Esperance & oubli

Boethius, a philosopher from late antiquity and a highly respected thinker in the Middle Ages, believed that art couldn’t cure suffering—it only prolonged it. In his masterpiece, The Consolation of Philosophy, he famously called the poetic muses “harlots of the stage,” scolding them with the question: “Who let these harlots of the stage get near a sick man? Not only do they not relieve his sickness with their healing remedies, but they nourish him instead with their sweet poison.”

However, Guillaume de Machaut, one of the most celebrated composers of the Middle Ages, disagreed with Boethius. In many of his works, he argued that music could extend life even through suffering by aestheticising and internalising grief, allowing us to truly experience and process it. This was all thanks to the gift of hope.

You might know that some composers have musical signatures—like BACH for Johann Sebastian Bach or DSCH for Dmitri Shostakovich. Machaut didn’t have a musical signature linked to his name, but he had at least two crucial musical and textual motifs that reappeared across his works. An attentive listener could grasp the meaning even without the words. The first was esperance (hope), and the second was oubli (forgetting). This is why the programme music is named after these two central ideas: Esperance & Oubli.

The programme features Machaut’s lais and motets, as well as two songs from his long romance, Remede de Fortune, in which Hope is a central character. A lai is a lengthy and mostly monophonic piece, usually made up of 10 to 14 double stanzas. The first and last stanzas typically share a similar melody and rhyme scheme, while the others are unique. This creates a complete song suite within a single work. Each stanza in a Machaut lai depicts a different emotional state of the lyrical hero.

Take for example, Le Lay de Plour (The Lay of Lament - Qui bien aimme a tart oublie). It begins as a song about love’s misfortunes, with a woman reflecting on her troubles. It seems to be a typical courtly love lyric, but then, halfway through, the heroine reveals her beloved has died. She’s in shock and moves through different stages of grief: anger, bargaining, madness. The music follows her every emotional shift. In the scene of madness and disorientation, the modal outlines themselves become chaotic—the tetrachords seem to wander up and down without purpose. The piece ends, as is typical for a lai, by repeating the melody of the first double stanza, but transposed up a fifth. It’s the same long, familiar tune, but it sounds different. The heroine has lived through her pain and emerged as herself, but transformed—liberated and cleansed of her sorrow. The entire work is infused with the motifs of both forgetting and hope.

Machaut’s motets are polyphonic and polytextual works. Polyphonic means they are multi-voiced, written for two, three, or four parts. Polytextual means each of those voices has its own unique text. What’s more, these texts are often in different languages! The lowest voice of the motet, called the tenor, often used a small fragment from a liturgical chant. The upper voices, usually in Old French or Medieval Latin, would discuss a variety of topics, most often secular. Each voice would present just one perspective on the issue. The context for this debate was set by the text of the tenor, from the Latin word tenere - ‘to hold’.

The motet Amours qui a le pooir / Faus Semblant / Vidi Dominus at first seems to have a typical, very French, courtly love text in the upper voices: “Oh, I will die a painful death / From these sorrows and flames [of passion].” It uses common ideas from the early 14th century: reason, compassion, generosity, mercy, cruelty, and so on. If you read the upper voices alone, the text seems conventional and uninspired. But the text of the tenor sets a completely different context: “I saw the Lord face to face, and my soul was saved.” The meaning of the piece is instantly transformed. Who are you, people? Can you be seen face to face? Or are you just Faus Semblant (false appearances)? Are you nothing more than cardboard figures, like all these courtly ideas?

In all the motets of the programme, Machaut used melodies from well-known Gregorian chants of his time for the tenor voice. The fragments containing the tenor’s text and melodies will be performed before each corresponding motet.