The Ranums' Panat Times

At the end of the autograph score of Marc-Antoine Charpentier's
"Les Arts Florissants" comes a "continuation" (suite) in Latin,
to honor the Virgin

Written in the late 1990s and put on this site in 2000.

Note: For a refutation of my hypotheses, see Gaëtan Naulleau's recent article on Charpentier's Sonate

Keeping up with all the things written about Marc-Antoine Charpentier has become difficult! It is especially hard for those of us who don't have ready access to French newspapers, concert programs, and so forth. Still, as far as I know, no one has commented on an explicit linkage between Les Arts Florissants (H. 487), his "opera" for the Guise singers, and Ad beatam Virginem canticum (H. 340).

Why is this intriguing fact generally overlooked — or deemed so unimportant that it can be disregarded? It's only a hunch, but I suspect the explanation lies in the fact that Wiley Hitchcock grouped (and numbered) Charpentier's works by genre, rather than according to their chronological order in the two series of notebooks. When he made this choice, Hitchcock was, of course, responding to the preoccupations of performers and musicologists — who tend to focus more on genres than on what Charpentier was doing, piece after piece and month after month. Put another way, when someone is interested in performing or studying an opera in the vernacular, at that moment it is more or less irrelevant to them that Charpentier tacked a Latin piece for the Virgin onto that opera. And if someone is preparing to record pieces honoring the Virgin, he tends to focus exclusively on Charpentier's many pieces in that genre — so a possible link between one of these works and a secular opera is scarcely a consideration .

Yet there it is, as clear as day, in cahier 47: "suite, ad Beatam Virginem canticum."

To be specific, Les Arts Florissants comes to an end on fol. 86v with "demeure, demeure toujours avec nous." At the left margin of that folio, the final words fill the first two measures of the system. Then, above the next measures — and with no real space between the end of the opera and the start of the Canticum — come the instructions ("suite") to move on to a prelude for two flutes, two violins, and continuo. The absence of a space between two pieces, be they related or not, is very unusual in Charpentier's notebooks: he usually ends a work with the sort of "squiggle" that follows the final bar of Les Arts Florissants, plus quite a bit of blank space. [Later addition to this Musing: but here the squiggle or flourish reaches out to the Canticum, with none of the space one would expect to set one work off from the other]. Then, if the works are related, he writes "suivez" or a similar expression, in the blank space that separates the two linked pieces. Charpentier uses "suite" a second time, just below the staff shown in the above illustration: there he means that the prelude "continues" on the three staves just below that word. He uses "suite" in the same way on the final verso of cahier 27 (vol. 4, p. 84 of Minkoff facsimile) where the Premier Aleph, part of H. 102, was sung by three nuns at the Abbaye-aux-Bois. It is followed — on the same stave and with no space between the final note of Aleph — by a Beth for two of the nuns, for the very same service, "Ténèbres du jeudi saint."  And back in cahier 2 (vol. 1, fols. 9 and 9v, and in fols. 10, and 10v) he used "suite" in that very same way: although a pause or a spoken text could conceivably have separated one piece from the next, the pieces were part of the same religious services and therefore "followed" one another.

In other words, there is strong evidence that the Canticum was supposed to follow Les Arts Florissants, perhaps with a brief pause, but as part of the same event. In fact, at this point the "violes" — the preferred instrument of the Guise instrumental ensemble — that had performed in Les Arts Florissants yield to "violons." Little wonder, therefore, that no one seems to have focused on the fact that H. 487 and H. 340 were written for the same event! This shift from one type of string instrument to another is so unexpected that someone skimming Catherine Cessac's tables of Charpentier's works (specifically, p. 487 of her Marc-Antoine Charpentier) has no reason to believe that the Latin work (H. 340) was intended as a "continuation" of the French opera (H. 487)

This mysterious shift in instruments would, however, seem to be explained by a third composition, which also appears to have intended for this event: the Sonate pour deux flûtes allemandes, 2 dessus de violon, une basse de viole, une basse de violon à 5 cordes, un clavecin et un théorbe (H. 548). Like the other two pieces, the Sonate has more or less been studied as a genre, rather than as one element of a musical whole. This may explain why little attention tends to be paid to the fact that the autograph part-books of this pioneering "sonata" had been placed (perhaps by Charpentier himself?) in the packet that contained the separate part-books of Les Arts Florissants. (The part-books for the opera were later given the call number Vm 1059; not until the twentieth century were the part-books for the sonata removed from the bundle and given their own call number, Vm⁷ 4813.)

The fact that these two sets of part-books were originally filed together, prompted Catherine Cessac to conclude that "the composition of the two works [H. 487 and H. 548] therefore appears contemporary" (Marc-Antoine Charpentier, p. 518). The watermarks do not, alas, permit us to move from "appearance" to assertion, for the paper used for the sonata does not appear in any other of Charpentier's autograph manuscripts.

