THE FRENCH CONNECTION
Sunday, October 28, 7:30 PM
First United Methodist Church, Evanston
Ticket Prices: $55, $45, $35
Pre-concert lecture by Robert Kendrick
in church chapel at 6:30 PM. Free admission.
Monday, October 29, 7:30 PM
Harris Theater, Chicago
(Millennium Park)
Ticket Prices: $75, $60, $50, $40, $30
Pre-concert lecture by Robert Kendrick
in Chicago Cultural Center's Randolph Cafe at 6 PM. Free admission.
PROGRAM
Les Petits Riens, K. 299b
Te Deum, S. 32
 |
Te per orbem terrarum |
Te Deum, H. 146
|
Prélude |
Le Tombeau de Couperin
|
fourth movement - Rigaudon |
Music of the Baroque
Chorus and Orchestra
Peter Van De Graaff, bass-baritone
During the reign of Louis XIV, the Te Deum was sung at all important occasions. Music of the Baroque presents two brilliant settings of this grand hymn of praise and thanksgiving written for the Sun King. Experience the pomp and grandeur of French baroque choral music at its ceremonial best. A sprightly Mozart dance suite and music by Ravel complete a program that makes "The French Connection."
Program Notes
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Les Petits Riens
When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart journeyed with his mother Maria Anna to Mannheim and Paris in 1777, he hoped that it would mark a turning point in his career. Unfortunately, the trip had profoundly mixed results. While his stay in Mannheim led to his acquaintance with the talented sisters Aloysia and Constanze Weber (the latter, of course, whom he later married), Mozart left Mannheim in March 1778 without any job prospects—and the same proved to be true in Paris. Although he worked hard to make the right connections, his efforts failed to produce the desired results. According to Friedrich Melchior von Grimm, one of his Paris sponsors, Mozart’s troubles ultimately stemmed from a lack of political savvy. As Grimm explained to Mozart’s father, “He is too trusting, too inactive, too easy to catch, too little intent on the means that may lead to fortune. To make an impression here one has to be artful, enterprising, daring. To make his fortune I wish he had but half his talent and twice as much shrewdness, and then I should not worry about him.”
Almost as if to illustrate Grimm’s point—and perhaps out of desperation—Mozart eventually started accepting commissions without payment. On May 14, 1787, he reported to his father that Jean Georges Noverre, the maître de ballet at the Paris Opéra, was “going to arrange a new ballet for which I am going to compose the music.” On July 9, the situation had changed slightly: “... [Noverre] needed just half a ballet and so I wrote the music for it—in other words, six numbers are by others and consist entirely of dreadful old French airs, whereas I’ve written the symphony and contredanses, making 13 pieces in all. The Ballet has been performed four times already—with the greatest applause.” Unfortunately, Noverre never paid Mozart for his work, nor was his name mentioned at any of the performances. It was a bitter lesson for the composer, who vowed to his father that “now I will accept no new commission unless I know ahead of time now much I will get for it.”
Titled Les Petits Riens, Mozart’s composition for Noverre was first performed on June 11, 1778 at the end of Niccolò Piccinni’s opera Le Finte gemelle. As a contemporary observer described the ballet:
It consists of three episodic scenes almost detached from each other. The first is purely Anacreontic: Cupid taken in the net and caged; it is very agreeably composed. Mlle. Guimard and the younger M. Vestris display all the grace contained in the subject. The second is a game of blind-man’s bluff; M. d’Auberval, whose talent the public finds so agreeable, plays the principal part. The third is one of the rogueries of Cupid, where he shows two shepherdesses another shepherdess disguised as a shepherd. Mlle. Asselin plays the shepherd and Mlles. Guimard and Allard the two shepherdesses. The two shepherdesses fall in love with the supposed shepherd, who, to undeceive them, eventually bares her breast. The scene is made very piquant by the intelligence and grace of these three famous dancers.
Since Mozart did not compose the entire ballet and was never actually credited with any of the music, scholars have used stylistic analysis to determine which of the dances he actually wrote. Although there is still some dissension, it is generally thought that the charming dances performed this evening are Mozart’s “13 pieces in all.”
Michel Richard Delalande: Te Deum
At the court of Louis XIV, music meant power. After his father died when Louis XIV was only four, Cardinal Mazarin (who effectively ruled the country along with Louis’s mother, Anne of Austria) took an active role in grooming the young king for the throne, including instruction in French dance and Italian music. When the king was 23, Mazarin died and Louis XIV finally took control of the throne. He worked quickly to consolidate his power, and with the help of his closest minister Colbert, soon marshaled the court’s musical resources toward self-glorification and the development of a French musical style. Over the course of his reign, Louis XIV employed some of the greatest musicians of the time, including Jean-Baptiste Lully and Michel-Richard Delalande. Few aspects of musical performance escaped royal reference—even in the realm of the sacred. As Jean de la Bruyère wryly described in his Caractères,
The great nobles of the nation are assembled every day at a given hour, in a temple which they name church; there is at the bottom of this temple an altar devoted to their God, where a priest celebrates mysteries which they call saints, holy and frightening; the great nobles form a vast circle at the foot of this altar, and stand, back towards the priest and the holy mysteries, their faces turned towards their king, who is seen kneeling in a tribute, and to whom all their minds and all their hearts seem to be directed. This usage, you can hardly avoid realizing, implies a sort of subordination, for the people seem to be worshipping the prince, and the prince worshipping God.
