program notes

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 (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

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Painting by Peter Paul Rubens (ca. 1622–1625)

Ameriquains”—a reference, perhaps, to the Algonquin and Huron peoples who were, at the time, allied with the French in a campaign against the Iroquois following the 1608 founding of Québec City in the burgeoning North American colony of New France.

In stark contrast to the grandiose and extroverted nature of music at court, the works of the illusive Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe (ca. 1640–ca. 1701) are characterized above all else by their introspection and intimacy. As the only composer featured here who was not directly affiliated with the court, it is perhaps not surprising that so little is known of SainteColombe’s life—even his first name remains a matter of debate. Nevertheless, he was revered as one of the greatest viol players of his day and is credited with several significant innovations, including a new left-hand technique and the addition of a seventh string (the low A) to the bass viol. A manuscript rediscovered in the late 1960s contains the master’s 67 Concerts à deux violes esgales; that is, viol duets, most bearing colorful or descriptive nicknames, which Sainte-Colombe was known to perform with his two daughters and various students. According to a note in the manuscript, Concert XLI: Le Retour (the return) was so named “because it returns to the repeat sign before beginning the gigue section.” Several familiar dance forms follow the opening movement and the work concludes with a pianelle, a dance in triple time that appears to be entirely unique to the oeuvre of Sainte-Colombe.

Sainte-Colombe’s most illustrious student was Marin Marais (1656–1728), who eclipsed his teacher to become an ordinaire of the musique de la chambre du roi at the court of Louis XIV in 1679. Marais published five books of Pièces de Viole for bass viol and continuo accompaniment between 1686 and 1725, which collectively capture both the aesthetic heights of the Grand Siècle and the zenith of the viol as a solo instrument. In “Marche Persane” (Book 5) Marais employs strident dissonances, punctuated rhythms, and other orientalist conceits to conjure a vision of when Mohammad Reza Beg and his retinue marched into Paris in 1715 to serve as the Shah of Persia’s ambassador to the French court. The alluring refrain of the “Rondeau Champêtre” contrasts with the stately poise of the “Sarabande à l’Espagnol” (both from Book 2), while the boisterous “Fête Champêtre” (Book 4) evokes a rustic festival and belongs to a series of pieces entitled Suite d’un Goût Étranger (suite in a strange style), wherein Marais pushed the technical and musical demands of his writing to new heights.

Although François Couperin (1668–1733) is primarily remembered today for his harpsichord works, he entered the service of the king as organiste du roi in 1693 and only became court harpsichordist in 1717, two years into the reign of Louis XV. But official titles notwithstanding, he was also engaged at court as a composer of chamber music, as exemplified by the four dance suites published as his Concerts Royaux. Couperin himself explains in the preface that he “composed them for the little chamber concerts to which Louis XIV had me come almost every Sunday of the year.” Like the other concerts in the set, the Troisième Concert Royal does not have a fixed instrumentation, but rather accommodates a range of performance scenarios, from harpsichord solo to instrumental trio. Couperin mentions the names of the court musicians with

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Painting by Hyacinthe Rigaud (1701)

whom he performed these pieces; they included a violinist, a bass viol player, a bassoonist, and an oboist (who happened to be the son of the copyist Philidor), although he also specifies the flute as a possible treble instrument. Couperin published a second collection of concerts entitled Les goûts-réunis (The Tastes Reunited) in 1724, with the express purpose of incorporating elements of the Italian style that was taking Europe by storm—an aesthetic move that would have been unthinkable just a few decades earlier, and which presaged further musical developments to come.

Following the death of Louis XIV in 1715, the monolithic culture industry centralized in Versailles gradually gave way to a more pluralistic approach to the arts as a facet of society as a whole—not just the monarchy. And so, while the influence of the court’s musical institutions subsisted well into the reign of Louis XV, French music culture increasingly developed independent of them. In this vein, Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764) represented a newer generation of musicians whose careers flourished largely outside of court circles; it was not until 1745, at the age of 60 and already famous, that Rameau finally received a royal appointment as Compositeur du Cabinet du Roi. Four years earlier, Rameau published his Pièces de clavecin en concerts, a collection of five trios that feature the harpsichord in a soloistic role with an obbligato right-hand part alongside a violin (or flute) and bass viol, rather than as an accompanying continuo instrument. The final movement of the third concert consists of a pair of raucous tambourins (a kind of rustic Provençal dance); Rameau borrowed the Première Tambourin from his opera Castor et Pollux (1737) and later reused it together with the newly composed Deuxième Tambourin en rondeau in Dardanus (1744).

While Rameau was regarded then, as now, as a revolutionary figure in French music, he innovated from within the prevailing style. Jean-Marie Leclair (1697–1764), in contrast, joined Couperin and others in appropriating elements of Italian music in hopes of imbuing their works with a new, hybridized style. A virtuoso violinist, Leclair studied in Italy before settling in Paris in 1723; he published his first of many collections of instrumental and chamber music that same year. Leclair eschewed the patently French genre of concert, choosing instead to adopt unabashedly the Italian construct of “sonata” for his chamber works. The Sonate VIII à Trois distinguishes itself as the only trio sonata among the sonatas for violin and continuo that otherwise comprise Leclair’s Second livre de sonates (1728). The slow–fast–slow–fast pattern of movements is characteristic of the sonata form popularized by throughout Europe by Arcangelo Corelli. His Italianate tastes notwithstanding, Leclair was appointed ordinaire de la musique by Louis XV in 1733 but resigned only four years later due to a disagreement with fellow court violinist Jean-Pierre Guignon over the directorship of the king’s orchestra—which, in any case, was hardly the ensemble it had been under Louis XIV. Ultimately, the once incomparable Vingt-quatre Violons disbanded in 1761, and less than thirty years later, the Bastille was stormed; as the monarchy fell, so too did the final vestiges of the Musique du roi. n

— John McKean

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Painting by Gustaf Lundberg (ca. 1740)