Chapter 1
Charting Charpentierâs âWorldsâ through his MĂ©langes
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 Charpentierâs time, an artist in the employ of a great noble or a religious house lived a sort of âservitudeâ. He was expected to conform to his masterâs or his patronâs tastes and preferences. Indeed, as the present chapter will show, Charpentierâs 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 Charpentierâs output against the cultural environment in which he was working, this chapter demonstrates how the composerâs 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 Charpentierâs works. This would doubtlessly also shed light on the extent to which he âmodernizedâ 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 âWorldâ that Shaped Charpentier
From 1670 until late 1687, the princely House of Guise put its stamp on the autograph corpus known as the âMĂ©langes de Charpentierâ.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 Charpentierâs creativity, because their dĂ©votions (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 individualâs 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 âMademoiselle de Guiseâ, 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 HĂŽtel de Guise, situated a few hundred paces north of the HĂŽtel de Ville and just to the west ofthe Marais district. The younger princess, Isabelle dâOrlĂ©ans, 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 âMadame de Guiseâ. For her musical dĂ©votions 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 Kingâs 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, Charpentierâs ad hoc post as composer to the Dauphin should be credited to Madame de Guiseâs influence: finagling such a post went far beyond Mademoiselle de Guiseâs sphere ofinfluence.3
Before focusing on some aspects of this multifaceted Guise protection, it is useful to characterize briefly the rather monolithic nature of Charpentierâs music for the two successive âworldsâ in which he lived after his departure from the HĂŽtel 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, Charpentierâs final âworldâ - the Sainte-Chapelle -doubtlessly brought still more constraints, because centuries of liturgical routine had shaped devotions there.5
Constraints and âServitudeâ
Seventeenth-century sources are unambiguous. Mademoiselle de Guiseâs householders were continually being âorderedâ or âcommandedâ to complete one or another chore for Her Highness.6 A composer for the Jesuits was likewise Orderedâ to carry out creative tasks. For example, composer Robert Cambert was careful to obey the reverend fathersâ explicit orders from start to finish of a special commission.7 Indeed, an artist went to great lengths to mirror his employerâs 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 âorderedâ to do so by his employer or protector. Cambert did not begin his piece for the Jesuits until his regular employer at the OpĂ©ra had âorderedâ him to do so; and he had to promise that the commission would not conflict with his ordinary duties at the OpĂ©ra. 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 protegĂ© 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 masterâs death because it belonged to the king;10 and Charpentierâs princely pupil, the duc de Chartres, refused to allow the publication of the opera he had composed under Charpentierâs tutelage.11 Although no similar statement about the Guisesâ 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 HĂŽtel 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 âorderedâ to do things by the Jesuits. In like manner, when Charpentier worked for the Sainte-Chapelle, the chapter would âorderâ 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 MĂ©langes
A tableau of these constraints emerges when the compositions in the MĂ©langes are charted. But first it is necessary to remind ourselves of a few general principles about the MĂ©langes, as a source to interrogate.
Firstly, the MĂ©langes represent Charpentierâs professional activities, not his personal ones. In fact, there is evidence that he kept his personal, non-remunerated work separate from the MĂ©langes. 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 dâĂȘtre 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 âordinaryâ, 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 âgatheringsâ or âfasciclesâ - to which he gave arabic numbers: these are the cahiers franĂois. Charpentier did not say as much, but for the first seventeen-plus years, most of the works in these cahiers correspond to the Guisesâ preoccupations; and after 1688 they reflect what other sources tell us about Jesuit devotions. In other words, these notebooks can be considered Charpentierâs 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 Charpentierâs 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 franĂois.
By contrast, the notebooks to which Charpentier gave roman numerals -cahiers romains - contain âextraordinaryâ pieces for which h...