A recurrent premise in the secondary literature, and one that rests on the very slimmest of evidential foundations, is that Janequin was closely connected with and even a dependent of the powerful and influential Guise family. The Guise dynasty had its power base in Lorraine, on France’s eastern frontier, delicately balanced between French and Imperial territories. Staunch Catholics, the Guises produced a number of notable warriors and churchmen, as well as contributing to the royal houses of Europe (Mary, Queen of Scots, was a Guise). Their loyalties in the conflict between the emperor and the French were decidedly on the side of the French, and their influence lasted well into the seventeenth century.

Noting that along with his elevation to ducal status in 1528, Claude, Duke of Guise (1496–1550) was accorded the parallel honor of calling himself “Royal Master of the Hunts,” and noticing that Attaingnant printed Janequin’‘s LM4 “La chasse” (“The hunt”) in that same year, Stuart Carroll has proclaimed that Janequin composed the work “for Claude” and then went on to serve the Guise family intimately for the next thirty years.^[1] Claude was the seventh child of Rene II of Lorraine, and spent much of his youth at the court of France, growing up side by side with Francis I. He served at Francis I’s side at the battle of Marignan (1515) and was a trusted military leader and royal counselor through much of his life. He may also have acquitted himself with dignity and enthusiasm as the royal master of the hunts, but until corroboration to the contrary is presented, it seems more likely that Janequin’s “La Chasse” was composed, not for Claude, but for the king himself, and performed for Francis in person during his presence in Bordeaux in 1526.^[2]

The key evidence for a “Guise connection” was provided by Janequin himself in the Premier livre des inventions musicales (1555.) Janequin dedicates the collection to Claude’s warrior son François, now second duke of Guise, and in the course of what is essentially a request for funds, the composer remembers “the singular affections and good will bestowed on me by your departed uncle, the illustrious Cardinal of Lorraine.” The character of these singular affections is not specified, but it is apparent that Janequin sincerely hopes the nephew will follow the uncle’s generous example.

The uncle in question was Jean, Cardinal de Lorraine (1498–1550), Claude’s younger brother. He was given his first bishopric in 1505 at the age of seven, and in the course of his life accumulated six more bishoprics, five archbishoprics and was named cardinal at the age of twenty. The wealth generated by these multifarious appointments enabled him to cultivate the arts on a lavish scale, and his magnanimity was legendary. In the more or less accepted traditions of Renaissance princes accorded high ecclesiastical position he didn’t let the implied austerity of religious responsibility curb his appetite for life. He lived well, ate well, had innumerable lovers and surrounded himself with fine things and the people (artists, writers, musicians) who created these fine things. He was also a close personal friend of the king and a royal counselor. There is no doubt that if he had wanted to, Cardinal Jean de Lorraine could have afforded to have Janequin in his household. Viewed as wasteful and profligate by Protestant reformers, Jean de Lorraine, in addition to being an important and effective ecclesiastical administrator (reassuringly orthodox but not fanatical) and a valued and trusted diplomat (widely respected for his knowledge of Italian) was a kind of Minister of Culture before the fact, ensuring that the court and the nation supported and accumulated magnificence in appropriate measure. The defining (and certainly apocryphal) anecdote about Jean has a beggar, discovering the size of the alms he had just received exclaiming “That must have been the Christ himself, or else the Cardinal of Lorraine!”^[3]

There are, however, no extant documents that even hint that Janequin enjoyed “live-in” status or residential patronage as a member of the cardinal’s household. Jean maintained a house in Paris but spent most of his time following the court from chateau to chateau or shuttling back and forth between France and Italy on diplomatic missions. With documents connecting Janequin to Bordeaux from 1512 to 1531, and other documents fixing Janequin in Angers between 1533 and 1548, there is really no convincing timeslot for this suggested service.

