The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 24 (2018) No. 1

The Lure and Legacy of Music at Versailles: Louis XIV and the Aix School. By John Hajdu Heyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. [xxii, 277 pp. ISBN 978-0-521-51988-5.]

By Peter Bennett*

1. Introduction

2. Survey of Contents

3. Conclusion

References

1. Introduction

1.1 As John Hajdu Heyer observes in the general introduction to this book, French Baroque sacred music, in particular the grand motet, has received much less scholarly attention than most other music-historical domains, and, if college music history courses and public concerts are anything to go by, it is a field that certainly remains outside the mainstream of musical consciousness in the English-speaking world. For those who follow the field, a flurry of activity in the 1980s—the colloquium held at the Sorbonne in 1984 and the actes that emerged from it in 1986, Mongrédien’s thematic catalogue of 1984,^[1] and the foundation of the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles in 1987—has been followed by a steady, if infrequent, flow of articles, editions, and shorter studies, mainly in French. Even an important work such as Thierry Favier’s relatively recent Le motet à grand chœur (reviewed by Don Fader in this journal), while certainly a major contribution, has probably not changed many minds in the Anglo-American musicological community.^[2] In English, apart from Anthony’s pioneering (yet superficial) survey, Lionel Sawkins’s important work on the chronology of the grand motet and his Lalande catalog have been the most notable contributions.^[3] Alongside Sawkins, Hajdu Heyer himself, the author of critical editions of motets by Gilles and Lully,^[4] has been the other major figure in the field for more than forty years. It is thus a great pleasure to see a major monograph bringing together many years of research into the Aix School, and affording a new perspective—not Paris-centered—on French sacred music in the late seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries.

1.2 Despite the prominence of the word “Versailles” in its title, The Lure and Legacy is primarily a richly documented biographical study of the composers associated with the maîtrise of Saint-Sauveur, Aix-en-Provence, from around 1660 to the mid-eighteenth century. Divided into three sections, it explores the web of connections between generations of composers as masters and students, between musical institutions in Paris/Versailles and Aix, and between composers as patrons and advocates for other members of the Aix school as they made their way up to Paris. Prompted by a question posed by Jean Duron in his 1996 article on Claude-Mathieu Pelegrin, Hajdu Heyer argues that there was indeed an Aix school, and that Aix composers were a significant presence and influence in Paris and at Versailles, punching above their weight in the production of sacred music at important institutions in the capital, and, in turn, transmitting Parisian practices to Provence.^[5]

2. Survey of Contents

2.1 Part 1 (“Rendezvous in Provence”) introduces the main protagonists of the study—the city of Aix-en-Provence, the maîtrise of Saint-Sauveur, and the composer Guillaume Poitevin—through the lens of the events surrounding Louis XIV’s visit to Provence in 1660. Chapter 1 describes Louis’s arrival in Aix (the entrée) and the political situation in Provence that necessitated it (echoes of the Fronde still resonating in 1659) and concludes that Louis’s presence in Provence for nearly two months had a major impact on both the political and musical unification of a still somewhat politically fragile France. Chapter 2 presents the linchpin of the study, Guillaume Poitevin, who, as a thirteen-year-old choirboy at the church of Saint-Trophime, Arles, was present for Louis XIV’s entrée into that city (three days before the entrée into Aix). Relying on Gantez’s colorful contemporary testimony,^[6] Hajdu Heyer leads the reader through the daily life and routines of a maîtrise in general (we learn not just musical and educational details but hear about their vestments, their food, their medical treatment, etc.) and of Saint-Sauveur in particular.

2.2 Part 2 (“The Aix School: A Legacy of Maîtres”) consists of a series of new and richly documented biographies of Poitevin and the now better-known composers who followed him—André Campra, Jean Gilles, and Antoine Blanchard, together with figures that Hajdu Heyer classifies as petits maîtres: Cabassole, Estienne, Belissen, and Pelegrin. Although even Poitevin is little known today, his musical expertise, his exposure to the presence of Louis XIV in 1660, and his curiosity to learn more about cosmopolitan musical trends—in particular the fact that he ordered a parcel of music to be delivered from Paris in 1667—set the stage (as Chapter 3 shows) for the subsequent generations of better-known composers who passed through his maîtrise. Chapter 4 focuses on the first of these, André Campra, who joined in 1668, demonstrating his precocious musical ability by composing a grand motet at the age of seventeen, before moving on to Toulouse and subsequently Paris in 1694, where, drawn by news of the upheavals at the Chapelle Royale, he clearly hoped to obtain a position. He was appointed instead to Notre-Dame. Hajdu Heyer leads us through Campra’s subsequent career and the tensions he experienced between his responsibilities for sacred music and his desire to become known as a stage composer. Chapter 5 traces the career of Jean Gilles, who joined the maîtrise in 1679 before following in Campra’s footsteps to Toulouse. Although he never worked in Paris, Gilles’s Messe des Morts (performed at the funeral of Louis XIV) and his motet Diligam te Domine (which became a favorite at the Concert Spirituel) became widely known after his premature death. Finally, Chapter 6 focuses on the petits maîtres who, as students, passed through the maîtrise at the end of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth—Cabassole, Estienne, Belissen, and Pelegrin—while Chapter 7 concludes Part 2 with a detailed study of Antoine Blanchard (born 1696).

