The Gallican rite of Merovingian France (c. 500–751)

As the Roman empire gradually disintegrated, its authority was largely replaced by local leaders and institutions. The Christian church took up some of the empire’s unifying functions, but it too was geographically fractured as communication became more difficult. A distinct Gallican liturgy can be seen even before the conversion of Clovis, the first of the Merovingian kings, around the year 500. In light of future events, it is interesting to note that the earliest document attesting to Gallican liturgy is a letter by Pope Innocent I, dated 416, requesting that the churches of Gaul follow the Roman rite, but surviving texts attest to the persistence of the local liturgy.¹

While the existence of a Gallican rite is clear enough, what it sounded like is harder to determine.² No musical sources survive, since Gregorian chant effectively suppressed Gallican melodies before the advent of notation in the ninth century. Some texts and descriptions give hints, and traces may remain within the Gregorian liturgy, but teasing out the details is difficult, and scholars do not always agree on methods or results.³ What evidence survives suggests less a single coherent rite than a heterogeneous body of materials whose specific contents may vary from place to place, perhaps sharing a basic liturgical structure but using different readings or prayers. Though it largely disappeared, Gallican chant provided the Frankish roots onto which the Roman rite was grafted to create what we know as Gregorian chant. This new hybrid was inextricably linked to Carolingian reforms.

The Carolingian renaissance and the creation of ‘Gregorian’ chant (751–c. 850)

While the effective power of the Merovingian kings declined over the seventh century, that of the mayors of the palace who ruled in the king’s name increased, until in 751 Pépin III (the Short, d. 768) definitively took the royal title himself. He sought to enhance his new royal status in part by a renewed Frankish alliance with Rome.⁴Pope Stephen II travelled to Francia, making the first trip of any pope north of the Alps, and in 754, at the royal abbey of Saint-Denis, he anointed Pépin and his sons. By the end of the century Pépin’s son Charles, later known as Charlemagne (r. 768–814), was the most important ruler in the West, controlling much of what is now France, Germany and Italy, and he was crowned by the pope in Rome on Christmas Day 800.⁵

The Carolingians took their role as protectors of the church seriously, seeking to reform religious life through the better education of clerics.⁶ The cultural flowering that resulted, often called the Carolingian renaissance, built on both Merovingian and Gallo-Roman roots. Monastic and cathedral schools were created to foster basic Latinity, which could be passed by parish priests to the laity, and to provide further education in the liberal arts and theology. Both patristic texts and classical works by authors such as Cicero, Suetonius and Tacitus, largely neglected in Frankish lands for a couple of hundred years, were copied in the new script known as Carolingian minuscule, developed at the monastery of Corbie.⁷ Not only were older texts copied, but Carolingian masters wrote new commentaries on both sacred and secular texts, as well as poetry and treatises on a wide variety of subjects. Through all this can be seen not only a concern for proper doctrine, but also an increased emphasis on the written word.

The church was also the primary beneficiary of many developments in the visual sphere.⁸ Liturgical manuscripts and other books were often highly decorated, both on the page and in their bindings, which may include ivory carvings or jewels. New churches, cathedrals and monasteries were built and supplied with elaborate altar furnishings, such as chalices and reliquaries. Few examples survive of textiles and paintings, but ample evidence exists of their use. Charlemagne’s court chapel at Aachen is a superlative example of visual splendour in the service of both religion and royal power.

The importing of the Roman liturgy and its chant into the Frankish royal domain was an important part of the Carolingian reforming agenda. Roman liturgical books and singers circulated in Francia as early as the 760s. The effort to displace the existing Gallican liturgy in favour of the Roman, however, was never as successful as the Carolingian rulers might have liked. The number of documents that mandate the Roman use suggests a general lack of cooperation on the part of the Franks, and the surviving books attest to far greater diversity in practice than Carolingian statements would suggest.⁹ Moreover, melodic differences between the earliest sources of Gregorian chant and later Roman manuscripts show that Gregorian chant is in reality a hybrid, created through the interaction of the rite brought from Rome and Frankish singers. Susan Rankin compares Gregorian and Roman versions of the introit Ad te levavi, arguing that the Gregorian version shows a Carolingian concern for ‘reading’ its text in terms of both sound and meaning to a greater degree than the Old Roman melody does.¹⁰ This fits within the Carolingian reforming ideas already seen. In any case, Gregorian chant eventually became more than just another local liturgy: it was transmitted across the Carolingian empire and beyond, and given a uniquely divine authority through its attachment to Gregory I (d. 604), Doctor of the Church, reforming pope and saint. The earliest surviving Frankish chant book, copied about 800, uses his name, and an antiphoner copied in the late tenth century provides what becomes a familiar image: Gregory (identifiable by monastic tonsure and saintly nimbus) receiving the chant by dictation from the Holy Spirit in the shape of a dove.¹¹

The need to learn, understand and transmit this new body of liturgical song led to developments in notation and practical theory that are first attested in Frankish lands.¹² The earliest surviving examples of notation come from the 840s, and the first fully notated chant books were copied at the end of the ninth century. A system of eight modes may have been in use as early as the late eighth century, as witnessed by a tonary, which classifies chant melodies according to mode, copied around 800 at the Frankish monastery of Saint-Riquier. Treatises explaining the modes and other aspects of chant theory appear in the ninth century; early examples include the Musica disciplina of Aurelian of Réôme, a Burgundian monk writing in the first half of the ninth century, and Hucbald (d. 930), a scholar and teacher from the royal abbey of Saint-Amand. In addition to chant books and treatises on practical theory, the earliest surviving copy of Boethius’s treatise on music, a fundamental source for the transmission of ancient Greek speculative theory to the Latin West, was copied in the first half of the ninth century, perhaps at Saint-Amand. The proper performance of chant, as aided by these tools, was an essential element in the education of clerics in Carolingian times and beyond.

Monastic culture under the later Carolingians and the early Capetians (c. 840–c. 1000)

By his death Charlemagne ruled much of Western Europe, but the later ninth century and the tenth century were marked by a return to local concerns, even while the authority of monarch and church were acknowledged. This attitude may be reflected in the flowering of musical creativity associated with individual religious institutions. Even as Gregorian chant took hold, new chants were created to enhance local saints’ cults, and new genres such as sequences and hymns allowed additions to established liturgies. Just as glosses became important in the second half of the ninth century as a way of commenting on texts, tropes were created to enhance existing chants, adding words and/or music to explain or expand upon the original.¹³ For instance, the notion of Jesus’ birth as the fulfilment of prophecy is underlined in this trope added to the Christmas introit found in a manuscript from Chartres (chant text underlined):

Polyphony, which will be discussed in the next chapter, likewise began as a way to enhance chant. While these practices can be found all over the Christian West, and some specific examples were transmitted widely, these additions to the central Gregorian repertoire were not standardised, but rather locally chosen, and often locally composed.

A major factor in the fracturing of the Carolingian empire was the common practice of dividing territory among all male heirs, rather than passing on a title only to the eldest. When Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious died in 840, he left three sons. At the Treaty of Verdun in 843, they agreed on a division of the empire, and Charles the Bald, the youngest, inherited most of what is now France. The notion of a unified kingdom, however, was difficult to maintain as areas such as Brittany, Gascony, Burgundy and Aquitaine each held on to their own culture and traditions, and often their own laws and language. The Frankish kingdom was further challenged by Viking raids, which became more numerous from the 840s. In 845 the Vikings reached Paris, and from the 850s winter settlements can be found in the Seine valley. In 911, Charles the Bald’s grandson Charles the Simple ceded the area around Rouen, creating what eventually became the duchy of Normandy. A further crisis came in 888, when, for the first time since Pépin III became king in 751, there was effectively no adult Carolingian candidate to take the throne. After a century of conflict, Hugh Capet was elected king in 987. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that Frankish culture was located more within individual religious institutions than at a royal court.

Monasteries were particularly important sites for the creation of new types of chant, and for the study and transmission of learning in general. From Alcuin, an English monk who was Charlemagne’s chief advisor and was named abbot of Saint-Martin of Tours in 796, to Suger (c. 1081–1151), abbot of Saint-Denis and confidant of Louis VI, and beyond, churchmen were key advisors to kings. New monasteries flourished even as royal power waned, and old ones were reformed and better endowed by local patrons, who requested in return prayers for their souls and those of their relatives. The best-known reform house was founded at Cluny in 910 by William the Pious, duc d’Aquitaine.¹⁵Cluny and its many daughter houses fostered proper celebration of the Office, reinforcing the idea that a monastery’s primary work is corporate prayer. Cluniac houses, like Benedictine monasteries, cathedrals, chapels in royal palaces and other churches, were adorned with new buildings and decorations to enhance the liturgy, which was preserved in notated and sometimes decorated manuscripts. Reforming impulses also led to the formation of new orders, most notably the Cistercians in the twelfth century, and the Franciscans and Dominicans in the thirteenth. These tended to take a more austere attitude towards chant, but they too copied liturgical books.

A number of Frankish abbeys can be associated with specific musical developments. The library of the Benedictine monastery of Saint-Gall, in modern Switzerland, still holds a number of the earliest surviving manuscripts containing musical notation, as well as standard works such as Boethius’s Consolatio philosophiae, classical authors such as Cicero, Virgil and Ovid, and vernacular texts.¹⁶Saint-Gall was also the home of major early creators of tropes and sequences such as Notker and Tuotilo, and an early example of the Quem quaeritis dialogue can be found there.¹⁷ Another early centre of both troping and Latin song, as well as liturgical drama and early polyphony, was the abbey of Saint-Martial in Limoges, founded in 848. The cultural flowering associated with this monastery in the late tenth century and eleventh century included an attempt to proclaim its namesake, a third-century bishop, as an apostle. This effort, spearheaded by Adémar de Chabannes, who wrote a new liturgy for Martial, was ultimately unsuccessful, but it did enhance the fame of the abbey and its value as a pilgrimage site.¹⁸

Saint-Denis, just outside Paris, had been a royal abbey since Merovingian times, and served as burial site of many French kings.¹⁹Pope Stephen II and his schola cantorum stayed there in 754, and demonstrations of the Roman chant and liturgy probably took place at the abbey at that time. New efforts to foster Denis’s cult in the ninth century led to the conflation of the third-century bishop of Paris with the fifth-century theologian Pseudo-Dionysius, in turn linked to Dionysius the Areopagite, a Greek disciple of Paul. The octave or one-week anniversary of this enhanced Denis’s feast was celebrated by a Mass with Greek Propers, the only one of its kind. In the twelfth century Abbot Suger, a close advisor and friend to Louis VI who had been educated at the abbey, built one of the earliest manifestations of the new Gothic architectural style there, replacing a Carolingian church. Aspects of the building reflect principles of Pseudo-Dionysian thought, and a mid-eleventh-century rhymed office for Denis emphasises ‘the light of divine wisdom’ as described in the theology of Pseudo-Dionysius.²⁰Saint-Denis did not cultivate polyphony, as the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris did, but its widespread practice of melismatic embellishments of chant can be seen as an attempt to move the singer or listener to the immaterial world, reflecting the belief that vocalisation without words approximated angelic speech and the Divine Voice.²¹

The Capetians and the age of cathedrals (987–c. 1300)

The focus on individual institutions as sites for musical developments continued under the early Capetians. While monasteries continued to serve an important role, urban cathedrals received increased attention, especially in the royal heartland still known as the Île-de-France. The election of Hugh Capet (r. 987–96) did not immediately lead to a resurgence of royal authority across the land, but it increased over the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Primogeniture was still gaining acceptance and was not uncontested, so the early Capetians formally crowned and associated their eldest sons with them in their own lifetimes. This stability of succession allowed them time to build power. They also encouraged a new ideal of kingship: while coronation had long been seen as a sacrament, and the notion that the monarch is defender of the church had long roots, the early Capetians went a step further to build an image of the king as holy man. This can be seen in Helgaud of Fleury’s life of Robert the Pious (r. 996–1031), and in the widespread belief in the king’s touch, by which scrofula and other illnesses were said to be cured.²² The strongest manifestation of the sacralisation of kingship was the canonisation of Louis IX in 1297.

The early Capetians directly controlled only the area around Paris, but they gradually extended their geographic control westwards and southwards, and this culminated in the reclaiming of Normandy from the English kings in 1204. Philip Augustus (r. 1179–1223) further enhanced the position of Paris as his royal capital, building a new wall to protect recent growth. An economic recovery, beginning in the second half of the eleventh century, also benefited the French kings: the agricultural riches of northern France, including the royal domain, began to be realised, and trade between these areas and markets to the north, south and east was strengthened. Urban areas, especially Paris, became transportation hubs. Because cathedrals, unlike monasteries, tend to be located in cities, they benefited from this economic activity through the patronage of kings, nobles and townsfolk. New buildings were created in the new Gothic style, which encouraged liturgical and musical developments as well.

After the cathedral in Chartres burned in 1020, Bishop Fulbert (d. 1028) began work on the current building, which was also dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The Marian cult already active there was enhanced, with a new focus on the Nativity of the Virgin.²³ The liturgy fashioned for this new celebration combined chants for Advent and Christmas from the traditional Gregorian repertoire with newly composed material, including three responsories attributed to Fulbert himself. The best-known of these outlines the lineage of Mary through the Jesse tree, which is spectacularly expressed in glass at the west end of the cathedral (see Example 1.1).²⁴

This melody begins by hovering around its final, D, dipping down to A at the word ‘Jesse’, in the process emphasising Jesse as the root of this genealogical tree. It then rises a little, centring on F with hints of G at the two appearances of the word virga (rod), showing how the branch lifts away from the root, but by moving downwards again links the branch to that root, as well as to the flower it produces. When the Spirit rests on that flower, it releases a luxurious melisma on the word almus (nurturing), which both rises to A, the highest note of the chant, and falls to the octave below before cadencing on the final. The effect is one of a gradual ascent, but one that is thoroughly grounded, like the Jesse tree itself. A similar process operates in the verse, which explains the image described in the respond: the melody rises to A on dei (God), then falls to flos (flower), showing how Christ ultimately serves as both culmination and source of the Jesse tree. Fulbert, or whoever composed the music, did not choose the perhaps obvious path and create a melody that rises inexorably from beginning to end through an authentic range (or that might even extend its range to show the scope of the tree’s ascent), but by using a plagal mode, with a relatively limited compass that envelops its final, he followed a different path, one that emphasises stability and rootedness.²⁵

Example 1.1 Fulbert of Chartres, Stirps Jesse, responsory for the Nativity of the Virgin, respond only

Notre-Dame of Paris, at the heart of Philip Augustus’s capital city, is perhaps the best-known Gothic cathedral. It was renowned for its cultivation of polyphony, which will be discussed in the next chapter, but chant and other forms of monophonic song continued to be central to its liturgical life.²⁶ Its canons had connections outside the cathedral, most notably at the abbey of Saint-Victor and the nascent university. Saint-Victor was a major centre of Augustinian reform in the twelfth century, balancing rejection of the world with serving the laity and seeking to create clerics who would teach ‘by word and example’.²⁷ Its canons translated their reforming doctrine into liturgical song through a substantial group of sequences, many associated with Adam (d. 1146), who served as a canon and precentor of Notre-Dame before retiring to the abbey. Philip, chancellor of Notre-Dame from 1217 to 1236, wrote a number of conductus texts (for more on the conductus see below), though it is uncertain whether he wrote music, and indeed several are linked to melodies by Perotin, who will be discussed in the next chapter. Since Philip’s position brought him into contact with the university, it is not surprising that some of his conductus refer to student conflicts in the early thirteenth century.²⁸

The growth of the University of Paris reflected a renewed concern for the proper education of clerics. Paris became the centre of a new cadre of clerks, associated with noble and royal households, educated at cathedral schools and universities and often remunerated in part through the acquisition of church benefices. University-trained clerics also enhanced the rosters of monasteries, cathedrals and other sacred foundations. This educated non-noble class, whether based at church or court or moving between the two, provided a number of the creators and performers of the written musical tradition, monophonic and polyphonic, in both Latin and the vernacular. Music as an abstract mathematical art was one of the seven liberal arts, but Joseph Dyer argues that it and the other disciplines in the quadrivium were effectively eliminated from the curriculum at the University of Paris by the mid-thirteenth century in favour of other subjects, especially Aristotelian logic.²⁹ There is evidence, however, that university students had significant contact with practical music-making, through their early education, the liturgical practices of colleges and relationships with cathedral canons and singers of the Chapelle Royale. Peter Abelard and Peter of Blois are known to have written songs in Latin, and Abelard also composed hymns and six planctus. In perhaps the best-known witness to university-related music-making, the theorist known to us as Anonymous IV, probably a monk of St Albans in England, tells us about sacred music in Paris, especially Notre-Dame polyphony, on the basis of his experience as a university student.

Cathedrals were not the only witnesses to the Gothic style. After Louis IX (r. 1226–70) bought the Crown of Thorns from the Byzantine emperor in 1241, he built a chapel within the royal palace to house it. The Sainte-Chapelle is a masterpiece of colour in glass and paint that visibly links the French kings to those of the Old Testament and both to Christ the King.³⁰ These connections were made in the liturgy for the chapel as well, perhaps most notably in the Offices created to celebrate Louis IX after canonisation:

In this responsory, Louis is explicitly linked to the New Testament parable, and both Christ (by analogue) and Louis are offered celestial kingship for their earthly work. The responsory is less melismatic than many examples, perhaps in part so that it can reflect the rhyming text.³² Its fourth-mode melody is restless, beginning with a leap from D to A and cadencing on various pitches before the extended melismas on glorioso commercio (glorious exchange, referring to Louis’s exchange of earthly rule for spiritual delights) close on E, as though finding at last in heaven the rest the saint could not find on earth.

Secular monophony and the growth of courtly song (c. 1100–c. 1300)

To this point we have focused mostly on music for the church, but other forms of Latin song appear as early as the ninth and tenth centuries. Particularly associated with the abbey of Saint-Martial is a group of songs variously called carmen, ritmus and especially versus. While many of these pieces are sacred or even para-liturgical, they also include planctus or laments, such as those on the death of Charlemagne and on the battle of Fontenay (842), satirical songs and so forth. These songs are mostly syllabic and usually strophic in form, with a single melody used for multiple stanzas of text, though the planctus and lai share the paired-verse form of the sequence, where a new melody is used for each pair of verses.³³ From the twelfth century Latin songs called conductus appear in Aquitaine and Paris; these are likewise strophic and largely syllabic, though sometimes melismas appear at the beginning and/or the end of the stanza. The conductus can be either monophonic or polyphonic, with all voices moving together homorhythmically.

Peter Abelard wrote six planctus, though their melodies are written only in unheightened neumes that cannot be read, except for this lament of David on the deaths of Saul and Jonathan:

Songs in the language now known as Occitan or Provençal began to appear at the turn of the twelfth century. The relative autonomy of the southern territories and their generally more urban culture may have allowed greater scope for the creation and transmission of vernacular song than was possible in the north. Some have also suggested influence from Arabic songs, by way of Spain, but that cannot be proved. Created by poet-composers known as troubadours, these songs flourished into the thirteenth century, though southern culture was largely cut off by the Albigensian Crusade in the 1220s. Troubadours included both noble amateurs and professionals of lower rank: Guillaume IX, duc d’Aquitaine (d. 1127), and Bernart de Ventadorn (d. c. 1190–1200), who may have been the son of servants of the comte de Ventadorn,³⁵ give an idea of the range possible. Others came from the urban merchant class, and several ended their days in the church; one is known to us only under the name Monge (Monk) de Montaudon. Several women wrote songs, though only one melody, by the comtessa de Dia, survives.

Stylistically, troubadour songs are much like their Latin counterparts: a single melody is used for multiple stanzas of poetry, and mostly syllabic text-setting allows that text to be heard clearly. While laments, crusade songs and satirical songs exist, the most common subject is love, specifically the kind of sacralised devotion known as fin’amors, often translated into English as ‘courtly love’. This is in many ways comparable to the Marian devotion that also flowered in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and it can be difficult sometimes to determine whether the subject of a given song is the Virgin or an earthly lady. While erotic feelings can exist within fin’amors (or within a mystical spiritual context in Marian devotion), they usually cannot be consummated, because the lady is married, of higher social status, or otherwise unavailable. She can, however, be worshipped, and deeds can be done in her name. As Bernart de Ventadorn writes, ‘Fair lady, I ask you nothing/Except that you take me as your servant.’³⁶ On the other hand, the lady’s rejection can be a mortal blow for the poet, as Bernart says elsewhere:

Perhaps more importantly, songs can be sung to and for her, and many examples speak of the narrator’s compulsion to sing. Troubadour songs therefore are in some ways less about love than about singing about love, especially in the high-register examples known as cansos (or grande chanson courtoise).³⁸Gace Brulé (d. after 1213), a minor noble from Champagne and a trouvère, provides one of many examples (see Example 1.2).³⁹

The melody of this song is typical of troubadour and trouvère song in many ways: strophic with a refrain, it sets the text with mostly one note per syllable, sometimes marking the cadences at ends of lines with short melismas. This kind of setting allows the performer to focus on declaiming the text. Lines 1–2 and 3–4 receive paired melodies, which draw the ear to link the lover’s sad state to his separation from those around him. (This reading reflects only the first stanza, which usually seems to be most carefully set to the melody.) The next section rises into the upper range as he sings of how his desire is killing him, but then falls as he realises she will not save him.

Example 1.2 Gace Brulé, ‘Desconfortez’

In the short final stanza or envoi, the poet names himself and refers directly to his song:

This self-referential aspect, foreign to chant and early polyphony, may be reflected in the manuscript transmission of the songs: they often appear in collections organised by author, frequently including author ‘portraits’ and even short ‘biographies’ (vidas). The vidas cannot be trusted for strict documentary veracity, but they demonstrate an interest not only in the songs but in the lives of the individuals who created them, an attitude far removed from the fundamentally anonymous nature of chant and sacred polyphony.

The surviving sources of troubadour song come from the mid-thirteenth century and beyond, considerably later than the main flowering of composition. Some manuscripts come from Occitan areas, but many were copied elsewhere, in northern France, Catalonia and especially Italy. Only four of about forty surviving sources or fragments include musical notation. The notation used, like that for chant, generally gives no information about rhythm, much less other nuances of performance, such as the use of dynamics or instrumental accompaniment. This lack of notational specificity has created difficulties for scholars and modern performers, but it seems to suggest a kind of performative flexibility that could not be written in any system available to thirteenth-century scribes.⁴⁰ Texts are generally unstable, and where a melody appears in more than one manuscript, there are nearly always variants that show a similar lack of concern for fixity and suggest not only oral transmission but also the possibility that scribes intervened in the copying of melodies as well as texts, creating and fixing problems in transmission and ‘improving’ readings according to their lights.⁴¹

While many examples of troubadour song are in the elevated style of the canso, lower-register poetry such as that of the pastourelle also exists, set to popularising melodies reminiscent of dance styles. Such songs were probably performed metrically, whether or not they are so written, and they may well have had some form of improvised instrumental accompaniment. The higher-register songs, on the other hand, may have been performed without accompaniment, facilitating the rhythmic flexibility that allows greater expression of the text.⁴²

From the late twelfth century poet-composers known as trouvères appear in northern lands, working in French dialects. The shift may not be directly attributable to the influence of Eleanor of Aquitaine (c. 1122–1204), as has sometimes been argued, but it is worth noting her extensive family connections to secular song: her grandfather, Guillaume IX, duc d’Aquitaine, was the first documented troubadour, while her descendants included two trouvères, her son Richard, King of England, and Thibaut de Navarre, grandson of Marie de Champagne, one of Eleanor’s daughters by Louis VII and a major literary patron in her own right.⁴³ Paris and the royal court, however, were less important for the development of trouvère song than Picardy and Champagne, and in the thirteenth century Arras became an important centre of trouvère activity among members of the merchant class, notably the poet and composer Adam de la Halle (b. c. 1245–50; d. 1285–8?). Most of the basic formal and stylistic features of trouvère songs are similar to those already outlined for the troubadours, but by the mid-thirteenth century a shift of emphasis may be seen, away from the high-register grant chant courtois and towards less elevated and more popularising styles and genres such as the pastourelle and the jeu-parti.⁴⁴

Trouvère song survives in written form much more strongly than its southern counterpart. This may be in part because it flourished rather later, so it benefited from the growing book culture of Paris and the Île-de-France during the thirteenth century. It is not surprising, then, that not only more sources exist, but more sources with musical notation, and that therefore far more songs survive with melodies intact. Where Elizabeth Aubrey calculates 195 distinct melodies for 246 troubadour songs, approximately 10 per cent of the surviving poems, surviving in four sources with notation,⁴⁵Mary O’Neill cites ‘some twenty substantial extant chansonniers’ of trouvère song containing approximately ‘1500 songs [that] survive with their melodies’.⁴⁶

Ample evidence exists in literature, sermons and other texts for dance music, ceremonial music, popular song and so forth, but few traces of these remain.⁴⁷ Courtly song and dance were often performed by minstrels or jongleurs, whose activities went beyond music to include storytelling, conversation and other forms of entertainment. Minstrels and heralds also sometimes served diplomatic or messenger roles, since they tended to travel from place to place; in the process, they could facilitate the movement of musical styles and genres. In a song written around 1210 the troubadour Raimon Vidal outlines a fictional journey from Riom at Christmas time to Montferrand (with the Dalfi d’Alvernhe), Provence (and the court of Savoy), Toulouse (where the narrator receives a suit of clothes), Cabarès, Foix (where the count is unfortunately absent) and Castillon, finally arriving at Mataplana in April.⁴⁸ There is no reason to believe that similar travels were not undertaken by actual musicians.

