On Medee

The Ranums' Panat Times

On Charpentier's Médée

Did Marc-Antoine Charpentier "identify" himself with Medea?

Downing A. Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647-1785 (Cambridge U.P., 2002), devotes a chapter to Marc-Antoine Charpentier. In this chapter entitled "The disruption of poetics: Médée's excessive voice," he sets Charpentier's Médée and its Italianisms against Lully's operas that were being vociferously supported by the Lulliophiles who opposed a more savant and Italianate "new music."

By the time I finished the chapter, I was saying to myself: "How interesting! Why did I fail to notice that 'most' of the sources that mention Médée were 'identifying' Charpentier with that barbarous barbarian, Medea? I must go back and reread my notes!"

D.A. Thomas's argument

I will use primarily D.A. Thomas's own words to summarize his argument, which is based on the notion of "otherness," "alterity," that in recent years has been shaping trendy papers at French-literature conferences. To bring out Thomas's principal points about an "identification" of Charpentier with Medea, I have added bold face and underlining; I use small caps when he alludes to "otherness."

"I [D.A. Thomas] was struck by a detail: the provocative connection between the composer and his central character that emerges from most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century commentaries on Médée" (p. 129).
"Quite consistently, and apparently unwittingly, commentators identified Charpentier with Medea" (p. 129), asserts D.A. Thomas. In subsequent pages he drops hints about the nature of this "identification": Thomas Corneille and Charpentier, he proposes, "allegorized" Medea, mirrored themselves and their works in this woman who "can be said to constitute a 'return of the repressed' after the death of [Lully]" (p. 130) and who "exacts spectacular revenge upon her persecutors" (pp. 131-132).
"One might even go so far as to suggest that Thomas Corneille and Charpentier returned to Médée [a subject earlier treated by Thomas's brother, Pierre] in order to portray the otherness of opera itself in relation to late seventeenth-century spoken tragedy. In this light Médée could be understood to represent opera, through the figure of the exiled woman, as a "victimized" genre, one whose ostentatious spectacle and music were criticized because they threatened the aesthetic of interiorization and sublimation that dominates so many spoken tragedies by Pierre Corneille and Racine" (p. 131).
D.A. Thomas then compares Pierre Corneille's verse play Médée with the libretto for Médée by his younger brother Thomas. In the process he quotes Lacan and Euripides (and a bit later he relies on the observations of late-twentieth-century scholars of French literature).
Next he points out that Medea was not only an Asiatic "barbarian" (barbare), she also behaved in a "barbarous" way. (Four lines in the libretto do indeed apply the adjective barbare to her, but always in the context of the blood she sheds, not her foreignness.) This leads him to draw the following parallel, which serves as the heart of his argument: "Two of Medea's most obvious distinguishing characteristics, in all versions of the myth, contribute to early-modern commentators' tendency to identify Charpentier with Medea: her status as a foreigner among Greeks, and her knowledge and use of magic to terrible ends. Medea's barbarous otherness and her sorcery come to stand for the foreign roots of Charpentier's art. ... The Parfaict brothers, for example, noted that after his return from Italy Charpentier 'refused to write anything but very difficult music, music whose harmony and theoretical basis were heretofore unknown to the French. This brought him the reputation of being a barbarous composer'" (p. 135). A few snippets from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century statements about Charpentier's savant music follow.
"The comparison [with Medea] was thus being used to confirm or rehearse a conviction on the part of the commentators that Charpentier had drawn upon an enigmatic, foreign knowledge (science), one with which he conjured up complicated, discordant music with perhaps questionable and certainly bewitching effects ('charms') on the listener" (p. 135).
"If the identification of composer and character proved to be so irresistible or unavoidable, I want to suggest that it was in some measure deliberately orchestrated by Charpentier himself" (p. 136). D.A. Thomas backs up this "suggestion" with a footnote about the composer's Epitaphium Carpentarii where, not surprisingly, the central character is Charpentier himself. (Entre parenthèses, the Epitaphium could scarcely have known beyond Charpentier's circle of friends: it remained in his private files until his death, was passed on to his bookseller nephew, and was sold to the Bibliothèque du Roy in the late 1720s where it remained uncatalogued until 1752. For a discussion of the commonplaces upon which the libretto is based, see Françoise Waquet's article on the Epitaphium, in Marc-Antoine Charpentier, un musicien retrouvé, to be published in 2005 by the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles and Editions Mardaga.)
In the next sentence D.A. Thomas elaborates upon this "suggestion": "Charpentier ... created a Medea who would embody the foreignness of his work in relation to the normative musicality of late-seventeenth-century French compositional practices." This "foreignness," D.A. Thomas subsequently explains, results primarily from Charpentier's Italianate dissonances, which make Medea sound foreign compared to the other characters in the opera, and compared to the characters in Lully's operas (pp. 137-146). Indeed, asserts D.A. Thomas, "it was precisely through this kind of harmonic writing that Charpentier produced an effect of difference that of his opera in relation to the norms of the genre, and that of Medea as she gradually defines herself in relation to the utterances of the others" (p. 146).
"The fissuring of Medea as a character who is ostracized by others and who slowly resolves to inhabit that otherness suits perfectly Charpentier's purpose: for it allows Medea ... to stand for the work at the same time that she is an actor in the tragedy" (p. 147).
As D.A. Thomas prepares the peroration of this chapter, he returns to the "commentators" on Médée: "If commentators identified Charpentier, the barbarous Italianate composer, with Medea, the monstrous woman, ..." (p. 149). (His "If" scarcely can be read in the conditional: he clearly means "Because.")
D.A. Thomas's ultimate allusion to the hidden meaning in Médée extends his argument beyond Marc-Antoine Charpentier, to encompass the status of "lyric tragedy in general": "By realigning their Medea with that of Euripides, by distancing their version from that of Pierre Corneille, and by using differentiated voices and musical forms, Thomas Corneille and Charpentier staged the repudiation of Medea as a performance piece designed to represent the situation of lyric tragedy in general and that of Charpentier in particular" (p. 151).

D.A. Thomas's argument is built upon two findings, let us call them two "pillars" that support his argument:

1) Charpentier's "otherness," which has three facets:

a) his feelings of rejection at Lully's monopoly over opera (and, presumably, his quashing of music in the spoken theater,
b) his Italian training,
c) his savoir

2) Charpentier's "identification" with Medea.

Having gone through all the available evidence, I regretfully conclude that these two pillars were built on sand. There is no evidence that Charpentier had been excluded from the creative circles around the Sun King as a result of his savoir and his Italianisms. No one alludes to any feelings of rejection. In general his savoir is commended, as is his familiarity with the Italian style. Nor, it turns out, do "most" commentators suggest, explicitly or implicitly, that Charpentier "identified" himself with Medea the outcast.

My reading of the evidence is available on separate pages. The first one presents my observations about the alleged "otherness" of Charpentier. The second presents excerpts from the known commentators on Charpentier, quite a few of whom D.A. Thomas does not cite. My own observations accompany the citations.

Otherness Commentators Thomas replies

If I misread Dowling A. Thomas, or if he unearthed evidence from commentators unknown to Carpentarianists but decided not to cite this evidence in the notes or bibliography of his book, I will be pleased to publish his reply and/or his contribution to musicological knowledge.

As the above link shows, Dowling A. Thomas replied to my criticisms

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