(Julie Sadie, Early Music, 1979, p. 331, implies that since the paper used for the Sonate has a watermark that shows a bunch of grapes, and since is the same size as the paper used for the rest of the "Meslanges," it is somehow identical to the paper employed for Les Arts Florissants and/or its part-books. She is wrong. True, one of the watermarks in the sonata paper is a bunch of grapes, but this extremely common mark is related to the quality and size of the paper and, taken by itself, is not discriminative. For example, the part-books of Les Arts Florissants, made of paper d, do indeed show a bunch of grapes; so does the paper L employed for cahier 47, into which Charpentier copied the score of Les Arts Florissants. However, for each of these papers, the maker's watermark — which appears in the center of the other half of a folio sheet — is totally different! And although the maker's marks in papers d and L appear elsewhere in Charpentier's notebooks, the maker's mark on the sonata paper is found nowhere else.)

Cessac's point nonetheless seems very well taken. Indeed, I would like to propose that the "two violons" who perform in the sonata may be the same violins for whom Charpentier wrote the prelude to Ad beatam Virginem canticum.

But what about the "flûtes" to which the both Les Arts Florissants and the Canticum refer? Are they recorders? Or are they the transverse flutes — the "flûtes allemandes" — specified in the title of Charpentier's Sonate? The term "flûte" generally referred to a recorder, of course; and most of the music for "flûtes" in the French-numbered (i.e., Guise) notebooks, does indeed seem to have been written for recorders. Still, in the absence of the numerous sharps that tend to make a piece sound bad on a recorder, and in the absence of a note that goes too low for a recorder, it is not always possible to tell which "flûte" is intended. Nor would it be prudent to assume that all of the eight "flûtes" owned by Guise musician Loulié were recorders, not transverse flutes. True, he wrote two methods for recorder, but he did so for pedagogical reasons. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that the flûte allemande — which was becoming increasingly fashionable in the 1680s — was for some mysterious reason banished from the Guise ensemble.

In sum, it is quite plausible that some of the instrumentalists from the Hôtel de Guise, who performed in Les Arts Florissants, performed in the Canticum and the Sonate as well. (The three males who sang the Canticum surely were Guise musicians, among them Charpentier, who sang the haute-contre part in Les Arts Florissants.) On the other hand, it is quite clear that, for the latter two pieces, the Guise musicians were joined by two outside violinists — and, perhaps, by one or even two transverse-flute players.

For the sake of argument, let's therefore assume that the Sonate, Les Arts Florissants, and the Canticum were written for a single event. Although the event had religious overtones — specifically, a devotion to the Virgin — it involved a stage performance of Les Arts Florissants by the Guise ensemble. During this opera, the singers were accompanied by the two "flûtes," two dessus de violes, and the continuo (basse de viole and harpsichord) that typified the Guise instrumental ensemble. No sooner had the opera ended than three of the Guise male singers stepped forward and performed the Canticum, invoking the Virgin's protection. Several non-Guise performers joined the Guise instrumentalists for this piece. At some point in the festivities, the Sonate was performed — the continuo probably being the responsibility of the Guise musicians, while the guest performers demonstrated their skills with the transverse flute and the violin. (I say that the violinists were "guests" because throughout the "French" notebooks, wherever a violin is specified, the work clearly was written for a special musical event involving hired performers.)

Why the Canticum? Does any of the evidence gathered thus far about the milieu within which Charpentier composed permit us to reconcile this devotional piece with such worldly genres as an opera or a sonata? I would like to propose two very similar contexts in which this mixture of secular and religious could have taken place.

Let's look first at the words of the Canticum, which explain the event being celebrated: "Today Mary the Virgin receives all of us as servants" (Hodie Maria virgo suscepit nos omnes in servos suos). It also adds information about "us": "Here we are, and the boys whom the Lord has given us, to serve them in thy name, to serve them, Mary, in thy name" (Ecce nos et pueri quos dedit nobis Dominus, serva eos in nomine tuo, serva eos Maria in nomine tuo). In other words, "we" is a group of adults who have been entrusted with a group of boys; and these boys will, in the name of the Lord, be raised as servants of the Virgin.

By the time he wrote Les Arts Florissants, Charpentier had a long-standing working relationship with the Jesuits — primarily, or so it seems, with the fathers of the profess house of Saint-Louis. But at some point in the 1680s Charpentier began working for the Jesuit collège: thus he composed Celse martyr for the annual pre-Lenten festivities at the Collège de Clermont (Louis- le-Grand), held on February 10, 1687. Judging from the paper that Charpentier employed for the score of Les Arts Florissants, this opera dates from the summer of 1685. It therefore coincides with another annual event at the Collège de Clermont: the award ceremony held each August, to reward the best students. Now, on August 6, 1685, a ballet entitled Le Ballet des Arts was performed at the collège in conjunction with a Latin tragedy, Clisson. However, despite similarities in the title, the livre de sujet for the Ballet (BN, Rés. Yf 434) has no points in common with the libretto of Charpentier's Les Arts Florissants.

