New Perspectives on Marc-Antoine Charpentier

Shirley Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754665793
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351556415
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Classical Music

The tercentenary of Marc-Antoine Charpentier's death in 2004 stimulated a surge of activity on the part of performers and scholars, confirming the modern assessment of Charpentier (1643-1704) as one of the most important and inventive composers of the French Baroque. The present book provides a snapshot of Charpentier scholarship in the early years of the new century. Its 13 chapters illustrate not only the sheer variety of strands currently pursued, but also the way in which these strands frequently intertwine and generate the potential for future research. Between them, they examine facets of the composer's compositional language and process, aspects of his performance practice and notation, the contexts within which he worked, and the nature of his legacy. The appendix contains a transcription of the inventory of Charpentier's manuscripts prepared when their sale to the Royal Library was negotiated in 1726 - an invaluable research tool, as numerous chapters in the book demonstrate. The wide variety of topics covered here will appeal both to readers interested in Charpentier's music and to those with a broader interest in the music and culture of the French Baroque, including aspects of patronage, church and theatre. Far from treating his output in isolation, this book places it in the wider context alongside such composers as Lully, Lalande, Marais, Fran's Couperin and Rameau; it also views the composer in relation to his Italian training. In the process, the under-examined question of influence - who influenced Charpentier? whom did he influence? - repeatedly comes to the fore. The book's Foreword was written by H. Wiley Hitchcock shortly before he died. Hitchcock's own part in raising the profile of Charpentier and his music to the level of recognition which it now enjoys cannot be emphasized enough. Appropriately the volume is dedicated to his memory.

Chapter 1
Charting Charpentier’s ‘Worlds’ through his Mélanges

Patricia M. Ranum

How free was Marc-Antoine Charpentier to follow his Muse? During the three centuries that separate his world from ours, the way society perceives an artist has changed fundamentally. What have changed specifically are the constraints within which the creative person worked, as well as the freedoms he enjoyed. For example, historical evidence reveals that, in Charpentier’s time, an artist in the employ of a great noble or a religious house lived a sort of ‘servitude’. He was expected to conform to his master’s or his patron’s tastes and preferences. Indeed, as the present chapter will show, Charpentier’s creative life was shaped by hierarchical constraints that contrast sharply with the increasing freedom artists enjoyed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet within these constraints, Charpentier developed into a masterful and highly original composer.

By charting various aspects of Charpentier’s output against the cultural environment in which he was working, this chapter demonstrates how the composer’s conditions of employment are mirrored in the content of his autograph manuscripts. Furthermore, the results of this study provide a research tool for other scholars who may be able to discern patterns in his compositional or notational style, and thus gain new insights into how originality could flourish within constraint. For example, charting tonal patterns that prefigure the eighteenth century could provide insights about an evolution towards tonality in Charpentier’s works. This would doubtlessly also shed light on the extent to which he ‘modernized’ some of his early works when he recopied them. One might also chart his Italianisms, for example, void notation or the descending minor tetrachord.¹ This could show whether Charpentier became more Italianate as time distanced him from Rome, or less so, and whether he reserved his Italianate effects for a select group of patrons, or used them for everyone, indiscriminately. And would charting unusual combinations of voices and instruments tell us more about music in female convents, music for sodalities, or vespers at the Jesuits and the Theatines?

