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Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377) was a prolific poet, composer and civil servant, curating in Rheims at the end of his life a careful, beautiful and thorough record of his work. In a century of war and repeated visitations of plague, Machaut confidently mastered the innovations of poets and composers who preceded him, and created a body of work of staggering complexity and grace unlike anything else – which sounds astonishingly modern!

ETO’s site-specific staging of secular motets and ballades, featuring four male singers and harp, is an introduction to a world of courtly love, dubious salvation, and yearning for peace – in the context of our own world.