We sometimes think that Alejandro Planchart's association with Du Fay goes back to 1972, when he published his Musical Quarterly article repositioning the Mass cycles. That, at any rate, could be seen as the official start of his preoccupation with Du Fay, witnessed by significant publications almost every year since (though at the same time he was no less prolific in his publications about Beneventan chant). He actually signed the contract for this book in 1976: so forty-two years to delivery, and forty-six years of publications leading up to it. But Planchart and Du Fay go back a lot further, not just fifty-two years to 1967, when he issued his first LP of Du Fay with Capella Cordina on Lyrichord, but fifty-four years to his edition of the three Caput Masses, one of which everybody at the time thought was by Du Fay. Anyway, now aged 83, he has eventually published the long-awaited book in two elegant volumes.

And it was absolutely worth waiting for. The broad outlines of the story will be familiar to anybody who has been following his publications over the years. But there is now so much more detail, so much more texture. This is the result of years going through and through the archival material. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he sat every day in the Vatican archives between when teaching ended at Santa Barbara and when the Vatican closed for the summer in the middle of July. Presumably he then went on to Lille, where the Cambrai Cathedral documents received similar treatment. In any case, the first appendix here (nearly a hundred pages of archival details, almost all published for the first time) lists all the known petits vicaires at Cambrai Cathedral in the long fifteenth century; the next (pp. 784–91) lists the magistri puerorum there for the same years, a totally absorbing document since most of the people concerned had a substantial role in the history of fifteenth-century music, and Planchart has large quantities of new information about nearly all of them; then (pp. 792–7) he gives all the known grammar teachers in the cathedral. The kind of new detail offered here contributes a lot to the texture of the body of the book: he has innumerable footnotes and comments fleshing out the bald details of the life.Footnote ¹ Oh, and the next appendices (pp. 798–856) comprise complete transcriptions of the executors’ account and inventory of Du Fay's estate followed by his will. Only the will has been printed previously (by Houdoy in 1880, and reprinted by Haberl in 1885).

The biographical account in volume 1 also includes a floor-plan of Du Fay's house, a photograph of the surviving fragment of its cellar-wall, various early plans of Cambrai Cathedral and its surroundings, with Du Fay's house indicated. His discussion of the music, in volume 2, opens with an intriguing general chapter on Du Fay's conception of himself as a composer or musicus. Then he discusses almost every work credited to Du Fay or in Planchart's view probably by him. Some of the discussion is inevitably heavy reading, not least because so many of the musical examples are presented in landscape format when they could so easily have been reduced slightly and presented in portrait: the musical discussions are mostly in volume 2, with an extent of well over 600 pages, so it is not so easily turned on its side. But there is no question that all future discussions of Du Fay's music will need to begin from Planchart. Everything is fuelled by his profound understanding of church archives (primarily the Vatican and Cambrai Cathedral, but many others besides), his profound understanding of liturgy and chant, and his absolute commitment to detail.Footnote ²

Despite that, there are a few matters on which it seems important to put down a marker. Most of these have already been in the literature for some years, but they turn up again in the present book; and it seems time to clarify them.

