In 2015, during an auction, a collector felt adventurous and took a risk: He bought a lot including a statuette, a box, and a small old book. One year later, curiosity led him to contact the Alamire Foundation in Leuven, because there were some old songs in the book and he wanted to get advice from specialists in Renaissance polyphony. 

They couldn’t believe their eyes: It was a fifteenth-century chansonnier. They of course knew all the sources of this period, which formed a group of manuscripts called the “chansonniers de la vallée de la Loire” and which at the time could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The incredible discovery of this sixth source was an important event in the world of Renaissance music: The last chansonnier of the Loire Valley had been discovered almost a century earlier. But above all, it came as a great surprise when it was discovered that twelve of the pieces copied in this chansonnier were unica, transmitted in this source alone, and had been lost for five hundred years, remaining in silence for centuries.

Comparable to the rediscovery of a lost Rubens, this finding immediately aroused great interest in scholarly circles, not only in the field of music, but also in the study of manuscripts. Little by little, the chansonnier is revealing its secrets: The original owner might have been Philippe of Savoy, and a very probable later owner was Margaret of Austria, a major patron of the arts and herself a musician. But there is still a great deal of mystery in many areas. Opinions differ as to the attribution of the “new” pieces, and although three different calligraphies can be distinguished, it is not yet known where and when the manuscript was compiled. 

In terms of tangible knowledge, we will undoubtedly learn a great deal in the coming years thanks to the research conducted by musicologists around the world. For now, however, each song is a small window through which we can glimpse emotions experienced centuries ago and prevent them from fading away.