Dame de qui tourte ma joie vient is attributed to the fourteenth-century French poet and composer Guillaume de Machaut. It is written in the genre known as the ballade, which was originally a dance form on the subject of love, but had, in the fourteenth century, become a more formal polyphonic form probably performed mainly for the intelligentsia and nobility. It is catalogued by Schrade as Ballade No. 42.
The fourteenth-century ballade was a member of the group of genres known as the formes fixed. These forms defined the musical and poetic structure of a work and developed around the turn of the century. The ballade, for example, consisted of a repeated first section followed by a second section, forming the structure AAB. The last line of the second section would be retained through all stanzas (usually numbering three) of the work, forming the refrain.
This work is one of two ballades in Machaut's long narrative poem "Remede de Fortune". Manuscripts of this work contain notated examples of each of the main secular genres in which he wrote: the ballade, lai, rondeau and virelai.
