Program Notes

Notes on the Program
By Robert Mealy

Tonight’s program takes its theme from the cultural wars of the early 18th century, when the arrival of Corelli’s music in France provoked something of a crisis in musical circles. This new Italian style was epitomized by the sonata, a genre which mystified French critics by its very abstraction: in the famous words of Fontenelle, “Sonata, what do you want of me?” More forward-thinking musicians welcomed the compositional vigor that this new style offered, and soon a counter-culture grew up of Italianate musical salons, to which composers like Charpentier and the young Couperin contributed. Other figures heard tonight, like the venerable Sieur de Sainte-Colombe, represent the French style in its classic form. Couperin himself was the first to explicitly call for a reunion of styles in which the energy of the Italian style would be combined with native French grace; we hear his own essays in this genre with some excerpts from his Concerts royaux, written to entertain Louis XIV at Versailles. Our concert closes with the music of Jean-Baptiste Leclair, whose violin sonatas move fluently in this new international musical language, one that sets the scene for the galant and Classical styles of the later 18th century.

JEAN-BAPTISTE LULLY
Born November 29, 1632, in Florence; died March 22, 1687, in Paris.

Ironically, the composer that most perfectly represented French style to the French was himself an Italian (which may say something about all myths of cultural origin). Jean-Baptiste Lully was born a son of a Florentine miller. His quick wit and nimble dancing talents won him a place as Italian coach and entertainer in the retinue of Louis XIV’s cousin, who happened to be passing through Florence on a grand tour. Brought back to Versailles, Lully proved to have an astonishing gift for adapting to a different culture. By luck, the new King was only a few years younger than Lully, and loved to dance: soon the composer became the indispensable provider of lavish spectacles for the court’s entertainment.

One of Lully’s smartest moves early on was to associate himself with the brilliant comic talents of Molière. Of all their collaborations, the Bourgeois gentilhomme was by far the most popular, aided and abetted by Lully’s own appearance as the Grand Turk in the final scene, where poor Monsieur Jourdain (the ultimate fashion victim) is made to undergo a ridiculous initiation rite so he can become a grand mufti. The Turkish Ambassador had in fact visited the French court the year before, and Lully’s music was inspired by his retinue—so this program opens with a particularly global goûts-réunis, as Turkish music is heard through Italian ears to decorate a French farce.

The Spanish dances from the Bourgeois gentilhomme come from the conclusion of the play: everyone decides to go watch “nostre Balet,” a grand entertainment that has been prepared by one of the characters. This “Ballet des Nations” is rarely done today, as it adds a good half hour onto the play, but has some of Lully’s most inventive dance music, including the Airs des Espagnoles. The first is a kind of sarabande, danced by six Spaniards; the second is a proud and fiery loure, for a pair of dancers. After an elegant Rondeau and a Canarie (a quick dance, rather like a gigue, that ends the lesson of M. Jourdain’s dance master), the suite concludes with a festive Chaconne, again part of the Ballet des Nations, in which the lively characters of the Commedia dell’arte take part.

JEAN DE SAINTE-COLOMBE
Fourished 1658–87; died by 1701.

With the Sieur de Sainte-Colombe, we turn to the true French style that Lully inherited, the highly refined court arts of the previous generation. Sainte-Colombe’s music was only rediscovered in 1966, when a manuscript of his 67 Concerts à deux violes esgales was discovered in the library of the famed pianist Alfred Cortot. His music (and a fictionalized account of his relations with his more famous student Marin Marais) was brought to wide attention in Tous les matins du monde, a film that opened the ears of many to the glories of the viola da gamba. Sainte-Colombe’s Tombeau les regrets is exemplary for its passionate and lyrical rhetoric. This extended work does not memorialize anyone in particular but is rather a general meditation on loss. It includes vivid movements depicting the funeral bells (the carillon), the call of Charon (the boatman of the Styx), the weeping (“pleurs”) of those left behind, and finally the joys of the blessed souls in the Elysian Fields.

MARC-ANTOINE CHARPENTIER
Born 1643 in or near Paris; died February 24, 1704, in Paris.

