residence in the Palace des Tuileries precisely where the Sun King bided much of his time during Versailles upgrade). The early 1670s mark one of

LOUIS LEGACY Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do. - François-Marie Arouet aka Voltaire Three hundred years ago, on 1 September, after a long reign of 72 years and 110 days, the Sun King strutted no more. Louis is recorded by numerous eyewitnesses as having said on his deathbed: «Je m'en vais, mais l'état demeurera toujours» ( I depart, but the State shall always remain ). And in his final hours, enduring much pain from the symptoms of gangrene, he finally yielded up his soul without any effort, like a candle going out while reciting Psalm 69: Domine, ad adjuvandum me festina (O Lord, make haste to help me). Le Roi est mort: Vivre le Roi! Louis XIV, le Roi Soleil (1638-1715), discovered early and learnt well the virtue of absolutism: «L État, c est moi!». He exercised control through an elaborate code of etiquette and an extensive bureaucracy that left no one in any doubt as to his or her proper place. Having been exiled from Paris as a child by the Fronde (a political group of provincial nobility opposed to his father s lavish spending which ultimately Louis was to imitate), he retained little affection for that city, preferring to reside at his country châteaux: Fontainebleau, Versailles, Marly, Saint Germain and Chantilly. Consequently, Louis retinue of several thousand people nobles, personal servants, musicians, military and maintenance personnel were obliged to accompany the Court on an annual circuit of the royal estates. These quickly became the backdrops for sumptuous feasting, ballets de cour, masked balls, concerts, fireworks and water displays, all of them requiring appropriate music. Gambling and playing at cards, romance and intrigue were offset by daily attendance at Low Mass where, by royal command, music was sung and played (in direct contravention of the restrictions on its use in Catholic services as laid down by the Council of Trent, 1545-1563). In 1669, after eight years supreme rule, the Sun King resolved to convert his father s hunting lodge at Versailles into a palace of unprecedented splendour. Thirteen years later, on 6 May 1682, in a bid to sweep away the remnants of feudalism which had persisted in parts of France, he appointed it the Court Residence and centralised Seat of French Government. Finally the court could move in for good (or at least until just over a century later when it was forced by the Revolutionaries, on 6 October 1789, to retreat to Paris and take up

residence in the Palace des Tuileries precisely where the Sun King bided much of his time during Versailles upgrade). The early 1670s mark one of those crossroads at which the history of art and music benefited. This was due to the coincidental and judicious bringing together of just the right combination of people, events and even instruments. Louis XIV contributed in several ways. There was his unprecedented thirst for glory born out in his building up of France as the leader of All Europe, likened only to the Medici in Tuscany. There was also his genuine and discerning love for all the arts, especially for music and dance. Accordingly, he made the latter two art forms his désir de gloire and bestowed on artists in these fields virtually unlimited resources with which to pursue their creative business. Second to Louis XIV was Jean Baptiste Lully (1632-87). Originally garçon de chamber to the niece of the Chevalier de Guise, Lully was the greatest beneficiary of the Sun King s munificence. Perhaps it is easy to criticise Lully s attitude towards music, like Louis XIV s attitude towards the arts in general, as dictatorial. It is a fact, nonetheless, that no other musician (not even Richard Wagner) ever received from his divinely appointed patron such an abundance of financial and moral support: it was this support and consequent power that would enable Lully to influence the destiny of all Western music in the way that he did. Through Louis ordaining, this would be both Lully s and his own enduring legacy. François-Marie Arouet aka Voltaire (1694-1778) praised Louis XIV s reign for its patronage of literature and the visual arts, not to mention music. In his introduction to «Le Siècle de Louis XIV» (1751), Voltaire explained that his purpose for writing was to provide posterity with an account of the achievements of the human spirit in the most enlightened age there has ever been and it is perhaps the one which approaches most nearly to perfection. Voltaire compares Louis XIV s reign to those of Alexander the Great and Emperor Augustus. Future generations, he surmised, digging among the ruins of our time, may someday discover works like the Baths of Apollo, now exposed to the weather in the woods of Versailles... If this were to happen, one may well believe that these productions of our own time would be placed side by side with the finest works of Antiquity. (The sculpture to which Voltaire refers is the work of François Girardon: his marble group sculpture Apollo Tended by Nymphs [1666-75], which shows Louis XIV in the guise of Apollo.)

