(b before c1429; d after 1472). French playwright and musician. By 17 July 1450, when he is mentioned as organist at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris, he was already designated magister; on 19 October of that year he also became magister cantus puerorum and soon afterwards magister grammatrice, thereby quite exceptionally holding all three posts simultaneously. He resigned the position of organist on 4 January 1454, and left the cathedral at the end of April 1455 to enter the service of Charles, Count of Maine (younger brother of King René of Anjou). He was received as a Bachelor of Theology on 28 September 1456.
Before the end of 1452 Greban wrote a gigantic mystery play, La nativité, la passion et la résurrection de nostre Saulveur Jhesu-Crist, as the title-page of the principal manuscript source reads (F-Pn fr.816). It took four days to perform and had over 200 individual roles. It was one of the most successful of the 15th-century mystery plays; all or parts of it were produced repeatedly in various French towns. The version of the first day in F-LM 6 contains an unusually large number of rubrics indicating the participation of singers and instrumentalists (see Champion, p.174–8). No music specifically composed for the play has survived.
Darwin Smith (forthcoming) has plausibly proposed that he is to be identified with the composer Ser Arnolfo da Francia, or Arnolfo d’Arnolfo (see Giliardi, Arnolfo), who appeared in Florence on 3 September 1473, shortly after the death of the Count of Maine (10 April 1473), and remained in Italy until 1492. Since Arnolfo is described in a papal dispensation of 14 June 1477 as a cleric from the diocese of Cambrai, Smith has further proposed that he could be identified with the theorist Arnulf of St Ghislain, whose Tractatulus is normally dated c1400 but could well be considerably later.
Greban's brother Simon (d 1473), with whom he may have collaborated on the mystery play Actes des apostres, mentioned several composers in his Complainte sur la mort de Jacques Milet (1466).
A. Piaget: ‘Simon Greban et Jacques Milet’, Romania, xxii (1893), 230–43
P. Champion: Histoire poétique du quinzième siècle, ii (Paris, 1923), 133–88
R. Lebègue: Le mystère des Actes des Apôtres (Paris, 1929)
O. Jodogne, ed.: A. Greban: Le mystère da la passion (Brussels, 1965–83)
C. Wright: Music and Ceremony at Notre Dame of Paris 500–1550 (Cambridge, 1989), 30
D. Smith: ‘La question du Prologue de la Passion ou le rôle des formes métriques dans la Creacion du monde d'Arnoul Gréban’, L’économie du dialogue dans l’ancien théâtre européen, ed. J.-P. Bordier (Paris, 1999), 141–65
D. Smith: ‘Arnoul Gréban: éléments de biographie’, Journal des savants (forthcoming)
HOWARD MAYER BROWN/DAVID FALLOWS