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ISSN: 1089-747X
Volume 22 (2016) No. 1
Published 2017
New Perspectives on Marc-Antoine Charpentier. Edited by Shirley Thompson. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010. [xxviii, 385 pp. ISBN 978-0-7546-6579-3.]
Reviewed by Anita Hardeman*
2. Influences on Charpentier’s compositional style
3. Charpentier the recomposer: The Mélanges autographes
6. A diplomatic transcription of the Mémoire
1. Introduction
1.1 A gifted composer who studied in Italy anticipating a brilliant future upon his return to France, Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643–1704) had the misfortune to begin his career around the same time as the Italian immigrant Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687). Lully won the favor of the king, and though Charpentier had a successful career, he never achieved the level of renown enjoyed by his competitor and was largely forgotten after his death. Charpentier’s reputation was restored beginning in the 1950s through the work of scholars such as H. Wiley Hitchcock and more recently Catherine Cessac and Patricia Ranum. The publication of Hitchcock’s Catalogue raisonné of Charpentier’s works in 1982 and a facsimile edition of the Mélanges autographes, the composer’s collection of working scores, starting in 1990, made his compositions more accessible to the public.[1] Articles, biographies, dissertations, editions of scores, and an impressive number of recordings have now made Charpentier one of the best-known composers of the French Baroque. The tercentenary year of Charpentier’s death, 2004, brought two important conferences devoted to the works of the composer; New Perspectives on Marc-Antoine Charpentier had its genesis at the conference held at the Birmingham Conservatoire in Birmingham, UK.
1.2 As editor Shirley Thompson notes in the introduction to the volume, the thirteen essays, written by a mix of new and established scholars and performers, are aimed at specialists and non-specialists alike, and encompass a variety of approaches to the composer and his works. Thompson has organized these individual viewpoints into several groupings by theme, and I have simplified her groupings to four in this review (and my choice of category for each essay does not always match that made by Thompson): external influences on Charpentier’s compositional style, approaches to Charpentier’s emendations of his works, information in the Mélanges about performers and contexts for performance, and the reception of Charpentier’s works.
2. Influences on Charpentier’s compositional style
2.1 The question of Italian influence shadowed Charpentier throughout his career. Three essays grouped together address this issue either directly or indirectly. Lois Rosow investigates the descending tetrachord, famously identified by Ellen Rosand as a symbol of lament in Italian Baroque opera,[2] in works of Charpentier and Lully. Rosow comprehensively surveys the use of this figure in French sacred and secular pieces, both texted and with text nearby, and concludes that in France the tetrachord signified deep love, whether devotional or amorous. An Italian connection is suggested by Tim Carter’s observation that Monteverdi used the tetrachord along with triple meter and minor mode (the genere molle) to signify love.[3] Charpentier’s use of the tetrachord suggests that his music was an important locus for this type of Italian-French hybridization, which would culminate in the goûts réunis.
2.2 Rhetorical gestures also prompt the analyses of C. Jane Gosine, who considers Charpentier’s text setting choices within the context of late seventeenth-century Catholic spirituality. Gosine’s detailed study of several petits motets connects the period’s increased interest in arousing the emotions of worshippers through vivid imagery to the use of specific musico-rhetorical gestures by composers. Since Charpentier’s approach grew out of the Jesuit teaching that was important over a wide geographical area, his focus on intimate expressivity and sensuality in devotional music once again connects France to more general European trends.
2.3 Graham Sadler’s essay on Charpentier’s use of “void” notation begins with the promised notational issues but expands to cover broader stylistic questions. Charpentier scholars and performers are familiar with this notation, also called croches blanches, as a distinct anomaly resulting from Charpentier’s Italian training and interest in bygone styles. Sadler explores past assumptions about Charpentier’s use of this anachronism, traversing a great deal of musical, stylistic, and archival ground. A group of pieces that mix void and black notation leads Sadler to suggest that Charpentier may have used void notation to lend additional emphasis to changes of tempo, emotion, and musical character. As Sadler reminds us, modern editorial practices that remove these notational distinctions can prevent us from fully understanding and realizing these subtleties in performance.
3. Charpentier the recomposer: The Mélanges autographes
3.1 Charpentier’s use and reuse of the scores in the Mélanges throughout his career offer fascinating insights for scholars since the manuscripts capture details of the revision process. Catherine Cessac and Herbert Schneider use evidence for the reworking of pieces to reach different conclusions about Charpentier’s compositional process.