2.3 Part 3 (“The Lure and the Legacy”), in which, for me, Hajdu Heyer makes the most interesting and compelling arguments, documents the exchange and interaction between Provence and Paris: how Provençal composers were attracted to Versailles—the “lure” in terms of both compositional style and actual positions in the Chapelle hierarchy—and how, in turn, the practices they picked up in Paris, particularly in instrumental accompaniment and the secularization of their music, made their way back to Aix (the “legacy”). Chapter 8 covers a variety of topics relating to the “lure” of Versailles: after a brief survey of the workings of the Chapelle Royale (drawing on Maral’s important work)^[7] and its contemporaneous history, the reader is led through discussions of secular music and dance in Provence and how Parisian influence came to be felt, resistance from the church authorities to secular trends in sacred music, and the transmission of Parisian grand motet practices to Aix and their adoption in Campra’s first essays in the genre. But it is in Chapters 9 and 10 that Hajdu Heyer makes his most trenchant yet wide-ranging observations. Chapter 9 (“Patronage and the Provençal Networks”) shows how Campra’s connections in Aix were sufficient to help him obtain church positions, not just at Toulon and Arles but also in the États de Languedoc in 1685, and most significantly at Notre-Dame, Paris, where the usual appointment process was bypassed. Campra’s patronage by the Grand Dauphin is also considered, both as a positive force (the opportunities for secular composition, most notably of the Carnaval de Venise in 1699) and as a hindrance: the loyalist directors of the Concert Spirituel passed over Campra in favor of court-aligned figures such as Lalande, and the authorities at Notre-Dame censured him for his stage works.^[8] The remainder of the chapter shows how Campra nevertheless used his position to enable other Provençal composers—notably Gilles and then Blanchard—to make their way in the world, either to Toulouse or to Paris, and how he was eventually appointed to a coveted position at the Chapelle Royale after Louis XIV’s death.

2.4 The study concludes in Chapter 10 (“The Legacy of the Aix School”) by drawing together a number of disparate threads while providing copious appendices on the extant repertories and sources, and by addressing the stylistic traits of the Aix “school.” While the author has undoubtedly demonstrated the existence of an Aix school of composers, bound by a common heritage, early training, and self-patronage, was there an Aix school of composition? In the concluding section, “Common elements of style,” Hajdu Heyer attempts the perennially difficult task of distilling an elusive set of stylistic cues into a few measurable traits. A more disjunct, energetic, and “Italian” melodic style than we might expect from composers who trained in the Île-de-France, especially at cadences, seems to clearly differentiate their works from those of Lalande, Destouches, and Desmarets. The presence of the Fa-Mi-Re approach to cadences (the “Wappen” figure, proposed by Albrecht Stoll and embraced by Montagnier)^[9] seems less convincing; but Hajdu Heyer’s final point, the identification of what he calls the “supplication” figure—an upward leap of a fourth on the upbeat, followed by a downward half step to the downbeat, employed particularly on the word “Kyrie” or other supplication—is intriguing. Hajdu Heyer acknowledges that a full analysis is outside the scope of his study, but I wonder if this gesture—which to my ears sounds as if drawn from a dance music vocabulary—could be read as concrete evidence of the influence of secular music that he discusses in earlier chapters. Notwithstanding this observation, perhaps we should conclude that an “Aix School” remains slightly elusive—heavily dependent for musical structure on the Versailles model (with some more or less significant stylistic variations) yet biographically distinct. While we might have hoped for a revolutionary counter-narrative, perhaps here is yet another example of Parisian and court dominance extending into all areas of French cultural life.

3. Conclusion

3.1 Hajdu Heyer’s study is a major contribution to the study of the grand motet, a richly documented, generous book that opens up the field for those who wish to pursue the lines of inquiry he has initiated: the appendices alone are evidence of the decades the author has spent in the archives and libraries of Aix and other Provençal cities, and the study more generally provides a fascinating insight into the background and training of a number of under-appreciated composers—Campra in particular—who had an outsized influence in Paris. The volume should be of interest to all those who work on sacred music in France and to all scholars interested in Parisian interactions with the provinces.