The Early Music Legend

April 14, 2010 by Norman Lebrecht Last September, there appeared on the market an unusual tribute to the music of the French medieval composer, Guillaume de Machaut. It was the work of Robert Sadin, a Grammy winning producer, and the artists included the Brazilian guitarist and songwriter Milton Nascimento and the jazz singer Madeleine Peyroux. A limelight project from Deutsche Grammophon, once the pre-eminent classical label, it came from the fertile brain of Universal’s president of classics and jazz, Chris Roberts. Here is Sadin on its conception: Our conversation turned to David Munrow, whose early death was a great loss to this world. Munrow had a tremendous vitality – he mastered an astonishing array of instruments and devoted himself to bringing the treasures of medieval and Renaissance music to the awareness of today’s listeners. His recordings have a vibrancy and a sense of adventure which no one who has heard them will ever forget. Chris raised th...

Machaut seems a poet and a musician in equal measure, one of only a handful of figures to show equal mastery of these arts. I first heard his works attending a concert given by David Munrow in the seventies. It was a bleak winter day; the cold was bitter. And somehow the virelai music and poetry of Machaut seemed perfect and timeless. It had a somber bittersweet feeling to it. The music was haunting. On the surface it seemed simple and song-like, but listening to it again (and especially to a purely instrumental performance), the amazing geometric complexities of the works unfolded. Machaut regularly used a novel mirror approach in which a strophe proceeds A-B-C-D, and is then followed by a reversal, D-C-B-A. The effect is striking and introspective. The poetry follows courtly themes of his time, and the image of Douce dame jolie is a wonderful, easily approachable example. For our age, this will seem a simple love song. But to Machaut?s contemporaries it would have been understood to...