REVIEW

GIVEN the acknowledged historical significance of Guillaume de Machaut's Messe de Nostre Dame, it is remarkable that few performances appear to have been scheduled for the 600th anniversary of the composer's death. Clearly, several problems confront anyone attempting to present the work in concert: apart from the dubious box-office appeal of 14th-century church music and the uneasy relationship of liturgical music with the concert hall, this is demanding music, employing a vocal line-up quite different from today's predominant SATB formation and an idiom quite foreign to most of today's singers. Moreover, the Mass has frequently been assumed to require multiple exotic instruments. Ironically perhaps, a further reason why the work is so seldom programmed may be its very accessibility on gramophone records: with several recordings now available, the considerable practical and musicological problems it poses may conveniently be bypassed.

The text-book fame of the Messe de Nostre Dame rests on the fact that it is the earliest complete polyphonic setting by a known composer. It also stands alone among surviving 14th-century settings in being in four parts throughout (rather than three). Although clearly an exceptional work, no special occasion is known for which it may have been written. Nor perhaps need there have been one, since the title ‘de Nostre Dame’, which appears in just one source, merely tells us that it is a mass ‘of our Lady’; the plainsong it uses would qualify it for any of the more important Marian feasts in the Church calendar.

Interest in Machaut's mass in modern times goes back at least to a performance in Paris in 1918, but it was undoubtedly the 1956 recording by the Belgian group Pro Musica Antiqua under the direction of Safford Cape that first brought the work before the general musical public. Awarded a Grand Prix du Disque, the record remained unchallenged in the catalogues for over a decade, since when a further decade has produced a steady succession of at least six more versions. That a 14th-century mass should have been accorded so much attention is a clear sign of the fascination this astonishing music can still hold for musicians of today. However, not only did some of the recordings under consideration follow surprisingly closely on each other's heels, they also bear a greater similarity to each other than one might reasonably have expected, given how little is known about medieval performance practice.