Music can also be found in dramatic genres, from debate songs and dialogue tropes to more fully developed plays.⁴⁹ Latin liturgical dramas such as those found in sources from Saint-Martial in Limoges and Saint-Benoit in Fleury, near Orléans, were completely sung, mostly using chant and chant-like styles. The Play of Daniel, one of the best-known examples today, was created by students of the cathedral school in Beauvais in the early thirteenth century for performance in the Christmas season, perhaps in conjunction with Matins on the Feast of the Circumcision (1 January).⁵⁰ Vernacular religious drama tended to use spoken dialogue along with a wide range of musical styles, from chant to instrumental music. The only French secular drama that survives with a substantial body of music is Adam de la Halle’s Jeu de Robin et de Marion, probably intended to entertain troops from Arras spending Christmas in Italy around 1283. The melodies it contains use the style of popular refrains like those also found inserted into narrative poems, so they may have been borrowed rather than newly composed.

Christopher Page traces a ‘powerful secularising impulse … in many areas of cultural life’ as in other areas of culture during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.⁵¹ The ability to write and sing songs becomes an essential attribute of the courtier, a manly art suitable for indoor display in front of women.⁵² Indeed, this ideal of the noble who can sing and play is common within romance, and this image surely not only reflects lived reality but in turn influenced the training and self-image of young nobles who read and heard such tales. Employing minstrels or jongleurs could also enhance the reputation of a nobleman, because it showed his generosity and ability to entertain his courtiers; those travelling entertainers in turn could carry songs and tales about his prowess to other lands.⁵³

By the thirteenth century clearly secular forms of music were much more likely to be written down and discussed by both courtiers and churchmen than they had ever been. Sacred and secular, however, were frequently intertwined throughout medieval culture: liturgy and politics served each other at the Sainte-Chapelle as at Charlemagne’s court, court functionaries from Alcuin to Machaut were educated in schools tied to the church and rewarded with ecclesiastical positions, and the languages of fin’amors and Marian devotion continually overlapped. Our neat categories do not always fit the medieval reality.

It is easy to believe that the story of French monophony ends at this point, and indeed polyphony has taken over most readers’ attention well before the end of the thirteenth century. Nevertheless, monophony continued to be performed, and it probably dominated the average person’s daily experience well into the early modern era. Monophonic dance music and popular song surely flourished – it simply was not usually written down. Gregorian chant remained the foundational musical experience of choirboys, so it served as the roots, both literally and figuratively, from which polyphony grew. New chant continued to be composed when needed, for instance by Guillaume Du Fay for a new celebration at Cambrai Cathedral in the 1450s. Since the primary tale of music history, however, is the story of compositional innovation in the written tradition, we turn the page towards a polyphonic future.

The Notre-Dame school

In the years from 1163 to 1250, a new cathedral of Notre-Dame was built on the central island in Paris. Remarkably, the construction paralleled the development of a new polyphonic music, the first to be regulated by metrical rhythm. Much of what we know about the so-called Notre-Dame school of composers comes from a music treatise penned perhaps in the 1270s by ‘Anonymous IV’, an unnamed English student who had once studied in Paris.¹ He records the achievements of two composers, Leonin, organista, author of a great book (magnus liber) of organa, and Perotin, discantor, who made ‘better clausulae’ than Leonin.

Extant musical manuscripts confirm that the first great achievement of the Notre-Dame composers lay in a collection of two-part organa (settings of the Gregorian cantus firmus plus one added voice, the duplum). For the most part, three plainchant genres were subject to elaboration: the Gradual and Alleluia from the Mass, and the Great Responsory from the Divine Office. As monophony, these are ‘responsorial’ chants, alternating virtuosic solo passages with unison choral passages. In the new organa, segments originally delivered by the soloist provide the cantus firmus, as another soloist sings new music above. Segments originally delivered by the choir remained the domain of the choir.

Theorists distinguished two styles of polyphony, organum purum and discant. Broadly speaking, the two styles respond to two patterns of text declamation in the original plainchant. Segments of syllabic text were set in organum purum, sustaining the individual pitches of the cantus firmus in the long tones of the tenor, above which the added voice would rhapsodise freely. Melismatic segments were set in faster-moving discant, one or two notes in counterpoint against the cantus firmus. At first probably unmeasured, by around 1200 discant segments exhibited metrical rhythm based on a regular pulse. In these isolated discant segments of Leonin’s two-part organa, a fateful step towards a fundamental prerequisite of Western music occurs: the ability to control polyphonic voices in rhythm. Examples 2.1a and b illustrate excerpts from a Notre-Dame organum purum and discant, extracted from the organum Alleluia Nativitas for the Nativity of the Virgin.²

Example 2.1a Alleluia Nativitas, organum purum (beginning) by Leonin(?)

Example 2.1b Alleluia Nativitas, discant on ‘Ex semine’ (beginning) by Leonin(?)

Craig Wright has shown that Leonin may be identified with a canon at the cathedral of Notre-Dame who lived from around 1135 to after 1201.³Anonymous IV credits Leonin as the best organista, a specialist in organum purum. Does he mean a skilled singer capable of negotiating a new work as a performance unfolds or a figure closer to what we would label a ‘composer’, someone who literally puts together a work, which is then notated and transmitted as an entity? The question is currently debated.⁴

Anonymous IV has much more to say about Perotin (d. c. 1238?). First, his superior skill as discantor produced better clausulae (phrases), discant segments that can replace corresponding segments in Leonin’s settings. Such ‘substitute clausulae’ utilise the same snippet of chant, but exhibit increasing rhythmic sophistication. Our most complete source of music of the Notre-Dame school, the Florence Codex, finished in 1248 for the dedication of Louis IX’s Sainte-Chapelle, has a fascicle of no fewer than 462 of these two-voice substitute discant segments.⁵Example 2.1c illustrates a modernised reworking of Example 2.1b, presumably by Perotin.⁶

Example 2.1c Alleluia Nativitas, discant on ‘Ex semine’ (beginning) by Perotin(?)

Unlike most chansonniers of the troubadours and trouvères, manuscripts of polyphony in this period lack composer attributions, but thanks to Anonymous IV seven specific works preserved in the extant manuscripts can be attributed to Perotin. Two highly sophisticated four-part works can even be dated: the Viderunt (Gradual for the third Christmas Mass) of 1198 and the Sederunt (Gradual for St Stephen’s Day) of 1199. Three of the attributions involve a second genre cultivated by the Notre-Dame school, the conductus, a freely composed setting of strophic Latin poetry in one to three voices. Several conductus texts can be attributed to Philip the Chancellor (b. c. 1160–70; d. 1236), a direct contemporary of Perotin, and in fact Beata viscera, a monophonic conductus, is a collaboration between them.

The early motet

Notre-Dame organa and conductus soon receded from compositional history, but a third genre, the motet, became the crucible for all advances in polyphony for at least the next 125 years. Unfortunately, our informant Anonymous IV is completely silent on its origins. The usual musicological narrative links the earliest motets to the active development of discant in the early thirteenth century: the initial step that created the motet was the application of a poetic text to the most modern rhythmised music of the time, pre-existing discant clausulae.

Consider again the Alleluia for the Nativity of the Virgin (Example 2.1a). Our earliest source, W₁ (c. 1230), transmits a rudimentary discant setting the words ex semine (Example 2.1b), modernised in the Florence Codex (Example 2.1c).⁷ Indeed this modernised clausula saw double duty in a work that Anonymous IV attributed to Perotin, the three-voice Alleluia Nativitas, with the addition of a triplum voice. Both as a two- and three-voice form we can count this segment one of the ‘better clausulae’ composed by Perotin. The text, probably by Philip the Chancellor, fits Perotin’s music and makes the segment into a motet (Example 2.2).⁸

Example 2.2 Perotin(?) and Philip the Chancellor(?), motet Ex semine Abrahe/Ex semine

In explicating the mysteries of the birth of the Virgin Mary, Philip framed his text with the words of the cantus firmus, and skilfully incorporated bits of text from elsewhere in the Alleluia verse (these connections are set in italic type). Note that the poetic impulse behind the motet has a different emphasis from that of a purely occasional conductus text. Because of its ultimate origins in liturgical organum, the motet’s text glosses the original liturgical context of the parent organum; indeed, it is possible that early motets, like tropes, were used liturgically.

Besides responding to the liturgical moment, a poet faced a special challenge, for it happens that the discant clausula was not a kind of music suited to traditional poetic forms, which build strophes out of regular patterns of rhyme and syllable count. The melody of the cantus firmus is usually broken into groups of two or three notes, separated by rests and set in rhythmic ostinato, as in Example 2.2. Phrases in the duplum voice play off the recurring patterns, now bridging across rests, now pausing with the tenor. The text given above divides lines according to their distribution across each statement of the five-note ostinato. One might also print the text observing rhymes, which produces a flood of irregular short lines: neither option produces an orthodox piece of poetry, because musical exigencies generated ad hoc poetic designs.

Thomas Payne argues that the creation of the motet was a product of collaboration between Perotin and Philip the Chancellor: its conceptual beginnings lie in surviving organum prosulas (texting just the duplum of the four-voice Viderunt and Sederunt) whose texts can be ascribed to Philip.¹⁰ One might push Payne’s thesis a step further and seek the earliest notation of rhythm itself in the application of text, for this simple means was available well before modal rhythmic notation, first attested in W₁.¹¹ The motet texts themselves suggest musical rhythm, a sing-song that results from the alternation of strong and weak word accents organised into lines of specific syllable count, and from the chiming of the frequent rhymes. The texted form of the duplum voice of Perotin’s Viderunt is thus a surviving remnant of compositional process: each phrase of text preserves the rhythms of a phrase of music right from the start – a true collaboration of a skilled musician and a skilled poet. The other two voices, the triplum and quadruplum, did not require separate notation, for they operated closely in tandem with the texted duplum through voice exchange, and could apply the same words. Guided by Philip’s text, performers learned Perotin’s music. Such a scenario allows us to imagine the construction of Perotin’s organum as a ‘work’, even before an efficient notation was devised to fix it onto parchment.

The motet in the mid-thirteenth century

Motets of the early and middle years of the thirteenth century are protean works, products of collective and collaborative creative efforts. The ‘case history’ of motets based on Perotin’s Ex semineclausula in its two forms, a two-voice discant updating Leonin’s Alleluia Nativitas and a three-voice discant taking its proper place in Perotin’s new three-voice Alleluia Nativitas, can serve as a simple example. We have seen that Philip’s poem Ex semine Abrahe was key to the initial fixing of the rhythms of the new work, and thus motet and clausula were interlinked from the beginning. Once the music was set, it was available for further use. For example, the three-voice version appears with a new text for the triplum, again alluding to a liturgical context by borrowing words from the parent Alleluia.¹²

Crucial to the explosive development of the motet was its quick acceptance of vernacular French texts. Two use Perotin’s discant as their musical source: Se j’ai amé/Ex semine and Hier main trespensis/Ex semine.¹³ Most often, new vernacular texts are in no way tied to the liturgical context of the tenor cantus firmus, but the tenor text may relate emblematically or ironically to the texts of the upper voices. In general, the direction of development is towards more phrase overlap between the voices than we observe in Example 2.2, a musical characteristic confirmed by poly-textuality (a separate poem for each upper voice) and different verse structures in each text. Often new music as well as new text can replace an existing voice.

Once the motet entered the world of vernacular literature, it began to participate in a highly ramified and interconnected cultural endeavour. Its polyphonic and poly-textual nature made it the ideal form for the synchronous juxtaposition of diverse materials (the French motet can draw upon the wide variety of contemporary trouvère genres, such as the gran chant, chanson de mal mariée, chanson de toile, pastourelle and rondet, as well as the ubiquitous refrain), which in turn stand in dialogue with the sacred associations of the tenor. For example, one could juxtapose a male and a female voice, or different voices that represent different sides of a single persona, or place courtly love conceits side by side with Marian adoration and with earthy pastoral high jinks.¹⁴

The French motet epitomises in miniature the most characteristic large-scale literary production of this period: the narrative with lyrical insertions (‘hybrid narrative’). Indeed, the first hybrid narrative, Jean Renart’s Roman de la rose (c. 1210?), which includes forty-six lyrics of diverse genres cited in the course of the narrative, appeared about the same time as the first French motets. The most familiar of the hybrid narratives is Le jeu de Robin et de Marion (c. 1283, seventeen refrains and chansons), a pastoral drama by Adam de la Halle (b. c. 1245–50; d. 1285–8?), working at a French outpost, the Angevin court at Naples. Integration and unity were not artistically desirable traits in this aesthetic: its essence lies in the unexpected and ingenious juxtaposition of dissimilar materials. Intertextual citations, cross-references within and between genres (especially prominent in French motets that cite refrains), can be bewilderingly complex.¹⁵

For us today the most elusive aspect of the mid-thirteenth-century motet is its social context.¹⁶ Hybrid narratives, such as Renart’s Roman de la rose, often present credible social contexts for the lyrical insertions. No one in a hybrid narrative stands up at a banquet to sing a polyphonic motet, however. The best information we have is the statement of the Norman theorist Johannes Grocheio, writing in Paris around 1300: ‘This kind of music should not be set before a lay public because they are not alert to its refinement nor are they delighted by hearing it, but [it should only be performed] before the clergy and those who look for the refinements of skills.’¹⁷ Yet the clerics, in creating works for their peers, proved themselves thoroughly conversant with the vernacular courtly-popular literary culture of the day. In the French motet, the elite clerical culture transforms ‘lewd entertainment’ into ‘spiritual performance’.¹⁸

The late thirteenth-century motet

By the end of the thirteenth century the motet had assumed a level of complexity that excluded the casual contribution of a new poem or the revision of a single musical voice, favouring instead skilled individual creators of unique works. The new diversity meant that the mensural system needed to be regularised. For a time, the old ostinato patterns of the Notre-Dame tenors held sway along with the Notre-Dame cantus firmi (cf. Example 2.2). But when a refrain with pre-existing music was incorporated into the upper voices, it meant that the tenor required more flexibility so that the tenor pitches could be adjusted as needed to fit with the refrain, and hence there was a growing urgency for the exact specification of rhythmic values. The new system of mensural notation drew upon the notational figures of Gregorian chant, utilising three traditional shapes, but now assigning them the durations of long (), breve () and semibreve (). A definitive and rational mensural notation was codified by the theorist Franco of Cologne around 1280.¹⁹

The late thirteenth century was a period of great experimentation. For example, the motet Mout me fu grief/Robin m’aime/Portare incorporates Marion’s well-known opening song from Adam de la Halle’s pastoral drama Jeu de Robin et de Marion as its duplum.

Maintaining the song’s original rhythms, it is the duplum’s phrase structure and irregular repeating patterns (ABaabAB, rondeau-like) that shape the overall structure of the motet, not the tenor. Yet the composer was also able to incorporate a second bit of pre-existing music, a Gregorian cantus firmus carried by the tenor.²⁰ This was but one experiment among many.

Beginning with collective and collaborative creative efforts, the motet underwent enormous expansion in the thirteenth-century creative nexus, more and more delighting in connections that touched every sort of literary and musical creation until the emergence at the end of the century of individual works. The late thirteenth-century motet exhibits a striking variety of organisational techniques, each aiming at a new flexibility in handling long-range structural articulation that had not been possible with the short ostinatos that structured the earliest motets. In the early fourteenth century, by dint of powerful intellectual application, this quest for variety converged in a new approach, which created a concentrated and reflexive form that would overturn the old aesthetic of rupture.

The ars nova and the Roman de Fauvel

Until this point, musical rhythm had been largely based on triple metre (‘perfect time’). The potentialities of duple metre (‘imperfect time’) were first rationally worked out in the early fourteenth century. The new notation, epitomising a dawning new age of music, is a product of the ars nova, a term attested by four witnesses of around 1325. While two music-theory treatises celebrate the new developments, a third treatise and a papal document deride them. Regardless of opinion, the ars nova brought an enormous expansion to the possibilities of organising and notating rhythm, best expressed by the music theorist Johannis des Muris: ‘whatever can be sung can be written down’.²¹

The most important musical monument of the early ars nova is a version of theRoman de Fauvel found in only one manuscript, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fr. 146.²² It expands two earlier allegorical hybrid narratives (of 1310 and 1314) critiquing the government of King Philip IV and admonishing his heirs Louis X and Philip V. The revised Fauvel of fr. 146 (c. 1318) incorporates seventy-two miniatures as well as 169 musical insertions, including items of Gregorian chant, newly composed pseudo-Gregorian chant, conductus (some with newly composed music), motets, French refrains, ars nova chansons, lais and satirical or obscene sottes chansons.

Perhaps compiled with the patronage of a prince in the king’s council, the Roman de Fauvel gives satiric artistic expression to the discontent felt by officials of the royal chancery over a government in crisis. It is a topsy-turvy world ruled by Fauvel, a corrupt half-man-half-horse creature; here, the sort of grotesqueries formerly relegated to the margins of a manuscript have been transformed into the principal players, front and centre.²³

Though we lack certain proof, for no music is attributed in the manuscript, it appears likely that the young Philippe de Vitry (1291–1361) was the principal composer of new music for the Fauvel project. Arguably the most progressive musical work of the entire manuscript is his ingenious motet Garrit Gallus/In nova fert/Neuma.²⁴ The quotation of the opening of Ovid’s Metamorphoses at the start of the duplum voice – ‘In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas’ (‘I am moved to speak of forms changed into new bodies’) – epitomises the work’s message, an expression of the political transformations that threatened society. In this motet Vitry brilliantly succeeds in transferring the essence of this message – the abstract notion of transformation – into the very core of the musical structure. He accomplishes this first through the absolutely unprecedented rhythmic design of the tenor, which transforms itself from perfect to imperfect time and back again, employing red ink for the imperfect notes and rests, an ars nova innovation (Example 2.3). (In the original notation, the note shapes form a palindrome.)

Example 2.3 Periodic structure in Philippe de Vitry(?), motet Garrit gallus/In nova fert/[Tenor]

Further, in composing out the poetic idea, Vitry drew on a new aesthetic of integration. We have seen that the Roman de Fauvel as a whole incorporates both old and new works among the musical insertions. Sometimes they stand in loose juxtaposition with the narrative, an extreme expression of thirteenth-century discontinuity, while at other times they form coherent episodes. In a performative sense, they are ‘staged’.²⁵ The same can be said of the motet. Since its inception, the form had exhibited discontinuities: a stratification of voices and especially poly-textuality, which before had allowed for a refreshing independence in phrase lengths between the different voices. In this motet, Vitry ‘stages’ these discontinuities by coordinating the phrase lengths of both upper voices with the tenor. In Example 2.3, the rests above the tenor talea indicate the placement of rests in the duplum and triplum (there are no other rests in these voices).²⁶ Except at the very beginning and at the very end, rests always recur at the beginning and end of the tenor segment transformed into imperfect time. By means of this ‘periodicity’, the whole musical structure is subject to transformation, not just the tenor. The poetic message is integrated into the deepest structure of the work, permeating it.

The polyphonic chanson

The motet was not the only genre revolutionised by the Roman de Fauvel. The Roman de Fauvel also turned vernacular song on its head. Although it took longer to accomplish the full measure of change in the chanson than it did in the motet, eventually the transformation set in motion in the early fourteenth century came to fruition with polyphonic chansons in ‘fixed forms’ that saw their first maturity in the 1340s in the works of Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300–1377) and his contemporaries. Ultimately built on thirteenth-century dance genres, the three fixed forms – ballade, rondeau and virelai – each incorporate the text and music of refrain and stanza in a different pattern.

The emergence of the Machaut-style chanson involved at least three steps.²⁷ First, the projection of rhythm through syllabic declamation at times dissolves in melismatic passages. In the monophonic fixed-form chansons inserted into the Roman de Fauvel, melismas can sever the direct tie to the sung dance, for now syllabic declamation no longer animates the rhythm; further, the melismas effectively slow the text delivery, or relegate it to isolated active patches. At the same time, melismatic melody imbues the refrain form with an unaccustomed highbrow artifice.

Another stage of development, which we can follow in early fourteenth-century hybrid narratives, lends the ballade a certain dignity stemming from long poetic lines, as had been characteristic of the most precious chansons of the trouvères. Finally, the chanson takes on polyphony, a new disjunctive polyphony rare in the chanson before Machaut. Earlier essays in the polyphonic setting of refrain lyrics, such as those of Adam de la Halle, exhibit an integrated projection of the poetic structure, too uniform to command sustained compositional interest.²⁸ Rendered fully independent by the new notation, now the tenor operates freely, creating discant-based counterpoint with the texted cantus voice. Other parameters that may be in play, and which may be staged with disjunction or with integration depending on the needs of the moment, include text projection (syllabic or melismatic, normal or syncopated declamation patterns), tonal centres (degree of tonal unity, use of directed progressions) and sonorities.

As with the motet, our role as attentive listeners in coming to terms with this aesthetic is to discover the poetic image that the work reifies. Examples are legion in Machaut: the harsh leaps and unexpected turns, as well as the wholly unorthodox cadence formation of the ballade Honte, paour, represent the contortions a faithful lover must endure; the fragrance of the rose in the rondeau Rose, lis, which is sensed in sonorous descending progressions, now with E♮, now with E♭; the ‘sweet’ opening sonority of the rondeau Douce, viare, which concludes on a soft B♭; one might continue such examples at will.²⁹

Guillaume de Machaut and the Remede de Fortune

The figure of Guillaume de Machaut looms large in any discussion of fourteenth-century music. Equally distinguished as a poet and musician, he was unusual for the care he took in the preservation of well-organised manuscript collections of his works.³⁰

Machaut’s early works were written in the service of John of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia (r. 1311–46), son of an emperor and father of another emperor, an itinerant king active in political affairs throughout Europe. A favourable marriage sealed an alliance with King Philip VI of France: in 1332, John’s daughter Bonne married John, Duke of Normandy (the future King John II the Good, r. 1350–64). Bonne spent most of her time at Vincennes, the royal manor just east of Paris. It was here that most of the royal children were born and raised, including Charles (the future King Charles V, r. 1364–80) and his siblings, many of them patrons of music of the next generation.

Although full documentation does not survive, it appears likely that Machaut served Bonne at Vincennes at least from around 1340 until she succumbed to the Black Death in 1349. It was at her court that Machaut produced the hybrid narrative Remede de Fortune, a didactic treatise on poetic forms couched in a love story that waxes and seems to wane (one rotation of Fortune’s wheel?).³¹ The seven interlarded model genres, all supplied with music, include a lai, complainte, chanson royale, duplex ballade, ballade, virelai and rondeau, that is, the three fixed forms (with two forms of ballade) as well as the lyric lai (itself newly ‘fixed’). All of the fixed-form chansons are radically new, to the point that a thirteenth-century courtier would scarcely recognise them as music. Dame de qui toute ma joie vient, the second of the two ballades, is typical of the new style, now holding back and lingering on a syllable, now pushing rambunctiously ahead, always playfully unpredictable and yet affording a satisfying whole (Example 2.4).³²

Example 2.4 Guillaume de Machaut, ballade Dame de qui toute ma joie vient, beginning

In the Remede de Fortune Machaut created his own universe, a self-contained world of allusion and intertextual complexity. While he does cite from past authorities such as Adam de la Halle, more frequently he cites himself.³³ Like the complete works themselves, it is a world ruled by Machaut, the professional author.

The motet after the Roman de Fauvel

Philippe de Vitry had a particular expressive purpose in mind in composing the motet Garrit/In nova fert/Neuma. In realising that purpose, he hit upon the new concept of periodicity, a systematic coordination of long-range phrase articulation in all voices. Once such a powerful organisational technique was discovered, it soon transformed the motet. In so far as we can tell, all subsequent motets of Vitry, and most of the twenty-three motets of Machaut, are stamped with periodicity, always in the service of a particular poetic image.

As the century progressed, further developments continued to serve a poetic focus. For example, many ars nova motets have two sections, with an additional statement or more of the color (melody of the cantus firmus) in a different rhythmicisation, usually in diminution by one-half. The second section frequently incorporates hocket, the ‘hiccup’ effect of an isolated note in one part emphasised by a rest in the other part, a striking texture that enhances articulation of periodicity in the diminished taleae, thus making relationships clear that had been obscure in the section of long rhythmic values. An early example, Vitry’s O canenda vulgo/Rex quem metrorum/Rex regum (1330s?), leaves the diminished section without text. Yet the unusual texture is justified by a poetic image, announced in the final lines of the duplum, which speak of ‘[the king] whose virtues, mores, race, and the deeds of his son I cannot write; may they be written above the heavens’.³⁴ What more fitting response to follow than pure music, an evocation of the music of the spheres?

After around 1360, motets might appear in three or four sections, with proportional reduction of tenor rhythms, as in Ida capillorum/Portio nature/[Ante tronum], in four sections in the proportions 6:4:3:2.³⁵ Further, the periodicity of the upper voices often extends itself well beyond rests (as in Example 2.3), even to ‘isorhythm’ throughout each talea, in which each iteration is absolutely identical, as regards rhythm, from one talea to the next.³⁶

Isorhythm in this literal sense has often been regarded as a desirable, even inevitable, consequence of periodicity. Paradoxically, however, isorhythm is a symptom of the breakdown of the founding principles of the ars nova motet, for it tends towards disintegration – strophic projection – instead of the integration and accumulation of poetic and musical expression that had been the ideal of the motet since Philippe de Vitry. More and more the motet tends to represent a certain generic model, a series of sections, each culminating in imposing washes of hocket sonorities. The gain was a form of polyphony impressive for public display, since a motet effectively cast in movements, with regular pockets of sublime sonorities, could be appreciated for an overall effect, as an assertion of power. This, along with easy adaptability to dedicatory or celebratory Latin texts in a variety of forms, made the motet useful in state functions in grand architectural settings.³⁷ Later examples of grand political motets include works by Ciconia (a native of Liège) as well as many by Guillaume Du Fay.

