophize Guillaume, archbishop of Reims, now identified as Guillaume de Trie, who held the post from 1324 to 1334. It is most likely that the piece was composed for his enthronement.Footnote 28 Here the meaning of the work is closely tied to the occasion of formal first presentation, which has a specific relevance to the compositional history. The work and its première are inseparably linked in the very idea of the piece.
Very little of Machaut’s work had such a direct relationship to a singular event. Nonetheless, the idea of the first performance, or at least the formal presentation of the piece, was important to Machaut. As he wrote to Toute Belle in sending her Dix et sept, he regretted that the visitors staying with him had seen it before she had.Footnote 29 Of course, Machaut had implicitly shared the piece with the musicians who had tried it through with him to check that he liked it, as he had told Toute Belle previously. What concerned him about the visitors in this later instance was that they were of the sort that constituted the audience of the music. Machaut implies that the composition was intended specifically for the patron and that she should be the first to see it. This, then, is what the première is in this context: not necessarily a public concert, but a formal receipt of the work by the patron; an acknowledgement of the completion of compositional work by releasing it to its audience.
The importance of the première in this sense can be seen in the index to the works compiled for MachA. The order here appears to be basically chronological within genres and thereby confers significance to the time of completion of the work as part of its continuing identity within the larger oeuvre.Footnote 30 For Machaut, another facet of the première was the placement of the work into the Book, in whatever way that occurred.
Post-première revision
Dedications such as that to Peronne in Dix et sept explicitly indicate the work’s relationship to a specific individual who assumes a patronage role in relation to it. Once given, the work cannot be taken back or changed. Yet if we can take the inclusion of it in the Book as marking the première, then there is clear evidence for revision after this point for some of the songs.Footnote 31 This may be the case where a copy in a later manuscript deviates significantly from one in any earlier source.
One such difference is the addition of voice-parts.Footnote 32 Machaut tells of taking a monophonic rondeau and adding two other voice-parts to it. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson has proposed Puis qu’on oubli (rondeau 18) as the song in question.Footnote 33 In this case, there was a further stage of revision, very likely by Machaut again, as the copy in MachE has different tenors and incorporates changes in metre. In the earliest of the Machaut manuscripts, MachC (c.1353), Dame, de qui (ballade 42) has two voices where the later sources give four; Rose, lis (rondeau 10) has three voices where the later sources give four; and Mors sui (virelai 29/26) has just one voice where the later sources give two.Footnote 34 Here, then, pieces that seemed complete in one scoring went on to be revised in versions with richer texture.
More puzzling are instances where Machaut appears to have reduced the number of voice-parts. The copies in MachE of Une vipere (ballade 27) and Se vous n’estes (rondeau 7) are for three voices with contratenors where the other manuscripts have two; that of De toutes flours (ballade 31) is for four voices where the other manuscripts have three. In each case, the seemingly added voice meshes very well with the existing counterpoint of the songs; and its omission seems to leave a hole in the texture at certain points. It seems very unlikely that these are instances of Machaut adding voices late in life to pieces that had been previously complete without them; rather it looks as if he began by composing the three- and four-voice versions but reduced them to two and three voices in distributing them, most probably in keeping with a shift in his compositional aesthetic. The fuller versions remained among his papers and were fished out after his death for copying into MachE. Here the post-première revision consists of reinstating early versions abandoned by the composer, though this was quite possibly undertaken without the composer’s authorization. Elsewhere in MachE, there are post-première revisions by hands other than the composer’s: the added contratenors for On ne porroit (ballade 3) and Biaute qui (ballade 4) are consonant with Machaut’s style, whereas those for Je sui aussi (ballade 20) and De Fortune (ballade 23) are not.
There are also instances of works for which revisions are apparent within the substance of the music. The second part of Pour ce que tous (ballade 12) in MachC differs from copies in the later sources;Footnote 35 similarly, the opening of ballade 30 (Pas de tor) as given in MachVg and MachB differs from the reworked version in the later manuscripts MachA and MachF–G.Footnote 36 The differences here are not so great as to vitiate the identity of the work, but they are sufficient to indicate compositional intervention. In both cases, they arise from the omission of a dot of division in the notation; and given the role that Machaut indicated for performance in the completion of his compositional process, one may speculate that these revisions came about initially through accidents on the parts of performers failing to take account of the dots of division. The resulting displacement of the counterpoint pleased Machaut, who incorporated it into a revised version of the piece. Perhaps the displaced counterpoint in ballade 4 (Biaute qui) came about similarly through performance error in a first run-through, was found to be a fitting correlate for the word ‘etrange’ and was therefore retained.Footnote 37 If so, the accident happened here before the première, so that no earlier version remains.
The Machaldian dilemma: première versus oeuvre
Machaut’s work was conceived as finished and fixed by the time of its first presentation to the audience. By and large, this finished form was the one that was transmitted and that continued to be transmitted thereafter. In a few cases, though, Machaut had second thoughts, and those second thoughts created anomalies: works coexistent in more than one finished state. Machaut’s idea of his works as belonging to an ongoing larger work, his oeuvre, preserved for posterity in his Book and the specially prepared manuscript copies of it, created this possibility. Even though a work had been formally given to the patron in the act of the première, Machaut maintained proprietorial rights over it. If he had a better idea for a piece, he did not hesitate to revise it accordingly. Perhaps in the Book, the earlier version was removed and the later one installed in its place. However, the copying of the oeuvre at various stages during its development into replica manuscripts meant that post-première revision led to the simultaneous circulation of different versions of certain pieces.
Machaut’s authorial pride overcame the proprieties of the patronage system. Although the work was officially finished, his sense of the importance of his achievement as a whole meant that further refinements could be entertained. Had he been more fully engaged with writing for real patrons, this might have posed a problem; indeed, it might never have occurred to him to do it. His desire for control over his work, aided no doubt by the amenable personal circumstances of his high standing in courtly circles, led him to absorb patronage into the work itself, as an allegory of its creation. He controlled the patronage and reserved the right to assert his judgment on the work even after its formal acceptance by the patron. During an era of increased interest in the modalities of writing within musical practice, Machaut made a stand for a culture of written music.Footnote 38