The House of Guise: The ‘World’ that Shaped Charpentier

From 1670 until late 1687, the princely House of Guise put its stamp on the autograph corpus known as the ‘Mélanges de Charpentier’.² Musically gifted, but born into a clan of scribes and secretaries, Charpentier lacked ties to the musical guilds of Paris, who protected their own and made life very difficult for outsiders. Without the generosity ofthe Guise princesses, it is highly unlikely that this well-educated but almost penniless orphan would have been given such opportunities to blossom creatively in a variety of musical genres. The two Guise women were a sort of Janus. It is difficult to delineate the role that each of them played in Charpentier’s creativity, because their dévotions (a term denoting either the devotions of a confraternity or a type of religious service - for example, salut or the vespers ofthe Virgin - about which an individual’s worship centred) were so similar that music written for the elite worship services prepared for one woman was usually appropriate for the other. The older princess, Marie de Lorraine, known as ‘Mademoiselle de Guise’, was in her fifties when Charpentier joined her household. She remunerated Charpentier, Chapel Master Du Bois and the members of the Guise Music, and she housed them all in her sumptuous residence, the Hôtel de Guise, situated a few hundred paces north of the Hôtel de Ville and just to the west ofthe Marais district. The younger princess, Isabelle d’Orléans, was just eight years younger than her first cousin, Louis XIV. Widowed in 1671, when Louis-Joseph, due de Guise succumbed to smallpox, she was known to her contemporaries as ‘Madame de Guise’. For her musical dévotions and for the events she sponsored at court, she had access to the Guise Music and the Guise composer. There is evidence that she was among the privileged few who could call on the King’s Music. Madame de Guise has not been given her due: we tend to be so fixated on the elder princess, Mademoiselle de Guise, that we credit her with everything, even events that could only have been sponsored by the younger one. For example, Charpentier’s ad hoc post as composer to the Dauphin should be credited to Madame de Guise’s influence: finagling such a post went far beyond Mademoiselle de Guise’s sphere ofinfluence.³

Before focusing on some aspects of this multifaceted Guise protection, it is useful to characterize briefly the rather monolithic nature of Charpentier’s music for the two successive ‘worlds’ in which he lived after his departure from the Hôtel de Guise. His years with the Jesuits, late 1687 to mid-1698, brought an abrupt change in the genres in which he wrote, as well as in the subject matter of the works. These changes appear to mirror the musical taste ofthe Jesuits at the church of Saint-Louis and the demands of a relatively inflexible liturgical year.⁴ From 1698 until his death in 1704, Charpentier’s final ‘world’ - the Sainte-Chapelle -doubtlessly brought still more constraints, because centuries of liturgical routine had shaped devotions there.⁵

Constraints and ‘Servitude’

Seventeenth-century sources are unambiguous. Mademoiselle de Guise’s householders were continually being ‘ordered’ or ‘commanded’ to complete one or another chore for Her Highness.⁶ A composer for the Jesuits was likewise Ordered’ to carry out creative tasks. For example, composer Robert Cambert was careful to obey the reverend fathers’ explicit orders from start to finish of a special commission.⁷ Indeed, an artist went to great lengths to mirror his employer’s artistic tastes rather than his own, and he avoided showy innovations that might imply that he knew better than his master.

Thus an artist dared not accept an outside commission without having been ‘ordered’ to do so by his employer or protector. Cambert did not begin his piece for the Jesuits until his regular employer at the Opéra had ‘ordered’ him to do so; and he had to promise that the commission would not conflict with his ordinary duties at the Opéra. Nor could Guise householders work for outsiders, unless Mademoiselle de Guise permitted them to do so. She sometimes refused.⁸ These negotiations were conducted very privately, for she did not wish to have her name linked publicly to that ofa protegé or householder.

We also know that patrons were very insistent about maintaining control over the music they commissioned. In Rome the Jesuits obtained a papal order giving them exclusive rights to the music that Giacomo Carissimi had composed for them;⁹ in Paris the Sainte-Chapelle immediately confiscated all music on a music master’s death because it belonged to the king;¹⁰ and Charpentier’s princely pupil, the duc de Chartres, refused to allow the publication of the opera he had composed under Charpentier’s tutelage.¹¹ Although no similar statement about the Guises’ control over the creations of their householders has yet been found, the fact that Marc-Antoine Charpentier published none of the music he wrote for this princely house speaks for itself.

In short, within a princely household or at a religious establishment such as the Jesuit profess house of Saint-Louis or the Sainte-Chapelle, a composer was bound by strong constraints. He wrote what he was ordered to write, and he could not accept outside commissions unless his employer approved. This suggests, of course, that virtually everything that Charpentier wrote from 1670 to mid-1687 was destined for the Guises, or for the privileged few with whom the princesses were willing to share their composer.