3.2 Cessac conducts a thorough review of instrumental preludes and cues for them found in the Mélanges. Because Charpentier placed new preludes in completely different cahiers (gatherings) from the pieces they were meant to precede, Cessac hypothesizes later reuse of those pieces. This research required extensive detective work in deciphering Charpentier’s cryptic notes. Indeed, Charpentier’s reference to a “repertoire” in a comment on Exaudiat pour le roy a4, H180, leads Cessac to deduce that the composer had a collection of separate instrumental parts, now missing, that supplemented the Mélanges. In addition to new preludes, the insertion of instrumental cues in various pieces suggests to Cessac that the Mélanges scores may represent more than one version of some compositions; this idea reinforces claims made by Patricia Ranum and Théodora Psychoyou (whose articles are discussed below) that link the presence of revisions to the reuse of pieces. Most of the pieces containing such cues were originally composed for the household of Charpentier’s employer Marie de Lorraine de Guise; the changes seem to be adjustments Charpentier made to accommodate larger performing forces, such as those at the Jesuit church of Saint-Louis.
3.3 A different approach to revision informs Herbert Schneider’s painstaking examination of the corrections and compositional adjustments that Charpentier made throughout the Mélanges. As in Cessac’s article, the clear and logical categorization of patterns conceals an enormous quantity of minutely detailed research. Schneider reviews several levels of emendation, from corrections of obvious mistakes to the addition of newly composed music. His approach creates an interesting counterpoint to the work of Psychoyou and Cessac, as he focuses on evidence for Charpentier’s refinement of musical ideas rather than on modifications in performing forces. Nonetheless, both essays reinforce a view of the Mélanges not as a fixed set of collected works but rather as Charpentier’s personal musical library, a working document that the composer used throughout his career.
4. Performers and contexts
4.1 In addition to the compositional revisions found in the Mélanges, Charpentier made other annotations throughout the manuscripts, and he assigned pieces composed for his regular employers to different cahiers from those composed as a result of outside commissions. The essays of Patricia Ranum, Anthea Smith, Théodora Psychoyou, and John Powell explore these aspects of the Mélanges.
4.2 By far the broadest approach to the Mélanges is taken by Patricia Ranum, whose essay opens the volume. Ranum is a valued and prolific contributor to Charpentier research; indeed, her publications (many available through her website: http://ranumspanat.com/index.html) make up a considerable proportion of the book’s bibliography. Her essay here focuses on a series of charts analyzing the contents of the Mélanges according to various parameters: year of composition, type of composition, amount of paper filled, or even the number of singing roles performed by Charpentier himself. Ranum’s intention in creating and discussing these charts is to show the different “worlds” Charpentier worked in—i.e., the different types of compositions and performance situations that concerned him at each stage of his career; in addition, the charts familiarize readers with the contents of the Mélanges.
4.3 Two essays focus on performing forces in Charpentier’s sacred compositions. Anthea Smith’s essay, based on her doctoral research on the personnel of the Chapelle Royale, speculates about four of Charpentier’s pieces that may have been performed at the royal court. Smith’s overview of the singers and instrumentalists of Louis XIV’s court chapel is a valuable resource for any scholar interested in the institution during this period, when castrati jostled with dessus mué (soprano falsettists) on the upper vocal parts, and instrumentalists strove to establish themselves in the chapel. Théodora Psychoyou analyzes motets for an unusual ensemble of six singers, composed for Mademoiselle de Guise in the 1680s, after her household musical forces had been expanded. Performers’ names included in the scores by Charpentier provide an obvious link among these pieces, but Psychoyou draws out additional connections, including texture, exploitation of particular tone colors, and double chorus effects created by the use of symmetrically scored petit chœur and grand chœur.
4.4 John Powell’s essay on performance practices of the Théâtre de Guénégaud and the Comédie-Française considers works composed for the theater between 1672 and 1686, using the composer’s annotations and other performance practice evidence to supplement Jan Clarke’s more general information on the troupe.[4] During this time, Lully managed to enact a series of ever more repressive statutes limiting music’s presence in plays, and Powell investigates their influence on the size and location of the orchestral and vocal ensembles available to Charpentier, as well as the number of dancers and choreographers, among other factors. An examination of music’s dramaturgical function within these works and some speculation about the intended audience for and purpose of Charpentier’s annotations conclude this essay.