At Versailles, the Musiciens du Roi was one of many groups of skilled servants. Each person held one or more positions in the music of the Chapelle Royale, the Chambre and Écurie (stable). Positions were bought and sold but most often inherited. Known as Ordinaires, they were recruited from lower middle-class Parisian families. Their salaries depended on rank and in certain cases, the instrument they played; those connected to the Chambre were best remunerated. Such musicians divided their time according to three-month semesters, travelling between Versailles and Paris a day s coach ride away. In Paris they performed, composed and taught the daughters of the aristocracy and rich bourgeoisie from whom they gained assistance in the publishing of their own music, in part to enhance their position back at Court. The King's day was timed down to the last minute so that the officers in the service of the monarch could plan their work as accurately as possible. The Musiciens du Chambre, such as Jean-Baptiste de Lully fils (second son of Jean-Baptiste Lully) were expected to perform each day at the King s Grand levée: 7.30-8.00am, Sire, it is time, the first Valet de Chambre would utter as he awoke the King; only the most important personalities in the kingdom were admitted to observe this ritual. The number of attendants is estimated at around a hundred, all male. Then, at mealtimes, at private entertainments in the King s appartements, 11.30pm at the couchée (going to bed) and on the thrice-weekly jours d appartement when the King made his rooms available to courtiers for 10pm buffet suppers (soupers), a concert, card playing/gambling, billiards and dancing. The Musiciens de la Chapelle Royale included singers, organists, a string band and a cornettist. For special occasions their contingent was augmented by the voices of women (mostly wives and daughters of Ordinaires) as well as recorder players. Chamber and large ensemble motets were the staple of these special services. Louis XIV favoured the Low Mass to the more formal High Mass, as he could then be assured of enjoying one grand motet and two petits motets, which he preferred to the settings of the Ordinary. So, what then of the other musicians and their music that was spawned by the Sun King s désir de gloire and Lully, his surintendant de la musique de la chambre du roi? Early in her life, Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet (1665-1729) performed on the harpsichord for Louis XIV (much like the young Mozart playing for Louis XVI) and created a sensation as a five-year-old female child prodigy. By the age of twelve, the King s mistress, Françoise Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart, marquise de Montespan, saw to it that Elisabeth-

Claude was under the direct guidance of Louis de Mollier, Maître de musique du Dauphin et des enfants de la Chambre et de la Chapelle. In the following year, she was already admitted as Ordinaire in the Chapelle Royale to provide suitable music at the Low Mass. By 1684, however, Elisabeth-Claude had left her royal employ and married the Parisian organist, Marin de la Guerre although she continued to develop a wide following through her composing and performing activities. A highlight of her earlier years in the public eye was the production, in 1694, of her own tragédie lyrique, «Cephale et Procris», the first composition by a woman to be presented at the Académie Royale de Musique. Until her retirement in 1717, Elisabeth-Claude was also among the first to inaugurate a series of harpsichord recitals in her own home, where according to Évrard Titon du Tillet (Le Parnasse François, 1732) all the great musicians and fine connoisseurs eagerly went to hear her. Between Lully and Rameau, in the salons of Paris, the poetic form of the cantata became wildly popular and found musical expression in the Italian inspired cantate françoise. Like their Italian models, cantates françoises were written for small forces: one or more solo singers, basso continuo and perhaps an obliggato instrument like the flute, violin or bass viol (whose function can change between a concertato and a continuo instrument). Typically, they portrayed some mythical or allegorical story, and included flowery poetry, amorous entanglements and a concluding moral. To the (fast-becoming) normal Air Recitatif components, in her second cantate françoise (1715) - «L Isle de Délos», Madame de la Guerre adds a prélude, a musette, a chaconne and a charming Simphonie de rossignol (nightingale). In the case of Jean-Philippe Rameau, cantatas were his first contact with dramatic music. The modest forces the cantata required meant it was a genre within the reach of a composer who was still unknown. His «L Impatience» is one of seven secular cantatas written during his early period as organist in Clermont Ferrand (1715-22). Although full of musical and even dramatic interest, Rameau s cantatas have been overshadowed by his later stage works. Elizabeth-Claude Jacquet s friend and colleague, François Couperin, chiefly hailed today for his works for organ and harpsichord (from 1693 he was organist of the Chapelle Royale and Ordinaire de la chambre pour le claveçin), wrote some of the most significant sacred music of the period. His earliest sacred works were in the form of Petits Motets, based largely on Psalm texts. In the Quatre versets d un motet (1703), Couperin chose the unusual medium of the high soprano voice and two obbligato flûtes douces