Towards a new synthesis

The years from 1360 to 1450 saw palpable increases both in the functions assigned to polyphony and in the diffusion of works. In terms of French music, the period begins with the consolidation of the motet and polyphonic chanson within the French orbit, and the first applications of compositional techniques learned in those genres to sacred art music. It ends with the cultivation over a wide geographical area of a broadened spectrum of forms, for use in a variety of sacred and political contexts, in which the French input, decisive at the beginning, was tempered and merged with streams from the Low Countries, Italy and England in new syntheses, which eventually consolidated into the pan-European ‘international’ style that we associate with the Josquin generation of the late fifteenth century.³⁸

Despite enormous social instability, a number of historical developments contributed to an environment in which musicians and music circulated freely, leading to the diffusion of the advanced French polyphonic style beyond Francophone limits and allowing cross-pollination with indigenous elements. Among these factors were (1) a weakened and unstable central French government under Charles VI and the increased influence of outlying courts; (2) the cultivation and development of sophisticated art polyphony at the courts of the pope and cardinals in Avignon, with a new centre opening in Rome as a consequence of the Great Schism; (3) the international diplomatic missions, with full musical retinues, that gathered at the early fifteenth-century church councils designed to lift the Schism; and (4) an increase in private endowments for polyphony in side chapels of churches, giving rise to service works in sets and cycles. It would be a long and uneven process to establish artistic polyphony at court and church; indeed, the process was far from finished at the end of the period covered in this chapter.

France under Charles VI and the Valois princes

The death of Charles V marked the beginning of a long period of decline for France as a central power. Charles VI (r. 1380–1422), at first too young to rule, then subject to intermittent bouts of insanity, stood by as his brother and his uncles vied for power. This phase of the Hundred Years War saw the English gain traction, with the victory of King Henry V at Agincourt (1415) and the occupation until 1435 of northern France by the English.³⁹ Slow recovery, with the encouragement of Joan of Arc and the forces she rallied, came with Charles VII (r. 1422–61), crowned at Reims in 1429. The princely power centres, particularly Burgundy and Berry, stood in fierce competition with each other for the best performers and composers, although a given ruler’s active support for music might vary in times of peace or war, depending on financial resources. Dynastic marriages of Charles V’s sisters and their progeny brought French influence even further afield, to Aragon and northern Italy. One further important princely patron important for the diffusion of northern French culture, with close ties to Aragon, was Gaston Fébus, comte de Foix and vicomte de Béarn (r. 1343–91). Froissart reported that Fébus not only ‘took great pleasure in minstrelsy, for he was well versed in it’, but also ‘gladly had his clerks sing polyphonic chansons, rondeaux and virelais in his presence’.⁴⁰ As musicians moved around, the cultivation of French polyphony radiated further.

Music at court

The favourable survival of archival sources for the Valois dukes of Burgundy have made it possible to form a detailed picture of courtly musical activities in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.⁴¹ Servants of widely varying musical skills provided a broad range of musical functions. Trumpeters played an essential role, conveying military orders in the din of battle (indeed they were issued with armour). Their fanfares, along with the blare of the minstrels, also contributed to the pomp accompanying the duke’s grand entry into a city, or added to the clangour of the tournament, or to the ceremonial tattoo at diplomatic gatherings and peace conferences.

Closer to the duke (and also issued with armour in war) was his harper, a courtier who not only provided soft music as an ornament to the chamber or to the duke’s immediate proximity in the banquet hall, but was also essential for the duke’s diversion over his numerous displacements between Flanders, Burgundy and Paris. Sometimes such virtuosos of harp and song can be identified as known composers (for example, Jaquemin de Senleches, fl. 1382–3, and later Gilles Binchois, c. 1400–60), allowing us to imagine a social context for a portion of the extant written repertoire. Other chamber valets serving the duke (or ladies-in-waiting serving the duchess) might cultivate musical skills as a singer-poet (faiseur), or play estampies on the portative organ or clavichord (eschequier).⁴²

Chapel singers and choirboys were essential to the cultivation of the holy rites, even when the court was in transit. While plainsong sufficed for church processions as well as the day-to-day Office, Philip the Bold’s chapel performed polyphony for special expanded celebrations at Christmas, Easter, Pentecost and All Saints’ Day, as well as New Year’s Day.

Finally, among the musicians serving at court were minstrels skilled in strings, winds, percussion, portative organ and clavichord, who played for the entries, banquets and balls that accompanied weddings, baptisms and important political gatherings. Minstrels performed music learned by memory, perhaps employing strategies worked out in meetings – the so-called minstrel schools – held yearly in different cities during Lent.⁴³ The grandest occasions were supported by the full range of court musicians, at times massing the forces of several separate courts with town musicians. Perhaps the most notorious large gathering, occasioned by a planned crusade against the Turks after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, was Duke Philip the Good’s ‘Feast of the Pheasant’ held the next year in Lille, which enacted musical entremets between chapel musicians in a miniature church at one end of the hall and minstrels performing from an enormous pastry at the other.⁴⁴

The Avignon papacy and the Great Schism

Pope Benedict XII (r. 1334–42) had established a college of some dozen singers for papal Masses, a group that subsequent popes maintained throughout the fourteenth century.⁴⁵ Although solemn feasts, bound more rigidly by tradition and often officiated or at least attended by the pope, were sung in plainchant, polyphony was probably introduced in lesser feasts and left to the direction of the college of singers. Polyphonic Mass Ordinaries could be performed for most of the year. It was also possible, at least by the early fifteenth century, to use the organ in hymns, probably in alternatim practice (alternating verses, one in the choir, unaccompanied, the next in the organ, instrumentally elaborating the cantus firmus).

The importance of Avignon as a musical centre in the fourteenth century was due not merely to the pope’s singers, but also to the chaplains and clerks in the retinues of the many resident cardinals, whose households rivalled those of secular princes in splendour. Grand festivals celebrating visits of kings and great princes offered ample occasion for musical exchanges and interaction. Surviving written polyphony celebrates particularly the more luxury-loving popes.⁴⁶

The emergence of the pope and ambient cardinals as patrons of music came to a head with the return to Rome and the Great Schism (1378–1417). The reconstituted Roman papacy maintained the Avignonese model of bureaucracy and patronage, as well as a chapel of skilled singers from northern dioceses. In addition, the Roman pope controlled lucrative benefices in territories that aligned with Rome, notably the county of Hainault and bishopric of Liège, which would funnel skilled musicians to Rome. Johannes Ciconia (c. 1370–1412) of Liège, who journeyed to Rome around 1390, was one of the first of a long line that would include Du Fay and later Josquin des Prez.⁴⁷ Ciconia is best known for a series of political motets that synthesise French and Italian elements, and for his Italian songs.⁴⁸ A significant work in French is his virelai Sus un’ fontayne, perhaps written for the Visconti court at Pavia, which quotes the opening passages of three French ballades of Philipoctus de Caserta, an Italian composer who wrote exclusively in the most complex French style.⁴⁹

Musical styles in the years around 1400: an ars subtilior

The style of motet and chanson that consolidated around 1360 was well known in the courts and curia of the late fourteenth century. An example – the most widely transmitted work of the entire fourteenth century – is the ballade De ce que fols pense (‘What a fool thinks’) by Pierre des Molins, a chaplain of John II who served the captured French king in English exile during the years 1357–9. (He is later found in the service of the duc de Berry.) To judge from its refrain, ‘d’ainsi languir en estrange contree’ (‘thus to languish in a foreign country’), the ballade was written in England. Works of a core ars nova repertoire such as this one seem to have been cultivated for many years: to judge from transmission patterns, perhaps as late as around 1420.

Another popular style of artistic polyphony cultivated in these courts (one with no precedent in Machaut) is the mimetic chanson, particularly the so-called ‘bird-call virelai’, such as Jean de Vaillant’s widely known Par maintes foys (‘Many times’). Here the disruptive call of the envious cuckoo competes with the complex song of the nightingale, providing a neat justification for a rhythmic innovation, in which four fast minims can replace three, in effect shifting between quaver triplets and groups of four semiquavers.

The confrontation and combination of disjunct elements that polyphony makes possible occasionally affords a glimpse of a realm of music normally left unwritten. For example, the anonymous virelai Contre le temps et la sason jolye/He! Mari, mari! (‘Against the pretty weather and season/Hey, husband, husband!’) pits a virtuosic and rhythmically complex upper voice against a simple dance-song in the tenor. (The opening text of the upper voice is a pun, with the additional meaning of ‘against the time’ or ‘against the measure’.) We can only be grateful that a window on what must have been a large and vital phenomenon at court survives in such a work: the performance of a sung dance on the sort of refrain known since the thirteenth century. This and a few similar works delight in a stylistic disjunction between ultra-refinement and a continuing oral tradition, a rupture savoured in high French courts as an outward manifestation of cultural sophistication. Such works became even more common in the course of the fifteenth century, for instance the charming Filles a marier (‘Girls to be married’) by Binchois on a popular song tenor Se tu t’en marias, tu t’en repentiras (‘If you get married you’ll regret it’).⁵⁰

By the 1380s some works display an ars subtilior, a fever pitch of complexity, the ultimate expression of high French culture.⁵¹ Justification for extreme compositional virtuosity sometimes lies in mimesis, of which Par maintes foys is a modest example. At other times, a work may comment in apparent irony on the current woeful state of music, as in the very complex ballade by Guido, Or voit tout en aventure (‘Now everything is run amok’), which employs three different note shapes to express the same duration, seeming to prompt the refrain ‘Certes ce n’est pas bien fayt’ (‘Certainly this is not well made’). On the one hand this navel-gazing may appear to focus on musical developments of restricted value and function, but on the other such works manifest a growing focus on the individual artist.⁵²

The most skilled of these ars subtilior musicians also played games of one-upmanship with each other, multiplying intertextual citations and allusions in their works. A good example is the ‘En attendant’ series, involving at least two rondeaux and three ballades by various composers, works that have been related to the ill-fated Neapolitan campaign of Louis I, duc d’Anjou, of the early 1380s, aided by Pope Clement VII and Bernabò Visconti.⁵³

The complex style also manifests itself in many dedicatory songs, such as ballades for Pope Clement VII, ballades celebrating Gaston Fébus and ballades celebrating the wedding of John, duc de Berry, and Jeanne de Boulogne (a princess raised by Fébus) in 1389. Characteristics of the style include fast ornamental passages in complex cross-rhythms, motet-like hocket segments and held notes to set off the refrain rhetorically. Long after simpler styles had begun to dominate the scene, such highly refined and hyper-virtuosic display was prized in aristocratic circles quite far afield, as for example in Du Fay’s ballade Resvelliés vous (‘Rouse yourselves’) for the wedding of Carlo Malatesta da Pesaro and Vittoria di Lorenzo Colonna at Rimini in 1423.

Church councils and papal politics

An effort to end the Schism at the brief Council of Pisa (1409) succeeded only in electing a third pope. It was the Council of Constance (1414–18), culminating in the election of Martin V in 1417, that finally deposed the pretenders. Countless receptions and ceremonies of high officials of church and state, processions and grand Masses gave thousands of participants ample opportunity to hear diverse practices, both the unwritten musical collaborations of trumpeters and minstrels and the artistic polyphony of chapel singers.

One index of the reception specifically of French music at Constance is seen in the contrafacts (new textings of old music) of the poet and composer Oswald von Wolkenstein (c. 1376–1445), in the service of King Sigismund of Luxembourg, an architect of the Council. Among several popular French works that Oswald heard was Vaillant’s Par maintes foys, reworked as Der mai mit lieber zal (‘May, with a lovely throng’).⁵⁴ Vaillant’s virelai also appeared in the Strasbourg manuscript (Bibliothèque Municipale, 222 C.22, burned in 1871) with a sacred contrafact text Ave virgo gloriosa. It must have been jarring for French clerics to hear familiar vernacular chansons subjected to Latin sacred contrafacture by German and Bohemian clerics, let alone the amusingly incomprehensible prolixity of von Wolkenstein’s South Tyrolian dialect. Thus did foreigners reimagine French musical art. Even so, the new Latin sacred settings were attractive vehicles, communicating their messages in the appealing garb of a chanson rather than the high formality of a motet. It is worth considering this and other possible scenarios (including English input at the re-established papal chapel in Rome, and the English occupation of Paris and northern France) to ground the development of the cantilena motet (more like a chanson with sacred text than a traditional motet), a new genre emerging in the 1420s.⁵⁵

Several manuscripts document the widespread transmission of English music to the Continent during the extended period of the Council of Basel (1431–49).⁵⁶ By now the cantilena motet was a well-established fact; at this point the most useful lesson for further development lay in the enormous potential of undergirding several movements of the Mass Ordinary with a single cantus firmus, a technique first found in some English Masses of the 1420s.⁵⁷ The compositional (and aesthetic) lessons of the old motet were brought to bear in this multi-movement ‘tenor Mass’, a form increasingly employed in Mass cycles composed for special functions.

Votive Masses and anniversaries, sets and cycles

Even at large churches throughout a good part of the fifteenth century, High Mass in the choir remained hidebound, celebrated in monophonic plainchant. Nevertheless, manuscripts show that as the fifteenth century unfolded, there was a growing demand for polyphonic service music, answered more and more by sets or cycles of works, for both Mass (Propers, Sequences, Ordinaries) and Office (especially hymns, antiphons and Magnificat settings for Vespers).⁵⁸ Two tendencies are present. On the one hand, a composer might fill out feasts in the liturgical year with workaday elaborations of plainchant cantus firmi, often paraphrased (rendered into modern-sounding melodies) in the upper voice or tenor of a three-voice setting. For example, Du Fay wrote large cycles of hymn and Kyrie settings, products of his many years of service to the papal chapel and to princely chapels.⁵⁹ On a far larger scale, Du Fay supervised the collection of polyphonic service music – both Ordinaries and Propers – for the entire liturgical year at Cambrai Cathedral in the 1440s.

On the other hand, a composer might write a set of Propers, or most usually a polyphonic Mass, a cycle of Ordinaries, for special-purpose endowments.⁶⁰ Members of elite social strata, at first princes and rich churchmen, and increasingly rich merchants and guilds, endowed such private devotions in side chapels, most usually a Mass to the Virgin performed in a lady chapel, to ease the path of their souls to salvation. Such ‘anniversary’ services were not restricted to yearly observance, as the name seems to imply, but might be observed weekly or even daily; it depended on the revenues made available by the patron to pay the singers. An early example is the Machaut Mass (c. 1364), the composer’s own memorial to be sung at the Saturday Lady Mass at Reims Cathedral.⁶¹Reinhard Strohm has proposed an analogous commemorative function for Du Fay’s last Mass, the Missa Ave regina celorum (c. 1470–1), replaced after his death by a three-voice Requiem (not extant).⁶²

Guillaume Du Fay

At the close of this chapter, it is appropriate to focus on Du Fay (c. 1397–1474), a figure who not only sums up the principal stylistic heritage of the fourteenth century, the motet and the fixed-form chanson, but also, in absorbing contemporary influences and tendencies, materially contributed to a new beginning, broadening the domain of art music with the cantilena motet and a vastly expanded repertoire of simple service music for Mass and Office, as well as contributing model cantus-firmus Masses, which synthesised English and Continental tendencies.⁶³ No other composer of polyphony, from any previous period, composed as much music in as many different styles. Yet despite this new beginning, Du Fay at the same time marked a point of termination in that his music had a short shelf life: what he helped to begin was continued in new directions after his death.

Educated as a choirboy at Cambrai Cathedral, Du Fay probably figured among the some 19,000 clerics and church dignitaries who in 1414 descended on Constance, where he would have observed written and unwritten local practices of ecclesiastical and courtly chapels from all over Europe. From there he proceeded to Italy, one of the most distinguished of the French-speaking northerners to forge a new style in that land. Over the next twenty-five years, Du Fay established himself as a leading composer whose works were actively sought by ecclesiastical and secular patrons alike, including an Italian noble family, the Malatesta, two popes and finally duc Amédée VIII de Savoie. By hiring Du Fay, the duke in one stroke raised the level of his musical establishment to such a degree that in 1434, at the marriage of his son Louis with Anne of Cyprus, he could without embarrassment greet the visiting Burgundian Duke Philip the Good, who had travelled to Chambéry with a retinue of some 200, among them the distinguished composer Binchois.

The marriage was doubtless the occasion for the meeting of Du Fay and Binchois celebrated by the Savoyard poet Martin Le Franc in his Champion des dames (c. 1438–42). The passage, well known in music history, proclaims a shift in musical style, occasioned by Du Fay and Binchois, who in some sense ‘followed’ the English composer Dunstable and adopted the ‘English manner’ (contenance angloise). Many music historians have associated Le Franc’s commentary, as well as some related statements in the music theorist Tinctoris, with the watershed of a musical ‘Renaissance’.⁶⁴ In the end, the attempt to find some occasion or other to justify such an apocalyptic label is not helpful, but it is certainly true that these years of stylistic assimilation served a rapid transformation of music.

The music of this first period of Du Fay’s compositional career, which exhibits maturity from the start, counts major works in the full range of genres he cultivated. Solemn occasions found expression in the learned style of the political and dedicatory motet, of which the best known is Nuper rosarum flores, celebrating the consecration of Florence Cathedral in 1436. The proportional lengths of its four sections – 6:4:2:3 – represent the model church, Solomon’s temple.⁶⁵

Probably a little more than fifty of around eighty extant songs belong to these early years. Among them is the ars subtilior dedicatory ballade Resvelliés vous (1423), mentioned earlier. By contrast, smooth and flowing rhythms (some consider this quality a matter of English influence) dominate the ballade Se la face ay pale, perhaps originally destined for the 1434 Savoy wedding and popular for many years thereafter (the last section is given in Example 2.5a).⁶⁶ French-language songs enjoyed an overwhelming preponderance in Italian sources until at least 1440, and there exist only a handful of works in Italian from these years in Italy, notably Du Fay’s own setting of the Petrarchan canzona Vergine bella.⁶⁷

Example 2.5a Guillaume Du Fay, ballade Se la face ay pale, last phrase

Du Fay returned to Cambrai in 1439, now as a resident at his home church, enjoying the canonicate that papal service had netted. The next decade saw the completion of some large-scale sacred projects, including a thorough-going reorganisation of liturgical music at Cambrai Cathedral, encompassing both plainchant and polyphony.

A good part of the 1450s found Du Fay back in the south, mostly at Savoy. One important work of this period, the Missa Se la face ay pale, creates a uniquely Continental response to the English cantus firmus Mass cycle, building especially on the anonymous Missa Caput.⁶⁸ The reception of the relic known today as the Shroud of Turin (held at Chambéry from 1453 until 1578) was probably the occasion for Du Fay’s Mass. The cantus firmus, the tenor of the ballade Se la face ay pale, which Du Fay had composed for Savoy twenty years earlier, infuses each of the five movements of the Mass with the musical emblem of Christ’s pale face.⁶⁹ Musically, Du Fay’s cyclic Mass draws on form-defining aspects of the grand motet: cantus firmus iterations in proportional diminution prefaced by introductory duets, and culminating in rhythmically animated segments. For example, both the Gloria and Credo movements of the Missa Se la face ay pale are laid out in three colores, with the cantus firmus subject to proportional diminution (3:2:1); see Example 2.5b for the last phrase, and compare Example 2.5a.⁷¹

Example 2.5b Guillaume Du Fay, Missa Se la face ay pale, Gloria, last phrase

As far as we know, Du Fay spent his last sixteen years at Cambrai. By the late 1450s, the composition of Mass cycles on the Continent had exploded. Du Fay’s own Missa L’homme armé was composed then, perhaps becoming the first of a long line of Mass settings on that tune.⁷² But the work that best sums up the moment is a devotional motet that Du Fay had asked to be sung at his deathbed, a work that combines a setting of the Marian antiphon Ave regina celorum (‘Hail Queen of Heaven’) with a personal prayer. Table 2.1 shows the interlocking layout of the texts in the first section, as the antiphon is interrupted by Du Fay’s prayer (italic text). As in the earliest polyphony, the tenor (shown in the right-hand column) carries only the cantus firmus, first entering at the point when the other voices intone Du Fay’s prayer. Du Fay exhibits his fluid mastery of cantus firmus paraphrase in this work, for the borrowed melody may appear in voices besides the tenor, always recognisable at the beginning of a phrase, but free to break into florid melisma to drive to an important cadence, thereby supplying the excitement of the old hocket segments without the hard edges. The tenor statement in Example 2.6 is by contrast rather literal (cantus firmus pitches are indicated by ‘x’).⁷³

Table 2.1 Text distribution in Du Fay’s Ave regina celorum (III), first section

Example 2.6 Guillaume Du Fay, Marian antiphon Ave regina celorum (III), end of first section

Gradually over the course of the first half of the fifteenth century, itinerant performers and composers, in restlessly absorbing new influences as they responded to demands from new centres of activity, effectively transformed musical genres, broadening uses and venues for polyphony. The new syntheses and diversity of forms made a preponderantly rhetorical music possible later in the century, a new emphasis that would shake the foundations of expression.⁷⁴ This, however, was a matter for the future. A familiar Marian antiphon resounds throughout Du Fay’s funeral motet, directing his personal prayer; despite some modern details, it remains emblematic of the ‘totalising’ aesthetic set in place in the early fourteenth century.

Introduction

In most surveys of Renaissance music of the past fifty years, the guiding narrative thread is one of transition from one dominant aesthetic paradigm to another, from the ‘Gothic’ north, centred on the Low Countries, to the humanist-inspired, properly ‘Renaissance’ south, centred on Italy. Within this narrative the notion of a distinctly French music assumes a subordinate position. This is a paradoxical situation, since while French remained the international courtly language for most of the Renaissance period, the music to which its poetic forms were set enjoyed a wider international currency than that of any other vernacular: thus pieces like De tous biens plaine, J’ay pris amours, Mille regretz, Jouyssance vous donneray, Doulce mémoire, Susanne un jour and many others were copied and known by name throughout Europe. Before the middle of the sixteenth century, very few songs in other languages could boast a comparable vogue. To complicate matters further, the composers of these international ‘hits’ were by no means all native francophones, and of those who were, many were born in territories outside the direct control of the French crown. Thus defining French music in this period is no easy matter. During the early sixteenth century, however, the situation becomes somewhat clearer. After 1500 the classically francophone formes fixes, inherited from the medieval period, were on the wane throughout Europe; meanwhile French composers showed a marked predilection for declamatory clarity that surpassed their former interest in more intrinsically musical priorities. A further paradox was that this relative loss of international currency saw the rise of poetic and musical forms and idioms that came to be seen by outsiders as specifically French (as shown in the Italian term canzona alla francese and its cognates, which, ironically, designate an instrumental piece opening with dactylic rhythmic patterns and following closely the clear sectional structure of a song model). This brand of ‘Parisian’ chanson was thus imitated by composers working and publishing far from Paris, such as Nicolas Gombert and Thomas Créquillon at the peripatetic imperial chapel of Charles V, Orlande de Lassus in Munich and Philippe de Monte in Prague. In what follows it will be useful to keep in mind the distinction between ‘music in France’ and ‘music setting French texts’, while remembering that such a distinction would have had little pertinence at the time.¹

The period 1460–1600 saw the restoration and growth of central French power on the European political and economic stage following the conclusion of the Hundred Years War, despite the lengthy struggle between King Louis XI (r. 1461–83) and his Burgundian cousin Duke Charles the Bold (r. 1467–77). The international conflicts centred on Italy, which began under Charles VIII (r. 1483–98), were not fully resolved until the 1550s. But they prevented neither French singers and their music from dominating the chapels and chambers of royal, princely and ecclesiastical courts, nor the dissemination of their works in print and manuscripts throughout Europe. Political events and the reformation of religious thought and ceremony also had important consequences for the arts and music. The individual and congregational interpretation of the scriptures, encouraged by Luther and followed by Calvin, led to a profusion of simpler monophonic and homophonic settings of biblical psalms (translated by Clément Marot and Théodore de Beze), which were widely printed and copied for the bourgeoisie and menu peuple (common people) during the 1540s. The bloody Wars of Religion, which from the mid-century decade embroiled the realm in civil conflict, took their toll on all levels of French society, including princes and even kings. The thousands of Huguenots massacred on St Bartholomew’s Day (1572) and its aftermath included at least one composer, Claude Goudimel, who had devoted most of his considerable skills to setting the new French psalms. A measure of political and religious stability returned with the advent to the throne of Henri IV in 1589. The tradition of strong, centralising royal power begun under Louis XI and reinforced by François I (who moved the previously itinerant court from the castles of the Loire valley to the palace of the Louvre) was thus resumed with increased vigour, and the position of Paris as the seat of that power definitively established.