5. Charpentier reception
5.1 The four remaining essays examine Charpentier’s influence among his contemporaries. Benjamin Pintiaux evaluates Médée (1693) in the intertextual context of the repertoire of the Académie Royale de Musique, where the work’s failure meant that it was not likely to be emulated by other composers. Among the important predecessors of Médée was Lully’s Thésée (1675), which also featured the sorceress Médée; as the first fully formed tragédie en musique, this work served as an important structural and musical model for Charpentier. The titular sorceress of Lully’s Armide (1686) provides yet another antecedent for the character of Médée.[5] While the 1713 tragédie en musique Médée et Jason, by Joseph-François Salomon, could be seen as a response to Charpentier’s work, Pintiaux argues that the later work’s success is actually attributable to its avoidance of Charpentier’s plot devices and musical choices; indeed, Charpentier’s true influence was not realized, according to Pintiaux, until much later, in the works of Jean-Philippe Rameau.
5.2 Peter Roennfeldt also looks at the reception of Charpentier’s music, but through a long lens and against the background of reception of French Baroque music more generally. His appraisal of the genesis of Charpentier’s Les Plaisirs de Versailles and Michel-Richard de Lalande’s Les Fontaines de Versailles, which premiered in 1682 and 1683 respectively, illustrates how these pieces resulted from very different circumstances, including sponsorship. Roennfeldt’s essay concludes with the different posthumous reputations of the two composers—Charpentier quickly sank into oblivion after he died, but Lalande retained his fame—and the transformation of Charpentier in the twentieth century into a well-recorded and frequently performed composer.
5.3 David Ponsford dissects one of the more idiosyncratic pieces in Charpentier’s oeuvre, the Messe pour plusieurs instruments au lieu des orgues (H513). He begins by explaining how the circumstances surrounding the commissioning of this piece contributed to its singular scoring and form. Ponsford then assesses the ways in which the Messe both conforms to and subverts the expectations created by Charpentier’s probable model, the French Baroque alternatim organ Mass, and evaluates Charpentier’s influence on later organ Masses by composers such as François Couperin and Lalande.
5.4 Shirley Thompson’s essay concerns the sole volume of music published after Charpentier’s death, his Motets melêz de symphonie. Thompson reviews the three motets in the publication that have identical concordances in the Mélanges, and contends that the autograph collection was used in the process of preparing the published Motets. The edition provides evidence of recomposition, though likely by the engraver rather than the composer himself. Thompson proposes that the gros cahier, a grouping of miscellaneous works mentioned in the 1726 inventory of Charpentier’s music, probably included all the motets that were published in the Motets melêz de symphonie. Although neither the dedicatee of the Motets nor sales of the volume seem to have provided much income for Charpentier’s nephew (his sole heir), these dire circumstances were indeed fortuitous for modern scholars as they forced the nephew to sell his uncle’s manuscripts to the royal library, where they were preserved as the Mélanges.
6. A diplomatic transcription of the Mémoire
6.1 As part of the 1726 acquisition process, the royal library prepared an inventory of the contents of the Mélanges, the Mémoire des ouvrages de musique latine et françoise de défunt Mr. Charpentier. The diplomatic transcription by Ranum and Thompson included in this volume is an important endeavor that increases the accessibility of the Mélanges to modern scholars. Hitherto only the final section of the Mémoire, the “Reflexions sur les ouvrages de Musique de défunt Mr. Charpentier,” had been published.[6] The first three sections describe the contents of the Arabic cahiers, the Roman cahiers, and manuscripts that seem to belong to neither series.[7] The Mémoire records the contents of the collection as originally received by the library rather than in its current state, so this document is particularly valuable when considering questions of chronology.
7. Other observations
7.1 One of the impressive aspects of New Perspectives on Marc-Antoine Charpentier is the richness of its supplemental materials. In an era when many publishers are cutting or minimizing musical examples, New Perspectives has an impressive quantity of examples, some in modern transcription and some in facsimile, including two color plates. A slight drawback is an intermittent problem with spacing, where placement of an example has resulted in a nearby page being one-quarter to one-half empty.[8] The bibliography (restricted to works cited) is extensive and lists works on Charpentier in many languages; it includes a substantial number of websites.
8. Conclusions
8.1 During and after his lifetime, Charpentier’s reputation was often eclipsed by those of other musicians such as Lully and Lalande. As many essays in this book attest, his status in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has undergone a nearly complete reversal. The wider accessibility of materials by and about Charpentier has certainly brought this composer to a greater audience, creating the opportunity for the type of in-depth exploration evidenced within New Perspectives. This volume is an important addition to the corpus of scholarly work on Charpentier and the French Baroque, accessible to both connoisseurs and newcomers to this music, and likely to inspire new research of equal quality in the future.
We regret the delay in publishing this review, not the fault of the author. Ashgate Publishing is now part of Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group. The publisher reissued this book in paperback in 2016 (ISBN 978-1-13-824968-4) and as an e-book in 2017 (ISBN 978-1-31-509054-2).—Ed.