Against the sophistication of the viola da gamba, the brashness of the Italian violin and the Italianate style was a shock to many Parisian ears; one contemporary devoted an entire treatise to a “Defense of the Viol against the Pretensions of the Violin.” Marc-Antoine Charpentier was one major composer who wholeheartedly recognized the virtues that recent Italian developments offered in composition; his works are much influenced by the highly inflected vocal declamation of Carissimi. A figure whose compositional genius has only come to light in our own time, Charpentier suffered from a career spent on the outskirts of the Court, in the shadow of the power-hungry Lully. He found his own sanctuary in the Parisian salon of the Guises, a powerful French family that had at one time rivaled the Bourbons for political influence. Here Charpentier could pursue his art with the intimate musical forces of the household. Luckily for us, Charpentier immortalized his own art in a series of carefully prepared autograph cahiers, which even today serve as his published complete works. Among the many delights of these volumes is a Caprice pour trois violins, an Italianate trio-sonata movement (originally for two violins and cello, or “bass violin”) that may well have served as incidental music to a larger entertainment.

The two other works of Charpentier we hear tonight are both from various settings of the Christmas story. Over the course of his many years working with the Guises, he produced several works on this theme, all with some variation on the title In nativitatem Dominum Christum. In one of these, the large-scale In nativitatem Dominum Canticum, he includes a remarkable piece of mood-painting entitled “Nuit,” a depiction of the still silence before the arrival of the angels and the annunciation of the joyous birth of Christ. Charpentier lavishes his considerable harmonic resources on this tone-poem, moving through a rich and sonorous series of chords with the characteristic soft two-note slurred figure that was the hallmark of French operatic sleep-scenes or sommeils.

Charpentier’s similiarly named In nativitatem Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Canticum provides a sharply contrasting movement that illustrates the joyous progress of the shepherds to witness the Christ Child. This festive Marche en rondeau uses the traditional rondeau structure, where the opening theme returns between various contrasting couplets.

MONSIEUR DE SAINTE-COLOMBE LE FILS
Flourished around 1710.

The famed Sieur de Sainte-Colombe had one son, an even more enigmatic figure who seems to have spent a certain amount of time in England. In May 1713, we know that a benefit concert for Sainte-Colombe le fils was held in London, and his music, including the rhapsodic and melancholy Prelude in E Minor, survives in the Durham Cathedral library. French viola da gamba music found a highly receptive audience in England, where Marais’s works as well were much sought after. One is perhaps reminded of LeBlanc’s characterization of the sound of the viola da gamba in this elegant work: “like the voice of an Ambassador, delicate and even a little nasal, always being highly proper.”

FRANÇOIS COUPERIN
Born November 10, 1668, in Paris; died September 11, 1733, in Paris.

One of the great landmarks of French Baroque instrumental writing are the four magisterial Ordres published as Les Nations in 1726 by François Couperin. These enormous works are true goûts-réunis in several senses: musically, they combine the elegant flexibility of the French melodic line with the serene and balanced harmonic architecture of Corelli, while formally they literally unite the French suite and the Italian sonata (which Couperin, in deference to French tastes, calls a sonade) into a grand form with the neutral title of ordre.

Couperin’s four Ordres are tributes to the four great Catholic powers of his time: France, Piedmont (the Kingdom of Savoy, now part of Italy), Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire of Germany. These grand productions are the high point of Couperin’s late chamber music, and rival those of his contemporary and friend J. S. Bach (who may well have known them). The sonades that form the lengthy opening to each of these works are largely a product of a much earlier period in his compositional career, however. As he tells the story in his preface to Les Nations,

<INDENT>
Charmed by the sonatas of Signor Corelli, whose works I shall love as long as I live, just as I do the French works of Monsieur de Lully, I attempted to compose one myself ... Knowing the keen appetite of the French for foreign novelties above all else, I rearranged the letters of my name to form an Italian one, which I used instead. My sonatas, fortunately, won enough favor for me not to be in the least embarrassed by the subterfuge.
<END INDENT>

The sonata to La Françoise survives in its earlier form in a manuscript preserved by the Italophile music collector Sebastian de Brossard: there it is called La Pucelle or “The Maiden,” presumably a reference to Joan of Arc, but also perhaps a gesture toward the purity of this first youthful trio. Despite Couperin’s attempt to speak Italian in this work, it sounds unmistakably French to our ears today!

MARIN MARAIS
Baptized. May 31, 1656, in Paris; died August 15, 1728, in Paris.

