Guillaume Dufay

1397–1474

Poet
Composer

The Sacred and the Secular.

Guillaume Dufay (1397–1474) was born near Cambrai in northern France, where he is first recorded as a member of the cathedral choir in 1409. He became a priest and received a degree in canon law from the University of Bologna. Throughout his career he traveled widely, being associated with the court of Burgundy, the Papal Chapel, the duke of Savoy, and the Malatesta family in the Italian towns of Pesaro and Rimini. He was appointed a canon (a member of clergy on permanent staff) of the Cathedral of Cambrai by Pope Eugenius IV, and he returned there at the end of his life. Dufay's compositions are widely considered to be among the finest creations of his generation. His works include settings of the Ordinary and the Proper of the Mass, Latin motets and hymns, and secular songs in Latin, French, and Italian. His Mass for St. Anthony of Padua may have been written for the dedication of Donatello's great altar in the Church of St. Anthony in Padua in 1450. He was one of the earliest to write cyclic masses based on non-sacred material: his Missa Se la face ay pale (1452) is based on a love song he had written earlier. Of the many outstanding compositions by Dufay, two of his motets are especially significant in terms of their commemorations. His Nuper rosarum flores was written in 1436 for the consecration of Santa Maria del Fiore, the Florence cathedral, on the completion of the dome by Fillipo Brunelleschi. Lamentatio Sanctae Matris Ecclesiae was written in 1454 on the occasion of the Banquet of the Feast of the Pheasant in Lille, in which Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, pledged to recapture Constantinople and reunite the Holy Roman Empire. The borrowed tenor in this motet is from the Lamentations of Jeremiah in Latin, with a French text in the upper voices that glosses (that is, translates and explains) that of the tenor.

sources

David Fallows, Dufay. Rev. ed. (London: J. M. Dent, 1987).