This is not to say that opportunities for contact between the cardinal and the composer were not present. As trusted counselor to Francis I, Jean de Lorraine accompanied the king on many of his journeys, and the cardinal was in Bordeaux in 1526 following the release of the king from his Spanish exile, at which time Janequin’s employer (the archbishop of Bordeaux) served as host for the royal entourage. As noted above, circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that Janequin’s “La Chasse” was part of the royal entertainment during the courts visit, and responsibility for saying a few polite words and conferring a small purse to the purveyors of the evening’s entertainment may well have fallen to the cardinal as the king’s “minister of culture.”

Another possibility is that the composer was invited to the cardinal’s residence in Paris. The first hard evidence that Janequin travelled to Paris is from 1549, but music by Janequin appears in close to twenty Attaingnant volumes between 1530 and 1539, and it seems likely that for at least a few of these, the composer felt that being personally present during the publishing process was warranted. Once in Paris, the center of activity for the composer would have been Attaingnant’s printing shop on the Rue de la Harpe, a three-minute walk from the cardinal’s residence in what is now the Musée Cluny. Given the cardinal’s reputation for generosity and appreciation of the finer things in life (in the words of Daniel Heartz “untrammelled by Puritan meanness”^[4]), and given the attention that “La Guerre” had accrued for Janequin, it is not difficult to imagine a messenger from the cardinal appearing at Attaingnant’s shop with an invitation, one that almost certainly contained the expectation of musical performance, as well the promise of food, drink, good company well met, and a purse of some size or other at the end of the evening.

Unfortunately, “imagine” is the key word in these scenarios, and if the support of the cardinal had been truly extraordinary, we would have expected some tiny reflection of this in the historical record. While the household records of Jean are less available than those of other members of the Guise family, his generosity is recorded in a number of sources.^[5] None of these mention Janequin, and we are constrained to base our estimate on the size and frequency of the cardinal’s largesse on the composer’s dedicatory epistle, the nuances of which are clearly designed to motivate generosity on the part of the late cardinal’s nephew.

Jeans’s nephew, was François, Duke de Guise (1520–1563). Son of the warrior Claude, François was a warrior himself with the nickname “Scarface” and an orthodox-bordering-on-fanatic Catholic. He was not famous for his support of the arts, although the household records of both Claude and François Guise contain diverse mentions of singers and musicians. Significantly, Janequin is not mentioned in any of these sources. However, the composition of three late battle chansons, LM210a/b “La prise de Boulogne”/”La réduction de Boulogne,” LM235 “La bataille de Metz,” and LM254 “La guerre de Renty” has fueled speculation about a direct and continuing connection between Janequin and members of the Guise clan. What is difficult to establish in these cases is whether the pieces were results of princely patronage or commercial opportunism: were they commissions, written with a reasonable expectation of financial reward from a specific person, or just hopeful shots in the dark?

“La prise de Boulogne” and “La réduction de Boulogne”

LM210a “Pour toy ton prince” (“La prise de Boulogne”) and LM210b “Réveillez-vous Boulongnois” (“La réduction de Boulogne”)^[6] are two parts of a unit written to celebrate the return of Boulogne to French control in March of 1550. Being newly established in Paris in 1550, and certainly doing what he could to curry favor with the court, Janequin (acknowledged composer of the well-known “La Guerre”) no doubt felt it incumbent on himself to celebrate the event in music. Compared to Francis I’s glorious victory at Marignan, however, the circumstances surrounding the retaking of Boulogne made the job of image-shaping on behalf of the new monarch problematic, to say the least.