The musical landscape: church and court

The key role of the French royal court within musical life is undeniable. Its prestige may be gauged from the calibre of the singer-composers it attracted, especially from 1454, when Johannes Ockeghem (c. 1425–97) was appointed head of the Chapelle Royale. Ockeghem merits pride of place not only chronologically, for he was clearly an outstanding figure: apart from his musical excellence as both singer and composer, he was evidently an impressive administrator and valued royal advisor. His position as treasurer of the abbey of Saint-Martin of Tours (whose titular, hereditary abbot was none other than the king himself) made him probably the most powerful French musician before Lully. His long tenure as premier chappelain ushered in a long period of sustained musical excellence and prestige at the French court. All the same, the Chapelle Royale is perhaps best understood as part of a complex network of musical establishments throughout the realm. Charles VII and his successors preferred the Loire valley to their fractious capital, and throughout the Italian wars, Lyons was a more convenient base of operations, with the court in permanent residence there between 1499 and 1503. But wherever it was located, the court exerted a direct influence on the surrounding area. During its period of residence in Tours, connections existed with neighbouring ecclesiastical institutions in Tours itself, but also at Bourges and Poitiers. Thus in the early 1460s, Antoine Busnoys (c. 1430–92) was certainly active within the court’s orbit. Later, during the Parisian period beginning with François I (r. 1515–47), links with the neighbouring Sainte-Chapelle were particularly close, owing no doubt in part to its own royal pedigree.² These links took the form of a more or less regular exchange of personnel between the two institutions, so that Claudin de Sermisy (c. 1490–1562) and Pierre Certon (d. 1572), for example, were attached to both. By contrast, Notre-Dame’s relations with the crown remained uneasy, and the more august ecclesiastical institutions were often similarly jealous of their prerogatives. Recent research has uncovered much unsuspected information on the activities of regional collegiate institutions.³ There is scarcely a town of any importance that cannot boast of the presence, however fleeting, of a major musical figure. Most of Janequin’s long career, for example, was spent en province, notably at Angers and Bordeaux; by the time official royal preferment came his way, over half of his extant output had been published.

With a few significant exceptions, throughout the fifteenth century the singer-chaplains of the Chapelle Royale tended to be French or francophone, and their number (little over a dozen singers and an organist) remained comparatively stable. During Charles VIII’s reign their number included Alexander Agricola (b. 1456?; d. 1506) and Loÿset Compère (c. 1445–1518), as well as Ockeghem. Under his successor Louis XII (r. 1498–1515) there was considerable expansion: his consort, Anne de Bretagne (d. 1514), established a chapel of her own, equal to the king’s in size and excellence. The membership of their combined chapels included Compère, Antoine Brumel (b. c. 1460; d. 1512–13?), Antoine de Févin (b. c. 1470; d. 1511–12), Johannes Ghiselin (fl. 1491–1507), Jean Mouton (b. c. 1459; d. 1522) and Dionisius Prioris (fl. c. 1485–1512),⁴ and later the young Sermisy. This period was surely one of the highpoints of the chapel’s history. The trend throughout the sixteenth century was for increased formalisation and specialisation. The long reign of François I marked a number of significant innovations. By 1526 at the latest, the chapel was placed under the control of a high-ranking cleric, although his direct subordinates (sous-maîtres) continued to be singers and composers; from that date, the singing of plainchant and polyphony was entrusted to different ensembles (the former being by a considerable margin the larger of the two), while certain musicians were specifically named as composers or even scribes. A smaller group of singers and instrumentalists was attached to the king’s household or chamber, which during François’s reign was established as distinct from the chapel. In some cases the association appears to have been merely formal or honorary (as may have been the case with Janequin). Although François’s personal interest in music may not have matched his demonstrable enthusiasm for the other arts, philosophy and sciences,⁵ he clearly appreciated its value within courtly life, ceremonial ritual and diplomacy. Some of the later Valois were probably more enthusiastic: François’s successor, Henri II, is reported to have composed, and both he and his son Charles IX (r. 1560–74) were known to join in singing with their choirs. Charles IX tried unsuccessfully to coax the most celebrated composer of the day, Orlande de Lassus (c. 1532–94), to join his service. His younger brothers, Henri III (r. 1574–89) and François, duc d’Alençon (d. 1584), carried on this lavish musical patronage. In the closing years of the century the chapel was further expanded, the leading composer being Eustache Du Caurroy (1549–1609), whose Requiem was used for the obsequies of Henri IV, Louis XIII and Louis XIV. Baptised in the Protestant faith and a pragmatic convert to Catholicism, Henri IV (r. 1589–1610) was content to leave the structure of the Chapelle Royale unchanged, but his interest in music is attested by the quality of his musiciens de chambre, who included the lutenist Charles Tessier and the singer Pierre Guédron.

Throughout our period, the provision of instrumental music at court had been similarly expanded and formalised. In contrast to the singers of the chapel, these musicians included a high proportion of foreigners, particularly Italians recruited from the time of the wars of Charles VIII and Louis XII. The distinction between the musicians’ different functions becomes explicit under François I, who established a military band (écurie) consisting of loud instruments, while several lutenists (including Albert de Rippe) were paid as servants in the king’s household as musiciens de chambre. As queen and later regent, Catherine de Médicis (d. 1589) shared her adoptive family’s enthusiasm for sacred music, but inclined also towards secular entertainments of the sort she had known in her native Florence, particularly dance. A well-documented occasion was the visit of the Polish ambassadors in 1573, which saw the staging at court of one of the first ballets, followed in 1581 by the Balet comique de la royne, with choreography by the Italian-born violinist Balthasar de Beaujoyeux (or Beaujoyeulx) and music in the form of récits, airs, choruses and dances by Girard de Beaulieu and Jacques Salmon. It was most likely at Catherine’s behest that a set of violins (including, that is, all the instruments of the violin family) was sent from Italy to France. The Valois court also imported Italian musicians in great number to provide the music at secular entertainments. Their standing was beginning to change: for the most part, their education continued to differ markedly from that of singers, and with the obvious exception of organists, the ecclesiastical revenues available to singers were closed to them; yet certain individuals, like the blind menestriers (minstrels) of Charles the Bold, or later Albert de Rippe, were more admired and highly rewarded than the chapel singers. Finally, it was during the reign of Henri IV that the violin band was put on a more formal footing (partly to please his queen, Marie de Médicis), laying the groundwork for the famous Vingt-Quatre Violons, which was eventually transferred from the écurie to the chambre, further elevating its status.

The musical landscape away from court

The overwhelming presence of the church within later medieval and Renaissance society is today increasingly difficult to imagine. The second of the three estates (the first being represented by the crown and the aristocracy), it provided the only meritocratic route to social advancement for members of the third. Through a network of choir schools (maîtrises) it afforded musically gifted boys an excellent general education and a secure, lucrative career.⁶ Just as the wealthier nobility kept their own chapels, so did the most powerful ecclesiasts, who also employed musicians for secular entertainments.⁷

The craft of instrumental musicians was, in contrast to the polyphony of singers, largely unwritten, and had its own professional organisations: the confraternités or guilds, which regulated the pay and status of their members and stipulated their years of apprenticeship. The guilds were involved in state occasions and public entertainments, as when visiting nobles or foreign dignitaries were welcomed, or when the king was received on an official visit. These occasions, known by the term joyeuse entrée, were also a common feature of urban life in the Burgundian lands. The festivities were reported in locally published pamphlets that reflect the role and importance of musicians at such events, and the attainment of a degree of musical literacy as a mark of breeding increasingly filtered down from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie. The growing middle classes’ enthusiasm for the music sponsored by church and courts is most concretely signalled by the advent of music printing in France, which occurred simultaneously in Paris and Lyons in 1528.

The Parisian Pierre Attaingnant was the first to develop a more economic single-impression method of musical typography, an invention soon adapted by others. Supported by royal funding and privilege, his firm was also the first to achieve a truly international distribution based on a wide aristocratic and bourgeois readership. In 1547 Henri II relaxed his father’s monopolies, opening music publishing opportunities to competitors including Nicolas Du Chemin, Robert Granjon and the lutenist Adrian Le Roy, who in collaboration with Robert Ballard established a dominant position supported by new royal patents.

For much of the sixteenth century the populous city of Lyons functioned as a second capital through the quantity and quality of its literary and musical publication.⁸ Its strategic location and safe distance from Paris engendered a greater cosmopolitanism and diversity of outlook, making it a natural home for intellectuals, freethinkers and Huguenots (owing to the proximity of Geneva). Although Lyons represents a special case by virtue of its administrative independence from royal authority and its commercial prosperity, its individuality offered a valuable corrective to the royal and centripetal view of Paris’s cultural dominance.

For much of our period, and with the limited exceptions just noted in church and court, the social status of practising musicians was on a par with that of artisans. The medieval distinction between musicus and cantor (that is, those versed in music theory and its practitioners) continued to hold sway throughout the Renaissance. This was a consequence of music’s position as one of the seven liberal arts taught at university, in which it was placed with the three other number-based sciences, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. With music considered a speculative branch of knowledge, it was almost de rigueur for theorists to profess disdain of their practising counterparts, including clerical singers of polyphony. Yet many of those theorists were composers with a university education, such as Johannes Tinctoris (c. 1430–1511), the most influential theorist of his generation, who was connected with the university and cathedral of Orleans in the late 1450s and early 1460s. All the same, the later Renaissance evinced a growing unease at a theoretical model dating back to Boethius, and the universities themselves were increasingly derided for clinging to outdated models.⁹Intellectuals and artists responded by forming ‘academies’, at which questions could be debated in a freer manner than was possible at the university. In Paris the writer Jean-Antoine de Baïf (1532–89) gathered one such circle around him under the patronage of Charles IX, who granted the Académie de Poésie et de Musique its own royal charter in 1570. A crucial point of discussion, also carried on at contemporary Italian accademie, concerned the relation of text and music. A similar concern animated the deliberations of the Council of Trent (1545–63), in response to the Reformed church’s criticisms of the textual unintelligibility of the music being composed for the Catholic Church. As in the accademie, Baïf and his musical collaborators Guillaume Costeley (c. 1530–1606), Joachim Thibault de Courville (d. 1581) and Girard de Beaulieu (fl. 1559–87) sought a model inspired by the supposed musical practices of ancient Greece; but, typical of the French propensity to give rhythm and metre predominance over melody and harmony, the Académie’s musical fruits were very different from the rather freer Italian monody: the vers mesurés à l’antique presented stressed and unstressed syllables with long and short note values, respectively. The proximity of this approach to the Huguenot tradition of metrical psalm singing is striking: though it stemmed from different ideological premises, the parallel can hardly be coincidental. The metrical formulations devised by Marot for his psalm translations followed the melodies of Calvin’s Genevan musicians, and their harmonisations by Loÿs Bourgeois, Janequin and others were combined with the dance rhythms of the same composers’ settings of secular strophic verse (voix de villes and airs). These formulations no doubt inspired the declamatory patterns found in the airs mesurés.

The significance of the Académie’s classicising stance for music history and its implications for musical style (in particular the move away from complex polyphony) have tended to overshadow its larger intellectual programme, indeed the deep moral purpose with which it saw itself invested, to which the king’s charter repeatedly refers. In France as elsewhere throughout Europe, the late Renaissance was the last period in Western music in which music was regarded almost universally as unequivocally positive, essential for the improvement and proper conduct of individuals, for their peaceable coexistence in society and for the very fabric of the universe. Music was perceived not only as positive, but as popular: familiarity with music and its terminology was therefore more widespread in this than in any other subsequent period. Further evidence for this is the establishment in 1570 of the Puy d’Evreux, an annual competition – the first of its kind – to which composers submitted works in different categories, including motets and chansons, and whose victors included the most prestigious composers of the day, including Lassus, Du Caurroy and many others. In the following century, however, music’s status as a science increasingly came under scrutiny. Although later thinkers (particularly the encyclopédistes) became deeply concerned with the acoustic bases of tonality, music itself was no longer considered a tool of cognition. It may be argued that, even compared with the other arts, music never regained the position within French culture that it enjoyed in the Renaissance.

From formes fixes to strophic song

In the last forty years it has been established that several of the most significant French-language formes fixes manuscripts transmitting the song repertoire of the later fifteenth century originated in the Loire Valley – that is, in the orbit of the French royal court.¹⁰ Further, two of its major composers, Ockeghem and Busnoys, were closely associated with the court’s circle. The close collaboration between two of the century’s most influential composers marks out the period around 1460 as one of the highpoints of French music. It is not unreasonable to ascribe to this time and place certain key developments in French song: first, the revival of the virelai in an abbreviated form, sometimes referred to as bergerette (ABbaA). This was a particular favourite of Busnoys, and the surviving examples from Du Fay and Ockeghem count among their most memorable and distinctive songs. Ockeghem’s Ma bouche rit and Presque trainsi, both virelais in the Phrygian mode, seem in different ways to have been extraordinarily influential, and it is quite possible that the use of the Phrygian mode in polyphony, with its attendant textual topos of mourning, is due to the success of these pieces. However, Busnoys was arguably the more immediately influential figure of the two stylistically: the songs of several other figures of the time (for example Caron and Delahaye) show remarkable affinities with his. During the third quarter of the century, this group of composers also resumed experimentation with poly-textual pieces, in which different texts were brought into relation with each other. The textual play with different narrative voices (typically opposing the courtly and the pastoral or rustic) harks back to the early motet; but the graphic obscenity of some pieces (like Caron’s Corps contre corps) was carried on in the épigrammes which, alongside the strophic song and the ‘popular’ song with regular symmetrical strophes, supplanted the courtly formes fixes early in the following century. However, it should be realised that, notwithstanding these differences of tone, the evidence that ‘native’ popular idioms played a significant role in that transition is scant: as in the fifteenth century, references to the menu peuple are entirely from an aristocratic perspective, even though those popular references may themselves have contributed to the widening demographic appeal of the music observed in prints.

Until recently, the transition was difficult to pin down, owing to several documentary problems: first, the transmission of French printed and manuscript chanson sources in the second and third decades of the century is extremely patchy; second, poetry manuscripts and printed anthologies (such as the monumental Jardin de plaisance, published in Paris by Antoine Vérard in 1502) continued to transmit formes fixes poetry that had long ceased to be set to music; and finally, contemporary nomenclature (even of an apparently straightforward term like ‘chanson’) is by no means straightforward. But as Frank Dobbins has shown, a clear transitional stage is perceptible in other contemporary collections of verse and music, including the well-known monophonic ‘Bayeux’ chansonnier, commonly known as the manuscrit de Bayeux, probably copied for Charles de Bourbon and transmitting melodies set polyphonically by countless composers.¹¹ A shift of emphasis is also detectable with the two most prolific song composers of the following generation, Compère and Agricola, both of whom composed superb formes fixes settings alongside strophic and through-composed songs. The varied strophic structure with refrain of Compère’s ribald Nous sommes de l’ordre de Saint Babouin prefigures the later songs of Janequin and his emulators. By the turn of the century, these strophic forms (including single strophes, such as the famous Mille regretz) became increasingly the norm for polyphonic settings, and their affective range broadened commensurately. Josquin’s Nymphes des bois, setting Cretin’s lament for Ockeghem, is an outstanding example of a relatively new trend. A few songs that may confidently be ascribed to Mouton adumbrate the ‘new songs’ of Sermisy, Janequin and the younger generation found in the earliest books published by Attaingnant, starting with the Chansons nouvelles of 1528. As with the Italian madrigal, printing (initially in Italy, but soon afterwards in France) was to play a crucial role in the dissemination of the chanson.

This new style is far too diverse and widespread for the designation ‘Parisian chanson’ that attaches to it.¹² The variety of the poetic texts in their forms, metrical structures and use of refrains is mirrored in their musical settings. Sermisy is perhaps the purest exponent of the style in its courtly vein. The melody of Je n’ay poinct plus d’affection illustrates it neatly. The repetition of the music for the third and fourth lines of text, though not ubiquitous, is typical enough; still more common is the reprise of the opening phrase for the end, which may be lightly varied or expanded. A lighter variant of the basic form is the drinking song (e.g. Hau, hau je bois and La, la, Maistre Pierre), in which the refrain punctuates the text at intervals (sometimes in truncated form). Janequin’s style is occasionally close to Sermisy’s lyrical simplicity, though inclining to a more melismatic approach, but he far outshines him in the variety of his rhythm and brilliant articulation of a syllabic counterpoint that is perfectly matched to the words of the narrative. A distinct category is the épigramme, setting single strophes whose last line introduces a pointe or punch-line. The narrative is often obscene, and some of the wittiest settings (such as Janequin’s Ung jour Colin) contrive a musical representation of the (usually sexual) activity described. Strophic settings were less often associated with ribald texts; an exception is Sermisy’s scatological Je ne menge point de porc, whose two strophes with refrain are through-composed. The pointe is not the refrain here but the penultimate line, in which a pig addresses a piece of excrement as he prepares to eat it. To emphasise this surreal moment, Sermisy moves to perfect time (by then seldom used), effectively slowing down the beat to stress the pig’s apostrophe.

Janequin’s narrative songs with their lively counterpoint and neat structures profoundly inspired the song-writing of generations of followers. The best known are Le chant des oyseaulx and La bataille, which must commemorate the victory of François I over imperial forces at Marignano in 1515; but the hunt-scene in La chasse, which paints a tableau including the king himself, and Le caquet des femmes (‘The chatterbox of women’) are just as accomplished. The formal mastery and sense of pacing that he deploys in these large-scale compositions are remarkable: moments of harmonic stasis, in which the music is overrun with onomatopoeia, set the scene for a sudden dramatic breakthrough, as when the quarry is finally sighted in La chasse. The impact of these pieces in live performance is undeniable, and they were frequently imitated: even the usually straight-laced Gombert was moved to try his hand in La chasse au lièvre and his own setting of Le chant des oyseaulx.

The later sixteenth century was dominated by Costeley and Claude Le Jeune, both closely associated with Baïf’s académie and its vers mesurés à l’antique. These might be described as a typically French attempt to impose a rational framework on an inherently fluid medium; not coincidentally, however, the concern to systematise the French language itself was shared by countless authors and intellectuals of the time, from Rabelais to the circle of the Pléiade.

Between these early and late figures is a group of significant personalities mostly active outside France: Thomas Créquillon and Pierre de Manchicourt, both born in the northern town of Béthune but employed by the Habsburgs, and Jacobus Clemens (alias ‘non Papa’ owing to his dissolute lifestyle). To some extent they stand apart from the composers working in France, exhibiting the Flemish preference for more elaborate and stricter imitative counterpoint, stricter fugal sequence, stretto entries, dovetailed cadences and denser textures most markedly exhibited in the work of Gombert. There will be more to say concerning the distinction between ‘Franco-Flemish’ and French, but the most gifted of these Ausländer – indeed, arguably the most versatile of all composers in the genre – is Lassus, who settled in Munich from the mid-1550s. Much has been written about his phenomenal sensitivity to text, which ranges from the mimetic games dear to Janequin to extraordinarily subtle references audible (or, in the case of Augenmusik, visible) to musicians alone. This psychological acuteness is matched by an effortless facility with counterpoint and an elfin sense of play with style unmatched by any of his contemporaries. His lyricism, figuralism and word-painting are illustrated in songs like Bonjour mon coeur, which neatly balances Ronsard’s poem; La nuit froide et sombre, which depicts each antithetical image portrayed in a few lines from Du Bellay’s Ode à l’inconstance des choses; and Paisible demaine, which succinctly sets an old ‘Blason de Paris’. His compositions combine Sermisy’s stylised elegance with Janequin’s rhythmic verve and Arcadelt’s allusive touches. Lassus set French verse ranging from Villon to Baïf and never fails to show his skill and originality in reworking the many musical models provided by the previous generation of composers. In turn, his songs profoundly influenced countless later settings of the same verses.¹³ Although Lassus’s delight in contrapuntal mastery and emotive use of harmony appears to flout classic French sensibility, which holds that art should conceal art, his pith and lucidity mark him out as one of the greatest composers ever to have set the language.

In 1571, the publisher and lutenist Adrian Le Roy brought out a collection of solo songs with lute accompaniment, which he called Airs de cour (the first known use of the term). These arrangements of strophic songs, mostly composed by King Charles IX’s organist, Nicholas de La Grotte, and published by Le Roy in a four-voice version in 1569, included texts that Ronsard had composed for masquerades and other quasi-dramatic festivities performed at Fontainebleau in 1564. Le Roy’s monodic arrangements introduce a novel unmeasured, declamatory rhythm, rarely found earlier, though it occurs in some of his own airs, including Est-ce pas mort quand un corps froid (Second livre de chansons, 1564). The air de cour had less of a European vogue than the chanson, but it was still widely disseminated – the best-known instances being the publication by Thomas East of Charles Tessier’s Chansons et airs de court, which influenced the first book of Dowland’s ayres printed in the same year, 1597. Although the fashion for solo singing may have been influenced by developments in Italy, the directness and simple elegance of the air de cour is typically French. But that simplicity is deceptive, for the best singers ornamented the melody as lavishly as their Italian counterparts. The highly stylised attitude that characterises the genre, already evident with Pierre Guédron, was carried still further by his successors. This rarefied sophistication reflects the tone of airs de cour texts, which is subtly different from that of the chanson. Humour, though present in the sub-generic airs à boire (drinking songs), seldom matches the ribaldry of the chanson at its most direct; more typically, allegorical descriptions of the beloved are pursued to the point of preciosity – or so it would seem, were it not for the excellence of the music. The change of sensibility indicates a significant aesthetic shift.

Instrumental music

Instrumental music remained subordinate to vocal music in France, as in other European countries during the period. The minstrel’s oral traditions are only marginally represented in notated sources like the published dance books, the earliest being that of Michel de Tholoze (c. 1510). These included mostly basses danses, pavanes and gaillardes, such as were danced in courtly ballrooms and town halls for weddings and other festivities arranged for four-part instrumental ensemble, keyboard, or solo lute. The arrangers are rarely named, but they included Claude Gervaise, the bandsman Étienne du Tertre, Tielman Susato and the distinguished lutenists Albert de Rippe, Guillaume Morlaye and Adrian Le Roy, as well as the guitarist Simon Gorlier. Many of these dances were structured and strictly rhythmicised versions of chansons, which also provided a vast repertoire of straight arrangements. Freer arrangements of chansons and occasionally motets or mass sections were also published in the form of phantaisies and rechercars, and some were preceded by virtuosic preludes, which were often mere finger-warming exercises with scales and arpeggios. Several books of choreographies were printed in Lyons and even Troyes, where in 1588 Thoinot Arbeau (Étienne Tabouret) issued his treatise Orchésographie. In 1576 under the title ‘voix de villes’ Jehan Chardavoine published the melodies for many airs and other songs that were sung and danced on the Pont Neuf in Paris. Music and notably chansons played a key role in French drama, from the passion plays, mysteries and moralities of the fifteenth century to the farces, pastorals and tragedies of the sixteenth century.¹⁴ The repertoire is clearly represented in the song-books of the time, and a few examples of full scores survive (e.g. a nativity play by Barthélemy Aneau with noëls by Étienne Du Tertre, Didier Lupi and Goudimel).

Sacred versus secular music

Because of the social structures within which leading musicians worked, there was little distinction between composers of sacred and secular music before the sixteenth century, even though individual composers might favour the one over the other. Thus Busnoys’s sacred output is comparatively small in relation to the number of his chansons, and the reverse is true with Ockeghem; but conversely, more copies survive of Busnoys’s justly celebrated L’homme arméMass than of any of Ockeghem’s Mass cycles, while none of Busnoys’s songs matched the popularity of Ma bouche rit. In the following century, Sermisy, though master of King François I’s chapel, published more songs than Masses or motets, while the priest Janequin hardly touched sacred genres. The enduring amalgamation of the sacred and the secular is marked by the fact that a significant proportion of the Masses, and many Magnificats, composed after 1500 were ‘imitations’ or ‘parodies’ of polyphonic chansons.

All the same, a number of points testify to the gradual split between the two. The most far-reaching event from this standpoint was the Reformation, and the reaction it triggered in Catholic countries. The rise of Reformed churches led to forms of worship in the vernacular, and a need for new musical genres suited to them. In French, this led most notably to countless settings of the Psalter, newly translated by Clément Marot and Théodore de Beze. As we have seen, the singing of these psalms in French was very popular at court, and they were set by the Catholic composers Janequin and Certon. Conversely, prominent Huguenots like Goudimel composed and edited collections of Masses for the Parisian printer Nicolas Du Chemin, and the pastor Simon Goulart made a career out of contrafacts, devising spiritual verse to fit the words of Ronsardian sonnets set by Bertrand, Boni and even Lassus. It was only from the 1560s onwards, when attitudes hardened on both sides, that the linguistic divide was perceived to mirror the confessional. Thus the entire production of Paschal de l’Estocart (a generation on from Goudimel) was conditioned by religious considerations. His Octonnaires de la vanité du monde set insistently moralising vernacular texts, albeit in a musical idiom strongly tinted with Italianate chromaticism. A remarkable degree of chromaticism also informs the spiritual as well as secular songs of Jean Servin and the airs spirituels of Antoine de Bertrand. It can hardly be coincidence that this emphasis on the devotional use of the vernacular corresponds to the emergence of new secular forms within each linguistic group – chanson, madrigal and the like.

The linguistic question aside, there is little doubt that the growing rift between sacred and secular was a pan-European phenomenon: while the Spaniard Victoria’s decision to concentrate on sacred music appears to have arisen out of personal conviction, Palestrina’s in Rome seems to have been more calculated. But either position would have been unthinkable forty years earlier. In French-speaking areas matters were rarely so clear-cut, as we have seen with Goulart’s practice of framing sacred texts to the very chansons that Reformed religious leaders denounced for their scandalous content! Trends in printed music, similarly, cut both ways: at first glance, the publications devoted to genre argued for the perception of sacred and secular as distinct; yet the two were often found alongside each other in collections known as meslanges (miscellanies), whether collective (as with those issued in Paris in 1560 and 1572) or from individuals.

Latin-texted sacred music: French versus Franco-Flemish?

