Graham Sadler / Shirley Thompson: the Italian Roots of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’S Chromatic Harmony Schriftenreihe Analecta Musicologica
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Graham Sadler / Shirley Thompson: The Italian Roots of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Chromatic Harmony Schriftenreihe Analecta musicologica. Veröffentlichungen der Musikgeschichtlichen Abteilung des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Rom Band 52 (2015) Herausgegeben vom Deutschen Historischen Institut Rom Copyright Das Digitalisat wird Ihnen von perspectivia.net, der Online-Publikationsplattform der Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland, zur Verfügung gestellt. Bitte beachten Sie, dass das Digitalisat der Creative- Commons-Lizenz Namensnennung-Keine kommerzielle Nutzung-Keine Bearbeitung (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) unterliegt. Erlaubt ist aber das Lesen, das Ausdrucken des Textes, das Herunterladen, das Speichern der Daten auf einem eigenen Datenträger soweit die vorgenannten Handlungen ausschließlich zu privaten und nicht-kommerziellen Zwecken erfolgen. Den Text der Lizenz erreichen Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode The Italian Roots of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Chromatic Harmony Graham Sadler and Shirley Thompson »Charpentier revêtu d’une sage richesse Des cromatiques sons fit sentir la finesse, Dans la belle harmonie il s’ouvrit un chemin, Neuviémes & tritons brillerent sous sa main.« (Jean de Serré de Rieux, La musique, 1714)1 For the modern listener, one of the most striking and attractive features of the music of Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643–1704) is its harmonic boldness. This was never- theless an aspect of style that proved controversial among his contemporaries. In the passage quoted above, for example, Serré de Rieux seems to relish Charpentier’s rich harmonies, yet elsewhere he refers to them more equivocally as »les charmes déplacez d’une haute science«.2 Such ambivalence is symptomatic of the on-going aesthetic debate in France at the end of the seventeenth century concerning the respective roles of melody and harmony – a debate which revolved around such matters as simplicity versus complexity, liberty versus restraint, the natural versus the artificial.3 Here Charpentier occupied a position diametrically opposite that of Jean-Baptiste Lully. Whereas »le beau naturel« of Lully satisfied the prevailing taste among French music lovers, the appeal of Charpentier’s music was evidently limited mainly to those with some level of musical education or talent. He and his music were categorized as savant (learned, 1 »Charpentier, adorned with an erudite richness, | Revealed the subtleties of chromatic sounds: | In beauteous harmony he opened up a path; | Ninths and tritones sparkled in his hands.« The present citation is from an undated edition in F-Pn, Ye 8980, p. 21. 2 »the misplaced charms of advanced learning«. Serré de Rieux, La musique, p. 11. 3 For a recent discussion, see Don Fader, The Honnête homme as Music Critic: Taste, Rhetoric and Politesse in the 17th-Century French Reception of Italian Music, in: The Journal of Musicology 20/1 (2003), pp. 3–44. 546 Graham Sadler and Shirley Thompson erudite),4 a label which sometimes proved a stumbling block in that it tended to alienate the ordinary listener.5 The adjective savant also brought with it connotations of Italian styles and tech- niques. This is implicit in the Parfaict brothers’ description of Charpentier’s music as being characterized »d’une harmonie et d’une science jusqu’alors inconnues aux François«.6 Indeed, one feature of seventeenth-century Italian music which many in France found most difficult to accept was its audacious harmonic language. As one of the first native composers to adopt elements of that language, Charpentier earned the particular scorn of Jean Laurent Le Cerf de La Viéville: Comment ont réüssi ceux de nos Maîtres qui ont été les admirateurs zélez, & les ardens imitateurs de la manière de composer des Italiens? Où cela les a-t-il menez? A faire des Piéces que le Public & le tems ont déclaré pitoyables. Qu’a laissé le sçavant Charpentier pour assurer sa mémoire? Médée, Saul & Jonathas. Il vaudroit mieux qu’il n’eût rien laissé.7 From the tone of this and other criticisms,8 many of Charpentier’s contemporaries evidently believed that he had sold out to the Italians. With the benefit of hindsight, however, it is clear that he merely sought to enrich his native French style with ele- ments imported from Italy. In more modern times, the Italian influence on Charpentier’s harmony has frequently been acknowledged. Yet the composer’s use of certain specific chords and harmonic procedures has never been systematically traced back to its Italian roots. This is the aim of the present article, which draws particular attention to the composer’s role in pioneering the use of chromatic chords and related harmonic procedures in France. Given that the majority of examples discussed below are from 4 Sébastien de Brossard, for example, in his Catalogue des livres de musique (F-Pn, Rés. Vm8 20, fol. 226), described Charpentier as »le plus profond et le plus sçavant des musiciens modernes«; quoted in Hugh Wiley Hitchcock, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Oxford 1990, p. 6. 