Machaut’s Erotic Theology: The Ferrara Ensemble’s Uneven Journey
Guillaume de Machaut: Mercy Ou Mort – Chansons et motets d’amour
Kathleen Dineen, Lima Morin, Eric Mantel, Stephen Grant, Karl Heinz Shackles, Randall Cook, Crawford Young
Ferrara Ensemble/Crawford Young
ARCANA A305 [76:10]
The problem with Machaut—and it’s a glorious problem—is that he won’t sit still. Priest, diplomat, poet, the greatest composer of his century: he slips between categories like mercury between fingers. This music, secular love songs penned by a man in holy orders, embodies contradictions that would have made the Church fathers squirm. The lady is unattainable, cruel, perfect. She’s an abstraction, a theological principle dressed in courtly garb. Desire without consummation. It’s erotica for the spiritually ambitious.
Crawford Young’s Ferrara Ensemble understands this, mostly. Their approach to these virelais, ballades, rondeaux, and polytextual motets shows genuine scholarship—the release was made at the Church of St. Germanus in Seewen, and you can hear that stone resonance, that slight cathedral bloom which suits Machaut’s harmonic language even when he’s writing about unrequited lust. But scholarship and inspiration don’t always arrive at the same rehearsal.
Take the opening motet, “Quant en moy/Amour et biaute/Amare,” performed by unaccompanied voices. It’s clean, professional, utterly correct. The three separate texts weave around each other with the precision of a Geneva watchmaker. But where’s the fever? Machaut’s polytextual motets aren’t academic exercises—they’re arguments, seductions, simultaneous narratives that should make your head spin with their architectural audacity. The Clerks Group, in their 1999 Signum recording, found something rawer in “Trop plus est belle/Biaute paree,” an all-male performance with a relaxed intimacy that felt like eavesdropping on actual 14th-century gentlemen debating the metaphysics of feminine beauty.
The instrumental choices here range from inspired to baffling. That ballade “S’amours ne fait par sa grace” rendered as a solo harp piece? Glacial. Funereal. The harp can dance—medieval harps were lively instruments, not Celtic mist machines—but here the tempo drags like wet velvet. You wait for momentum that never arrives.
Yet when Kathleen Dineen enters on “Il m’est avis qu’il n’est dons de nature,” everything shifts. Her voice has that particular quality of controlled fragility that this repertoire demands—not the vibrato-laden sound of later centuries, but a focused, almost instrumental clarity that can navigate Machaut’s serpentine melodic lines. Accompanied by dolce melos (a guitar-like instrument) and vielle, she makes the ballade tease and shimmer. The interplay between voice and strings suggests conversation, flirtation, the very push-pull of courtly love that animates Machaut’s poetry.
The disc includes eight motets, and here’s where things get complicated. These aren’t the sacred polyphonic structures you’d encounter in Palestrina or Victoria—they’re secular, sometimes bilingual, three-part contraptions where French texts bounce off Latin tenors, where love poetry intersects with philosophical meditation. “De Bon espoir/Puis que la douce/Speravi” pairs two voices with vielle, and if you follow the separate textual strands carefully (the booklet provides everything, bless them), you hear how Machaut builds meaning through collision. One voice hopes, another despairs, the tenor grounds everything with its liturgical fragment. It’s thrilling when it works.
But does it always work here? The rondeau “Rose, lis, printemps de nature” suffers from an odd performance choice: only one voice carries the text while the others vocalize on neutral vowels. Project Ars Nova’s 1994 recording texts all three voices and treats the rhythm with a gentle rubato that brings out the sweet-bitter ambiguity of the poetry. Here it feels stiff, as if the ensemble hasn’t quite decided whether they’re performing a love song or a mathematical demonstration.
Similarly, “Puisque en oubli” emerges lugubrious and heavy when sung by two male voices with vielle. Brigitte Lesne’s 1988 version for Harmonic Records found something lighter, more idiomatic—that particularly French quality of elegant despair that doesn’t wallow. Machaut was writing about suffering, yes, but suffering as an aesthetic principle, not as a dirge.
The disc’s real competition comes from Gothic Voices, whose 1983 Mirror of Narcissus remains the benchmark. Their “Biaute qui toutes autre pere” uses the full three-voice version (the Ferrara opts for the less arresting two-voice variant) and bursts with a lively vitality that makes medieval music sound urgently contemporary. Christopher Page’s ensemble understood that this repertoire needs intellectual rigor and sensual immediacy—not one or the other.
Still, condemnation would be unfair. The Ferrara Ensemble brings genuine expertise to this project, and their previous Arcana recordings of 14th-century French music prove deep immersion in the style. Several pieces here I’d never encountered before, and the disc offers variety in approach: solo vielle on the virelai “He dame de valour,” voices with harp on “De petit po,” constantly shifting the timbral palette. The production is exquisite—a folded cardboard package with a fifty-page booklet featuring manuscript illuminations from Machaut’s Remède de Fortune. Texts in the original with translations into English, Italian, and German. This is how you present medieval music.
The ongoing debate about instrumental participation in this repertoire hovers over the entire enterprise. British scholars and performers—Gothic Voices, the Orlando Consort—have argued persuasively for a cappella performance based on manuscript evidence and contemporary descriptions. The Ferrara Ensemble’s liberal use of instruments reflects a different scholarly tradition, one that emphasizes the practical realities of 14th-century rendition and the improvisatory culture that surrounded written music. Both approaches have validity, but they produce fundamentally different aesthetic experiences.
What we have, then, is a professional, scholarly, occasionally inspired but sometimes earthbound traversal of Mach