To return to the question broached at the beginning of this chapter: what, if anything, qualifies as specifically ‘French’ in the music written in French, or in France, during the Renaissance? The problem is posed perhaps most acutely in the sacred music written for the Catholic ritual, and not just for the obvious reason that it sets Latin rather than French texts.

With Ockeghem, the Chapelle Royale – and by extension, France – could claim the most respected composer of his generation. But because barely a handful of contemporary French sources of sacred polyphony have come down to us, such knowledge as we have of the music itself comes second-hand at best, often from sources copied very far afield. Hence the impression that French sacred polyphony of the late fifteenth century is well-nigh indissociable from an international style practised by the ‘Franco-Flemish’ musicians who disseminated it throughout Europe. In fact, most of the principal composers active in France at the time were francophone. Long believed to have been of Flemish origin, Ockeghem is now known to have been born near Mons, in French-speaking Belgium. A survey of his sacred music is beyond the scope of this chapter, but a word is in order concerning his contribution (and through him, that of composers working on French soil) to that most lofty of fifteenth-century musical genres, the polyphonic Mass cycle.¹⁵ Ockeghem’s posthumous reputation rested on a group of works of a distinctly speculative sort: the three-voice canonic song Prenez sur moy, the Missa Cuiusvis toni, designed for performance on several starting pitches, and the Missa Prolationum, conceived almost entirely in double canon. Such pieces may have been designed as audition pieces for the French Chapelle Royale, but compositionally they seem also to straddle the fault lines of the theoretical systems within which they are conceived. (The idea that a notated work may have several sounding realisations was revisited a couple of generations later by Pierre Moulu in his Missa Alma redemptoris mater, which can be performed with or without rests longer than a minim.) At first glance, these important pieces are exceptions within his output, and they have often been portrayed as such. Nevertheless, their speculative bent is typical of the composer more generally, for in his other Masses he frequently adopts a questioning stance towards the borrowed material that serves as their basis.

Apart from their theoretical bases (or rather, precisely on account of them), the Masses Cuiusvis toni and Prolationum are exceptional in relying on no pre-existing material whatever.¹⁶ The more usual way of treating the Mass cycle was to take pre-existing material of one sort or another as a basis for a new work, the options available to the composer depending on the nature of the borrowed work. The tradition of using a line of plainsong as a compositional starting-point was already centuries old, but its application as a recurrent structuring (hence the term ‘cantus firmus’) across the five movements of the Mass Ordinary counts as one of the fifteenth century’s greatest innovations. If its invention is credited to the English composers of the generation of Leonel Power (c. 1380–1445) and John Dunstable (c. 1390–1453), its development and diversification seems to have been a largely French affair, most notably through Guillaume Du Fay (c. 1397–1474), and Ockeghem and Busnoys in the following generation. Where the English tended to present the plainsong in the same guise in each movement, their successors might ornament it differently each time, as in the Ecce ancilla Masses by Du Fay and Ockeghem. And it may also have been Du Fay who first hit upon the idea of using a line from an existing polyphonic song as a cantus firmus in his Se la face ay pale cycle, probably composed in the 1450s and based on a strophic song of Du Fay’s own. (This intersection of sacred and secular can be surprising to modern sensibilities, but it would have seemed entirely natural to contemporary observers. For one thing, God and his saints were everywhere, tangible presences; for another, medieval culture delighted in the sort of analogical relationship that such correspondences set up: thus the Virgin Mary was readily assimilated to the idealised, unattainable Lady of chivalry, subject of countless chansons of the period.¹⁷) Bold though these developments undoubtedly are, still more striking is the speed with which new ideas were not only adopted, but their implications pursued and extended. More or less from the off, composers began to quote not only from the single line but from several or, again, from the entire polyphonic texture of borrowed pieces. Most of these developments may be observed in Ockeghem’s Mass output, and whether or not he initiated them himself, the number of his surviving Masses (over a dozen, whether complete or fragmentary), most of which must have been written during his long tenure at the French court, is indicative of an influence beyond what the surviving sources suggest.

Independently of his international reputation, within France itself Ockeghem was unquestionably the dominant figure of his generation. Once again, the lack of primary sources obscures the picture; but with the exception of Busnoys (who had left France by the mid-1460s), Ockeghem had no rival in the domain of sacred music. Busnoys’s L’homme armé Mass has already been mentioned, and was one of the most influential works of the century; and his motet in honour of Ockeghem, In hydraulis, composed just before his leave-taking of his colleague around 1465, was also echoed in a number of works, including, for example, Josquin’s Illibata virgo nutrix. More obviously, perhaps, than Ockeghem’s, Busnoys’s music exhibits traits that might be described as quintessentially French: innate balance and sense of line, and fastidious contrapuntal technique. And of the two, it was arguably Busnoys who was the more influential. Like many of his songs, his Missa L’homme armé (which may well date from his last years at the French court) supremely embodies a form of mid-fifteenth-century classicism, refined, consummately sure-footed and yet capable of coups de théâtre as breathtaking as they are carefully staged (as the concluding section of the Agnus Dei reveals). Not only was it widely copied, but its elegant design led to a number of homages by younger composers, notably Jacob Obrecht and Josquin (the latter in his Missa L’homme armé super voces musicales). Close to Busnoys in style is his probable near contemporary Firmin Caron, who was probably born at Amiens and left five elegantly executed Masses, including a Missa L’homme armé. (The popularity of his songs has already been mentioned.) In the 1480s and 1490s, the royal court was joined by more distinguished figures. Although born in Ghent and therefore of Flemish birth, Agricola appears to have made some impact during his tenure there. His highly individual style might be held up as a synthesis of his two most illustrious predecessors at the French court, for its textural vocabulary owes much to Busnoys, but its subversive streak is reminiscent of Ockeghem. It is possible that there existed a relationship between Agricola and Ockeghem similar to the one that had linked Ockeghem and Busnoys twenty years earlier.¹⁸

The music of both Ockeghem and Agricola exhibits stylistic traits often described as ‘Flemish’: a preference for convoluted, intricate lines, dense textures (whatever the number of voices) and contrapuntal sophistication. These features have sometimes been contrasted with the gradual simplification of style observed in the early years of the next century in the works of the chapel members Prioris, Divitis, Moulu and Févin, characterised by a greater clarity of texture, melodic design and form, and a preference for four-voice textures where five and six voices were increasingly the norm elsewhere (for example with Habsburg musicians in the Low Countries and northerners in Italy). But the interpretation of these changes as evidence of a specifically French sensibility emerging from the shadow of a Franco-Flemish school is overhasty. Divitis, for example, was born in Leuven and spent most of his career in Flemish-speaking areas. His works exhibit a stepping-down of contrapuntal virtuosity comparable to that of his francophone contemporaries at the Chapelle Royale. Conversely, in the work of the francophone Mouton the propensity for clear textures is balanced by an occasional interest in contrapuntal artifice, so the ‘Franco/Flemish’ duality is hardly clear-cut. The difference may depend more on the formation received in certain choir schools like those of Cambrai or Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle, or from the prevailing fashion at the place of employment. To view it from the other side, the composers working in the Habsburg orbit continued in the ‘Flemish’ manner just noted, particularly retaining the preference for rich and dense textures; but not a few of these composers (Manchicourt, Crecquillon) were francophone. So one need hardly invoke the tunefulness and the textual and formal clarity of the new ‘Parisian’ chanson (a quintessential symbol of the French Renaissance) to explain the lack of contrapuntal artifice in Sermisy’s sacred music, which is better viewed in light of trends extending beyond France to include much of Europe.

The early sixteenth century ushered in the heyday of the motet, which replaced the Mass as the main focus for composers of sacred music, and of canonic writing as a privileged locus of contrapuntal virtuosity. The simplification of style just discussed applies here also, for in the fifteenth century the term ‘canon’ was applied to a wide variety of techniques for transforming a single line of music by means of externally imposed criteria, of which the technique designated by the term nowadays (that is, the exact replication of a single notated line by two or more voices sounding at different times) was only one.¹⁹ After the turn of the sixteenth century the vogue for abstruse and cryptic ‘non-fugal’ forms of canon went out of fashion (notwithstanding the odd exception), while the strict imitative sort became increasingly popular, as in the Chanzoni franciose a quatro sopra doi, which consists entirely of canonic pieces (in the sense of ‘fuga’), both sacred and secular. In its concentration on fugal canon this was the first publication of its kind; but it is striking that nearly all the composers represented had close links with the French court in the decade preceding the volume’s appearance. Its title should not be read anachronistically, since national and linguistic labels were quite loosely applied during this period; but it plainly signals a perception of French composers (or of composers working in France) as a distinctive presence on the international scene.²⁰ The influence of Italy on courtly French culture in the Renaissance is widely documented; but it is worth noting that the traffic was not exclusively in one direction, since at least one of the pioneers of the Italian madrigal, Philippe Verdelot, was French.

Compared with that of the preceding period, sacred music in France during the latter half of the sixteenth century gives the impression of being somewhat insular or conservative, but this perception is neither fair nor accurate. Until recently, musicology has neglected the abundant and often fine sacred polyphony of such figures from the middle of the century as Arcadelt, Certon, Maillard, Phinot and Boni.²¹ True, no French composer of the time has since achieved the iconic status of Byrd for England, of Victoria for Spain or of Palestrina for Italy, though Du Caurroy’s reputation within France was nearly comparable, eliciting enthusiastic citations fifty years after his death, not least from Mersenne. The fact that Du Caurroy’s music was not widely published until the very end of his life (two major collections appeared in 1609 and 1610, and Mersenne mentions several Masses that are now lost) must explain, at least in part, why his fame did not spread more widely. But his Preces ecclesiasticae is an impressive collection of motets, to which a modern edition has only recently done justice,²² and in Nicolas Formé he left a talented disciple who succeeded him as sous-maître of the royal chapel and contributed to the development of the grand motet that was to characterise the sacred music of the grand siècle. In the closing years of the sixteenth century, however, Lassus’s reputation eclipsed Du Caurroy’s in France as it did that of so many contemporaries elsewhere. Yet Ronsard’s famous encomium of Lassus as ‘nostre divin Orlande’ reminds us that the composer could reasonably be regarded by native French speakers as one of their own. Not for the first time in this survey, the correlation between linguistic and national boundaries fails to do justice to the complexity of the situation. But if that situation resists convenient packaging, the fluidity of musical exchange that characterises it is one that Europe would hardly encounter again before the twentieth century.

Music under Louis XIII

When the eight-year-old Louis succeeded to the French throne after the assassination of his father Henri IV in 1610, the outward organisation of the musical establishment at court and the roles it played did not change, nor would they for the remainder of the century. As Louis XIII tightened his grip on power, however (he assumed personal rule in 1617, after the regency of his mother, Marie de Médicis), music at court became as much directed to political ends as to entertainment and worship. Although the most obvious examples of a political role for music were the frequent performances of ballets de cour (court ballets), which featured thinly disguised allegories of Louis as victorious over adversity, most famously in the Ballet de la délivrance de Renaud in 1617, in other ways too music served, and was subject to, the growth of Louis’s absolutist rule. Only forty years earlier, Charles IX’s Académie de Poésie et de Musique had made explicit the Platonic conception of the harmony inherent in music reflecting and reinforcing the harmony of a well-governed state. Under Louis too, all genres of music, from liturgical and devotional to court entertainment and music for entrées (ceremonial entrances into towns and cities), were engaged to serve the political needs of the king.³

As part of Louis’s controlling influence, musical activity became centralised at court. This centralisation extended to music publishing, with the king continuing to grant a monopoly (known as a privilège) to members of the Ballard family, during most of this period Pierre. From his appointment in 1607 until his death in 1639, Pierre Ballard’s musical tastes and commercial interests dominated music publishing in Paris and indeed France more widely, with only the occasional threat to his hegemony emerging from figures such as the composer Nicolas Métru (c. 1610–c. 1663) in 1635. After that threat, in 1637 Ballard was granted an even more exclusive monopoly in a decree from Louis XIII which also extravagantly praised the quality of his work, but on Ballard’s death the king nevertheless complicated matters by granting a privilège to Jacques Senlecque for the printing of plainchant, as well as to Pierre’s son and successor, Robert. The Ballards were eager to publish popular and fashionable repertoires (such as the books of airs de cour by the court composers Pierre Guédron, after 1564–c. 1620, and Antoine Boësset, 1586–1643), but less inclined towards sacred or instrumental ensemble music, though the firm was responsible for the publication of Jehan Titelouze’s Hymnes de l’église pour toucher sur l’orgue (1623), the only printed keyboard music to survive from the entire era. In the context of musical activity already centralised at court (a hallmark of absolutist rule, continuing with the reign of Louis XIV), Ballard’s selective choices and commercial impulses, together with the favourable survival of manuscripts from royal circles, preserve a historical picture of musical activity almost completely dominated by the royal household.

The musicians of the royal household were distributed among a number of performing ensembles (some musicians being members of more than one). The musique de la chambre was controlled by a surintendant (probably the most important musician at court) and participated in all aspects of the court’s musical life – sacred, secular and ceremonial. Under the direction of the surintendant (during Louis XIII’s reign Pierre Guédron, Henry Le Bailly, d. 1637, Paul Auget, c. 1592–1660, and Boësset), a small vocal ensemble (one elite singer to a part, with three boys taking the top line) together with a few instruments (lute, harpsichord, flute and viols) provided both secular and devotional entertainment for the court, while the Violons du Roi, considerably enlarged in the early years of Louis XIII’s reign with players from the Paris violin guilds, provided music for both social dancing and ballets de cour. While the musicians of the grande écurie (literally ‘large stable’), which consisted of trumpets, oboes and drums, provided ceremonial music for processions and large-scale events such as the entrées, the Chapelle Royale (sixteen men singing the lower parts and eight boys singing the top line, all under the direction of a sous-maître) performed music for the daily liturgy at court, and combined with the singers of the musique de la chambre on special occasions.

Secular music

During the reign of Louis XIII, vocal music was more highly valued than abstract instrumental music. Accordingly, instrumental music, though of course widely performed, remained firmly rooted in dance, with the lute and later the harpsichord the most popular solo instruments. (The Ballard house published numerous collections of lute music during this period.) Ensemble music for the chamber remained particularly conservative: only a few works such as the polyphonic fantasias of Métru survive, although the fantasias of Le Jeune and Du Caurroy were probably also still being performed. Thus it was to the air de cour that the great composers of the day (those generally associated with the musique de la chambre) turned their attention. Based on models from the late sixteenth century (most notably Le Roy’s 1571 collection Livre d’airs de cour, which set poetry by Ronsard and others), the air de cour set strophic ‘courtly’ poetry to a simple and singable melody (the air). Like the sixteenth-century models, the air under Louis XIII remained essentially a polyphonic genre, with versions for solo voice and lute intabulation appearing only after the polyphonic original (generally four or five voices with or without lute accompaniment).

The most important composer of the early years of Louis’s reign, Guédron, published five volumes of airs for four and five voices (Ballard, 1602–20).⁹ Guédron’s earliest airs (setting poetry by contemporary poets such as Du Perron, Malherbe and Durand) remained influenced by musique mesurée: while their rhythmic motion was often restricted to homophonic crotchets and minims, their melodies eschewed all melisma and virtuosity in an effort to declaim the poetry clearly and correctly. By the time of Guédron’s later collections, however, the influence of musique mesurée had waned. Instead, a sensitive and supple approach was taken to text setting, and a complex patchwork of scoring was used to highlight the text: one line of text for treble and bass, the next for lower parts only, the next for upper two only and so on. Later volumes also introduced a particularly declamatory style, the récit, in which the line between theatrical declamation and singing was blurred. Sometimes unaccompanied, these works were generally composed for ballets de cour before being made available to a wider audience in the published volume (see Example 4.1).

Example 4.1 Authors’ transcription of a Guédron récit from the Ballet de la délivrance de Renaud

The better-known and more widely distributed versions of Guédron’s airs de cour appeared in a parallel series of publications from the Ballard house, the Airs de différents autheurs mis en tablature de luth (16 vols, Ballard, 1608–43: Guédron’s works appear in vols III–VI, 1611–15), a series in which (like the 1571 publication) the melodic voice was reproduced, accompanied by an intabulation for lute (at this time by Gabriel Bataille) of the other voices. In an era in which the song for solo voice and continuo (or monody) was becoming prevalent in Italy, these more ‘modern’ versions found a receptive audience among the French elite; also more practical and convenient, they are the arrangements generally heard today.

After Guédron’s death, the most widely renowned composer of airs de cour, and probably the most influential composer of Louis XIII’s reign, was his son-in-law Antoine Boësset. Like Guédron’s, Boësset’s airs were originally composed for four to five voices (9 vols, Ballard, 1617–42), but from 1632 onwards, a basso continuo or basse-continue accompaniment began to be specified for some works. More widely disseminated were the versions for solo voice and lute intabulation, these versions being arranged by Bataille and then Boësset himself (9 vols, Ballard, 1614–43). Boësset’s airs (now setting formulaic texts by minor and largely anonymous poets) no longer exhibited any obvious musique mesurée influence or the exaggerated declamatory style of some Guédron. Instead, he took Guédron’s ‘patchwork’ approach to scoring but developed an easy melodic style (now much more frequently moving in triple time), which remained influential throughout the remainder of the century. The critic Le Cerf de la Viéville (1674–1707) in the early eighteenth century distinguished Antoine from his son Jean-Baptiste thus: ‘The Boësset you knew was the younger, a very mediocre musician. Everything good written under this name is by his father, whom we call the “old” Boësset, and whom we have always talked about. It was the father Lully esteemed, a man whose memory will be immortal because of his famous air Si c’est un crime de l’aimer, etc.’¹⁰ This simple ‘classical’ style was subject to a practice of elaborate ornamentation and diminution, as documented by the principal music theorist of the period (and one of its foremost mathematicians), Marin Mersenne.¹¹ Although the French style avoided technical display, the diminutions on Boësset’s air N’esperez plus mes yeux (by Boësset himself and Le Bailly, his colleague at court) represent the height of veiled virtuosity, at the same time retaining the French interest in correct declamation.

Music under Louis XIV

Under Louis XIV, music and music patronage, building on the model of Louis XIII, set a standard for magnificence that was emulated throughout Europe. On the death of Louis XIII in 1643, France entered into the regency of the queen mother, Anne of Austria, who ruled with the aid of her premier ministre, the Italian Cardinal Mazarin. As a young man, Louis XIV showed little interest in the government of the kingdom, devoting himself instead to his education in the courtly arts. Like his father, he became quite proficient as a dancer and instrumentalist, but unlike Louis XIII, who excelled on the lute, Louis XIV chose the guitar – formerly associated with the lower classes – as his primary instrument, which contributed to a new acceptance for that instrument among the aristocracy. With the death of the cardinal in 1661, Louis unexpectedly chose to reign alone rather than appointing another premier ministre. From that date forward he took an active interest in the government of the kingdom and in the creation of a body of music that would reflect his glory as monarch and his patronage of the artistic production of Europe’s pre-eminent court.¹²

Music under Louis XIV may be divided into periods of emphasis according to the king’s shifting musical interests. During the 1650s and 1660s, Louis himself danced in the court ballet, to which he committed an enormous amount of time, energy and financial resources. In the 1670s and 1680s, after his retirement as a dancer, emphasis shifted to the creation of a uniquely French version of opera called the tragédie en musique or tragédie lyrique. In his late years, under the influence of his devout second wife, Françoise de Maintenon, the king’s increasing religious devotion entailed a further shift away from the theatre and towards sacred music.

Until the death of Lully in 1687, musical taste in Paris and the rest of France was influenced by that of the king and the court. Chamber music was developed in the salon in imitation of the elegance and refinement of a courtly style. Ceremonial music, which continued at court and in the king’s public entrances and other royal celebrations, also left its stamp on the adulatory prologues and heroic plots of French opera. In the last two decades of the century, the centre of music production began to shift away from Versailles to the urban arena and commercial market. From that time onwards, musical taste tended more to be imported from Paris, rather than set by the court, in a process that would only intensify in later years. The development of the opéra-ballet and the enthusiastic importation of the Italian style around the turn of the century defined a clear demarcation between the conservative taste of the king and a developing public taste for a more modern style.

Ideology, aesthetics, society

In the seventeenth century a number of royal academies were formed with the aim of centralising and controlling the arts. The Académie Royale de Musique was founded in 1669, following the models of the Académie Française (founded 1634), the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (1648) and the Académie Royale de Danse (1661). Lully is well known as the director of the Opéra (as the Académie Royale de Musique was informally known), for which, with the king’s support, he wrested the monopoly or privilège from Pierre Perrin in 1672. With his librettist Philippe Quinault, Lully produced a series of tragédies en musique that, both through the overt praise contained in their prologues and through the glorious heroism of their plots, served as a keystone of monarchical representation during the 1660s and 1670s, when Louis XIV was at the height of his power.

Lully and a number of his fellow artists, while contributing to an ideology and aesthetic of sovereign power, also belonged to a loosely knit community of French libertines, a group of individuals who combined in varying degrees transgressive sexual behaviour with political free thought. In the last years of his life (1685–7), Lully fell into disgrace with the king, at least in part because of his libertine behaviour. During these years he was patronised by the duc de Vendôme and his brother Philippe, leaders of a community lying outside police jurisdiction, within and around an old castle known as the Temple.²³Lully’s final stage works, Acis et Galathée (1687) and Achilles et Polixène (1687, completed by Pascal Collasse), were settings of librettos by Jean de Campistron, a playwright who was also part of this community. These works, along with two operas by Lully’s sons, Jean and Jean-Louis, may be read as a stringent critique of Louis XIV in the late years of his reign. Treating themes of tyranny, victimisation of the artist and the sacrifice of the arts to an overweening militarism, they use an imagery of the abandoned theatre and deprived audiences as metaphors for a crisis in the arts in the last decades of the century. Similarly, the Muses appear in Lully’s last, uncompleted opera, as well as in several operas of his successors, as the voice of Louis’s artists, complaining that the ‘greatest hero’ has forgotten their games and pleasures. A similar critique, cast in a more utopian tone of optimism, characterises the new genre of the opéra-ballet developed by Campra and his librettists Antoine Houdar de La Motte and Antoine Danchet at the turn of the century. Campra’s opéra-ballet Les Muses (1703) may be read as a satire on a court ballet of Louis XIV, Le ballet des Muses (1666). It also represents a tribute to the genres of comedy and satire itself over the outworn gestures of monarchical praise. Likewise, Les fêtes vénitiennes presents the arts of a public, libertine Paris under the transparent mask of Venetian carnival. The music of these opéras-ballets, like their dances, light-hearted scenarios and Italianate idiom, exemplifies the galanterie, hedonistic spirit and anti-authoritarianism that audiences craved during the dismal late years of the Sun King.²⁴

Lully, his sons and Campra all had connections with Louis, the Dauphin of France (‘le Grand Dauphin’), who patronised and protected Lully during the period of his disgrace. During these years a cabal arose around the dauphin, later known as the ‘cabal de Vendôme’ because of the leadership of that libertine duke. The Grand Dauphin, who attended the Paris Opéra on a regular basis (to the extent that it became a kind of counter-court), was favoured by libertines and artists because of his hedonism and love of the arts, particularly opera. The French fascination with italianisme was not shared by the king. Recent scholarship has shown, however, that an Italianate repertoire was performed at court in the chambers of the Grand Dauphin.²⁵

It can be argued that despite its importance for French art and identity, a seventeenth-century aesthetic of sovereign power, reflected in a literary classicism paralleling the apex of the reign of Louis XIV, merely obscured rather than effaced a more long-standing aesthetic of galanterie equated with an aristocratic taste. It is true that ceremonial music, associated with conquest and glory through large choruses, heavy instrumentation, trumpet fanfares, drumrolls and other military motifs, branded the European imagination with the grandeur of Louis XIII and Louis XIV. At the same time, another form of power could be discerned in the king’s ability to make of the court a ‘society of pleasures’ dependent on his patronage. In the late seventeenth century, the high nobility (les grands seigneurs), largely divested of their former feudal powers, were constrained to live at court and to fashion a new identity from the pleasures it afforded. The king traditionally partook of these diversions, but as Louis XIV aged he withdrew from the social life of the court for a variety of reasons, including illness, a turn to religious devotion, military losses, a worsening economy and continuing tensions with his nobility. If the king was associated in his late years with grandeur, his nobility was associated with the quality of galanterie, a term evoking games of love, satiric wit and chic fashionability. This quality was absorbed by the bourgeoisie, who were eager to develop a taste for music, dance and the other arts as the reflection of an enhanced social status accompanying the wealth that had begun to accrue to their class.

