Music in The Court of Louis XIV Past — Aspect Chamber Music Series

PROGRAM NOTES

When we visit museums or walk through collections, we look upon vestiges of beauty and creativity, surviving history – and defining how it is we think about history itself. The carvings on a chair or the chinoiserie on a vase appear pristine and opulent, indicative to us of times where the lines between an object’s utility and pulchritude are not demarcated as they might be today. It’s up to us to imagine a world where beauty has a function and our modern utilitarian biases have no place.

And so it is with music, particularly of the Baroque period. The intricacy of Bach’s music appears to us as a symbol of individual human achievement or aesthetic edification, though his scores all contain dedications to his Lutheran religion, with the words Soli Deo Gloria. The stunning virtuosity of Vivaldi’s string concerti dazzles us on concert stages, though most were written for the young girls at the Ospedale della Pietà, Venice’s largest orphanage. For women music was but one of several skills learned alongside embroidering, sewing and domestic work, on the understanding that the practice of homemaking also necessitated the provision of music to engage the senses and provoke conversation for guests of either sex. There is no shortage of examples of how our modern concert conventions only offer a glimpse of what music meant to the dual consumer-practitioners, in whose lives music was not just a pastime.

This was no less the case in seventeenth-century France. Upon Maria de’ Medici’s marriage to Henry IV of France in 1600, music became a central focal point for the court as it would have been in her native Tuscany. While pleasurable to listen to, the music performed by members of nobility mediated messages of royal policies. Among those was the establishment of the French language as a medium for literature and poetry, seeing the rise of institutions like the Académie Française, constructed to imitate the Florentine Accademia, founded by the Medicis to promote the worlds of Petrarch and Dante, but also to standardize the Italian language.

In 1604, the Queen Consort wrote to her family in Florence to request the service of the famous musician in their employ, Giulio Caccini, once described as “a gentleman who sang and played the harp well.” Caccini and his entourage of Italian singers spent several months tutoring members of the court in singing, as an equal counterpart to dance. In the following year, a ballet de la reine was staged for Maria, in which Italian songs by Caccini, Jacopo Peri and others were interspersed with choreography performed by the Queen herself, who embodied the great classical heroines who spurned avarice and lust in favor of virtue.

Ironically, the simple musical style of these Italian songs was falling out of favor in Italy, where lengthier and more complex musical forms were on the rise with composers such as Monteverdi, who gave birth to opera in 1607. As such, the Italian Cinquecento lived on in French poetry, song and portraiture. Those scenes of pastoral serenity were taken out of the hills of Italy, and into the fields outside of Paris, where where Maria and her family made music at the Château de Compiègne. Composers such as Étienne Moulinié (serving in the employ of Maria’s second son Gaston d’Orléans, brother of Louis XIII) and Antoine Boësset (serving in the employ of the King himself) were among the first generation of French musicians who partook in the great translation process, and the firm establishment of the air de cour: airs to be sung for court performance.

This new form of air not only survived, but flourished well into the reign of Louis XIV, by which point it had become a medium for establishing the court’s apparent leadership in setting artistic and linguistic standards. Among composer Michel Lambert’s greatest contributions was that of using the printed press to exemplify that courtly poetry was best expressed in musical forms. His setting of Philippe Quinault’s poem Dans nos bois was one of many which appeared in Mercure Galant, a literary magazine (which still exists to this day) established under Louis XIV with the purpose of keeping everyone up to date on the latest artistic and intellectual debates in the court. A source of information, it can equally be seen as a publicity machine of sorts to affirm the court’s relevance in face of the rising (monied) middle class.

Ballets such as those performed by Catherine de Medici grew in size and scale throughout the 17th Century. In 1653, a Ballet de la nuit was performed by Louis XIV and eight dancing masters, whereby the young King, dressed as Apollo, set the planets in motion in a 13-hour long performance. In 1661, the King’s establishment of the Académie Royale de Danse not only made dance a function of court but turned choreography into a piece of intellectual property. Thirteen dancing masters were employed not simply to teach members of the court to dance, but to design choreographed spectacles further establishing his authority in line with that of the god Apollo. In the court of Louis XIV, dancing was not a pastime but an active tool to control the expenditure of time of his subjects.

As such, when scholars talk about music of the French Baroque, they are inevitably talking about music inspired by or incorporating dance forms. This was true of the operas of Jean-Baptiste Lully, where choruses and arias all took dance forms (such as chaconnes or minuets) which which choreography could be interspersed. Though not as long as the royal ballets, operas were evening long affairs of some four or 5 hours, with as much of a third of the evening being taken up with dancing. Indeed the grand Chaconne/Passacaille from Armide we heart tonight can, in its fullest manifestation, take up to seventeen minutes to perform..

Dancing’s primacy saw the eventual waning of the air de cour, as vocal forms came to be dominated by opera’s influence (as they had in Italy in the early seventeenth century). In cantatas like those of Louis-Nicolas Clérambault, a slow minuet is the chosen form to depict Apollo’s peaceful slumber, as there is no event in which his movements were not accompanied by the evocation of graceful movement. Even in the liturgical music of François Couperin it is doleful minuets and sarabandes which alternate with narrative recitatives to beckon a convent’s visitors to contrition and penitence as they meditate on redemption during Holy Week.

With such extreme resources set aside for dancing, it comes as no surprise that hundreds of musicians were placed in employment of the court to aid the dancing masters in rehearsals and smaller musical events. As such, almost all instrumental music of this period was organized into dance suites, be they for keyboard, wind instruments, or string instruments such as the viola da gamba. No greater example of dance’s primacy exists than in the 400 or so pieces by Lully’s student the gambist Marin Marais, a member of the King’s musical inner sanctum: an ordinaire de la chambre du roy pour la viole. Allemandes, sarabandes, gigues, chaconnes (and a whole host of other forms) often followed semi-improvised preludes to form a tight group of works from which a selection might be chosen for a dancing master to dance to, or for a young musician to perform as he or she was tutored in the styles expected for dancing. By the 18th century these forms were expanded to aid with dancing, but also to depict those objects drawn into the King’s orbit. In Marais’s Suite d’un goût étranger, it is arabesques, sauterelles, caprices, tartarines and ameriquaines which (ironically) illustrate the King’s new gradual dominion over corners of the globe, and not just the solar system.

All humans love to imbue music with meaning, but it can still be difficult for modern listeners and practitioners to imagine a world where music is not metaphorical, but substantive of the power and literal property of a single monarch, self-cast as Apollonian deity. Of course, while we wouldn’t want to return to such a paradigm, it’s interesting to consider the points in history where music has been viewed as so transcendent as to be used as an instrument of political influence. Tonight’s audience is invited to enjoy the music but also to gain a glimpse of Louis XIV’s personhood as embodied in the music that accompanied his daily life from waking till resting, from his birth until his final repose.

MUSIC IN THE COURT OF LOUIS XIV

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