Just as the religious service glorified the king, its music—which traditionally had been used to enrich the liturgy—was also used for royal promotion. As musicologist Jean-Paul Montagnier explains, “Indeed, the grand and petit motet which were sung during the king’s Mass were hardly—to say the least—selected according to the liturgy of the day, but rather according to a laudatory rhetoric: this is obvious for the choral setting of the verse Domine salvum fac Regem which concluded all the ceremonies.”
The numerous Te Deum settings written during this period provide one illustration of the way the secular and the sacred were blurred during the reign of the “Sun King.” A lavish work used to commemorate events significant to the monarch and his kingdom, such as military victories, weddings and births, the Te Deum could only be performed by royal decree. As Louis de Rouvrouy, duc du Saint-Simon, wrote in his Memoires, “The Te Deum is a public action […] reserved […] to kings to thank God with ceremony on behalf of the public for the graces which interest one and all.” Furthermore, as Montagnier suggests in a recent article on the Te Deum at the time of Louis XIV, many of the settings performed at court contain a plainchant figure in the Sanctus section (UT – RE – MI – FA – MI – RE) that may have served as an aural link between God (the divine ruler) and his royal counterpart on earth. The model for many late seventeenth-century settings of the Te Deum was that of Lully, which premiered in 1677 and enjoyed many subsequent performances. The most notorious took place in 1687, when Lully stabbed himself in the foot with a baton while conducting the work and died two months later from gangrene. Shortly after his appointment as sous-maître in 1683, Michel-Richard Delalande composed a Te Deum of his own that similarly became one of the most frequently performed motets at court.
One striking aspect of Delalande’s Te Deum is that it gives precise timings for each movement, the motivation for which the work’s full title makes clear: “Te Deum simple, le feu Roy ayant voulu qu’il ne dura guère plus que sa messe ordinaire” (A simple Te Deum, the late king having wished that it should not last longer than his usual mass). The festive mood is established from the start of the opening Sinfonie with brilliant trumpets and drums, as well as a D major tonality (often associated with celebration). In the movements that follow, Delalande generally stays true to the structural demarcations implied in the text, using distinctions between solo and chorus as well as striking changes in mood to further dramatize the words. The sprightly solo-textured movements that surround the celestial Sanctus, for example, throw into greater relief a section already distinguished by its slow tempo and homophonic choral texture. (As Montagnier points out, the Sanctus was particularly symbolic at court and would have been understood as a glorification of the king.) In addition to large-scale contrast between individual movements, Delalande adds smaller gestures within the sections to enhance the text’s meaning. In the movement “Tu ad liberandum,” a lyrical melody and string accompaniment illustrate the serene Virgin, while repetitions of the phrase “non horruisti” underscore the immaculate conception. In the choral “Per singulos,” the reverence of the phrase “we bless thee” is highlighted with lilting homophony and reduced accompaniment, while an abrupt change in tempo, the addition of trumpets and drums and a more contrapuntal texture announce “we praise your name forever.”
Marc-Antoine Charpentier: Te Deum, H. 146
Although Marc-Antoine Charpentier never held a position at the court of Louis XIV (a serious illness kept him from participating in the competition that led to Delalande’s appointment in 1683), he did hold prestigious posts with several of the king’s relatives. Not only was Charpentier the director of music for the king’s niece, Marie de Lorraine, the duchesse de Guise, but in 1680 he began serving in a similar capacity for the king’s son at Saint-Cloud. Charpentier also had a reputation as being one of the king’s favorite composers, a fact which may have prevented the jealous Lully from fully endorsing Charpentier’s employment at court. During a visit to Saint-Cloud in 1681, the king was reportedly so taken with Charpentier’s music that he dismissed his own musicians, preferring instead to hear Charpentier’s motets as performed by the dauphin’s ensemble. Charpentier also held several church positions during his lifetime, including music director for the Jesuits of the church of Saint-Louis as well as the Sainte-Chapelle.