The style galant, codified by German theorists in the eighteenth century, had its roots in the delicate ornamentation of the air de cour and the lute and harpsichord repertoire, as well as in the more brilliant coloratura of Italian opera. The qualities of galanterie and a light-hearted joie de vivre pervade the harpsichord music as well as much of the chamber music of Couperin. Like Campra’s opéras-ballets, these works shun the profound, majestic and grand for the topical, satirical and fashionable. The insouciant spirit of galanterie paralleled more serious philosophies of pleasure. In the early seventeenth century a group known as libertins érudits espoused a doctrine derived from the writings of Epicurus, which had been transmitted by the Roman philosopher Lucretius. The libertine movement tended to go underground in the late seventeenth century, though its tenets, overlapping with Epicureanism, were encoded in various doctrines of love as most particularly embodied in the goddess Venus.²⁶

These ideas challenged the emphasis on reason that had come to France via the rediscovery of Aristotle in late Renaissance Italy, which thrived in the local soil of Cartesian rationalism and political absolutism. Another challenge came from across the Channel, in England, where John Locke and Thomas Hobbes formulated theories of cognition through the senses. In the early eighteenth century, French philosophers began to eke out a place for sensory perception in a field that around mid-century would come to be known as aesthetics. Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, a follower of Descartes, formulated a system in which the senses could function without disrupting reason. The abbé Dubos, who went the furthest in developing an aesthetic dependent on the senses, also developed the concept of ‘the sixth sense’, a direct physical apprehension of beauty circumventing reason altogether. Instead of imitating Descartes’s ‘passions of the soul’, the arts were now seen as setting in motion more delicate sensibilities, with the aim of touching lightly rather than moving forcibly. This appeal to the senses allowed the appreciation of the arts to bypass reason, so that the message of the text was now overshadowed by the direct apprehension of musical sound. This aesthetic, then, opened the way for a full appreciation of instrumental music. Finally, Dubos’s connection of this sixth sense with good taste, bon goût, illustrates the change that had come about since the height of seventeenth-century classicism, which had equated good taste with reason and the rules. Dubos in effect allowed the substitution of a relative taste, in which an individual could manifest preferences according to personal sensitivities. All these philosophies, in supporting a relative taste at the expense of a universal standard, undermined the authority of the academies, and indirectly the power of the king, to set the standards by which art should be created and judged.²⁷

Introduction

In Louis XIV’s twilight years, illness, lack of enthusiasm, increased religious conservatism and shrinking coffers all contributed to the declining influence of musical establishments at Versailles. The ultra-nationalistic music that had been characteristic of Louis XIV’s reign lost its potency, shifting the locus for trend-setting away from Versailles. Power and influence over musical forms and tastes became increasingly decentralised as the eighteenth century wore on. Residing in Paris (rather than at Versailles) while governing as regent during the period of Louis XV’s minority, Philippe, duc d’Orléans (1674–1723), nephew of Louis XIV, cultivated an interest in the fashionable Italian music that would become an all-out public obsession, inspiring a generation of French composers to experiment with an international style that fused Gallic lyricism with the rhythmic propulsion and harmonic drive of Italian idioms. The passionate, polemical debates over the merits of French and Italian style that played out in the public sphere became de facto political arguments, all the while fuelling demand for the new, audacious music. Meanwhile, members of the lesser nobility established themselves as patrons of the arts such that private concerts at invitation-only salons and public concerts (beginning with the advent of the Concert Spirituel in 1725) took the lead in introducing performers and composers from Italy and Germany to increasingly diverse audiences. A growing bourgeoisie also stoked demand for music that would be enjoyed and performed by amateurs within the home: vocal chamber music, instrumental duos and works for solo keyboard.

This chapter traces changing tastes and the development of instrumental forms such as the symphony and string quartet in eighteenth-century France. From the Chapelle Royale and petits appartements at Versailles to Paris’s exclusive salons, and from the concert stage of the Concert Spirituel to the intimate confines of the middle-class drawing room, we will witness the profound influence of foreign musical styles on native composers. We will also note the myriad effects of broader public access to the arts: new platforms (like public concerts and journals that chronicled fashion, art and music) fostered appreciation for technical accomplishment that led to the rise of the virtuoso, elevated the status of the professional musician and contributed to the rapid expansion of the music publishing industry. While the debates between the French and Italian styles were vociferously played out in the public spheres of print and performance, music intended for private, personal entertainment happily integrated the new, foreign-influenced music with quintessentially French idioms of the ancien régime: we observe the updating of nostalgic, century-old songs (brunettes and vaudevilles) with contemporary harmonisations and Italianate walking bass lines, as well as the publication of modern, Italianate concertos and sonatas for refined versions of traditional folk instruments such as the hurdy-gurdy and musette (a bellows-blown bagpipe).

Music at Versailles

The Regency (1715–23) was a quiet period for music at Versailles. While Philippe, duc d’Orléans, presided over the government from his private residence at the Palais Royal in Paris, the young Louis XV was educated in Vincennes and at the Tuileries palace. Philippe d’Orléans was an avid amateur who studied music and composition with some of France’s leading Italian-trained musicians, including Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643–1704), Nicolas Bernier (1665–1734) and Charles-Hubert Gervais (1671–1744), even composing his own operas under their tutelage.¹

Louis XV assumed control of the government upon reaching maturity in 1723, and his long reign (1715–74) ushered in a new era for music in France, even if music at the court remained conservative: rather than expanding, court music and entertainments had been contracting for some time. That said, Louis XV, Queen Marie Leszczinska and her daughters were all accomplished musical amateurs. The queen played several instruments, including the vielle à roue (hurdy-gurdy), and hosted concerts several times a week in the Salon de la Paix at Versailles.² From 1751 her musical evenings were held in the Salon des Nobles in her own apartments. Repertoire and musicians for these private concerts were arranged by the surintendants de la musique de la chambre, including André Cardinal Destouches (1672–1749), Colin de Blamont (1690–1760), François Rebel (1701–75) and François Francoeur (1698–1787). Many publications were dedicated to Leszczinska’s daughters, including the first book of Pièces de clavecin (1746) by Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer (c. 1705–55) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Sonates pour le clavecin qui peuvent se jouer avec l’accompagnement de violon, K. 8 and 9 (1764).³ In addition to the salon concerts she had hosted since the early 1740s, the marquise de Pompadour (Louix XV’s official mistress from 1745) created the ‘Théâtre des Petits Appartements’ or ‘Théâtre des Petits Cabinets’, which once again allowed for the presentation of theatre pieces, operas and ballets at Versailles from 1747. The marchioness herself frequently took part in these entertainments.⁴

However, religious music comprised the bulk of daily musical activity at Versailles. Despite the prevalence of republican philosophies during the reign of Louis XV, France was still a conservative and devoutly Christian country. Daily life was rooted in Christian traditions and rites from birth until death. The sounds of church bells, the celebration of weddings, funerals and baptisms, processions, the feast days of local patron saints and holy days permeated the fabric of daily life for peasants, lower classes, bourgeoisie and aristocracy alike. The conservative religious fervour that had dominated the court under the influence of Madame de Maintenon (Louis XIV’s second wife) continued under Louis XV.⁵

As it had since the time of Louis XIV, the Chapelle de la Musique Royale played a major role in the life of the court. In addition to Masses on Sundays, solemn Masses on high feast days, official ceremonies and Vespers services, daily Masses were celebrated for both the king and the queen. The highlight of the service was the performance of a grand motet. In addition, a petit motet for one or two voices might be performed during the elevation of the Host. On Easter, Pentecost, All Saints, Christmas, Pentecost, the Feast of the Circumcision, the Feast of the Purification, Palm Sunday and Holy Thursday and Saturday, High Masses (through-composed with choir and instruments) were also sung for the king on Sundays and ordinary feast days. The Mass itself was generally performed in fauxbourdon (plainchant accompanied by instruments), though the tradition and performance of the contrapuntal, polyphonic Mass persisted.⁶ Rather than being an anachronistic or stylistic anomaly, the polyphonic Mass continued to be appreciated and cultivated, and this attests to its perceived solemnity. Henri Madin, a sous-maître at the Chapelle Royale from 1738, ultimately failed in his attempt to reintroduce the ancient practice of polyphonic improvisation over a plainchant tenor in the late 1730s (he published his Traité de chant sur le livre in 1742) as a tool for performing the Mass.⁷

For all the seeming activity of daily Mass and private concerts, court musicians’ duties were relatively light. Although Louis XV initially maintained the three principal arms of the traditional court musical establishment (chapelle, chambre and écurie), the livelihood of the king’s musicians began to resemble that of freelancers: musicians increasingly compiled their yearly income from multiple streams (whether from various part- or full-time appointments held at court, or playing for the Opéra and other Paris theatres). In 1761 major organisational reform swept the court’s musical institutions: Louix XV capped the music budget at 320,000 livres and began to buy back and limit the number of offices available. The chapelle and chambre were merged, resulting in a reduced number of musicians to serve in both sacred and secular settings. The Vingt-Quatre Violons, the group which had comprised the core of the king’s musical establishment for so long, was eliminated.⁸

Louis XVI (who succeeded his grandfather as king in 1774) did not show the same interest in music as his predecessors, but his young bride Marie-Antoinette sang, played the harpsichord and harp and championed a number of foreign musicians, including Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–87).⁹Marie-Antoinette hosted extravagant balls during the carnival season and presented spectacles in her own specially designed theatre in the Petit Trianon from 1780, whose repertoire included operas by Gluck (Iphigénie en Tauride), Niccolò Piccinni (1728–1800, Le dormeur éveillé), Antonio Sacchini (1730–86, Dardanus), André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry (1741–1813, Zémire et Azor) and Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny (1729–1817, Le roi et le fermier) that not only reflected the queen’s tastes but mirrored those of Paris.¹⁰ In 1782, however, Versailles’s musical establishment was cut back still further. Limited to forty-two members, the court orchestra was now eclipsed in size and prestige by various concert associations in Paris.¹¹ As a result, the musical establishment at Versailles was reduced to importing performers who had already established their reputations at the Opéra, the Concert Spirituel and the inner circles of Paris salons to fill its ranks, including the violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer, the oboist Gaetano Besozzi and the bassoonist Étienne Ozi.¹²

The public concert: the Concert Spirituel

During Louis XIV’s reign, music and musicians from the French court had been a valuable international commodity, but as the eighteenth century progressed, the court increasingly found itself reacting to Parisian fashions rather than creating them. Publicly supported concerts in Paris and increased private patronage were central to cultivating tastes for international music and development of instrumental genres such as the concerto and symphony.

Following the success of private concerts at the home of the financierAntoine Crozat, in 1724 he and the marquise de Prie initiated a subscription-only concert association that promoted Italian music: ‘gli Academici paganti’, or the Concert Italien.¹³ Convents and monasteries with ties to aristocratic families had also offered resplendent concerts of sacred music on high feast days at least since the turn of the seventeenth century. These events drew large crowds that – with the help of donations – supported the work of the church.¹⁴ An enterprising individual, Anne-Danican Philidor, sought to take advantage of the opportunity to present performances when other major venues were closed. To this end he applied for a royal privilège to establish the Concert Spirituel in 1725. After the Opéra, it would become Paris’s most important presenting organisation until its suspension in 1790.

The Concert Spirituel’s concerts filled a clearly defined niche. As spoken theatre and opera were forbidden during Lent and the Easter season and at Pentecost, Christmas and other religious feast days, the Concert Spirituel primarily presented appropriate sacred music in twenty to thirty concerts per year. For example, concert-goers would hear O filii et filiae by Michel-Richard de Lalande (1657–1726) at Easter, Christmas concerts frequently included the motet Fugit nox by Joseph Bodin de Boismortier (1689–1755, now lost) interleaved with popular noëls, and Corpus Christi was observed with settings of Pange lingua or Sacris solemniis by Lalande.¹⁵ In effect, the Concert Spirituel deferred to the programming and performance schedule of the Académie Royale de Musique (Opéra) by restricting its repertoire to sacred Latin motets presented as concert pieces (divorced from any para-liturgical context) and instrumental music.

While programmes at the Concert Spirituel privileged diversity and variety of musical genres, they nonetheless adhered to a fairly standard format. They were usually bookended by grands motets (traditionally by maîtres from the Chapelle Royale de la Musique) interspersed with a variety of instrumental solos, chamber music and Italianate concertos featuring both native and foreign virtuosos. At different times in the history of the Concert Spirituel, these would be replaced or augmented by short vocal airs and airs italiennes.¹⁶

Because of its royal privilège and the strong associations of its leadership with the court establishment, the Concert Spirituel effectively functioned as a Parisian satellite of the Chapelle Royale.¹⁷ Commonalities between the two institutions extended to repertoire, such that motets by Lalande dominated programmes not only in Versailles but also in Paris for decades following his death in 1726. Only the motets of Joseph Cassanea de Mondonville (1711–72), of which nine survive, achieved similar popularity to Lalande’s following their introduction in the late 1730s; motets by Antoine Dauvergne (1713–97) and François Giroust (1737–99) entered the repertoire in the 1760s and 1770s. A remarkable conservatism governed the sacred repertoire of the Chapelle Royale and Concert Spirituel. This canonical approach, coupled with first-rank composers’ overwhelming interest in and commitment to instrumental or stage works, ensured that motets from Louis XIV’s twilight years by Bernier, Charpentier and Jean Gilles also lived on in the repertoire into the 1770s.

Trends in the grand motet

The endurance of Lalande’s sacred oeuvre was not simply the product of conservatism. Dubbed the ‘Latin Lully’ by Colin de Blamont, Lalande composed music that is rich and varied, displaying both noble and graceful sentiments, keenly affective text-setting and expressive harmony.¹⁸ Interestingly, Lalande’s dedication to repeatedly revising compositions also makes it possible to trace the influence of the goûts réunis in his work and on the grand motet more generally. The late seventeenth-century motet’s aesthetic of homophonic choruses of voices and instruments, short ritornellos and simple yet graceful récits accompanied by five-part strings gave way in the 1720s to elaborate ‘concert arias’ with obbligato instruments, polyphonic or fugal choruses and greater independence between voices and instruments. The chorus ‘Et ipse redimet Israel’ from Lalande’s De profundis is an excellent example of this development.¹⁹

Italian influence and trends from the Opéra were also felt in sacred genres. Grands motets from the 1730s increasingly exchanged récits for da capo airs, and featured lavish instrumental forces borrowed from the opera pit, including oboes, trumpets and drums.²⁰André Campra (1660–1744) went further by incorporating pictorial, dramatic elements directly from opera, such as the storm-scene figuration of ‘Velociter currit sermo eius’ from Lauda Jerusalem and the sommeil (‘Dormi erunt’) and subsequent tremblement de terre (‘Terra tremuit’) of his Notus in Judea Deus. Building on the works of Campra and Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764), Mondonville’s Dominus regnavit uses similar operatic devices to depict the potent imagery of Psalm 92: the chorus ‘Elevaverunt flumina vocem suam’ (‘The floods have lifted up, O Lord’) features swirling semiquaver runs for both orchestra and chorus. In addition to elaborate, virtuosic symphonies, popular elements found their way into the grand motet. Joseph Bodin de Boismortier’s Fugit nox (1741), for instance, adapted the melodies of well-known noëls to the sacred text. Indeed, the grand motet fell prey to such competing influences and inspirations as to give life to the Laudate Dominum of Michel Corrette (1707–95), a ‘Motet à grand choeur arrangé dans le Concerto du Printemps de Vivaldi’ (1766) for full orchestra with woodwinds. Such extravagance gave credence to criticism that long, concerted para-liturgical music served only to distract and divert rather than enrich and deepen the spiritual value of the music.

The rise of the virtuoso

From the outset the public concert became a platform for virtuoso – especially instrumental – display. Several elements contributed to the rise of the virtuoso in this arena. First, the public concert brought together a large, highly educated and passionate audience capable of judging and making comparisons between artists. The rise of the virtuoso in France also corresponded to the proliferation of periodicals and journals dedicated to the arts: Le Mercure de France, L’avant-coureur, Le journal des sciences et des beaux-arts and Les affiches de Province contained reports and reviews of performers and performances that served to publicise, create and build the reputations (and mythologies) of native and foreign virtuosos.²¹ In addition to popularising Italian concertos and sonatas by Vivaldi and Tartini, native virtuosos developed their own distinctive compositional styles and influential schools of playing.

Jean-Marie Leclair (1697–1764) is considered the founder of the French school of violin playing. Leclair benefited from the private patronage of Joseph Bonnier, studied with the Italian violinist Giovanni Battista Somis in Turin and built a formidable reputation through regular appearances at the Concert Spirituel. Also taught by Somis, Jean-Pierre Guignon (1702–74) made his Paris debut at the Concert Spirituel in 1725 and simultaneously held positions in the retinue of the prince de Carignan and as ordinaire de la musique du roy. The violinist Louis-Gabriel Guillemain (1705–70) studied with Somis following early professional success in Lyons and Dijon. He was appointed musicien ordinaire to Louis XV and served in the private orchestra of the marquise de Pompadour. Pierre Gavignès earned the epithet ‘the French Tartini’ and was Leclair’s successor as chief proponent of the French violin school.²² He made his debut at the Concert Spirituel at the age of thirteen, and performed his own concertos and symphonies there in the 1760s and 1770s. He was appointed professor of violin at the Paris Conservatoire from its establishment in 1795. Violinists such as Leclair and Gavignès, and the flautists Michel Blavet (1700–68), Pierre-Gabriel Buffardin (1690–1768) and Antoine Mahaut (c. 1720–1785), all benefited from an elevated status on account of their association with the Concert Spirituel.

Furthermore, new instruments and their players met with enthusiastic receptions at the Concert Spirituel. The cello was elevated from accompanist to first-rank soloist in the hands of Jean-Baptiste-Aimé Janson (1742–1808) and the brothers Jean-Louis and Jean-Pierre Duport. The Concert Spirituel also witnessed the first appearance of the pedal harp (a German invention), concerto soloists on the bassoon, oboe, clarinet (also a German import), trumpet and horn, plus more unusual fare for instruments such as the mandolin, musette and pardessus de viole.

Private patronage

While public concerts made large-scale concerted music available to members of Paris’s rising middle class, the real cutting edge of art, philosophy and fashion was cultivated within Paris’s luxurious private homes. Just as the title character of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme (Act II, scene 1) was advised by his music master to host a concert ‘every Wednesday or every Thursday’ in order to be considered a person of quality, so did a great number of the aristocracy and haute-bourgeoisie host regular salons in their own homes. In fact, music featured in virtually all types of salon gatherings, even those for which music was not a primary focus. Salons welcomed a wealth of interesting and influential people, for whom entry was by invitation only.²³ The diplomat and critic Friedrich-Melchior Grimm observed that the home of the fermier-général (tax farmer-general) Alexandre le Riche de La Pouplinière was ‘a meeting-place for all classes: courtiers, men of the world, literary folk, artists, foreigners, actors, actresses, filles de joie, all were assembled there. The house was known as the menagerie and the host as the sultan.’²⁴ It was at La Pouplinière’s, for instance, that Rameau first met many of his future librettists, and the house became ‘la citadelle du Ramisme’.²⁵

Private concerts promulgated changes in taste, which through the first half of the eighteenth century often meant the introduction and appreciation of Italian music. Reflecting this penchant, the household musicians of the regent Philippe d’Orléans included the castrato Pasqualino Tiepolo and the violinists Michele Mascitti and Giovanni Antonio Guido.²⁶Antoine Crozat, the wealthy treasurer of the États du Languedoc, also held twice-weekly concerts at his home from 1715 to 1725.²⁷Crozat’s Italophilic presentations included a troupe from London: the famous sopranos Francesca Cuzzoni and Margherita Durastanti, who performed operatic selections of Handel and Bononcini.²⁸ The prince de Carignan similarly maintained a private orchestra that included notable Italian instrumentalists and some of the finest French virtuosos, who cultivated the new, Italian-French mixed style known as les goûts réunis.²⁹ Following Carignan’s death in 1741, many of his personal instrumentalists were absorbed into La Pouplinière’s orchestra.

Patrons from the aristocracy and bourgeoisie provided refuge – metaphorical and physical – for foreign musicians in France. Patrons such as Philippe d’Orléans, Crozat, La Pouplinière and the baron de Bagge not only granted foreign composers and performers exposure to a tight-knit circle of knowledgeable and influential amateurs, but also offered non-native musicians lodging for the duration of their stay. La Pouplinière sponsored Johann Stamitz (1717–57) to reside at Passy and direct his personal orchestra in 1754, at which time he also conducted his works at the Concert Spirituel and Concert Italien. The baron de Bagge similarly sponsored Luigi Boccherini (1743–1805) and Filippo Manfredi in 1767, during which time Boccherini published his Sonatas for keyboard with violin accompaniment, Op. 5, which were dedicated to another salonnière, Anne-Louise Boyvin d’Hardancourt Brillon de Jouy.³⁰

Finally, the taste-makers of the salon had the opportunity to preview (and judge) new instrumental works and operas. Excerpts from Rameau’s ground-breaking Hippolyte et Aricie were first heard at La Pouplinière’s home, Passy, in 1731,³¹ and André Grétry acknowledged that the response of members of the elite salons would be essential to his success in Paris.³² Grétry looked on with fretful anticipation as an early version of his Les mariages samnites (1776) was presented before the entire court at the home of the prince de Conti.³³

As several of Mozart’s letters from 1777–8 attest, eighteenth-century Paris was potentially an excellent place to earn a living as a professional musician. Rather than work as duty-bound servants at a single court, professional musicians could support themselves as free agents on Paris’s large and diverse arts scene. Citing the success of his friend Johann Baptist Wendling (the Mannheim flautist), Mozart waxed poetic about the potential for artistic independence that came with varied income streams: one could perform or compose in virtually any genre (including opera seria, opéra comique and oratorio), present symphonies for one of the public concert associations, give private lessons and publish chamber music by subscription.³⁴

Paris’s finest musicians also found professional success performing in the private orchestras of the aristocracy and haute-bourgeoisie. Interest in maintaining private orchestras blossomed in the 1750s and 1760s in particular. Starting around 1731, La Pouplinière had maintained his small house orchestra, which performed an international repertoire of orchestral works that included pairs of winds and brass. The prince de Conti established his own highly regarded private orchestra in 1757; it included Pierre Vachon (1738–1803) as concertmaster, the Italian virtuoso oboist Filippo Prover, the cellist Jean-Pierre Duport, German horn and clarinet players, and the keyboard player Johann Schobert (c. 1735–67), plus François-Joseph Gossec (1734–1829), who joined Conti’s establishment following his stint at La Pouplinière’s.³⁵

From the 1750s, La Pouplinière’s home Passy was a haven for German composers and instrumentalists cultivating a taste for the nascent symphonic genre. In fact, it was La Pouplinière who engaged horn and clarinet players from Germany to make their first appearances in France in the late 1740s. Succeeding Rameau’s long tenure there, Stamitz led the orchestra at Passy for one year in 1754; he was followed by the twenty-one-year-old Gossec.³⁶ Despite their relatively small size – generally fourteen to fifteen players – private orchestras and their sponsors played an important role in the development and dissemination of the symphony in France.³⁷

While some of the larger salons – like La Pouplinière’s and Crozat’s – focused on symphonic or operatic repertoire, others cultivated the art of accompanied song and new genres in chamber music. In these more intimate salon settings, professionals played beside accomplished amateurs. The many chamber music works dedicated to the baron de Bagge (including quartets by Gossec, Boccherini and Capron) testify to his dedication to the music and musicians he patronised.

Salons like Bagge’s facilitated transformations in instrumental chamber music during the second half of the eighteenth century. These important changes took the form of expanding textures (from Baroque trio texture to quartets or larger ensembles), newly obligatory instrumentation, the standardisation of specific ensemble combinations and the gradual disappearance of a performer-realised figured bass.

Large ensemble music, 1720–1750

As imported forms, concertos and symphonies first found an enthusiastic response in private, Italophilic salons. Subsequently, however, their evolution and development owe a significant debt to the public concert.

Concertos by French composers began to appear in print at the height of the goûts réunis craze in the 1720s and 1730s, and for decades, ‘Spring’ from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was regularly heard alongside sonatas by Corelli and Tartini at the Concert Spirituel.³⁸Michel Corrette composed twenty-five ‘comic’ concertos, which were generally for three treble instruments (with flexible instrumentation that could include violins, flutes, oboes, hurdy-gurdy and musettes) and basso continuo. Like their Vivaldian models, they adopted ritornello form for outer, fast movements, and frequently made use of a unison theme for opening and closing ritornellos. The second movement was usually just a chord progression with decorated suspensions linking the outer movements. Corrette’s Concertos comiques frequently quoted popular tunes from the Foire (fair) theatres and noëls (see, for instance, the concertos entitled ‘L’allure’ and ‘Margoton’ from his Op. 8, and the tunes ‘Les sauvages’ and ‘La Furstemburg’ in his Concerto comique, No. 25).³⁹Boismortier also made significant contributions to this genre with his Opp. 21, 24 and 30 concertos for three treble instruments and his Noels en concerto, Op. 68 (1737).

Through the 1740s, the trio (two generic dessus plus basso continuo) remained the predominant texture for large ensemble music performed at the Concert Spirituel. The performing tradition of playing en simphonie created a kaleidoscope of instrumental colours, but it has also been responsible for some confusion regarding the genesis of the Classical symphony in France. Multi-movement works with designations like pièces de simphonies or concert de simphonies by Jacques Aubert (1689–1753), Boismortier, Corrette, Jean-Joseph Mouret (1682–1738), Dauvergne and Mondonville all utilised trio textures with the addition of figured bass. Transcriptions of harpsichord solos by Mondonville (from his 1734 Pièces de clavecin en sonates avec accompagnement de violon, Op. 3) and Francesco Geminiani (‘arrangées en grand concerto pour orchestre’ or ‘mises en simphonie’) were also regularly performed as ensemble music at the Concert Spirituel.⁴⁰ As late as 1750, even Corelli’s celebrated Op. 5 sonatas could be heard at the Concert Spirituel ‘mise en gd concert par Geminiani’.⁴¹

The 1730s witnessed various experimental works for large ensembles, ranging from the symphonie nouvelle Les élémens (1738) by Jean-Féry Rebel (1666–1747) to Mondonville’s lost Concert à trois choeurs and Concerto de violon avec chant.⁴²Rebel’s Les élémens is the most daring of his seven choreographed simphonies for the dancers of the Paris Opéra. The justifiably famous opening uses stacked dissonance to depict chaos, from which four distinct themes representing air, fire, water and earth emerge.