The fall of Boulogne to the English on September 13th, 1544, had been in the face of overwhelming odds, and there was little that the defenders could have done—unless, of course, they had been accorded sufficient reinforcements.^[7] The persons responsible for the defense of the city were nonetheless made subjects of trials for dereliction of duty, resulting in at least one execution. It later turned out that the convictions had been based on perjured evidence, but the trials themselves are an indication of the sense of national shame felt about the loss of the city. Henry II was determined to retake Boulogne, and he visited the area during the summer of 1547, reinforcing some forts. The real military action started in the summer of 1549. Several forts were taken, and English supplies were cut off, but by the fall of 1549, shelling of Boulogne had not produced capitulation, and Henry and his two principal lieutenants, Montmorency and François de Guise, retired to the capital, leaving events in the hands of negotiators. A treaty was signed on the 24th of March 1550, in which the English, after receiving considerable indemnities from the French, agreed to abandon Boulogne, leaving a month later. Henry made his official re-entry on the 15th of May 1550. Among the more important of the ceremonial aspects he performed that day was the re-establishing of a chapel to the virgin, destroyed by the English, to which the king, queen, and several other notables (including François de Guise who had just become duke upon the death of his father) made lavish gifts.

Since, apart from a few lesser military actions, the city was retaken by a combination of strategy and negotiation, the amount of battle-like material that would have been appropriate is limited. What made things worse was the general feeling that a large segment of Boulogne’s population had not really exerted themselves in preventing the English occupation. The text of part 1, LM210a “Pour toy ton prince,” chastises the Boulogne population for the trouble and nuisance they have caused, and for making alliances with “known traitors.” The king, however, according to the author of the text, is not without charity, and the inhabitants are now offered the opportunity to put things right by giving their monarch an appropriate reception.

After this somber preamble, the text of the second section, LM210b “Reveillez vous, Boulongois,” is more upbeat, making room for some onomatopoetic devices related to dancing, playing instruments, and shooting off canons. These sections are not particularly extensive, however, and the main theme of part 2 is a delicate reminder to the Boulonnais that if they know what’s good for them, they will show up (“chacun vienne en personne”) at Henry’s royal entry and make it a successful occasion.

Musically, the “La prinse de Boulogne” is reminiscent of another piece celebrating royal fortunes, LM17 “Chantons et sonnons” of 1530. Both pieces make extended use of C major tonalities and what can justifiably be called “trumpet themes.” At something over a hundred measures (in modern transcription), the piece is considerably shorter than LM3 “La guerre” (ca. 1515) and LM235 “La bataille de Metz” (1554), but considerably longer than the average courtly chanson.

The piece would not have been written before March 24th, 1550 (the date of the treaty), and was published for the first time on September 9th, 1551, by Nicolas Du Chemin.^[8] A delay of almost a year and a half is not unknown in the printing industry at this time, due both to the mechanics of printing and varying sales strategies by the publishers. Normally, however, one would expect celebratory works to be promoted as close to the event as possible. This is not the case for the two sections of the Boulougne panegyric. Instead, they were tacked onto yet another reprint of the “good old boys”: the “fifth book” of 1551 contains the ever popular “La guerre” and three equally perennial bird songs, plus these “two other new songs.”

Why in fact were these two settings composed? It has been suggested that the project was in honor of François de Guise.^[9] Guise was one of the organizers of the military actions around Boulogne (the other was his rival Montmorency), but Guise left the area in the fall of 1549, with the treaty being signed several months later.^[10] Since the text of this piece commits most of its energy toward re-stabilizing King Henry’s status in the area, it seems most likely that the point of the exercise was to focus on the king and not on one of his lieutenants.^[11]

A remote possibility is that “La prinse de Boulogne” was commissioned by the court itself, for performance in connection with Henry’s entry into Boulogne on May 15th, 1550. Despite the less than glorious backgrounds of the day, Henry was bound by circumstances to put a good face on events, and the fact that the de facto official purveyor of celebratory battle pieces was available was certainly not lost on the court. The careful wording of the chanson, with its delicate balance of reprimands and admonitions to renewed loyalty, might have satisfied Henry’s need to appear stern but magnanimous as well as was possible under the circumstances. There are, however, no records or indications of any sort that this was indeed a royal commission.

The fact that Du Chemin waited so long to publish the piece suggests that neither were commercial considerations those that weighed most heavily. A song representing a rousing victory with clear winners and losers would no doubt have quickly found its way into the market, but a negotiated settlement that cost the French a sizeable ransom was not the stuff of which rejoicing in the streets was most easily fashioned. In fact, the way in which Du Chemin bided his time and then tacked the piece onto an anthology of old standards (the 5th livre of 4. September 1551) almost suggests a certain embarrassment over the whole event.

