Until the mid-20th century, the music of French Baroque composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643–1704) had been mostly forgotten. Fortunately, this prolific composer—who excelled in all popular genres of music in his time, both sacred and secular—bequeathed most of his scores at his death to his nephew, who subsequently sold them to Paris’s Royal Library, where they were carefully preserved, but not performed.
As 20th-century musicians and scholars in France and America—William Christie prominent among them—began to explore this treasure trove, they were stunned by the superb quality of what they saw. Mr. Christie even named his ensemble Les Arts Florissants after one of Charpentier’s musical divertissements. Today, more and more musicians are proclaiming Charpentier the greatest French composer of the 17th century, far exceeding the more famous Jean-Baptiste Lully in the originality and expressiveness of his music. And few would contest his supremacy in sacred music.
Charpentier’s music must speak for itself, for little is known about his personality or life beyond the illustrious institutions for which he worked. A few tantalizing bits can be found in his curious work Epitaphium Carpentarii, an epitaph written in dialogue form shortly before his death in 1704, in which he returns as a ghost to examine some aspects of his life. It includes this bitter summation: “I was a musician, considered good by the good musicians, and ignorant by the ignorant ones. And since those who scorned me were more numerous than those who praised me, music brought me small honor and great burdens. And just as I at birth brought nothing into this world, thus when I died, I took nothing away.”
We do know the basic milestones of Charpentier’s career. Born in Paris in 1643, he went to Rome around 1662 and spent most of the remainder of that decade studying with the great composer Giacomo Carissimi, whose richly expressive music influenced him for the rest of his life. Upon returning to France around 1670, he joined the household of the pious and extremely wealthy Marie de Lorraine, Duchesse de Guise and generally known as Mademoiselle de Guise. At her grand estate in Paris, Mlle de Guise maintained an array of exceptional instrumentalists and singers who rivaled those at the French court. Giving Charpentier an apartment at her palace, she treated him more as an artistic associate than a servant.
When Lully broke off his association with Molière and his acting company in 1672, Charpentier was hired to create incidental music for the playwright’s scintillating comedies, including his last, Le malade imaginaire. Upon Molière’s death in 1673, his troupe, under Louis XIV’s command, was renamed the Comédie-Française, with Charpentier continuing as its composer.
One man stood in the way of Charpentier’s acceptance as a musician at the Court of the Sun King—Lully, Louis XIV’s mâitre de musique. Ambitious to a fault, Lully dictated Louis XIV’s musical choices and would not tolerate any rival as gifted as Charpentier. He also blocked the younger composer from writing operas for the Académie Royale de Musique at the Paris Opéra. Though Charpentier eventually was appointed mâitre de musique to Louis’s son and heir, the Grand Dauphin, he always remained on the fringes of the royal court.
Aside from Lully’s jealousy, the conflict between the two composers was intensified by a much larger conflict within 17th-century French music. Though he was born in Italy, Lully became the leader of the French school of music. Many French musicians and their patrons intensely disliked the encroachment of Italian influences in their music—Italian music being more daringly expressive than the French style and considered too operatic. The orthodox French style was cooler and more objective in tone, emphasizing refinement and clarity. Inspired by his teacher Carissimi, Charpentier had no hesitation about bringing Italianisms into his music, “including flowing melody, dramatic uses of silence, chromaticism, and learned harmonies shimmering with sweet or harsh dissonances and expressive modulations,” in the words of Charpentier scholar Catherine Cessac. Charpentier’s music, whether secular or sacred, was highly expressive, stirring the emotions of listeners.
If the court and opera were barred to him, the deeply religious Charpentier found his true home in the church. After composing for Mlle de Guise’s chapel and other churches and abbeys around Paris, sometime in the 1680s he was chosen to be composer and eventually mâitre de musique for the Jesuits’ principal Parisian church, the spectacular Église Saint-Louis, where artistic extravagance flourished alongside religious devotion. In fact, Saint-Louis became popularly known as “L’église de opéra.” Here, as well as for the Jesuits’ educational institution, the Collège Louis-le-Grand, Charpentier composed much of his greatest music. In his final years, he became the mâitre de musique of Paris’s Sainte-Chapelle with its dazzling walls of stained glass.
The 17th century was a time when, under the sway of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, religious faith and the power of the church flourished across France as rarely before. The Jesuits (Ignatius of Loyola’s Society of Jesus) were the intellectual leaders of the Catholic Reformation. In France, they were equally devoted to the arts, both secular and sacred, and Saint-Louis reflected this in its fabulously elaborate architecture and decor, as well as the splendor of its music performed by Paris’s finest singers and instrumentalists.