5 Charpentier himself acknowledged as much in Epitaphium Carpentarii, H. 474, in which his own ghost claims that, »since those who scorned me were more numerous than those who praised me, music brought me small honour and great burdens«. The original Latin text of this work appears in Catherine Cessac, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, revised and enlarged edition, Paris 2004, pp. 457–460; English translation of the first edition by E. Thomas Glasow, Portland 1988, pp. 379–381. See also Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Vocal Chamber Music, ed. John S. Powell, Madison 1986, pp. xx–xxi and 77–98. 6 »A harmony and technical knowledge hitherto unknown to the French«. Claude and François Parfaict, Histoire de l’Académie Royale de Musique, F-Pn, ms. nouv. acq. 6532, p. 80. 7 »What success have those of our masters had who were the zealous admirers and ardent imita- tors of the Italian manner of composing? Where has it led them? To write pieces which the public and time have declared pitiable. What has the learned Charpentier left to keep his memory alive? Médée, Saul et Jonathas. It would have been better to have left nothing at all.« Jean Laurent Le Cerf de La Viéville, Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique françoise, Brussels 1705–1706, vol. 2, p. 347. 8 See, for example, those quoted in Pierre Mélèse, Le théâtre et le public à Paris sous Louis XIV, Paris 1934, pp. 266 s. The Italian Roots of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Chromatic Harmony 547 his earliest works, such aspects of his harmonic language can be seen to anticipate comparable usage by his contemporaries and successors.9 * * * Charpentier was virtually unique among French musicians of his immediate genera- tion in travelling abroad to complete his studies. As is well known, he spent about three years in Rome during the late 1660s, sometime between 1666 and 1669.10 Although we have little information on his specific activities there, he is known to have placed himself in the orbit of Giacomo Carissimi and the Collegium Germani- cum.11 When Charpentier first arrived in Italy, the contrast between the musical idioms he encountered there and those he had experienced during his youth in France must have seemed enormous. In terms of harmonic practice, French music of the mid-seventeenth century was extremely conservative. With the notable excep- tion of Louis Couperin, the general character of both sacred and secular music was harmonically restrained. In the vocal repertory of the 1650s and 1660s, chromatic chords and progressions are virtually non-existent, and the quantity of strong dis- sonance limited. This is not to suggest that such music is necessarily inexpressive, as can be seen in Example 1, from Henry Du Mont’s setting of »Quemadmodum desiderat cervus« (Psalm 41/42). The exact date of this motet is not known,12 but its harmonic idiom is that of the mid-century. In setting the emotive text »fuerunt mihi lacrimae« (»my tears have been my bread night and day«), Du Mont limits his use of dissonance to a range of orthodox suspensions and passing notes. The result is suit- ably poignant, though without recourse to compositional extreme. 9 For a comprehensive study of the dating of Charpentier’s music, see Catherine Cessac, Chrono- logie raisonnée des manuscrits autographes de Marc-Antoine Charpentier. Essai de bibliographie matérielle, in: Bulletin Charpentier 3 (2010–2013), http://philidor.cmbv.fr/bulletin_charpentier (accessed 15 Oc- tober 2013). 10 See Patricia M. Ranum, Portraits around Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Baltimore 2004, pp. 527 s.; eadem, Some Hypotheses about Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Stay in Rome: the French Colony in Rome, 1666–1669, http://ranumspanat.com/html%20pages/rome_hypotheses.html (accessed 16 June 2012). 11 For a summary of the recent debate about whether or not Charpentier actually studied with Carissimi, see Graham Sadler, Charpentier’s Void Notation: the Italian Background and its Implications, in: New Perspectives on Marc-Antoine Charpentier, ed. Shirley Thompson, Farnham 2010, pp. 31–61: 46. 12 A setting of »Quemadmodum« by Du Mont entered the repertory of the Chapelle du Roi in 1678. See Lionel Sawkins, Chronology and Evolution of the grand motet at the Court of Louis XIV: Evi- dence from the Livres du Roi and the Works of Perrin, the sous-maîtres and Lully, in: Jean-Baptiste Lully and the Music of the French Baroque. Essays in Honor of James R. Anthony, ed. John Hajdu Heyer, Cambridge 1989, pp. 41–79: 56. See also Laurence Decobert, Henry