With Marin Marais, we come to the master who (according to Le Blanc) “founded and firmly established the empire of the viol.” Out of Marais’s huge output for the viola da gamba, we hear tonight three pieces from his Fourth Book, published in 1717. Marais included several different kinds of pieces in this collection; a third of it is devoted to “simple, singing works” that epitomize the style française. Tonight’s pieces are drawn from the fourth suite of this enormous anthology. The opening Prélude is in Marais’s most eloquent, rhapsodic style, while the Muzettes recall the French aristocratic vogue for the miniature bagpipe of the same name, with all its pastoral, Watteau-like associations. This short extract from Marais’s Fourth Suite concludes with another portrait piece of some graceful acrobatics (La Sautillante), which is then elaborated in a virtuosic variation or double.

FRANÇOIS COUPERIN

Couperin published his Concerts royaux in 1722, but explains in his preface that these works were heard in the salons of Versailles during Louis XIV’s declining years, in the season of 1714–15. With these works for unspecified treble instrument and continuo, Couperin found his most elegant summation of the goûts-réunis. Combining Corellian walking basses with a highly inflected, thickly ornamented treble line, Couperin creates a density of musical discourse in these works comparable to that of his colleague and friend J. S. Bach, while never losing a sense of charm or graciousness. The elegant Prélude gives way to yet another evocation of the rustic charms of the musette, enriched with an obbligato part for the viola da gamba; this brief selection of movements ends with a “light” Chaconne, written in 3/8 instead of the more usual 3/4.

ROBERT DE VISÉE
Born around 1655; died 1732–33.

Robert de Visée was the court guitarist and theorbo player to Louis XIV, and was a close colleague of many of the figures heard tonight: Marais, Forqueray, Lully, and François Couperin, whose Les Silvains (“the woods”) lent itself easily to transcription for theorbo, that long-necked bass version of the lute. Couperin’s original, marked “Majestueüesement, sans lenteur,” appears in the first suite of his Premier Ordre of keyboard pieces, published in 1713. De Visée’s transcription is quite faithful; note the characteristically Corellian walking bass in the first couplet, as well as the dreamy “broken style” in the second couplet, where the melody dissolves in a haze of arpeggiation. This section reveals how closely the native traditions of lute and harpsichord playing in France developed together.

ANTOINE FORQUERAY
Born 1672 in Paris; died June 28, 1745, in Mantes.

In 1747, Jean-Baptiste Forqueray, a remarkable gamba virtuoso, published his only volume of viola da gamba music, which he attributed to his father Antoine, a famed virtuoso of the previous generation. The authorship of these works is difficult to assign: most of the titles refer to the son’s contemporaries, like the financier Du Vaucel (guillotined in 1794), who may have been one of Jean-Baptiste’s patrons. That the son chose to immortalize his father’s works (in a rather more modern guise) is all the more puzzling considering their violent relations. At one point, Forqueray père (who seems to have had a violent jealousy of his son’s talents) put Jean-Baptiste into the Bicêtre prison for several years, and later had him banished from the country. Antoine’s stormy nature is borne out in many of the works included in the 1747 collection (he was said to play “like the Devil,” where Marais played “like an angel”), but another side emerges as well in works like this immensely sensitive and thoughtful portrait, full of a tender melancholy.

JEAN-MARIE LECLAIR
Born May 10, 1697, in Lyons; died October 22, 1764, in Paris.

The Mercure de France remarked on Leclair’s first book of violin sonatas that this music appeared at first to be “sheer algebra, capable of rebuffing the most courageous of musicians.” Indeed Leclair, a brilliant violinist, does call for some tricky passagework in these sonatas, but nothing too extravagant; that would come later, after he met the extraordinary virtuoso Locatelli in 1728. Leclair was trained as a dancer and a lacemaker before he settled on violin-playing as his métier, and both disciplines can be heard in his music, which combines grace, elegance, and a keen attention to polished detail. A student of the Turin virtuoso Somis, Leclair brought together the brilliance and virtuosity of the Italian violin school with the native refinements of France, thus fulfilling Couperin’s prophecy of a true goûts-réunis.

The opening Largo of the Sonata in G Minor, Op. 1, No. 8, makes elegant work of a motif based around a scale, while the Vivace offers opportunities for the soloist to show off both dexterity and the ability to bring out the sonorous possibilities of the violin, in double-stops on the two lowest strings. After another Musette, this one in rondeau form over a steady bass pedal of Gs and (briefly) Ds, the sonata closes with a Tempo Gavotta full of graceful slurred pairs of notes.

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