Why then, and when, was the piece written? There is no doubt that in 1550, Janequin desired a closer connection to the court. He had recently relocated from Angers to Paris, most likely to be closer to his publishers and to the opportunities for patronage that the court represented. This is shown by subsequent dedications to the Queen and the Guise family. There is no doubt either that Janequin was more than conscious of his contribution to the national image-making around Henry’s father, Francis I. Thus, faced with what was despite everything a national event, it would seem that Janequin had little choice. If he ignored the event, he would be doing very little indeed to encourage the new relationship with the court, that he had moved to Paris to foster. But by contributing anything at all, he would be entering the minefield of tensions between Montmorency and Guise, between the Queen and Diane d’Etampes, and between past military shortcomings and present realities. Whatever he did, he would have to tread lightly.

Realizing that he was damned if did and damned if he didn’t, Janequin composed a text that expressed a personal commitment to royal orthodoxy appropriate to the political mood in the spring of 1550. He underlined the shortcomings of certain elements in Boulogne, dwelled on the king’s magnanimity and underscored everyone’s duty and pleasure in celebrating his welfare. He stayed as far away as possible from the martial details in both text and tone, and clad everything in a musical mode that would be easily adapted by the kings trumpet players. Having done so, he then quietly sent the work in manuscript form to the court with his compliments, suggesting that they might use it if and when they saw fit. Whether or not it was then performed would have been immaterial to the composer: he had established his loyalty, underlined his orthodoxy, demonstrated his generosity, and covered his back. A year and a half later when the work finally appeared in print, Janequin was busy with the development of more promising and profitable projects than that which involved the troublesome Boulognese.

LM254 The battle of Renty: “Branlez vos piques”

In the spring of 1554, the emperor, with an army of forty-five thousand men, appeared to have designs on Meziere. The French assembled an army of approximately the same size, and on the 10th of August began preparations to attack a small fort at Renty, 40 km southwest of Calais. On the 13th of August, imperial forces engaged the French in some woods outside Renty. The French forces were on the ascendancy when night fell, at which point Montmorency called off the pursuit, thereby allowing the emperor to occupy the fort, even though the imperial forces had sustained losses. Guise, always more belligerent than the prudent Montmorency, was furious, and it was generally thought that Montmorency’s decision had prevented the French from crushing the imperial army and moving on to take Brussels, the current imperial seat. Soon after, with events in Italy also on his mind, the king decided to suspend operations in the north, and the royal forces were disbanded.^[12]

“La guerre de Renty” survives in two posthumous sources, both from 1559 and both from the presses of LeRoy & Ballard. The “Unziesme livre de chansons nouvellement composées en musique a 4. & 5. parties par plusieurs autheurs …” is devoted to martial topics (“La guerre marine”) and an assortment of other descriptive chansons, including “Le vol de la Perdrix, avec un quarillon de cloches.” There is no further precision of the date beyond the year on the title page, but LeRoy & Ballard had already printed the sixth, seventh (presumably, although lost), eighth, ninth (also lost), and tenth books in 1559, and would subsequently release the twelfth and thirteenth books before the year was out. Thus, it seems likely that the eleventh book appeared closer to the end of 1559 than the beginning.

LM254 “La guerre de Renty” is also found in the “Verger de musique contenant partie des plus excellents labeurs de M.G.Ianequin, a 4.& 5. parties, nouvellement imprimé en 4 volumes, revuez & corrigez par luy mesme, premier livre” that also appeared sometime in 1559. This collection was conceived while Janequin was still living (published as “reviewed and corrected” by the composer) as an impressive anthology of his most extended works, containing as it does all the known larger program pieces except “Le chant des oiseaux” and “Les cris de Paris.”

