Behind the Musik: Vive La France!

Program Notes

By Charlotte Nediger

No one embraced choral music more exuberantly than the French baroque masters. In the rest of Europe, choral music was largely limited to the church. A chorus occasionally appeared on the opera stage, but rarely with a dramatic role. When Louis XIV’s powerful court composer Jean-Baptiste Lully set out to create a truly French opera, both the dance and the chorus rose to prominence, essential to the drama and the spectacle. The chorus sang of love, jealousy, wonder, and grief as passionately as the solo singers.

Although choral music also played a role in the church, as elsewhere, in France it found its true home on the concert stage. The first public concert series in continental Europe was founded in Paris in 1725, and at the core of the repertoire was the grand motet, settings of Latin texts for choir, soloists, and orchestra. Concerts took place during Lent, the Easter and Christmas season, and on high feast days, when by royal decree the opera theatres were closed. The Académie Royale (the institution of the Royal Opera) stipulated that only sacred music, in Latin, could be sung at these concerts. The name adopted for the series was the Concert Spirituel. An enthusiastic paying public flocked to some 30 concerts a year, filling the 700 seats of the Salle des Cent Suisses at the Tuileries palace. The performers were the singers and players from the opera. Most programs included performances of at least two grands motets, and favourites were repeated year after year. The texts were Latin, as required, and generally drawn from Psalms or the liturgy, but the atmosphere was far from solemn. In addition to the motets, the orchestra played symphonies and concertos, the opera stars sang solos—and composers wrote motets with a decidedly theatrical flair.

This week we offer a tasting menu of excerpts from works written for the French opera stage, the church, and the Concert Spirituel. In tone and spirit they all exemplify the unforced expressiveness, the rhythmic and melodic fluidity, and the special characteristics of the French language that imbue this music.

The first offerings on our menu celebrate the sun, from Occitania in southern France (home of Jean-Joseph de Mondonville) to distant Peru (Jean-Philippe Rameau’s imagined Incan Festival of the Sun in his opera Les indes galantes). The Parisians were enamoured with the luminosity of Mondonville’s musical soundscapes in Cœli enarrant, depicting “the glory of the firmament” and the rising and setting sun, and the motet was performed at the Concert Spirituel for many years. The brilliance of the Rameau’s Peruvian sun is a dazzling counterpart.

The next course offers works by two less familiar composers, Henri Desmarest and Antonia Bembo. Both led lives worthy of an opera plot and were forced to spend much of their lives in exile. (I could well imagine films based on their lives—with rich soundtracks. Film producers, take heed!)

Desmarest was a precocious and talented composer who entered Louis XIV’s service as a teenager. Within a few years he enjoyed success with grands motets and operas at court, and famously earned extra cash by ghost-writing for one of the leading court composers. Things went awry after an elopement led to Desmarest being charged with seduction and kidnapping, condemned to death in absentia after fleeing to Brussels with his beloved. He took up a position in Spain as court composer to Philip V, and it is there that he penned the Messe à 2 chœurs from which we perform the Sanctus & Hosanna.

The parts for the Mass survive in a manuscript of works by the exiled composer compiled by his friend Danican Philidor, oboist and music librarian at the French court. Philidor arranged for performances of Desmarest’s works in Paris: the manuscript includes the names of the performers of this Messe à 2 chœurs, among them the leading musicians in the city, a testament to their dedication to their absent colleague.

We turn then to poignant settings of texts drawn from the Penitential Psalms, or Seven Psalms of David. The hauntingly beautiful opening movement of Desmarest’s De Profundis (From the depths I have cried out to thee) is followed by an excerpt from Bembo’s intimate setting of Psalm 38, Domine, ne in furore (Lord, rebuke me not).

The Venetian singer and composer Antonia Bembo found refuge in Paris after fleeing from an abusive marriage, forced to abandon her children. Her intimate settings of the Seven Psalms were inspired by paraphrases published in 1694 by the remarkable painter and poet Élisabeth Sophie Chéron. One senses in the music that the text of the duo we are performing, “Soulage mon tourment” (Relieve my torment), may have been deeply personal to her.

The Provençal composer André Campra arrived in Paris in 1694 with a case full of motets and masses written while posted as maître de chapelle at various cathedrals. Soon after being appointed to the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris he was required to write a Requiem Mass for the memorial service for a Paris archbishop. The music suggests that he approached the assignment with a surge of creative energy upon finding himself in the city of lights. The Mass is imbued with optimism, a Requiem that is life affirming. We offer the opening and closing sections: the latter resounds with the tolling of the funeral carillon by the orchestra.

We return to the Concert Spirituel with the spirited Gloria of Michel Richard de Lalande’s setting of the Pentecostal hymn Veni creator spiritus. Lalande was dubbed the “Latin Lully,” highly favoured by the king. Over 75 of his grands motets have survived, and they were remarkably popular, performed for decades after his death.

We open the second half with one last grand motet: Mondonville’s In exitu Israel was a tremendous success when it was premiered in 1753, and was revisited for many years. The opera singers and instrumentalists performing the work would have felt very much at home in Mondonville’s operatic textures and sounds in a dramatic score replete with a storm at sea.

We shift the focus to the opera stage for the remainder of the concert, and find ourselves caught up in another storm: the Orage from Rameau’s comic opera Platée, this time a storm conjured by the jealous Juno in the watery domain of the marsh nymph Platée.

Some 75 years earlier, Lully included a frost scene in his opera Isis, and the jealous Juno is again to be blamed, this time for subjecting Jupiter’s love interest Io to a series of torments, starting with being subjected to bitter cold in the frozen plains of Scythia. Lully has the orchestra and chorus imitate shivering, an effect that captivated audiences—and was borrowed by Henry Purcell in the cold scene in King Arthur (which you will hear in our performances of the Purcell in April!).

The frost melts away in Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s exquisite Shepherd’s Chorus from one of his Christmas pastorales: the shepherds sing of the sun, which “begins to gild our mountains once more in spite of the harshness of winter.”

The dessert portion of our tasting menu finds us embracing love in a series of evocative movements from Rameau operas, leading to the chaconne that concludes Lully’s opera Amadis. Most of Lully’s operas end with the spectacle of a grand chaconne or passacaille, music built over a simple repeating bass line that starts with an extended ballet, to which is then added chorus and soloists in alternation. The chaconne that ends Amadis is a wonderful example, and its text “Chantons tous en ce jour” (Let us all sing today of the power of love) is a fitting end to the program.

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