The Royal Court and Parisian connoisseurs flocked to Saint-Louis’s services, especially during the Lenten season before Easter when both theaters and L’Opéra were closed. The theatricality of these services compensated them richly for what they were missing in their customary entertainments. Cessac writes, “The beauties of architecture, sculpture, painting, and decorations; the pervasive odors of incense, glowing candles, and the blazing candelabra; the priests’ rich velvet, silk, and lace finery; the swell of the preacher’s voice, now menacing, now reassuring; and finally the music, filling this atmosphere of devotion and magnificence with its chords—all combined to turn ceremonies into sophisticated and enchanting spectacles.”
Throughout the Lenten season, Parisians of all classes filled churches to hear the leading preachers of the day deliver sermons of great length—and sometimes eloquence. During these sermons, short motets could be inserted to inspire the worshippers to meditate on the words they were hearing. That was undoubtedly the purpose for Charpentier’s Méditations pour le Carême (Meditations for Lent): 10 brief motets that serve as a musical Stations of the Cross, tracing Christ’s path from the Garden of Gethsemane to his arrest and trial before Pontius Pilate, his crucifixion on Calvary, and his burial in a donated tomb.
Using three male singers accompanied only by continuo bass instruments, these little motets vividly create theatrical scenes that feature the Biblical characters of Christ’s Passion. Their words come from varied sources: Some are drawn directly from the Gospels, others are liturgical texts like the “Stabat Mater,” and a few are free texts written by unknown authors.
In Psalm-like free verse, the first two meditations, “Desolatione desolata est” (“The whole land is made desolate”) and “Sicut pullus hirundinis” (“Like a swallow”), paint a scene of physical and moral desolation representing humankind’s separation from God. Charpentier sets the verse in an Italian madrigal style, moving flexibly between duple and triple meters as the words dictate and varying his textures from solo voices to three-voice counterpoint. His skillful deployment of natural speech rhythms brings each word to glowing life.
Slower and more introspective, the third meditation—“Tristis est anima mea” (“My soul is sorrowful”)—takes us to Gethsemane, where Jesus asks his disciples to watch with him as he prays for God to remove this sacrifice from him. The texture is more homophonic, the better for maximum clarity of this very intimate, painful liturgical text. Throughout, Charpentier uses chromaticism to build the emotional tension.
Number four, “Ecce Judas” (“Behold, Judas”), is an action scene in which Judas arrives to betray Jesus. Charpentier adopts the fiery Italian stile concitato to portray the violence erupting as the soldiers lay hold of Jesus. But this meditation also contains a lovely lyrical song of friendship as Jesus mildly asks Judas why he should betray him with a kiss.
Meditation five, “Cum cenasset Jesus” (“At supper Jesus”), returns to the Last Supper when Jesus told the disciples that all would flee from him, but Peter staunchly said he would not. It then fast-forwards to the scene outside Pilate’s palace, where Peter indeed denies Jesus three times. The vocal trio serves as a Greek chorus narrating this story, with the tenor enacting Jesus and the bass a delightfully blustery Peter. The piece closes with a passage of marvelous polyphony describing Peter weeping as he realizes what he has done.
Yet another Biblical scene is dramatized in “Quarebat Pilatus dimittere Jesum” (“Thenceforth Pilate sought to release him”) as Pilate—in this telling of the tale—unconvinced of Jesus’s guilt, struggles with a mob demanding Jesus be crucified. Again, Charpentier deploys his singers artfully: The bass sings the role of Pilate with lofty detachment while the trio yammers in frantic, imitative counterpoint, “Take him (Tolle)! Crucify him!”
In the Second Response, we hear one setting of the liturgical text “Tenebrae factae sunt” (“There was darkness”); here, the seventh meditation provides a fuller version of the Biblical chronicle of Jesus’s death. The tenor is cast as Jesus, and his last words commending his spirit to God are voiced in a sublime ascending phrase. His death is announced in the grinding dissonances of the trio. “Stabat mater dolorosa” (“Stood the mournful mother”) is one of the Catholic Church’s most revered liturgical texts. These familiar words describing Mary at the foot of Jesus’s cross are set as a folk-like melody migrating through the voices.
An anonymous text not in the Bible, “Sola vivebat in antris” (“Dwelling solitary in caves”) is Mary Magdalene’s passionate lament for the dead Jesus. This ninth meditation is the most Italianate of them all: an ardent love song with a gorgeous rocking refrain, “O amor meus cor,” that some worshippers may have been humming as they left church.
Departing from the Passion story, meditation 10—“Tentavit Deus Abraham” (“God tempted Abraham”)—returns to the Old Testament and Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of his son Isaac, here representing the image of Jesus as the sacrificial lamb. This is another theatrical scene with skillfully inflected dialogue between God (bass), Abraham (tenor), and Isaac (countertenor). The musical excitement builds and builds as Abraham prepares to slay his son. And then, the piece simply stops.