The text for “La guerre de Renty,” twenty-three loosely rhymed huitains, is more remarkable for what it doesn’t do, than what it does do. The essence of the text can roughly be summed up as “Get ready, it’s time to fight. This victory will be to our honor and to the glory of our liberator.” Since the title announces that the song treats on the battle of Renty, we not unnaturally expect some details of the engagement. There are none! The text unfolds without a single specific reference to any leader, army, battle, or even nation. Neither does it describe any actual military action and has subsequently none of the colorful onomatopoetic features of the other Janequin battle pieces, aside from a bouquet of generic calls to arms of the “a cheval, a mont, a l’estandart” variety. By and large the (brief) references to the god of war (Mars), the encouragements to get out there and kill the enemy, and the promises of glory as a reward for valor could have been applied to any one of a myriad of armed conflicts from the period.

The musical setting of “La guerre de Renty” runs to eighty-eight measures in modern transcription and has a certain sense of urgency, as befits a call to arms. Janequin writes for four voices and divides the poem into five sections, starting in duple time and then alternating duple and triple meters. He sets the duple sections imitatively and the triple meter sections homophonically (standard procedure for Janequin) and uses a good deal of parallelism in setting the couplets. However, it has none of the characteristic onomatopoetic elements that color the larger descriptive pieces and can hardly be judged to narrate a story of any kind. Generically speaking, “La guerre de Renty” is simply a chanson, a rather long chanson, but still just a chanson, containing some nice turns (as usual) but lacking any special identifying textual or musical traits that set it apart. ^[13]

“La guerre de Renty” celebrates events that took place in 1554, but our first record of this piece is from a collection printed in 1559. Why a five-year delay? The probability is that the piece was composed not long after the events it describes. The market for pieces of this nature was at its strongest while the memory of the events was still fresh. If the news of the battle took a couple of days to reach Paris, Janequin could have been at work already by the 15th of August 1554. Given his facility and experience at this point, he could have finished a piece of this nature in a few days. If the piece were then published as a topical broadside (and not as part of a larger collection) to take advantage of the news aspect, the publishing work could have been run through by Du Chemin in the course of another week or so. If this was the case, it should not surprise us that no copies have survived, since a broadside edition of this sort is much less likely to survive the ravages of time than a whole collection, few enough of which have survived.

There is an alternate scenario that should be considered. In this, news of the battle reached Paris and was registered in the public consciousness as a French victory. Janequin eyed the possibility of yet another commission in honor of François de Guise and began work on the composition. After some days, and before the piece had reached print, it became apparent that the Guise faction regarded the event as not a victory at all, but a lost opportunity due to Montmorency’s reluctance to pursue. Janequin then corrected his focus such that he avoided any particular references to the participants and celebrated the event in the most general terms, in the hope of making money on the sale of the piece, even if any kind of patronage was now a lost cause. Even though the piece describes an event in which there was a certain amount of exchange of fire, Janequin left the onomatopoetic possibilities untouched. He also steered clear of any royal panegyric, staying on safer ground instead by invoking the Almighty. As such, it is a work allowing all the parties, regardless of how much honor they were attributed or felt they deserved, to feel some satisfaction. If there is a submerged point of view, one could argue that the urgency of the call to arms reflects the impatience of the Guise faction, thus showing where Janequin’s loyalties lay, inasmuch as he had previously received favors from the Guise family and would court their patronage again in the future. By August 1554, Janequin had probably put considerable effort into the “bataille de Metz” (a siege lifted December 1552), and although it had not yet been published (on July 13th 1555), a dedication to François, duke of Guise, was clearly in the works. Getting “La guerre de Renty” wrong could have seriously jeopardized the Metz dedication.^[14] If this now-benign battle chanson was in fact offered to the purchasing public before 1559, no record has survived. What seems possible is that Du Chemin considered the whole subject of Renty to be politically contaminated and prudently withheld the piece from publication.^[15]