with the basso continuo played by unison violins. Qui dat Nivem sicut lanam (Ps. 147:16) opens with a flute duet with all parts moving in similar directions. This texture tends to feature throughout the work as the soprano voice joins one of the flutes or the flutes together play interludes. The poet and champion of French music, Jean Laurent Le Cerf de La Viéville gives a slightly cynical account of contemporary performing conditions for such works, describing how even favourite opera singers could be heard giving their version of them in holy precincts during Lent. (One particular church, St Louis in the rue St Antoine where Charpentier was for a time maître de musique, he even cynically named l église de l opera!): They are paid to perform the most devout and solemn motets! We are doing better the last few years: actresses are hired. Behind a curtain that they draw apart from time to time to smile at friends among the listeners, they sing a Leçon for Good Friday or a Motet for solo voice on Easter Day. People go to hear them at a designated convent. In the singer s honour the price that one would pay at the door of l Opera is paid for a chair a l église. In the famous national concours royal of 1683, Lully s most eminent rival, Marc Antoine Charpentier missed out on winning one of the four coveted positions as sous-maître de la Chapelle Royale. Charpentier could not complete the concours because of serious illness and, by default, consequently remained outside the official service of the King. Critical to his development as a versatile composer of sacred and theatrical works were the years that he spent in Rome, sometime between 1662 and 1667, under Giacomo Carissimi s guidance and it is suspected that it was due to this Italian training that Lully snubbed Charpentier on more than one occasion. On his return to Paris, Charpentier gained directorship of music for the King s niece Marie de Lorraine, Duchesse de Guise, and from about 1680, he provided music for the Masses of the Dauphin, which Louis XIV attended when in Paris. In fact, Louis so much enjoyed hearing Charpentier s music that, in 1681 when visiting his son at Saint-Cloud, he dismissed his own musicians in favour of hearing the Dauphin s chœur sing a few of Charpentier s 200 motets. In 1683, the King rewarded Charpentier with an annual pension in deference to his noteworthy service to the Dauphin, as well as consolation for missing the concours on account of illness. For added resilience, Michel Pignolet decided to add the name of the fortress Montéclair, near his birthplace in Andelot, to his name. Soon afterwards he settled in Paris where he held a post as basse de violon player in the petit

choeur of the opera orchestra from 1699 until his death in 1737. During this time he produced three books of imaginatively crafted cantates françoises (Le Dépit généreux is 4 in Book 1 and La Bergère, 5 in Book 3). To assist with their practical performance, he wrote Les Principes de musique (1736) one of the most important sources of French vocal ornamentation of the first third of the 18th century in which he stated, The incomparable Lully preferred melody, fitness of expression, lack of affectation, and lastly, noble simplicity. His earlier Méthode facile pour apprendre à jouer du violon (1711/12) was equally significant, being the very first violin treatise to be published in France, having its derivation from Montéclair s five years of travel through Italy in the early 1690s as Maître de musique to the Prince of Vaudémont. No doubt this book was a handy reference for one of his star violin pupils, Marguerite-Antoinette daughter of François Couperin. At the time of his untimely, self-inflicted death on 22 March 1687, Jean- Baptiste Lully was internationally regarded as the embodiment of French music and dance. 2½ months previous on 8 January, ironically during a performance in Paris of his own Te Deum to celebrate Louis XIV s recovery from a painful, anal fistula operation, Lully had stabbed himself in the foot with the sharp point of his conducting cane whilst fervently beating the pulse. Refusing surgery, gangrene set in causing a slow and painful demise as it also eventually would to his Maître. Lully had sought to gain royal approval up until the last through flattery on the grandest scale: the King s predilections were always catered for, his opinions carefully built-in, the events of his reign presented in a favourable light, his own persona endlessly allegorised, his wisdom and mercy equated with that of God. After the death of Louis XIV, the court was no longer the epicentre of French musical life. And in concurrence with the earlier of death of Lully, there was a steady shift towards the permitting and incorporating of the Italian style in French composition. (Both Louis and Lully had joined forces to eliminate Italian influence from all French music.) But now, French music under Italian schooling became more complex and more learned. No one was more responsible for the shift in taste than Rameau, as approved or blamed by his contemporaries: It is to M. Rameau that we owe this mongrel kind which passes today in France for Italian music; no agreement of the tune with the words, nor of the airs with the situations of the characters... Am I fated to hear nothing but this foreign, hateful, baroque inhuman music? Voltaire, Lettre 166 (1742)

