At the end of the festivities, the guests take their leave, and the Lover lingers so that he can speak privately with his lady. In this meeting they exchange rings, with Hope officiating in a kind of quasi-formal acknowledgement of their status as lovers, and as the Lover departs he composes a rondeau to express his feelings. The rondeau is the shortest of all the lyric forms practised by Machaut, and its two-line refrain, ‘My lady, my heart remains with you, / Though I am leaving you behind’, encapsulates the Lover’s feelings of the moment, conveying the impression that the rondeau was composed on the spot. This song is extremely melismatic, the words nearly getting lost in a sea of polyphonic voices. Is it fanciful to hear in the cascading notes something like the abundant happiness that the Lover is feeling in that moment?

from notes by Anne Stone © 2023