PROGRAM Not e s At no other point in European history have the forces of culture and state been more deeply interwoven than in France’s Ancien Régime. The aesthetics and style of French Baroque music stemmed in large part from the musical institutions of the French court that, themselves, mirrored the rise and fall of the Bourbon Dynasty—from the ascendancy of the Musique du roi during the reign of Louis XIII (1610–1643) and the opulent cultural absolutism of Louis XIV (1643–1715), to the decadence and gradual decline of the royal musical establishment under Louis XV (1715– 1774). Much of the surviving music from the reign of Louis XIII comes down to us thanks to the archival efforts of André Danican Philidor l’aîné (the elder), a music librarian and principal copyist at Versailles in the late seventeenth century. The Concert donné à Louis XIII is found among the pieces in Philidor’s Recüeil de Plusieurs vieux Airs (copied in 1690) and was originally presented as part of a celebration of Louis XIII’s name day on August 25, 1627. The concert’s constituent movements appear to have been drawn together as a pastiche from ballets de cour performed in the preceding years, with several movements attributed to Louis Constantin (ca. 1585–1657), one of the Vingt-quatre Violons du Roy (The King’s 24 Violins)—the premier string band in the king’s service. The grandeur of the occasion is reflected in the fact that the concert featured not only the Vingt-quatre Violons but also the Douze Grands Hautbois (12 Great Oboes), thus bringing together the principal ensembles of the king’s Musique de la Chambre (music of the chamber) and his Musique de la Grande Écurie (music of the great stable), respectively. Philidor’s score implies that these two five-part ensembles played in alternation rather than together, with the movements intended for the oboe band versus the violin band specified as such. But it is also conceivable that these pieces were adapted to other instrumentations in other settings, as suggested by the two-part 2 021–20 22 Seaso n
Louis XIII
Painting by Peter Paul Rubens (ca. 1622–1625)
(melody and bass line) versions of many of the movements transmitted by Philidor in yet another of his archival manuscripts. The concert opens with the dark, stately harmonies of “Les Ombres” (the shadows); but darkness soon gives way to light with the arrival of the Deuxième Air’s sprightly rhythms and shift to major. Like many of the pieces in this set, “Les Suisses” (the Swiss men) and “Les Suissesses” (the Swiss women) are duple-time dances that incorporate contrasting triple-time sections. There is reason to believe that “Les Gascons”—a reference to the inhabitants of the Gascony region of southwest France—was composed by Louis XIII himself, given the dance’s subsequent inclusion in the king’s 1635 Ballet de la Merlaison. The “Entrée de Mr. de Liancourt” refers to Roger du Plessis, Duke of Liancourt, who served as the king’s Premier gentilhomme de la Chambre du Roi, while “Les Valets de la Faiste” evokes further ‘courtiers of the celebration’. The rollicking refrain of “Les Nimphes de la Grenouillere” (nymphs of the frog pond) is followed by the naïve, lilting melody of “Les Bergers” (the shepherds). The concert concludes exuberantly with “Les 11