First, Du Fay's birthdate, given here as 5 August 1397. It is there in the 2001 Grove and in the English Wikipedia (though not in the German, which firmly states that his birthdate cannot be established). Planchart's view, originally stated in 1988, was that Du Fay would have followed the known belief of Cardinal d'Ailly, who ‘even toyed with the idea or returning to the symbolic age of thirty for ordination’.Footnote ³ And that since we know he was ordained priest between April 1427 and March 1428, he was therefore born in 1397. Further to that, he asserted that his birthday would have been on 5 August, because in 1470 he established his obit at Cambrai as 5 August.Footnote ⁴ This is the purest guesswork, and Planchart concedes this with almost a page of counter-considerations before deciding to stay with his original proposal.Footnote ⁵ What he does not say is that birthdays were rarely celebrated before the Reformation, except in the case of high nobility, whose birthdays were recorded for the purposes of casting horoscopes: so far as one can tell, most people did not even know their birthdays.Footnote ⁶ Certainly, as Planchart argues in detail elsewhere, there seems initially to have been some dispute as to whether Du Fay or the archdeacon of Antwerp would get 5 August;Footnote ⁷ but there could be many explanations of that, and his obit at Soignies was on the equally mysterious 12 June. Now Planchart brings a new consideration to the table (pp. 337–8), namely that the gift to Du Fay of a Doctrinale in 1410–12 is not only unique among the documents of Cambrai cathedral in the fifteenth century (we must, and probably can, take his word for this and similar statements: he really has looked at an awful lot of documents over the years) but also a perfectly extraordinary gift for a child, since this is an enormous and complicated book. If Du Fay was 14 or 15 at the time, that would just look precocious; but if he was only 11, as we had all assumed, it would be absurd. This I wholeheartedly accept; but I still insist that the date of 5 August 1397 is an unfounded guess and should be eradicated from the record. Besides, there is a further problem with the information as presented here: in 1988 Planchart stated that the document concerned is dated 1410–12, explicitly qualifying Craig Wright's earlier date 1411–12.Footnote ⁸ In the present book (p. 18) he gives the dates as 1411–12 without further discussion; later (p. 337) he gives the date as 1411. Obviously the difference is of some importance in the circumstances, particularly since Planchart proposes (pp. 60–2 and 465) three Mass movements as having been composed in 1414, prior to Du Fay's visit to the Council of Constance.Footnote ⁹ I happen to be happy with that proposal; but I am nervous about the surrounding documentation and argument.

Second, occasion for the Mass Se la face ay pale. Planchart had originally suggested that it was composed for the wedding of the Dauphin Louis and Charlotte of Savoy in 1451; and later he suggested that it could have been for the wedding of Prince Amadeus of Savoy to Yolande de France at Le Cleppé in October 1452. Then he endorsed Anne Robertson's assertion that ‘Composers rarely, if ever, wrote full-blown polyphonic settings of the Ordinary for the nuptial Mass during Du Fay's lifetime’, apparently forgetting that there is not a single Mass ordinary cycle that can be associated unambiguously with any event in the fifteenth century. The early history of the Turin Shroud is mysterious: we know that Marguerite de Charny, comtesse de Villarseyssel, passed it to the ducal family of Savoy on 22 March 1453,Footnote ¹⁰ and that it was formally installed in the Sainte Chapelle at Chambéry in 1502.Footnote ¹¹ But all the evidence indicates that the ducal family wished to keep quiet about their acquisition, at least in the early years; and my own view was that there was no case to be made for associating the Mass with the Shroud. Now Planchart brings on a new consideration (p. 248), credited to Anne Robertson. This is in an article by the Lausanne historian Eva Pibiri, who states that new Masses (misse nove) were sung in the presence of the ducal family, apparently before the Shroud, in the Franciscan house of Rive, near Geneva, on 8 and 25 April and 1 and 6 May 1453.Footnote ¹² This completely changes the picture. At last I am prepared to believe that the Mass Se la face ay pale was most likely composed to celebrate their acquisition of the Shroud.

Third, composer of the combinative chanson Il sera pour vous combatu / L'homme armé. The chanson survives in two sources: anonymously in the Mellon chansonnier, with only three voices; and in the Casanatense chansonnier with an added voice and an ascription to ‘Borton’. Given that the song is addressed to Simon le Breton, a singer in the Burgundian court chapel, one might be inclined in any case to guess that it was composed by one of the other known composers there, namely Robert Morton, Gilles Joye or Constant van Languebroeck. Given in addition that the ascriptions in the Casanatense chansonnier are written in a beautiful littera antiqua alla romana script by a scribe who made many mistakes (including spelling Josquin's name in seven different ways), it seems reasonable to accept Morton as the composer. But I do not wish to insist on this. What I do wish to insist on is that there is no rational basis for crediting the song to Du Fay. Planchart's arguments include: (a) the consideration that Du Fay plainly knew Simon le Breton very well, and even mentions him in his will; (b) that the joshing tone of the poem could only be from someone who was on ‘tu’ terms with Simon (though the song always addresses him as ‘vous’); and (c) that Du Fay at his death owned a copy of the works of Virgil (which is relevant to the cycle of six anonymous L'homme armé Masses in Naples, but not to this song).Footnote ¹³

