Dufay: Missa L' Homme Arme

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Cat No: 8553087

Release Date: 01 January 2000

Label: Naxos / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 730099408721

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: DUFAY

Description
Guillaume Dufay (c. 1400 - 1474) Missa L 'homme armé Supremum est mortalibus bonum If Dufay's Missa L'homme armé (from the 1460s) had survived anonymously, one could easily believe it to be the work of a breathtakingly ambitious young composer. On the face of it, the Mass appears to be the work of a man determined to impress, keen to show that he is never lost for ideas, that he will not borrow any convention without turning his handling of it into a commentary of some kind - in short, a man who will always go one step beyond convention. The almost over-confident message seems to be: whatever others have done, I can do it better. Yet Dufay was not a young man when he wrote the Missa L'homme armé. In fact he was almost certainly in his sixties, by which time illness had already forced him to turn his mind to his imminent death and the salvation of his soul. Unlike younger composers such as Regis, Caron, and Busnois, who were struggling in low-paid and onerous choirmasterships, Dufay was a wealthy ecclesiastical dignitary at one of the most prestigious establishments in Northern France: Cambrai Cathedral. He had been a musical celebrity ever since he had written his first motets in the 1420s and produced that astonishing series of state motets in the 1430s (including Supremum est mortalibus bonum). These early works had evidently become something of a legend, as they were still being copied and performed thirty years after their composition. Yet the ageing Dufay was clearly not content with his legendary status alone, nor was he particu1arly wedded to the older styles in which he had once proved his international leadership. In the Missa L'homme armé he seems intent to prove (perhaps somewhat like the serialist Stravinsky of the 1950s) that his reputation had never depended on any particular stylistic idiom, but rather on his ability to carry every idiom to a plane of unprecedented artistic perfection. That intention - for a man who had little left to prove in this world (and might at that stage have been more concerned with his record in the next) - is no less remarkable than his undiminished artistic ability. The Missa L'homme armé seems to have become a popular and successful work. It survives in four manuscripts (a large number for any 15th-century Mass), three of which were copied in Italy and one, remarkably, in Scotland, at a time when no other Continental works seem to have been appreciated in the British Isles. More importantly, in 1477 (three years after Dufay's death), the chief music theorist of the time held up the Missa L'homme armé as an outstanding example of the aesthetic principle of varietas ('to be thoroughly imitated'). That aesthetic principle may be hard for us to appreciate today, since the Missa L'homme armé moves entirely within the musical horizon of the 15th century, whereas the modern ear is conditioned mostly by what lay beyond that horizon. Given the astonishing range o
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