Throughout his life Charpentier would have little say in selecting the texts he set to music, or in deciding which religious services merited being celebrated to new music. At the Hôtel de Guise, such decisions would have been the prerogative of Chapel Master Du Bois, who basked in his growing reputation as a Latinist. We have seen that composers were ‘ordered’ to do things by the Jesuits. In like manner, when Charpentier worked for the Sainte-Chapelle, the chapter would ‘order’ him to write a piece.¹² At both establishments, the liturgical text was doubtlessly specified by a member ofthe clergy, for it is unlikely that ecclesiastics would entrust such a momentous decision to an artist. In addition, we know that Jesuits provided Charpentier with texts written especially for one or another event.¹³

The Mélanges

A tableau of these constraints emerges when the compositions in the Mélanges are charted. But first it is necessary to remind ourselves of a few general principles about the Mélanges, as a source to interrogate.

Firstly, the Mélanges represent Charpentier’s professional activities, not his personal ones. In fact, there is evidence that he kept his personal, non-remunerated work separate from the Mélanges. Most of these manuscripts have been lost.¹⁴ Secondly, for more than three decades Charpentier filed his compositions away, chronologically, into two groups. Each group can be likened to a vast daybook, in which he kept a record (and a copy) ofthe work he completed, month after month, year after year. The daybook entries are cryptic. The pieces themselves are usually complete and performable, but patrons, events and venues are rarely specified. With persistence, a researcher can nonetheless identify the raison d’être of many ofthese works, and sometimes the venue and/or patron as well.

Scholars are now in a position to assert that one group of compositions contains the pieces that represented the ‘ordinary’, everyday chores that Charpentier completed in return for room, board and/or wages. He copied these works into the succession of notebooks - he called them cahiers, while some scholars use the terms ‘gatherings’ or ‘fascicles’ - to which he gave arabic numbers: these are the cahiers franÇois. Charpentier did not say as much, but for the first seventeen-plus years, most of the works in these cahiers correspond to the Guises’ preoccupations; and after 1688 they reflect what other sources tell us about Jesuit devotions. In other words, these notebooks can be considered Charpentier’s daybook for everyday business activities. When one of these works was mentioned in the Mercure galant, journalists avoided linking Charpentier to his employers, because the Guises - and later, the Jesuits and the Sainte-Chapelle - preferred not to have their artistic patronage mentioned in print. This silence shaped Charpentier’s creative life. His links to his full-time employers generally went unmentioned, so that the attention would focus on the individual or institution that had commissioned the music. In the charts that accompany this chapter, lighter bars or segments of bars represent statistics gleaned from these cahiers franÇois.

By contrast, the notebooks to which Charpentier gave roman numerals -cahiers romains - contain ‘extraordinary’ pieces for which h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Musical Examples
• Notes on the Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Conventions and Abbreviations
• 1 Charting Charpentier’s ‘Worlds’ through his Mélanges
• 2 Charpentier’s Void Notation: The Italian Background and its Implications
• 3 The Descending Minor Tetrachord in France: An Emblem Expanded
• 4 Repentance, Piety and Praise: Sensual Imagery and Musical Depiction in the petits motets of Marc-Antoine Charpentier
• 5 A Question of Genre: Charpentier’s Messe pour plusieurs instruments au lieu des orgues (H513)
• 6 Charpentier’s Music at Court: The Singers and Instrumentalists of the Chapelle Royale, 1663-1683 and Beyond
• 7 Performance Practices at the Théâtre de Guénégaud and the Comédie-FranÇaise: Evidence from Charpentier’s Mélanges autographes
• 8 ‘Une source peut en cacher une autre’: Added Preludes and Instrumental Cues in the Mélanges
• 9 The Historical Implications of a Distinctive Scoring: Charpentier’s Six-Voice Motets for Mademoiselle de Guise
• 10 Observations on Charpentier’s Compositional Process: Corrections in the Mélanges
• 11 Médée within the Repertory of the tragédie en musique: Intertextual Links and the ‘Posterity’ of Charpentier’s Opera
• 12 The Nature of Fame: Reflections on Charpentier^ Les plaisirs de Versailles and Lalande’s Les fontaines de Versailles
• 13 Charpentier’s Motets melêz de symphonie: A Nephew’s Tribute
• Appendix 1 Mémoire des ouvrages de musique latine et françoise de défunt M.r Charpentier: A Diplomatic Transcription Patricia M. Ranum and Shirley Thompson
• Bibliography
• Index of Works by Charpentier Cited
• General Index