Ultimately, “Le guerre de Renty” appeared in Le verger (LeRoy & Ballard) in 1559, as well as in the collection of martial chansons of the same year released as Unzieme livre. In some respects, Le verger is both retrospective and commemorative. We have no way of knowing how comprehensive the project (“reviewed and corrected by the composer”) was intended to be when it was begun, but after the master’s death, the size of the publication, plus the poem commissioned from Jean-Antoine de Baif in the composer’s honor, leave no doubt that the edition had now become both a comprehensive anthology and a tribute to the composer. Perhaps Janequin proposed including the unpublished “Renty” as part of the retrospective concept. Or perhaps LeRoy & Ballard thought it a natural part of the commemorative material. In either case, even though rivalry between Montmorency and the Guise family was a fact of French court life right up to the death of Henry II and beyond, LeRoy & Ballard may have reasoned that by this time the irritation felt by the opposing parties was no longer sufficiently infected to prevent the publishing of a relatively innocuous paean to a five-year-old French victory.

LM235 “La bataille de Metz: Or sus branslés”

During the summer of 1552, French armies roamed about Alsace/Lorraine, intimidating towns and extending (nominally) the extents of the border. Toward fall, six thousand French, under François, duke of Guise, entrenched in Metz, while the irritated emperor put together a large but poorly supported army (fifty-five thousand troops), and on the 10th of November laid siege to the town. Charles’ forces shelled the walls, but never succeeded in opening a large enough breach to permit an attack. Finally, on the 2nd of January 1553, Charles, out of money, retreated.^[16] The French victory had an enormous symbolic effect, for which the duke de Guise, who had organized the resistance, deservedly received most of the credit.

For Janequin, a resounding new French military victory represented an opportunity, not only to celebrate the national good fortune, but to enhance his income, both from the sale of music books and from the potential largesse of a wealthy prince to whom the work could be dedicated. The project, however, was not without its challenges. First, Metz was not a proper battle, only a siege that was ultimately abandoned. Thereafter, the candidate from whom the largesse was hoped, the duke François de Guise, was not famous as a patron of the arts. Nevertheless, Janequin must have thought the project worth pursuing, because LM235 “Or sus branlés” is the second longest piece he wrote, surpassed only by his 1555 reworking of his own 1528 “La guerre.”

In the final analysis, all the suppositions about a patron-client relationship between the Guises and Janequin are based on one source, the dedication by the composer of to François Duc de Guise of the Premier livre des inventions musicales (the volume containing La Guerre de Metz) published by Du Chemin in 1554.^[17] In this dedication to the nephew, François de Guise, Janequin says that he received “singulieres affections & bonne volonté” from the uncle, the Cardinal Jean de Lorraine. Exactly what might these “singular affections and good will” have been? One of the problems with dedications in this period is that it is seldom clear if they were requests for largess, tokens of gratitude for largess already received, or a refined game of chance-taking, in which it was hoped that the public focus involved would be noted with grace and acquitted with cash. So it is with Janequin’s dedication—its presence reflects an effort of sufficient magnitude (the construction of two-hundred-plus measures of polyphony) that there must have been some kind of strategy behind its elaboration. However, the mechanics of this strategy are not known. Did the composer first make some tentative overtures, and then begin to write, or did he simply sit down and work for several days, hoping for eventual returns from both his publisher and the duke?

The timing of the project does nothing to illuminate the question. At the moment the dedication was penned, the work being dedicated (LM235 “La bataille de Metz”) described an event that was already two years in the past—not exactly seizing the moment in terms of actuality. ^[18] And the logic of the dedication is a bit clumsy, not to say convoluted. Since the siege at Metz happened three years after the Cardinal’s passing, it must have been the reworked a5 version of “La guerre” that Janequin was going to dedicate to Jean de Lorraine, making the mammoth “Guerre de Metz” a kind of opportunistic afterthought. If the relationship between Janequin and François at the time was as recent and tentative as all of this suggests, how much should we then read into the phrase “your devoted chaplain”? All things considered, not, I think, a live-in patronage relationship, with the composer as personal confidant and confessor: rather, just a polite phrase, letting the recipient know that the purveyor of the gift is both devoted and devout (remembering that the Guise clan had little patience with the reform).