Early in his career, even François Couperin had become preoccupied with the blending of French and Italian styles as did Charpentier, Corrette, Naudot and Boismortier. La Cerf de la Viéville, in his Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique française (1704-6), refers to Couperin as a Passionate servant of Italy. This trend was also being aided and abetted by Italians themselves. For example, while en route from his native Turin, finding it necessary to virtuosically scale the heights and look down from the Jura Mountains towards Paris, this summit even produced Le Vertigo in the future Maître de musique des enfants de France, Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer. He was attracted by the Italian influence that was now being felt in the capital, ultimately becoming responsible for the musical education of the children of the next king, Louis XV. Joseph Bodin de Boismortier (1689-1755) is to Couperin and Rameau what Telemann is to Bach and Handel: (more or less) contemporaries all but with a dilettantist (melodious and technically-accessible music) viewpoint on composition i.e. la musique qui peuvent se jouer... facilement. Boismortier was so prolific that his opus numbers exceeded 100 (most of these being collections or sets of compositions), offering a vast array of sonatas and concertos for recorder, flute, oboe, bassoon, violin, viola da gamba, vielle (hurdy-gurdy) and violoncello equalled only in this era by Antonio Vivaldi! In France, Boismortier was the first to appropriate the term concerto for a composition s title. Initially finding work as a tax collector in the Pyrenees, ultimately he was probably the only composer anywhere in the first half of the 18 th century to make a living (and a fortune!) entirely from the sales of his own compositions, having arrived in Paris in 1724 and been granted a Royal Privilege to print his own editions. Jean-Benjamin-François de la Borde (1734-94), pupil of Rameau, librettist, music commentator and composer whose colourful life was cut short by the guillotine, remarks of Boismortier, in his Essai sur la musique ancienne et modern (Tome III 1780) [while] he will always be regarded by professionals as a good harmonist... anyone who will take the trouble to excavate this abandoned mine might find enough gold dust there to make up an ingot! Such a derogatory assessment of Boismortier is unwarranted. Partly on account of his prolificacy, and partly because many of his works were written either for performance by amateurs or to cater to popular taste, Boismortier

has by and large been regarded as a facile composer, and his music has not received the positive press it deserves. Michel Corrette s name is associated first and foremost with his 25 Concertos Comiques, composed on popular themes. Pierre Larderet claims they were entitled comic...because [Corrette] gives the lead role, instrumentally speaking, to characters from the [comic] stage. As a kind of corroborating musical comedy, they were conducted by the composer during the intermission at performances of L Opéra-comique in the open-air theatres at the St. Laurent and St. Germain fairs. With his Concerto Comique XVIII, entitled «La Tourière» (1760), the reference is to the Turning box or wheel at the entrance of a convent into which very young girls could be deposited from the street. Entrance to a convent at a very young age was perceived as a blessing to the future novice. The turning box could then be rotated from the inside by an attendant nun, who would receive the foundling all the while keeping the anonymity of the person who donated the girl to the convent. A contemporary of Royer, Corrette s career spanned almost the entire century: his enormous output and his long life, which saw the shift in taste that took place near mid-century (with the onset of the Rococo Era), prompted the musicologist Paul Louis Roualle de Boisgelou (1732-1806; a contemporary of Haydn) to pen a less than flattering assessment: Corrette was a prolific composer, but his work died before he did. As with Boismortier, that is surely an unkind comment. Perhaps it is more a comment on the eventual state of music in France overall, as was the product of all its native composers. All that Louis, le Roi-Soleil, had embodied, together with Lieutenant Lully, through the ebb and flow of fickle fashion, changes of monarch, political turmoil and the eventual dearth of Rameaus at the heights of their creative powers, gradually ebbed right away. The Rococo Era had dawned and with it, the holus bolus takeover of le goût italien. Be that as it may, sit a while and soak up the rays of the Sun King and his French Baroque Epoch. They may not be Venetian or Roman or Florentine, but they do still have an astonishing lasting vibrancy and warmth. Tim Blomfield 2015