Fourth, occasion for the Mass L'homme armé. In the same article, Planchart argued that the L'homme armé Masses of Du Fay and Ockeghem were both commissioned by Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy for a meeting of the Order of the Golden Fleece. He wrote (p. 335):

I cannot see how Planchart reached that conclusion. But now he has revised it and states his current view (p. 273) that the two Masses were indeed for performance at the general meeting of the Order of the Golden Fleece at St-Omer in May 1461, adding that ‘already by 1460 it was clear to all, including the two composers involved, that Charles [VII] was dying, and that the future king of France was, in fact, under the protection of Philip the Good’. All well and good, and the suggestion is highly attractive. There is just not a shred of evidence to support either Philip the Good's involvement or the date. Moreover there is an alternative occasion that is at least documented. On 15 March 1464 there was extra payment to the petits vicaires ‘for singing in the procession and the Mass on the day of “the proclamation of the crusade”’ (p. 281: it would be good to have the original wording).

Fifth, name of the Mass Sancti Anthonii de Padua. New to this book is the renaming of the Mass as the Mass for St Anthony of Padua and St Francis. That is because the Mass Propers for St Anthony of Padua, who was a Franciscan, have the same Gradual and Offertory as St Francis and because the Propers for St Anthony of Padua in the manuscript Trento 88 are immediately followed by those for St Francis (where the Gradual and Offertory are not repeated) and because we have later evidence, from Spataro, that one movement of the St Anthony of Padua cycle and one movement of the St Francis cycle are by Du Fay. Among the problems here are the almost complete certainty that the Trento 88 Propers (in void notation) are at some stemmatic distance from Du Fay's originals (in full black notation); and there is some support for the view that they reached Trento via Vienna. But far more seriously, in his own will Du Fay refers to the Mass quite specifically as Sancti Anthonii de Padua, with no mention of St Francis. And very shortly afterwards in the will he refers to the paper manuscript that contains his Mass for St Anthony Abbot and his Requiem. We have the information we have, and it is unhelpful to embellish it on such slender grounds.

Sixth, the contribution of Heinrich Besseler. It is well known that in the Nazi years Besseler made a lot of decisions that, with the knowledge of hindsight, look wrong. It is also widely agreed that the Besseler of the years after 1945 was no longer the equal of the magnificent scholar seen in his publications of 1925–35. In addition, everybody who has used Besseler's Dufay edition knows that some volumes have considerable errors. Now Planchart has done a new edition, and dated it 2008–14 in his bibliography; but he has made only three of its twelve parts publicly available (on the DIAMM website). Usually Planchart gives reference to the Besseler edition as well as to his own, but often enough he refers only to his own edition and his own bar numbers. Presumably the rest will become available in due course, but in the meantime his discussions are not always easy to follow.

Seventh, the reconstruction of fauxbourdon voices. For his one musical example of a fauxbourdon hymn (Ex. 11.1 on p. 431), Planchart borrows the reconstruction from Besseler (whom he otherwise regularly scorns) rather than the more musical Gerber. As I have said elsewhere, all Du Fay's early fauxbourdon pieces work far better if the missing voice is a third above the tenor, with a fifth at cadences.Footnote ¹⁴ For his later fauxbourdon pieces he seems to have followed the system of a fourth below the top line. When I discussed this, the one case that puzzled me was the post-communion of Du Fay's Mass Sancti Iacobi, unique to Bologna Q15, which explicitly states that the missing voice is a fourth below the discantus but which again works musically far better if it is a third above the tenor, with a fifth at cadences. Planchart implicity accepts this: at least, he states (p. 573) that the post-communion, as he and Besseler reconstruct it, has far more jarring dissonances than anything else of Du Fay. But it was for me a relevation to read (pp. 571–2) that there is a plain textual problem with the Alleluia of that Mass, which demonstrably has the text all in the wrong places for that movement, also unique to Bologna Q15. That is to say that in some respects Bologna Q15 is rather less authoritative than we had once thought for the music of Du Fay; and I think we can perhaps trust our musical instincts rather more in suggesting that the written instructions for the post-communion may not be authentic.

Briefly, there is plenty more to discuss about Du Fay and his music.