“La bataille de Metz” has some exciting moments, and its first performance may have been a resounding success.^[19] The duke of Guise, and a handful of his comrades in arms, may have nodded knowingly at the mentions of the Spaniards and Bourguignons, and thrilled to the triumphant fanfares of the closing section, in which the welfare of the nation and the courage of the defenders is acclaimed. I think, however, that we are on safer ground if we regard “Le guerre de Metz” more as a commercially calculated follow-up in a genre that had shown itself remarkably resilient, than as proof of a residential patronage on the part of the Guise dynasty. For all we know, the militarily preoccupied duke perhaps never even got around to sending a gratuity to the composer, much less incorporating him in his household.

1. Carroll, Stuart. Martyrs and murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe. Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.38-39. ↑
2. On “La Chasse” see Clément Janequin: French Composer at the Dawn of Music Publishing, pp. 55-62 and 69. ↑
3. On Jean Cardinal de Lorraine, see: Colligny1910; Heartz1969:81ff; Knecht1982:279ff; Cloulas1985:175ff. ↑
4. Heartz1969:83. ↑
5. See Freedman, Richard. “Le Cardinal Jean de Lorraine: un prélat de la Renaissance mécene de la musique” in Bellenger, Yvonne, ed. Le mécenat et l’influence des Guises. Paris, 1998. ↑
6. “For you, our prince” (“The taking of Boulogne”) and “Wake up, O ye citizens of Boulogne” (“The submission of Boulogne”) respectively. ↑
7. Ivan Cloulas gives an account of the fall and recapture of Boulogne in Henri II, Fayard 1985, pp. 262–270. ↑
8. In “5e livre du recueil contenant quatre exccellentes chansons anciennes … plus deux aultres chansons nouvelles” RISM J449. ↑
9. Jacques Barbier in “La musique au temps de Claude de Lorraine, Premier Duc de Guise” in Yvonne Bellenger (ed.) Le mécenat et l’influence des Guises. Paris: Champion, 1998. pp.149–151. ↑
10. See Cloulas1985:286. ↑
11. The chanson ends with a tribute to Henry II, the queen, and the royal children (“vive le roy … vive la reyne et les enfants”). By itself, this conventional nod to the dynastic figureheads is not a particularly weighty identifier, and it would not have been out of place in a work where the primary focus was on someone else. However, no such alternate focus (not least, on a member of the Guise family) is present in the text. ↑
12. Cloulas, Ivan. Henri II. Paris: Fayard, 1985, p. 407 and Baumgartner, Fredric J. Henry II King of France 1547–1559. Durham and London: Duke University, 1988, p. 169. ↑
13. French composer and music historian Vincent d’Indy published a version of “La guerre de Renty” (Rouart, Paris, 1916) in which he reconstructed both the altus and the bassus lines (and not just one voice as noted by Lesure and Merritt vol VI: p.180.) D’Indy’s reconstruction can be viewed on BNF’s website Gallica. ↑
14. Barbier1997:151 advances “La guerre de Renty” as part of his evidence that Janequin enjoyed a patronage relationship with François, duke of Guise. My take is that relations between the two men were somewhere between tentative and ephemeral. ↑
15. There is always the possibility that the “Guerre de Renty” was published shortly after the fact (August 1554) in a volume now lost. ↑
16. Knecht 1996:254. ↑
17. Complete text with English translation in the Sources section of this website. ↑
18. “The battle of Metz” would have been written sometime between the lifting of the siege on the 2nd of January 1553 (n.st.) and its appearance in print (by Nicolas Du Chemin) on the 13th of July 1555. The piece was published again in LeRoy & Ballard’s Le Verger of 1559. ↑
19. For an analysis of the text and musical setting of LM235 “La guerre de Metz” see below Chapter 8:24-28. ↑