In contrast to large ensemble works performed en simphonie with only limited instructions regarding orchestration, the virtuoso violinist Leclair’s twelve published concertos (Op. 7, 1737, and Op. 10, 1745) were explicit in their instrumentation, for solo violin accompanied by string orchestra and continuo, and made specialised technical demands upon the player. Leclair’s incorporation of Italian style and techniques drew on his own training and experiences with the celebrated violinists Giovanni Battista Somis (a student of Corelli) in Turin and Pietro Locatelli in London. While his concertos also typified goûts réunis in their adoption of Vivaldi’s models in the outer movements, the lyricism of the slow movements reflected French taste and sensibility.

The symphony and concerto, 1750–1790

Alongside the infiltration of German music and musicians into Paris’s private salons, the 1750s saw the arrival of the nascent Classical symphony by proponents of the Mannheim school on the concert stage. New leadership at the Concert Spirituel from 1748 ushered in a period of financial stability that enabled the organisation’s concert venue and repertoire to expand. Under the direction of the harpsichordist Royer and the violinist Gabriel Capperan, the Tuileries palace underwent major renovations (including the installation of an organ on which the virtuoso Claude Balbastre (1724–99) frequently performed concertos and his own transcriptions of opera overtures) and saw the first French performances of Pergolesi’s Stabat mater and the first foreign symphonies.⁴³

The French Classical symphony of the 1750s combined Classical elements of structure, melody, rhythm and harmonic organisation with thematic development and prolonged sequences.⁴⁴ Whereas early essays in the symphonic genre such as Louis-Gabriel Guillemain’s Premier livre de simphonies dans le goût italien en trio (1740) had been composed in a trio texture, ensemble music of the 1750s was increasingly composed in four parts (such as Antoine Dauvergne’s 1751 Concerts de simphonies, Opp. 3 and 4). Similarly, Gossec’s earliest symphonies (Op. 3, 1756) were published in four parts, with oboe parts interleaved in the viola book. In all likelihood, pairs of horns would also have been added for performances at the Concert Spirituel.⁴⁵ At this stage, most published works still included a figured bass, and a three-movement structure based on Italian models predominated.⁴⁶

Following Royer’s death in 1755, Mondonville upheld his predecessor’s commitment to innovation, introducing symphonies by Wagenseil, Hasse, Beck, Jomelli and Geminiani as well as native composers’ first forays into the genre (Guillemain, Gavignès, Davesne and Gossec). Complete with trumpets, timpani and (after 1760) horns and clarinets from Germany, these expanded grandes simphonies or sinfonie a più strumenti would soon become the standard, even though conservative factions would not allow this progressive symphonic music to become fully established on Concert Spirituel programmes until the 1770s. In the mean time, the orchestra at the Concert des Amateurs (1769–81) quickly gained a reputation for commissions and performances of symphonies. Supported in part by the fermier-général La Haye and the baron d’Ogny as well as by public subscriptions, the Concert des Amateurs was established at the Hôtel de Soubise by Gossec in 1769. During the four years he led the Concert des Amateurs, Gossec conducted many of his own works and was the first to conduct a Haydn symphony in France.

Synthesising foreign elements with inherent French lyricism, the French Classical symphony of the 1770s and the burgeoning symphonie concertante exhibited the influence of Grétry’s comic operas in addition to the powerful, dramatic stage works of Gluck.⁴⁷ French symphonies from this period, which were in three or even two movements (rarely four), were characterised by their ‘brilliant orchestral effect’ and ‘fluid, singing melodies’.⁴⁸Gossec’s innovations lay in his grand instrumental works, which despite their harmonic and thematic simplicity displayed keen, colourful orchestration and refined use of dynamic markings. Works for the new grande orchestre included ample sonorities such as two viola parts, divisi violins, additional winds (including clarinets) and brass (horns, trumpets and drums). Similarly, the three symphonies that Simon Leduc (1742–77) composed for performance at both the Concert Spirituel and the Concert des Amateurs take full advantage of the orchestra’s sonic possibilities, with pairs of flutes and horns, trumpets and drums in the Amsterdam edition of Schmitt, periodically divided second violins and violas and in places an independent part for double bass.⁴⁹

Comparable in style and structure to the Classical symphony, symphonies concertantes comprised another important element in Concert Spirituel programmes from the 1770s. The form flourished in France and particularly in Paris, owing its popularity to contemporary social changes, such as the proliferation of concert societies patronised by bourgeois audiences, as well as to an increased fascination with virtuoso display and enthusiasm for rich orchestral sonorities. Featuring two, three, four or occasionally more solo instruments in dialogue with each other and the orchestra, the symphonie concertante was essentially a Classical concerto for multiple instruments that fused elements of the solo concerto, Baroque concerto grosso, divertimento and symphony. The symphonie concertante’s appeal lay in its light, pleasing and melodious character, and in the flexibility of its instrumentation, which provided a platform for a variety of local performers. Performances frequently included the composer as one of the soloists, as in symphonies concertantes by the violinists Joseph Boulogne, chevalier de Saint-George (1745–99), Simon Leduc and Jean-Baptiste Davaux (1742–1822).⁵⁰

Gossec is generally considered the most important composer of Classical symphonies in France. Following formative studies in his native Wallonia, Antwerp and Brussels, he arrived in Paris at the age of seventeen. With the support of Rameau, he joined the orchestra at La Pouplinière’s and held leadership positions in the private orchestras of both the prince de Condé and the prince de Conti in the 1760s. He served briefly as the general director of the Opéra before assuming leadership of the École Royale de Chant (a predecessor to the Conservatoire de Musique) in 1784.⁵¹ Following his success with the Concert des Amateurs, Gossec was persuaded in 1773 to join the violinists Leduc and Gavignès in leading the Concert Spirituel, where he responded to a mandate to improve the ensemble’s performing standards (which had lagged in recent years), expand the size of the orchestra and overhaul its stale programming. As a result, symphonies by Stamitz, Toeschi, Giuseppe Maria Cambini (1746–1825), Wagenseil, Sterkel, Cannabich and Haydn were regularly brought to Parisian audiences, which had the effect of undermining the achievements of native composers in the symphonic genre in the years prior to the Revolution. Not only did French composers of instrumental music have to grapple with the celebrity and popularity of Haydn,⁵² but they faced a constant struggle in justifying the merits of abstract symphonies and quartets against the prevailing aesthetic criticisms of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Grimm and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, who defined the function and potential of instrumental music in terms of painting and the imitation of nature.

The final decades before the Revolution witnessed increased access to public concerts and the expansion of concert societies. For instance, the Concert des Amateurs, Concert des Associés (1770–?), Concert de l’École Graduite de Dessein (1781–6), Concert des Amis (1772–?), Société du Concert d’Émulation (1781–6) and Concert de la Loge Olympique (1783–9) all flourished. At the same time, private orchestras, which had played an important role in cultivating symphonies and soloists, began to be disbanded because of financial difficulties and the proliferation of orchestras elsewhere, which took away the prestige of maintaining an orchestra.⁵³

Chamber music

The ‘trio’ for four players persisted as a popular texture for chamber music throughout the eighteenth century. Generally, this meant that two treble instruments (perhaps two violins or flutes) were joined by a bowed bass (viola da gamba, basse de violon or cello) and a chordal accompaniment usually on the harpsichord. In the 1720s and 1730s, trio sonatas were frequently expanded to quartets in a variety of instrumental combinations. Telemann’s ‘Paris’ Quartets (flute, violin, viola and continuo, 1738), Guillemain’s Quatuors ou conversations galantes (two flutes, violin and continuo, 1743) and the Quatuors de l’art de la modulation (oboe or flute, two violins and continuo, 1755) by François-André Philidor (1726–95) are all representative of the Rococo quartet in France.

The generalised dessus had long been a cornerstone of French instrumental conventions, whereby a treble part could be played by violin, flute, oboe, pardessus de viole or a variety of other instruments. Furthermore, instrumental doubling had been a standard practice since the mid-seventeenth century. The result had been relatively undifferentiated, ‘idiomatic’ writing for treble instruments, and an approach to large-ensemble orchestration that emphasised combinations of instrumental timbres. By the 1760s, however, obligatory instrumentation and the standardisation of specific ensemble combinations (such as the string quartet with two violins, viola and violoncello) began to take hold. The new specificity of the 1760s excluded the inclusion of wind instruments in pieces that did not call specifically for them; the century-old French instrumental practice of playing en simphonie (that is, doubling instrumental parts) was, in effect, abandoned.

These trends inspired a typically French approach to ensemble writing: the vogue for works concertant et dialogué. Publications of quatuors concertants flooded the Parisian market between 1770 and 1800.⁵⁴Cambini was an essential figure in their development, which would be further cultivated by Vachon, Étienne-Bernard-Joseph Barrière (b. 1748; d. 1816–18), Jean-Baptiste-Sébastien Bréval (1753–1823), Davaux, Jean-Baptiste Janson and Saint-George. A famous mulatto violinist, Saint-George led the Concert des Amateurs from 1773, was orchestra leader for Madame de Montesson’s private concerts and published eighteen string quartets in three collections between 1773 and 1785. Cambini’s Op. 1 quartets were published by Vernier in 1773 and were lauded for their excellent harmony, natural interplay and originality of style.⁵⁵

Quatuors concertants were generally for two violins, viola and cello, though in some cases an oboe or flute could replace the first violin. Marked by a galant, sentimental style and conservative harmonic language, these works reflect the influence of Boccherini and are generally in two or very occasionally three movements. The first movement most often adopts a sonata form with two themes, while the second movement consists of lighter fare: a rondo, minuetto or aria con variazoni. The word concertant referred not to the virtuosity of the music, but to its conversational aspect: all four parts were equally important (contrasting with a traditional Viennese quartet in which the presentation of melodic material is dominated by the first violin).⁵⁶ In a quatuor concertant, each player would have the opportunity to offer and elaborate motifs, contributing to the larger sense of musical dialogue or conversation in much the same way as a salonnière’s guests each made their own witty contributions to an evening’s entertainment. By comparison, the Viennese quartet of Haydn was characterised by a greater variety of forms, intense working-through and elaboration of a single theme by way of expanded development sections, and more wide-ranging modulations.⁵⁷

Vocal music: cantata and cantatille

Just as Corelli’s violin sonatas found a warm reception in Paris’s aristocratic salons, the French cantata (inspired by Italian models) counted Italophilic cognoscenti among its most ardent admirers. Indeed, the cantata’s popularity took hold with a virtual explosion in published compositions around the final years of Louis XIV’s life. The cantata’s heyday coincided with the short-lived Concert Français series (1727–33), an offshoot of the Concert Spirituel. Initiated but not ultimately directed by Anne-Danican Philidor (Mouret took over following his resignation in 1727), the Concert Français presented weekly concerts in the Tuileries on Saturdays and Sundays in the winter (thus competing with other concert series as well as the Opéra and various theatres) and once per week in the summer.⁵⁸ Cantatas and divertissements formed the focal point of the Concert Français’s programmes, which featured the cantatas of Colin de Blamont, Battistin Stuck, Louis-Nicolas Clérambault (1676–1749), Rameau, Mouret, Jean-Baptiste Morin (1677–1745), Louis Le Maire (c. 1693–c. 1750), Louis-Claude Daquin (1694–1772) and others, performed by some of the era’s finest singers (in particular Mademoiselle Antier and Le Maure).⁵⁹ The brief but intense interest in the cantata can be understood as a response to the insular aesthetic cultivated at court and the petrification of the operatic repertoire in the years between Lully’s death and Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie (1733).⁶⁰

A true manifestation of the goûts réunis, the French cantata borrowed from Italian forms such as the da capo aria while adhering to distinctly Gallic aesthetics of lyricism and sensibility, ornamentation and flexibility in recitative.⁶¹ Most cantatas adapted a format of three arias interspersed with recitatives, with or without obbligato instruments (most often a single violin or flute, but occasionally larger or more varied forces). Although many cantatas were obviously intended for the chamber and use just voice and continuo, sometimes with two violins or other obbligato instruments, a significant minority specify orchestral forces for accompaniment.⁶² With their concise texts on attractive subjects, mostly drawn from classical mythology, though occasionally from the Old Testament, cantata texts were a minor yet fashionable poetic form and were regularly published in the Mercure de France from 1711 to the 1740s.⁶³

Cantatas also brought operatic elements into the salon. The cantata’s dramatic symphonies served to illustrate a host of natural or deity-induced disasters ranging from storms to earthquakes and potent magical slumber.⁶⁴ As Michele Cabrini has recently argued, the significance of the instrumental contributions to the cantata should not be underestimated. Rather, the instruments ‘are raised to the status of dramatic character and equal partner to the voice, thus increasing the theatricality of the action’.⁶⁵Le sommeil d’Ulisse (1715) by Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre (1665–1729) serves as a prime example of a cantata that creatively expands on the standard form (with five airs and récits) and includes dramatic elements borrowed from the stage, including a swirling tempest and an extensive, beguiling sommeil. It is important, however, to recognise the differences between cantatas and dramatic works for small forces. Cantatas were not operas ‘in miniature’. They generally depict a single event (rather than the progression of a drama), and the singer narrates the scene rather than embodying a character. In addition, cantatas were never staged; neither did they incorporate the all-important elements of the tragédie lyrique, a chorus and dance.⁶⁶

In the wake of renewed interest in the tragédie en musique in the 1730s, the composition of large-scale, dramatic cantatas decreased dramatically.⁶⁷Composers of vocal chamber music instead cultivated the cantatille, which – as the diminutive of the name implies – was generally shorter than the cantata. Cantatilles usually included only a pair of arias interspersed with one or two recitatives. Although cantatilles were formally small-scale works, surviving scores frequently imply the use of large orchestral forces.⁶⁸ In addition, despite their generally light, charming subjects and predisposition towards triple metre, cantatilles were musically no less complex than the cantatas that had preceded them. The cantatilles of Mouret, for instance, beautifully pair the grace of dance metres with subtle, varied phrase lengths.⁶⁹ At turns intimate and virtuosic, the air ‘Doux rossignol’ from Julie Pinel’s 1737 Le printems exults in conversational interplay between soprano and obbligato flute or violin.

Overshadowed by the opera, and with only limited success in adapting to the new aesthetic requirements of the German-influenced Classical style, cantatas and cantatilles continued to be composed into the 1770s, though they had made little impact since the zenith of their popularity in the 1720s and 1730s. Working in the 1740s and 1750s, Louis-Antoine Lefebvre composed twenty-three cantatilles and one cantata that attempted to integrate the accompanimental textures, melodic contours and phrase structure of the Classical style.⁷⁰ By contrast, the court composer Pierre de La Garde responded to changing tastes by adopting the tuneful, naive style of opéra comique to the cantatille and providing an accompaniment of guitar (which was very much in vogue), violin and harpsichord.⁷¹

Music in the home: vocal music

Songs and other small forms of vocal chamber music were ubiquitous in eighteenth-century France. Paris’s blossoming publishing industry issued numerous new songs each year, and periodicals like the Mercure de France not only kept the new bourgeoisie abreast of developing fashions in literature, art and music, but also frequently published songs and tunes from current operas and announced new publications of ‘sheet music’.⁷² By mid-century, publishers were printing weekly and monthly tabloids of sheet music, designed for domestic music-making and purchased by subscription.⁷³

Eighteenth-century French song drew on the rich rhetorical language of the seventeenth-century air sérieux, but cultivated a lightness and ease that, as a whole, reflected the Epicurean tenets of the Rococo: leisure, pleasure and charm. Popular forms included the brunette, which was a simple, bipartite song that expressed tender sentiments within a limited vocal compass. Alternately known as an air tendre or gavotte tendre (which betrayed its origin as a dance tune), the brunette was quintessentially French in its natural simplicity, refinement and frequent preciosity.⁷⁴ Collections, or recueils d’airs, freely mixed brunettes with Italian ariettes, vaudevilles and drinking songs (airs à boire).⁷⁵ The romance is found in song collections from the 1760s onwards. A lyric narrative poem of Spanish origins, the romance, like the strophic brunette, hewed to an aesthetic of simplicity, naturalness and sentimentality. The form exerted a strong influence on the Opéra-Comique, where it featured in Rousseau’s Devin du village (most famously, ‘Dans ma cabane obscure’) and Mondonville’s Titon et l’Aurore, as well as works by Monsigny and François-André Philidor.⁷⁶

Although the repertoire was limited to charming but simple bipartite airs with light, pastoral subjects, successive collections nonetheless reflect changing tastes through the eighteenth century. Michel Pignolet de Montéclair (1667–1737), for instance, in his Brunètes anciènes et modernes (c. 1725), appended Italianate walking bass lines to airs dating back to the mid-seventeenth century. In his nine collections of airs from the 1730s and 1740s, François Bouvard (c. 1683–1760) expanded the form of the brunette to include introductory simphonies with ornate accompaniment consisting of flute, violin and bass.⁷⁷ The 1760s periodical La feuille chantante, ou Le journal hebdomadaire, by comparison, included all the traditional small vocal forms (chansons, vaudevilles, rondeaux, ariettes, duos, brunettes, etc.) but added harp as an accompaniment option along with violin and harpsichord.⁷⁸ Publications from the 1770s also began to include romances (made popular at the Opéra-Comique) with harp accompaniments, tablature for the increasingly popular guitar or fully realised harpsichord accompaniments.

Airs and brunettes were not just the province of amateur singers, but were also performed by instrumentalists. Following Jacques Hotteterre’s 1721 Airs et brunettes, a steady stream of publications featuring vocal repertoire adapted to instruments appeared.⁷⁹Brunettes were considered extremely useful pedagogical tools and could also be adapted as a vehicle for soloists (as in the virtuoso variations included in Blavet’s three-volume Recueil de pièces, petits airs, brunettes, menuets, etc. avec des doubles et variations, issued in 1744–51).

Parodies – whether spiritual texts added to profane airs or satiric verses set to the tunes of well-known songs – were another important genre in both domestic music-making and larger society. The simple, syllabic vaudeville formed a cornerstone of the early opéra comique because it was well suited to satirical or topical subjects. As Dorothy Packer has observed, ‘the vaudeville’s brevity encouraged a concise musical expression; its pointedness gave it a distinguishing piquancy’.⁸⁰Vaudevilles ranged from drinking songs to biting political satire, from moralistic or didactic airs to love songs, or even to recipes.⁸¹ While many vaudevilles were included in recueils d’airs, they were also transmitted orally: like English ballad tunes, vaudevilles could simply be provided with a timbre (or verbal cue) identifying the famous tune to which the new text should be sung.

Instrumental fashions in the drawing room

From the Regency until the Revolution, solo music increasingly favoured novelty and emphasised virtuoso display. While the fiery sonatas of the violinists Jean-Féry Rebel and Leclair and flautists like Blavet and Mahaut stressed technical accomplishment, the harpsichord suites or concerts of François Couperin (1668–1733), Rameau, Royer, Daquin and Jacques Duphly (1715–89) reflect a prolonged fascination with the character piece. Individual pieces often carried fanciful titles, paid homage to colleagues or patrons, or were transcriptions of stage works. For instance, Rameau arranged excerpts from his Les Indes galantes (1735), Royer included dramatic set pieces from his operas Pyrrhus, Le pouvoir de l’amour and Zaide in his Pièces de clavecin (1746), and Balbastre was famous for arranging opera overtures for performance at the Concert Spirituel.⁸²

The clavecinistes of the 1740s and beyond were also interested in exploring the limits of the instrument’s colouristic possibilities. Contrary to modern expectations, the dynamically endowed forte-piano did not eclipse the harpsichord upon its introduction in Paris in 1761. Rather, harpsichord production in Paris increased through the 1770s and showed no signs of slowing until the 1780s.⁸³ The most famous harpsichord builders were consumed with rebuilding old Flemish and French instruments (particularly those of Ruckers and Couchet) – updating actions, reinforcing soundboard and case and enlarging the compass to a full five octaves – and with installing buff stops, which were ubiquitous by 1750.⁸⁴Balbastre pushed the harpsichord to its technical and colouristic limits and is credited with the invention of the peau de buffle (a rank of soft leather plectra); he used knee pedals for special effects.

Since virtually all pianos were imported prior to the Erard firm’s first serious attempts to manufacture instruments in 1777, it was the English square piano that found a home in French drawing rooms in the 1770s and 1780s (while the Erard firm was experimenting with hammer actions in the 1750s and 1760s, serious manufacturing of square pianos began in 1777; production of grand pianos began in the 1780s).⁸⁵ The piano made its debut at the Concert Spirituel on 8 September 1768 when Mademoiselle Le Chantre performed works by her teacher Romain de Brasseur, but, perhaps because of the popularity of Balbastre’s organ concertos, the piano only rarely made subsequent appearances on the concert stage. The four symphonies concertantes (1777–83) of Jean-François Tapray (b. 1738–9; d. after 1798), which juxtapose harpsichord and piano, mark the last ‘French music in which the harpsichord was indispensable’.⁸⁶

The same fashion for depictions of amorous shepherds and gently warbling nightingales that inspired scenes by Antoine Watteau and François Boucher, and which drove the publication of a seemingly endless stream of sentimental airs and brunettes, also popularised the appropriation of ‘folk’ instruments by the aristocracy. But just as Marie-Antoinette’s Hameau de la Reine (the rustic farm she had built behind the Petit Trianon at Versailles) allowed her to play at peasantry within the luxurious confines of the royal estate, so were the musette and vielle à roue (hurdy-gurdy) suitably ‘civilised’ to appeal to noble amateurs. Rococo iterations of the hurdy-gurdy and musette were highly ornamented; stripped of previously negative associations,⁸⁷ they were championed by virtuosos, including Jacques Hotteterre, Nicolas Chédeville (1705–82) and Jean-Baptiste Dupuits.⁸⁸

Music for musette and hurdy-gurdy spanned a wide variety of genres from chamber concertos to sonatas and duos, character pieces and suites of dance music sporting titles that celebrated their supposedly rustic origins, such as Fêtes rustiques (c. 1732) by Jacques-Christophe Naudot (c. 1690–1762), Boismortier’s Balets de village (1734) and Chédeville’s Amusements champêtres (three volumes, 1729, c. 1731, c. 1733).⁸⁹ Interestingly, the craze for goûts réunis also extended to the peculiarly French fashion for playing the musette and hurdy-gurdy: Chédeville passed off Il pastor fido (a collection of sonatas for musette, 1737) as the work of Vivaldi and likewise reworked concertos from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons as Le printems, ou Les saisons amusantes (1739) for hurdy-gurdy and chamber ensemble.⁹⁰

Conclusion

As the Revolution approached, the effects of Enlightenment philosophy, which privileged the diffusion of culture and celebrated the liberating power of knowledge, extended to the large, public venue of the concert hall and the intimacy of the drawing room. Although the advent of concert societies and explosion of periodicals and published sheet music in Paris in the second half of the eighteenth century increased public access to arts and culture, music was still most successfully cultivated within the realm of the social elite. Ultimately, throughout the eighteenth century private patrons among the aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie played an essential role in shaping public taste for virtually every musical genre.

Political and cultural context

On 14 July 1789 a republican crowd stormed the Bastille, a fortress and prison in Paris. Until the formation of the Third Republic in 1870, France’s government lurched from constitutional monarchy, to republic, to empire, back to monarchy and so on, finally settling on a republic. The first constitutional monarchy failed early on; Louis XVI was guillotined on 21 January 1793, an event which ushered in the First Republic. The Reign of Terror began on 6 September 1793 with the formation of the euphemistically named Committee of Public Safety and ended on 27 July 1794. Thousands were killed and massive damage was inflicted. The Terror was followed by the Thermidorian Reaction, which reversed the trend, inaugurating the slow process of ending the Revolution.¹

Under the constitution of 1795 the legislature was divided between two bodies that, respectively, initiated legislation and passed resolutions into law. Severely damaged by military disasters, the Directory – a small group of members to which the executive was entrusted – failed to realise a stable republican order; as a result, the conditions allowed Napoleon Bonaparte to seize power. From the establishment of the Consulate after the Brumaire coup d’état in 1799, which ended the Directory, and the start of the Napoleonic Empire in 1804, Napoleon rapidly consolidated the changes the Revolution had made.²

By the early nineteenth century, musical and political institutions were strong enough to withstand the sometimes bloody paroxysms that followed. Napoleon’s demise led to a restoration of a constitutional monarchy in 1814. Louis XVIII was succeeded in 1824 by the reactionary Charles X, who headed a government that abolished the freedoms of the press and reduced the electorate. This inspired the July Revolution of 1830, which brought Louis-Philippe I to the throne. His liberal, bourgeois policies were not sufficient to stem demands for a larger electorate and parliamentary reform, and in 1848 crowds barricaded the streets; Louis-Philippe followed Charles X in abdicating and fleeing to England; the short-lived Second Republic was under way.

The Revolution asked how and for whose benefit society should be ruled, and challenged the role of the arts in ways that were novel (though anticipated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–78). In the last years of the ancien régime the musical highpoints were the grands motets at the Chapelle Royale, the tragédies lyriques of Rameau and Gluck and the symphonies of Haydn, Johann Stamitz and François-Joseph Gossec (1734–1829) at the Concert Spirituel.³ Not all of these suited the anti-religious world of the Revolution: the Concert Spirituel ended in 1790 after sixty-five years and the Chapelle Royale was suspended in 1792.⁴

While noting discontinuities, it is also important to stress continuities. In 1856 Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: ‘unbeknownst to themselves, [the French] had taken from the Ancien Régime most of the feelings, habits, and ideas that guided the Revolution which destroyed it … they had built the new society out of the debris of the old’.⁵ Even secularism, which constituted a striking discontinuity for musical institutions, had precedents in Enlightenment thought. Robespierre’s pursuit of a cult of the ‘supreme being’ – one of several attempts to create a ‘bourgeois non-Christian morality’, which maintained ‘the apparatus of ritual and cults’ – had its origins in Rousseau.⁶ After 1789 operatic and concert life soon picked up almost where it had left off, without Rameau and motets, but with Gluck and several major initiatives, which redirected the arts towards the ascendant bourgeoisie (hence the rehousing of the royal art collection and confiscated church art for public access – 537 paintings – in the Louvre in 1793).

