Machaut, ballads

Guillaume de Machaut
The Ballads

Year 2009

Label Æon

Reference AECD 982

Duration 75:17

Fomat CD (1)

Composer des chansons joyeuses
Lorsqu’on a le cœur triste, voilà qui est bien contradictoire.
Celui qui écrit dans un état d’esprit joyeux, il me semble
Qu’il pourra d’autant mieux exprimer des choses joyeuses.
Et c’est pourquoi mes chants paraissent rudes,
Car ils sont tous dictés par un cœur plus noir que la mûre:
Un cœur triste, affligé, pleurant des larmes de sang.

Ballad 29 (French translation by Agathe Sultan)
Guillaume de Machaut

To compose joyously
From a sad heart – in my opinion this is a contrary thing.
But he who composes from joyous feelings, I say
That he must compose more joyously.
This why my songs seem crude,
Because they are made out of a heart blacker than a berry
A sad, afflicted heart, which weeps tears of blood.

Ballad 29
Guillaume de Machaut

In his ballads, the canon of Reims pushes the rhetorical art to its highest degree, by the magnification of the principles of musical and literary writing. The beauty and the interlacing of the polyphony effectively scrambles, deconstructs and then reconstructs the speech across the two dynamics. The rewriting and reinvention of his ballads, where three texts are superposed and questioned, result in a defined contrast between them, leading to the profound debate of love in an impossible dialogue. With Machaut, the poet/musician, the music profoundly transforms the courtly poetry into a more ambiguous form.