As music for Lent, no happy ending is appropriate, and with this startling musical twist, Charpentier concludes his deeply affecting Méditations.
Among the most dramatic services of the days preceding Easter were the Leçons de Ténèbres or Lessons of Darkness, held on the evenings of Holy Wednesday, Holy Thursday, and Good Friday. During these ceremonies, the church was largely in darkness except for candles arrayed on a large triangular frame; as the lesson proceeded, these candles were extinguished one by one to symbolize the shadows that swept over the earth when Jesus died on the cross.
The texts for these lessons were drawn from the Book of Lamentations, attributed to the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah and found in the biblical Apocrypha. These mournful verses describe the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple by the Chaldeans in 587 BCE, along with the prophet’s denunciation of the sins of the Hebrews that provoked it. That catastrophe parallels the later tragedy of Jesus’s crucifixion.
Initially, the Catholic Church decreed these lessons should be sung only in Gregorian chant with no orchestral accompaniment. However, by the late 16th century, such austere strictures were dropped; in Charpentier’s time, the French settings were elaborately polyphonic, typically using three voices—alto or countertenor, tenor, and bass—and accompanied by high melody and low continuo instruments.
We hear two sets of Tenebrae lessons Charpentier created for Saint-Louis around 1690. The first is the Third Tenebrae Lesson for Holy Thursday, H. 124; Holy Thursday is the day commemorating the Last Supper and Jesus’s capture in the Garden of Gethsemane. Instead of using the full vocal trio for these verses, Charpentier assigns them to a soloist: the tenor who sings the middle part in the trio. He gives an especially prominent role to his orchestral ensemble, which is dominated by the plangent melancholy of two flutes. The instruments establish the mood of the lesson with a prelude of lyrical but solemn tenderness. They also link the three strophes together with extended interludes and comment throughout on the singer’s phrases.
Each strophe of the verses opens with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, taking the place of a number; they are sung as flowing melismas by the soloist.
In his earlier settings of Tenebrae lessons, Charpentier made the vocal lines elaborately florid in the French style. But since this practice obscures the all-important words, in these later sets he uses ornaments judiciously, reserving them for emotional emphasis of key words. A marvelous passage occurs at the end of the second strophe, when both singer and instruments drop to a very low register to express the words, “He hath set me in dark places.” And in the last line of the verses, wayward coloratura illustrates, “He hath turned my paths upside down.”
Each Tenebrae lesson closes with the words, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, be converted to the Lord thy God,” Jeremiah’s exhortation that the Jews repent and restore their relationship with God. Adopting a quicker tempo and a more positive spirit, the instruments introduce an elaborate arioso for the singer, urging the listeners to choose the path of reconciliation.
At the close of this concert, we hear the Third Tenebrae Lesson for Holy Friday, H. 137, a richly expansive setting of another section of Lamentations using the male vocal trio. It opens with a substantial orchestral introduction led by the flutes that sets the scene of desolation hovering over the surviving citizens of Jerusalem, again paralleling the horror of Good Friday. Incorporated within this introduction are the two higher voices intoning the titular words, “Incipit oratorio Jeremiae Prophetae.”
Charpentier powerfully deploys his vocal and instrumental forces in this portrayal of a broken people, reduced to starvation and servitude. Imitative counterpoint is a major device as voice upon voice piles on to describe the suffering of each individual. A stunning moment comes in the last stanza at the words, “Mulieres in Sion humiliaverunt” (“They oppressed the women in Sion”), as the voices, slightly out of phase, slip downward chromatically.
Again, the lesson closes with the words, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” this time expanded into a superb miniature motet in which instruments and voices spin their polyphony around the compelling melody.
After the singing of each lesson comes a responsory, which—though briefer than the lesson—is frequently more emotionally moving. Perhaps the most beautiful of them is the Second Responsory after the Second Lesson from the Second Nocturne for Holy Thursday, which is based on the scriptural passage “Tenebrae factae sunt” (“They are made of darkness”), describing Jesus’s last words and death on the cross. Charpentier’s music epitomizes the state of darkness through his choice of a bass voice as narrator, accompanied by a hushed, low-pitched string orchestra with very slowly moving harmonies and jarring dissonances.
In Cessac’s words, “Charpentier closely follows every word and every breath of the suffering Christ, while the orchestra weaves an impressive lament around the vocal line with mournful dissonances and pregnant silences. Everything here is eloquent, describing actions and sights: the voice in the low register … the tenderness of the modulation when Christ addresses His Father … and the astounding harmonies of the final measures.”
—Janet E. Bedell