During and out of the highly disparate movements of the eighteenth century and the Revolution, French Romanticism struggled to free itself from conservative forces, like the musical and architectural tastes of Napoleon, who favoured tuneful Italian music and classical architecture. It was perhaps in literature – in the works of English poets like Shelley and Byron – that the impact of the Revolution had its first resonance. Rousseau was vital: his influence, specifically his ‘emotional individualism’, is felt in the work of Bernadin de Saint-Pierre and François-René de Chateaubriand, who transmitted it to Victor Hugo and George Sand.⁷ Even though the surging espousal of the individual’s freedom from tyranny might have been contradicted by purges and the police state, the rhetoric lived on in the arts. Paradoxes abound, for the irrationality of religious observance was displaced temporarily by a Cult of Reason, which is perhaps more evocative of the Enlightenment than of Romanticism. Chateaubriand cultivated the colourful and picturesque without binding himself to accuracy, hence the allure of the exotic and oriental in much of the art and music of the period. Literary French Romanticism first peaked in 1830 with Hugo’s Ernani, in which drama mirrors life: ‘Decorum was banished and the wildest and weirdest scenes were portrayed without restraint.’⁸ Romantic poets show a freedom in their forms and expression, which we find echoed in Hector Berlioz (1803–69), and especially in the spontaneous lyricism of Liszt’s and Chopin’s music.

Music for the Revolutionary state

Institutions associated with the court found themselves vulnerable, particularly in the wake of the monarchy’s collapse in August 1792. This was true of the Catholic Church, which had been intimately connected with the monarchy. At the most extreme point in the Revolution the church was disestablished and churches were closed, which led first to the Cult of Reason (c. 1792) and then to Robespierre’s attempt to establish the Cult of the Supreme Being as a new state religion (he was appalled by the rejection of divinity by many of his fellow revolutionaries).⁹ For many musicians, this break was ruinous. What had been a traditional sphere for music-making and an important source of income simply disappeared, effectively halting the composition and performance of sacred music during the 1790s. With careers and education went infrastructure: thousands of organs were destroyed or left to rack and ruin, choirbooks were lost, countless manuscripts of early music vanished with the closure of the great monastic libraries, and many buildings were destroyed or damaged.¹⁰

At first religious music of a traditional kind was still heard, albeit in quite different circumstances. Gossec, already well known for his stage music, symphonies, religious works and much else, became one of the most prolific composers for the Revolution. In 1790 he wrote a Te Deum pour la fête de Fédération, which marked the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. Mass was also celebrated. It was held outdoors on the Champ de Mars, then outside Paris, which had been specially adapted for 400,000 spectators. Gossec’s Te Deum is for three-part male choir, wind and percussion; it employed a chorus of a thousand and a large orchestra.¹¹ Stylistically it is typical of the ceremonial music of the 1790s in its robust homophonic style with martial rhythms and simple cadential formulas regularly punctuating the phrases. Reflections of the past abound, though, for instance in the orchestral passepied (a French court dance, faster than the minuet) that precedes the ‘Te gloriosus’ section (bar 204).¹²

The fête was the harbinger of many such outdoor occasions. By means of ‘Revolutionary hymns’, large groups of people directly participated in the mass musical performances of the festivals, celebrating the membership of everyone present in the civic body, in an acknowledgement of their conversion from subjects of a king into citizens of the state. These ceremonies included symbolic rituals such as the planting of Liberty Trees, the erecting of statues of Goddesses of Liberty and the burning of effigies of Ignorance, all accompanied by wind bands and choruses that sometimes exceeded a thousand musicians.¹³ The festivals thus became secular liturgies in which Revolutionary hymns replaced sacred genres. Rousseau had adumbrated the character of these events in his Lettre sur les spectacles, in which he proposed open-air festivals in which the public came together en masse. As for the character of the hymns, they had to succeed as propaganda, which meant that the composer was required to ‘respect the poetic stresses of the refrain and first couplet, while the poet … would have to see that his verses scanned regularly’.¹⁴

The music for these events, used in conjunction with arrangements of popular patriotic songs like J. Rouget de Lisle’s Hymne à la liberté (La Marseillaise), ‘Ah, ça ira’ and La Carmagnole,¹⁵ formed the musical foundation of the Revolutionary festivals.¹⁶ Intended for performance at vast outdoor gatherings, these works were exceptionally grand in scale but necessarily simple in composition. An entire generation of composers was called upon: the more productive composers included Charles-Simon Catel (1773–1830), Luigi Cherubini (1760–1842), Gossec, Louis-Emmanuel Jadin (1768–1853), Jean-François Le Sueur (or Lesueur, 1760–1837) and Étienne-Nicolas Méhul (1763–1817).¹⁷Méhul’s Le chant du départ (words by Marie-Joseph Chénier), a hymne de guerre, is characteristic. Unlike many others, it outlived its era and is still played by the French army. It was first performed at a concert by the choirs and orchestra of the Institut National de Musique on 4 July 1794 in the Jardin National (Tuileries). Additional musicians were recruited from Paris theatres.¹⁸ It is strophic, with music for the first verse and chorus; there are seven verses, each of which gives voice to a character in the Revolutionary struggle: a deputy of the people, a mother of a family, two old men, a child, a wife, a young girl and three warriors, who conclude that ‘by destroying the notorious royalty/the French shall give the world/peace and liberty’. Like La Marseillaise, it is in C major with a simple, extremely direct melody that nevertheless briefly expresses doubt in itself by glancing at the tonic minor (on the words ‘Kings drunk on blood and pride’ in the first verse).

As well as enabling commissions for new music, the festivals created a demand for musicians, especially wind players, to support the choruses. This demand led to the establishment of the Institut National de Musique in 1793, under Bernard Sarrette, which became a source of such musicians. The Institut was absorbed into the Conservatoire de Musique, established by the government in 1795.

The restoration of religious music

Napoleon recognised that efforts to replace Catholicism had put the government in an adversarial position with a large section of the population. His negotiations with the papacy brought an end to that conflict, at least officially, by means of the 1801 concordat with Pope Pius VII. But this was no simple return to the pre-Revolutionary status quo, for Napoleon used his political and military strength in conjunction with the weak position of the papacy to restore the church to a position of spiritual prominence, without returning its former property and power.¹⁹ Nonetheless, the normalisation of worship in France inaugurated a new era of sacred music composition. So when the Chapel of the Tuileries palace was reopened in 1802 with Giovanni Paisiello (1740–1816) as its director, composition of works for the Catholic liturgy was once again sanctioned by the French state. The choice of Paisiello revealed the First Consul’s pronounced preference for Italianate musical styles. Shortly before the proclamation of the Empire in May 1804 Paisiello retired and was replaced by Le Sueur, who had earned a reputation prior to the Revolution as an innovative composer of sacred music.²⁰ Le Sueur’s work on behalf of the imperial chapel reflected his fondness for simple textures for use within highly resonant spaces; the repertoire also reflected the emperor’s taste and his limited patience for extended liturgies.²¹ A Mass in this context could consist of any piece of music that set a religious text, including small-scale oratorios or cantatas. Le Sueur survived Napoleon’s fall and continued as surintendant of the Chapel under the Bourbon Restoration. By then age forced him to share the burdens of the job, first with Jean-Paul-Gilles Martini (1741–1816) and then, after Martini’s death in 1816, with Cherubini.

Although better known today for his music for the stage, Cherubini was arguably the most influential composer of French sacred music of the nineteenth century. His operatic successes of the 1790s were not repeated during the Empire, and from 1805 to 1815 he experienced bouts of depression related to a loss of inspiration.²² Towards the end of this period Cherubini became intrigued by the possibilities of sacred music, and through his work for the restored Bourbon rulers he found a new creative outlet, to which the public responded enthusiastically. Characteristic of his innovative and dramatic approach is his use of a tam-tam at the opening the Dies irae of his first Requiem (C minor), written for the 1817 anniversary of the execution of Louis XVI.²³ His religious works draw on the broad synthesis encountered in the music of Haydn and Mozart, where symphonic, operatic and religious styles happily coalesce (Cherubini must have known and valued Mozart’s Requiem, for he conducted its Parisian premiere in 1804). While Cherubini’s sense of drama is clearly evident, so is his skill at counterpoint, honed when he was still a young musician working in Italy. In his best works from this period, he approaches the setting of text soberly, at times limiting vocal lines to the recitation of a single pitch, compensating for the lack of vocal lyricism by means of ostinato figures in the instrumental accompaniment that provide the necessary interest and momentum.

Cherubini’s tenure at the court came to an abrupt end with the Revolution of 1830 and the establishment of the July Monarchy. The new king, Louis-Philippe, wanting to emphasise the bourgeois qualities of his reign, disbanded the entire Chapel in order to disassociate himself from his Bourbon predecessors. In doing so, he brought the tradition of courtly sacred music in France to an end, though not the production of religious music in general.

Cherubini’s coronation Masses and first Requiem were composed for occasions of grandeur and political significance. Not surprisingly, a work like the Requiem was soon receiving concert performances. Paradoxically, this development bespeaks continuity with the ancien régime, not rupture: the Concert Spirituel had taken grands motets for chorus and orchestra conceived for chapel services and ‘gradually turned [them] into a sort of fashionable sacred music’ outside their original setting.²⁴ Some sacred genres also acquired national or political significance. This was true of Berlioz’s Grande messe des morts (Requiem, 1837). Written as a government commission, it is a stunning achievement in which the composer explored space and sound through the deployment of a large choir and orchestra, with four brass groups, one positioned at each corner of the auditorium. The extravagant effects of this massive work have precedents in the Revolutionary works of Le Sueur (among others), for his Symphonic Ode of 1801 also ‘employed four separate orchestras, each one stationed at a corner of the Invalides’, which was Berlioz’s venue as well.²⁵

Berlioz wrote his Te Deum (1849) without a commission, but with similarly large-scale performance in mind; the use of an organ gave him another architectural element to deploy in, for example, the epic counterpoint of the opening movement, which recalls Handel’s blend of fugal and homophonic writing. The statuesque qualities of the music owe much to the ambitious use of the brass in doubling vocal lines.

The grandiosity of Berlioz’s Requiem and Te Deum was only one expression of the way in which sacred music was evolving in nineteenth-century France. A Romanising liturgical drive was under way, but the move towards the adoption of plainchant was slow. We see the process in the work of the Benedictine monks of the abbey at Solesmes, in northern France, where the monks inaugurated a project aiming to restore ‘authentic’ Gregorian chant through scholarly scrutiny and comparison of disparate sources. Some forty years after its dissolution and partial destruction, a local priest, Dom Prosper Guéranger, embarked on a revival of Benedictine monastic life in what remained of the old abbey in 1833. A key component of this was the restoration of Gregorian chant. The goals of this abbot and his zealous group of Benedictines were clearly antiquarian and closely associated with the historicist impulses evident in the first half of the nineteenth century; they also revealed a desire to rehabilitate contemporary life through the recuperation of a lost spirituality that they believed would renew France as a Catholic nation.²⁶ The reforms, however, were not widely accepted until the 1890s (around the time of the foundation of the Schola Cantorum), because of the withholding of texts, which restricted access to a few abbeys. It was a slow process, but by the start of the twentieth century, Counter-Reformation polyphony, with Palestrina at the forefront, was deemed second only to Gregorian chant ‘as an appropriate vehicle for the Catholic liturgy’.²⁷

Enthusiasm for sacred repertoires of the past was not limited to the monks of Solesmes. Music educators like Alexandre-Étienne Choron (1771–1834) made significant contributions to the study and performance of early sacred music in the first half of the century.²⁸ In addition to being an author, publisher and committed teacher (and concomitantly founder of the Institution Royale de Musique Classique et Religieuse, which was revived by Niedermeyer – see Chapter 7 below), Choron exhibited an abiding interest in the reclamation of music from before 1800. At a time when very little music of the past was readily available, he published music of Renaissance and Baroque composers and actively participated in the Palestrina revival through his programming of Palestrina’s music in concerts devoted to historical works.²⁹ These performances were surprisingly successful and helped encourage a taste for a cappella performance.³⁰ The staunch classicist François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1871), composer, teacher, critic and one of the foremost music scholars of the period, applauded Choron’s efforts and started his own series of concerts historiques in the 1830s. Thus both men cultivated an interest in historical performance of sacred music that continued to develop and flourish later in the century at the École Niedermeyer and eventually the Schola Cantorum.³¹

Concert life

Concert life continued after the Revolution, although with at first fewer opportunities to hear instrumental and vocal music in a concert setting than hitherto. Life was chaotic, but musicians ‘hobbled along’,³² often unpredictably: in 1791 an orchestral concert was announced for the Cirque National in the inner courtyard of the Palais Royal, ‘where a young woman was to “perform a pianoforte concerto”; a ball was to follow the concert’.³³ With the increasing importance of the piano – an instrument that could play operas, symphonies and solo works, and accompany any instrument – tiny venues turned into concert halls, as the violinist Pierre Baillot lamented.³⁴

Paris theatres maintained much of the ancien régime’s momentum of concert-giving. The Feydeau theatre orchestra played symphonies, concertos and overtures during theatrical evenings. The concerts became fashionable and were the subject of ‘at least two short comedies’, in one of which a perfumed dandy remarks to a lady, ‘I don’t enjoy myself, or even exist, except at a concert.’³⁵Jean Mongrédien reproduces a typical programme: a Haydn symphony, a Viotti violin concerto, an Italian aria, a Viotti piano concerto, an excerpt from Cimarosa’s Le sacrifice d’Abraham, a Gluck overture, a symphonie concertante by Devienne and Mengozzi’s Air savoyard. This was given on 8 January 1797, one of a dozen concerts in the autumn–winter season.³⁶ Similar programmes were produced at other theatres, including the Opéra and Opéra-Comique, as well as in various pleasure gardens.³⁷

In 1798 the influential Concerts de la rue de Cléry began their subscription series in which the music of Haydn was prominently programmed, often with two symphonies per concert. The emphasis on Haydn provides a connection with pre-Revolutionary musical life (he had been popular at the Concerts de la Loge Olympique, for example).³⁸

The performances organised by the Conservatoire were the most prominent concert series of the early 1800s. Growing out of ‘public exercises’ for students in the 1790s, under the First Empire they quickly grew in scope and esteem. The conductor for many Conservatoire concerts was a former pupil, François-Antoine Habeneck, who proved to be a driving force.³⁹ After the series ended in 1824, Habeneck established the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire in 1828. This series was responsible for some of the most important musical premieres in nineteenth-century France, including Beethoven’s symphonic works. The first music played in the 1828 series was the ‘Eroica’, a duet from Rossini’s Sémiramis, a new work by Joseph Maillard illustrating a piston-valved horn he had helped design, a violin concerto by Rode and three works by the Conservatoire director Cherubini, including portions of his 1824 Mass for Charles X (all concerts included a chorus).⁴⁰Berlioz spoke about the significance of the programming of Beethoven in his Mémoires, claiming that ‘they opened before me a new world of music’.⁴¹ These performances ushered Beethoven’s symphonic works into the French concert repertoire and inspired emulation by Berlioz and other composers.⁴² The audience for these concerts was from the upper bourgeoisie and nobility, who were nothing if not loyal. Lists of subscribers clearly indicate the well-heeled character of the attendees, whose subscriptions to the concert series were passed on to family members from one generation to the next.⁴³ For the audiences, the concerts represented exclusivity in terms of both social profile and musical values.⁴⁴

The seriousness that greeted the Conservatoire’s concerts was matched by the growing interest in chamber music from the period of the Restoration and after.⁴⁵ The concerts organised by the violinist Pierre Baillot were influential. Starting in 1814 (and finishing in 1836), he organised performances that helped transform chamber music from an amateur pastime into a body of work intended for serious contemplation.⁴⁶ The audiences attracted to the chamber music performances, like those for the Conservatoire concerts, were a wealthy mix of aristocrats and the upper middle class, but Baillot performed less Beethoven than the Conservatoire performers, preferring the quartets and quintets of Haydn, Mozart and Boccherini. A sextet arrangement of Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony was nevertheless played six times, as was his String Quartet in G, Op. 18 No. 2. But while several of Beethoven’s late quartets were never played, all of Haydn’s Op. 76 featured at least once, and No. 2 in D minor seven times.⁴⁷ More recent compositions were also performed, including works by Cherubini, Hummel and Giovanni Battista Viotti (1755–1824). Within a few decades, several additional concert series dedicated to chamber music were founded by musicians inspired by Baillot.⁴⁸

Outside Paris the picture of concert life is much less clear (see Chapter 17 below). In the eighteenth century, a number of provincial concert series, often organised by local music societies, were to be found in centres such as Bordeaux and Lille.⁴⁹The interest in concert activities was, in part, supported by the number of virtuoso performers who toured Europe, stopping briefly in smaller towns in between longer stays in major urban centres. Nonetheless, even large regional capitals like Lyons and Marseilles could not compete with Paris. As a centre of European instrument building and music-making, Paris was attractive to many performing artists who stayed there for varying periods of time, performing in any number of venues within the capital.⁵⁰

It was Rossini who inspired Paganini and many others through the brilliance and virtuosity of his vocal writing. In the years after the demolition of Napoleon’s empire he was Europe’s most famous composer, and he lived in Paris.⁵¹ Although virtuoso musicians were to be found throughout Europe, their concentration in Paris was a product of that city’s high status as a focal point of musical culture. Many nineteenth-century musicians traced their determination to develop their virtuosity back to the influence of Paganini in his Parisian concerts.⁵² A veritable flood of pianist-composers came to Paris and adopted the new instruments of Erard and Pleyel. They included Dussek, Steibelt, Hummel, Kalkbrenner, Liszt, Thalberg, Hiller, Heller, Léopold de Meyer and Chopin. To sample what they did, it is worth itemising Chopin’s first concert in Paris, on 26 February 1832, for it gives a distinct flavour of what audiences expected and received. Liszt, Mendelssohn and around a hundred others assembled in the rooms of Pleyel et Cie (significantly, a piano manufacturer, emphasising the link between industry and concertising⁵³) to hear Beethoven’s Quintet in C, Op. 29, a vocal duet, Chopin playing his Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor with orchestral parts played by string quintet, Chopin and five other pianists in Kalkbrenner’s Introduction, March and Grande Polonaise for six pianos, an opera aria, an oboe solo and finally Chopin playing his ‘La ci darem’ Variations, similarly accompanied.⁵⁴ Although concert programmes typically mixed orchestral, chamber and vocal music, increasingly it was the piano that was heard throughout, either in concertos or as a member of a small ensemble, as here.

Situated between the public and private performing worlds was the salon culture, which reappeared in Paris in the early nineteenth century following a brief hiatus during the early years of the Revolution. Private recitals given in the homes of aristocrats and the haute bourgeoisie offered a semi-public showcase for professional performers and talented amateurs from the upper classes.⁵⁵ Some salon concerts received notice in the press, a celebrated example being the pianistic ‘duel’ between Liszt and Thalberg that Princess Cristina Belgiojoso organised as a benefit for Italian political exiles in 1837. But most of these social and musical events were not so widely advertised, being more private affairs.⁵⁶ They featured solo and chamber works, freely mixing operatic arias and virtuosic piano solos with more modest vocal romances, and later, after mid-century, mélodies.⁵⁷ These concerts served purposes of social advancement for their hosts, afforded certain amateurs a venue for performance and provided professional musicians with a significant supplemental means of income.

Instrumental music

The symphonie concertante

The symphonie concertante continued to flourish until around 1830, its galant origins somehow not counted dissonant with the stirring events of the time (see Chapter 5). Giuseppe Maria Cambini (1746–1825) was a prolific composer of Italian origin who settled in Paris in the 1770s and thrived there after the Revolution. His Symphonie concertante in D for two violins and orchestra, ‘La patriote’ (1794), unlike many others, is fully suited to the period of Robespierre, even in its scoring for oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trombone and strings. Its first movement, Allegro maestoso, uses La Marseillaise for its first subject and forte transitional material. Rushing string semiquavers accompany its familiar strains. Formally the movement follows Mozart’s concerto form, with a new second subject for the soloists’ establishment of the dominant. The finale starts with a Haydnesque 6/8 of a fairly light-hearted character, based on the popular French song ‘Cadet Rousselle’, but at bar 239 Revolutionary zeal returns in an assertive, rhetorical closing Allegro (see Example 6.1).⁷³

Example 6.1 Giuseppe Maria Cambini, Symphonie concertante in D, ‘La patriote’, finale, bars 239–43

In contrast, the Symphonie concertante in F, Op. 38 (c. 1795), by Jean-Baptiste Sébastien Breval (1753–1823) is of a much lighter character, which recalls Ralph P. Locke’s characterisation of these works: ‘audiences saw in the alternately chattering and cantabile interplay between the soloists … something similar to the conversation between characters in a play or opera’.⁷⁴ Mozart’s first-movement concerto form is followed here as well.⁷⁵

Music journalism

No reader of Balzac’s Illusions perdues will forget his depiction of the ruthless world of nineteenth-century Parisian journalism. However, amid the aggressive competition, corruption and greed, much artful music criticism appeared both in general newspapers like the Journal des débats and in the specialist music periodicals that began to proliferate in the 1830s. Music reviewers of the early 1800s resembled their eighteenth-century counterparts; they were literary figures. In spite of their literary backgrounds and biases, some authors were perfectly competent; yet their outspoken, imperious judgements were unsupported by much musical substance.⁸² Nevertheless, their writings helped to shape public taste as well as the development of the nineteenth-century French musical canon, exerting influence on musically trained critics active later in the century.⁸³ They served as a link between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as foreshadowing a number of the debates that would mark the latter years of the 1800s. Julien-Louis Geoffroy, who wrote for the Journal des débats, was among the most prominent of this group of authors. He was indebted to Rousseau, and shared his view that ‘melody was the seat of beauty in music’. His deep-rooted antipathy to what he identified as German musical values, as well as distaste for certain Italianate musical extremes, led him to emphasise a French national operatic style that privileged an aesthetic balance, based on ‘uniting the best elements from diverse sources’.⁸⁴

Musicians who subsequently entered the ranks of music journalism managed to subtly transform the discourse of the profession and cover a broader repertoire in their reviews.⁸⁵ One of Geoffroy’s successors as music critic at the Journal des débats, François-Henri-Joseph Blaze, known as Castil-Blaze, was a musician. Recent research has revealed his significance and influence as a keen observer of French musical culture in the first half of the nineteenth century.⁸⁶ Part of the first generation of Conservatoire students, Castil-Blaze had a thorough musical education, and he employed that training to develop a technically knowledgeable and adept music criticism.⁸⁷ This was evident in his interest in a wide range of musical genres and his enlarging of the scope of reviews beyond opera to include concerts, educational publications and published scores. Other critics worthy of mention include the poet Théophile Gautier, Joseph d’Ortigue, Jules Janin and Maurice Bourges.

Throughout the 1820s most music criticism was in periodicals of general interest, but in 1827 Fétis began publishing the Revue musicale, a weekly specialist journal devoted to music.⁸⁸ The Revue set a standard pattern by including historical articles, biographies and essays on instrument construction, as well as performance reviews and announcements of upcoming concerts and publications.⁸⁹ The fact that Fétis wrote almost all the articles gave the journal a consistent critical vision that aimed, for the most part, at educating the public. The Revue ushered in a new era of music criticism, and for the nine years of its independent existence it served as a model for the periodicals that followed in its wake. When Fétis left Paris to become director of the Brussels Conservatoire, he left the journal in the care of his son Édouard. A few months later Édouard withdrew and arranged a merger with a rival, the Gazette musicale de Paris, which had been in operation for only eleven months.⁹⁰ The resulting Revue et gazette musicale de Paris continued until 31 December 1880.

The Gazette was the house journal of Maurice Schlesinger, a Paris-based member of a prominent Berlin music publishing family. The Gazette’s ‘dominant character was … German Romanticism’. From the outset it attacked Fétis and seemed disposed to wage war on the ‘meaningless virtuosity of fashionable piano music’.⁹¹ The proliferation of music journals in the 1830s also meant that the editors had to vie for the attention of the public. Schlesinger therefore designed his journal to avoid overt educational goals. Instead, the Gazette prominently featured Hoffmannesque contesmusicaux, which were entertaining diversions and connected the journal to a Romantic aesthetic that would ultimately permeate many of its articles.⁹² The first ‘portrayed Beethoven as a social outcast, alienated and misunderstood’.⁹³ Others were by such celebrated authors as Sand, Janin, Dumas, Balzac, Berlioz and Wagner, whose ‘Une visite à Beethoven’ (1840) features the popular subject of alienated genius.

The journals provided forums for a wide variety of composers, professional critics and on occasion more scholarly figures like Fétis to voice their opinions about not only performance but music generally. Some, like Berlioz, chafed under the demands of journal editors,⁹⁴ but the extraordinary mix of knowledgeable authors engaging music seriously was truly outstanding. The articles vividly detailed that musical world and the figures who dominated it. Moreover, they chronicled the changes in musical composition of this period, tracking a shift in compositional aesthetics as well as providing, through their criticism, a framework for understanding the new musical values that resulted.⁹⁵