Although the precise circumstances surrounding this Te Deum are unknown, it is generally believed that Charpentier composed H. 146 for the church of Saint-Louis in celebration of the victory at the Battle of Steinkerque in August 1692. Of Charpentier’s four extant Te Deum settings, H. 146 is the most well known, due no doubt in part to the use of the Prelude as the opening theme for the Eurovision Song Contest. Like Delalande, Charpentier composed his Te Deum primarily in the key of D major, which he explicitly labeled “joyeux et très guerrier” (joyous and very martial) in his Règles de composition. Charpentier also uses the alternation between solo and choral textures for contrast and structure throughout the work. Whereas Delalande generally preserves the text’s structural divisions, however, Charpentier frequently overrides prosodic concerns in favor of creating musical drama. One striking instance of this can be heard in their respective treatments of the Sanctus. Unlike Delalande, who sets the Sanctus as an individual choral movement, Charpentier takes his cue from Lully’s setting, linking it to the previous “Tibi cherubim et seraphim” section and using soloists to portray the angels’ heavenly voices. Like Lully, he then “interrupts” the Sanctus at the phrase “Pleni sunt coeli,” perhaps switching to full chorus to call attention to the “glorious choir.” (Interestingly, Delalande incorporates a similar structure in later revisions of his Te Deum.) Charpentier also moves freely between solo and choral textures within movements. While “Aeterna fac” is essentially a choral movement, for example, solo voices or small ensembles highlight individual phrases, as in “benedic hereditate tuae” (bless thine inheritance), “per singulos dies benedicimus te” (day by day we bless thee) and “in saeculum saeculi” (for ever and ever).
Maurice Ravel: Le Tombeau de Couperin
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, many composers in France sought to create a uniquely French music aimed at countering Richard Wagner’s all-pervasive influence. In the decades that followed, however, this impulse took as sinister turn. As musicologist Jane Fulcher observed recently, the insistence on a French style, coupled with a renewed interest in the past, gradually became linked with World War I propaganda. At a time when France was deeply divided both politically and culturally, the idea of creating a “unified core of national beliefs” through art was appealing to many. To further this agenda, Republican nationalists turned to older models of state power, such as the “Golden Age” of Louis XIV and the classical notions of purity, proportion and order. Along with defining “French” music came a call to banish “dangerous influences,” giving rise to right-wing projects like the “Ligue pour la Defense de la Musique Francaise.” Although such rhetoric intensified in the postwar period, not everyone succumbed to the fervor. Throughout his lifetime, Maurice Ravel remained an outspoken critic of this xenophobic approach to art. Not only did he compose many works with distinctly foreign characteristics, including the Melodies hebraïques (1920), but he also explicitly refused to take part in the “Ligue pour la Defense.” As Ravel explained,
It would be dangerous for composers systematically to ignore the productions of their foreign colleagues and thus to form a sort of national coterie: our musical art, so rich in the present epoch, would not delay to become enclosed in its [own] clichés…I hope, nevertheless, to act as a Frenchman and count myself among those who want to serve.
Although Ravel remained steadfastly against nationalist music, Le Tombeau de Couperin seems at first glance to be a blatant example of this brand of neoclassicism. Begun as a keyboard suite in 1914, the work was finally completed in 1917, with each of its six movements bearing dedications to friends who had died in combat. Ravel arranged four of the movements for orchestra in 1919, and it is in this form that the work remains most popular. Not only does Le Tombeau memorialize Francois Couperin, an important musician (and music teacher to the king’s children) at the court of Louis XIV, but it also draws heavily upon baroque dance forms, rhythms and melodic gestures. Furthermore, Ravel himself planned the work as a general homage to eighteenth-century French music. In light of Ravel’s stated opposition to nationalist music, Le Tombeau de Couperin has been interpreted in multiple ways ranging from a reverent look at the past to a witty commentary on twentieth-century sound reproduction. The way Ravel intermingles wartime propaganda and the tragic reality of combat, however, invites another interpretation. While many in France viewed WWI as a victory, others—including Ravel—simply saw the war as tragic and bloody. When nominated for the Legion d’honneur in 1920, for example, Ravel refused the award, proclaiming that “a red ribbon would not bleed on his [Ravel’s] buttonhole.” With its discordant dedications to Couperin and Ravel’s fallen friends, Le Tombeau undercuts the notion of an “idealized France” that neoclassicism purported to offer. As Ravel once commented, “No, the ‘Marseillaise’ doesn’t figure into it.”
First performed on February 28, 1920, the orchestral version of Le Tombeau de Couperin includes four of the original six movements. In the opening prelude, running sixteenth notes recall the “perpetual motion” quality of baroque keyboard music, while subtly shifting harmonies and meters are quintessentially modern. Originally an Italian dance called the furlana, the Forlane became fashionable in the French court at the end of the seventeenth century. In Ravel’s version, the pungent chromaticism of the recurring motive that opens the movement provides a striking counterpoint to the lilting dotted rhythms. Although Ravel’s arrangement omits the references to his friends, the Forlane was originally dedicated to Lieutenant Gabriel De Luc. The dance form is slightly less audible in the third movement, which draws upon the minuet’s stately tempo, grace and elegance. (The minuet bore a dedication to Jean Dreyfus, with whose parents Ravel was staying when he completed Le Tombeau.) The lively Rigaudon, in memory of Ravel’s childhood friends Pierre and Pascal Gaudin, takes the work to a deceptively cheery close.
© Jennifer More Glagov 2007