Music & the Arts - Trinity Church

Program Notes
“I am he who was born long ago and was widely
known in the century, but now I am naked and
nothing, dust in a tomb, at an end, and food for
worms. I have lived enough, though too briefly in
comparison to eternity…I was a musician, considered
good by the good musicians, and ignorant by
the ignorant ones. And since those who scorned me
were more numerous that those who praised me,
music brought me small honor and great burdens.
And just as I at birth brought nothing into this
world, thus when I died I took nothing away.”
– Marc-Antoine Charpentier:
Epitaphium Carpentarii (H. 474)
It’s rather staggering to realize that the author
from whom the world’s most famous early music
ensemble (Les Arts Florissants) derives its name
was subjected to almost complete obscurity
until as late as the 1890s when a slightly skeptical
Camille Saint-Saëns undertook to mount
Molière’s final play Le Malade imaginaire in its
1672 version. This version, recently shorn of its
incidental music by the monopoly-holding Jean-
Baptiste Lully, was Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s
meal ticket into the mainstream of 17th-century
Parisian musical theater, and it was this work
that was resurrected more than 200 years after its
premiere.
Climbing out of the pit of obscurity would be
an arduous task for this composer and his music,
for unlike Mendelssohn’s complete devotion
to his rediscovery of Bach’s Matthäus-Passion,
Charpentier’s champion was publicly not entirely
enamored with the Baroque master’s abilities:
“The oversights of Marc-Antoine Charpentier
are crude mistakes, like a student’s clumsy turns
of phrase…whatever the case, there are works in
Charpentier’s considerable output that deserve to
be known. His ideas have an attractive freshness
and originality. Those marred by technical errors
are easy to correct without spoiling or modernizing
them; they are clearly improved by the elimination
of inconsequential schoolboy’s errors.” 1
1 Camille Saint-Saëns, “A Contemporary of Lully” Au courant de la
vie Dorbon-aîné, Paris 1914
2 Catherin Cessac, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Amadeus Press,
Portland Oregon 1995 (Trans. E. Thomas Glasow)
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Fortunately, Charpentier’s vast musical output
survived the verbal lashings of Camille Saint-
Saëns. Ironically, the composer himself did
the same in his own time, sustaining a fruitful
compositional life while under explicit attack by
the rival Jean-Baptiste Lully, who enjoyed a royal
monopoly on most matters artistic and firmly
held his position as the king’s court composer.
“Lully ruthlessly kept all other musicians (especially
those of genius) from claiming what he coveted for
himself alone: the supreme devotion and the recognition
of his king and his adopted compatriots.” 2
The life of Charpentier exhibits a curious
counterpart to the court-honored and -appointed
Lully, as it reveals a considerably different career
path, one that seems informed first by personal
loyalty (his long term commitment as “house
composer” to Madame de Guise), and additionally
by a sustained relationship with the Jesuits,
both in his youth and in his mature years serving
as the maître de musique of St. Louis in Paris. His
third and final position was also a master of music
position, this time through royal appointment
at St. Chapelle, where he served from 1698 until
his death in 1704. Even by today’s standards,
these jobs would be considered comfortable,
plum positions – allowing plenty of time for
compositional work in addition to the sustained
level of performance that would be expected of a
professional musician during this period.
Despite the fact that almost none of
Charpentier’s late music has survived, the
composer maintained a meticulous catalogue of
his own compositional portfolio up through his
time at the Jesuit church St. Louis. This collection
of cahiers was miraculously preserved for
posterity as Charpentier’s heirs sold the entire
collection to the bibliothèque nationale de France
where they remained forgotten until the 20th
century. This collection, Charpentier’s
mélanges autographes, comprises over 500 works
of stunning sophistication, variety and beauty.
Today, when one hears Charpentier, one
recognizes a truly unique voice – a compositional
language as individual and recognizable as
Brahms, Debussy or Mahler. In an ironic twist,
it is rather obvious that his relative comfort in his
positions, and his separation from the vulgarities
of royal “taste,” kept his process pure. Catherine
Cessac, one of Charpentier’s primary biographers
and editors, observes:
“Though detrimental to his personal fame and immortality,
Charpentier’s marginal position perhaps
benefitted his music. If the composer had obtained
an official post at court, would he have had occasion
to write his splendid masses when the king had no
taste for that type of work?...Whatever Charpentier
lacked in prestige, he gained in creative freedom
during a long career that allowed him to express
himself in diverse modes and to try his hand at all
music genres of the era, both sacred and secular.” 3
This unique and colorful voice and mastery of
compositional technique makes its most striking
appearance in his multi-volume settings of the
Tenebrae for Holy Week. Of the surviving works
in H. Wiley Hitchcock’s catalogue, one can identify
thirty-eight leçons and ten répons de ténèbres,
(H. 91 – H. 143) and with very few exceptions,
all are modestly scored and display a level of
introspective sublimity that must surely have
influenced François Couperin when he undertook
to create his similarly conceived settings of
the Tenebrae. In a wink to an archaic treatment
of chant and cantus firmus, many of these lessons
are rooted in the Gregorian ‘tonus lamentationis’
albeit merged and brilliantly clothed within a
more baroque understanding of rhetoric and
affectation. Clearly these works betray a Jesuitical
methodology, particularly in the way in which
subjective and deeply emotional vocal lines (contemporarily
identified as the ‘high melismatic
style’) interpret the ancient Jeremiahan texts.
Indeed, much as the orthodox Lutheran
church supports a hermeneutically informed
system for Bach, Charpentier’s massive output of
sacred repertoire clearly supports the thesis of a
parallel methodology within franco-catholicism,
particularly in its forward-thinking and erudite
Jesuitical faction.
“For the Jesuits to communicate most effectively
with the faithful and to move their congregation,
they had to provide what appeared tantamount to
entertainment. Within their church-centered society,
17th-century Jesuits practiced enculturation:
they adopted the secular artistic practices of the culture
as a means of evangelizing, exploiting the ideals
of devout humanism. Richard Viladesau has argued
that the Jesuits understood ‘the realm of aesthetic
3 Catherin Cessac, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Amadeus Press,
Portland Oregon 1995 (Trans. E. Thomas Glasow)