That does not, of course, rule out the possibility that Charpentier's opera was intended for an end-of-term ceremony organized at the Jesuit collège that summer. For, as I show in my latest contribution to the Bulletin Charpentier ("Marc-Antoine Charpentier compositeur pour les Jésuites, 1687-1698: quelques considérations programmatiques"), there were several "Congregations of the Virgin" at the Collège de Clermont, including a congregation reserved for the very best pupils. One might therefore be tempted to conclude that Charpentier wrote Les Arts Florissants, the Sonate and the Canticum for the collège.

But if the opera was written for the collège, how does one explain the prominent role played by the Guise singers that day? True, in November 1676 Their Highnesses' singers apparently performed Charpentier's earliest oratorio in honor of Saint Cecilia at the Jesuit Church of Saint-Louis, during the conversion of a Protestant wrought by Mme de Guise; but the Guise household musicians do not appear to have routinely sung for the Jesuits. (Indeed, would the two pious princesses have allowed their domestics to perform routinely for an order that was being criticized for allowing dissolute opera singers to perform in the House of God? See my Fugitive piece on music at Jesuit services!) And why would Their Highnesses have asked Charpentier to write these three pieces as part of his "ordinary" obligations to them? (For, as I have long argued, this is exactly what the presence of Les Arts Florissants in a so-called "French" notebook clearly implies.)

In sum, although my other Fugitive Piece (the one about music in Jesuit schools) demonstrates that the pupils in these collèges did indeed play "violons, basses de viole, clavessin, et autres instrumens," the Collège de Clermont seems an unlikely venue for the three compositions being considered here. It is far more likely that the three pieces were written for an academic establishment sponsored by one of the Guises, that is, the Académie de l'Enfant Jésus.

The Academy of the Infant Jesus was founded shortly after the death of Mme de Guise's only son. (I have written about this school in another Musing.) Although the exact curriculum taught at this school has not been determined, the goal of these educators was to train the sons of nobles of the robe to be royal servants — and to do so in a climate of devotion unlike the worldliness that characterized the other academies of the capital. Although complemented by monthly vigils around the crêche of the Infant Jesus, the boys' course of study must have resembled the curriculum described by L. Liger in 1715 (Le Voyageur fidèle, ou le guide des étrangers dans la ville de Paris, pp. 322-23). They would have acquired the physical skills taught in other academies for nobles: fencing, riding, and dancing. They definitely studied French, Latin and German grammar (the school published its own textbooks for these subjects); and they almost certainly studied heraldry, drawing, geography, and mathematics (obligatory knowledge for their social class and their future aspirations). In my biography of Loulié (Recherches), I proposed that his recorder and viol methods were written for the Academy, and that he likewise developed a system of teaching young people the "elements" of musical notation. In addition, the boys probably studied some of the other instruments listed by Liger: harpsichord, basse de viole, recorder, transverse flute, theorbe, guitar, and lute (violins are not on his list). The underlined instruments perform in Charpentier's Sonate and his Canticum.

In other words, at the Academy of the Infant Jesus (and also, of course at the Collège de Clermont), we not only find young people who were learning to play the instruments preferred in polite society, we find young people (and their teachers) who had given themselves to Jesus, and who were members of a confraternity — specifically,  in the Academy's case, a confraternity honoring the Infant Jesus. As members of that confraternity, they became not only "domestics of the Holy Infant Jesus" they became the servants of His Mother as well.

All of which brings us back to the lines from the Canticum: "Hodie Maria virgo suscepit nos omnes in servos suos," and "Ecce nos et pueri quos dedit nobis Dominus, serva eos in nomine tuo..." These phrases were, of course, appropriate not only for the students at the Academy, and for the pupils at the Jesuit collège! In short, we are confronted here by a striking example of how other schools emulated the Jesuit collèges.

Indeed, as a conclusion, I would like to propose that Charpentier's three works were written for an end-of-the-term celebration that was modeled after the annual prize-ceremony at the Collège de Clermont. This is the scenario I propose:

On July 16, 1685, the director of the Academy of the Infant Jesus signed a contract with a builder, to enlarge the school buildings (AN, MC, CVI, 68). This was something to celebrate! Eager to keep up with the Jesuits, and having learned that the "Arts" would be celebrated by the collège, the director and faculty of the Academy of the Infant Jesus selected the same theme. For one could not deny that the arts were indeed flourishing at the Academy. Someone at the Academy therefore wrote a libretto alluding to the peace that had recently come, and to the arts that were making that peace even more enjoyable. Having obtained the consent of Her Royal Highness Madame de Guise (who, as the king's first cousin, was always pleased to have the monarch lauded by her musicians), the text was passed on to Charpentier, along with  the text of a special Latin "song" in honor of the Virgin. (Does this piece for Mary suggest the date of the event? That is, circa August 15, when Christians celebrated the Virgin's principal feast day, the Assumption.

As for the Sonate, it can be seen as the instrumental equivalent of a term-end instrumental "ballet." Here the students performed beside their teachers, just as the students at the Collège de Clermont danced with a select group of professionals. I don't have access to a score of the sonata, nor do I have a record of the work. So I'll make a guess! If I were one of the Guise musician-teachers who would be performing alongside the best adolescent students at the Academy, I would probably propose to Charpentier that he write some virtuoso parts for us (for example, we who are masters on the viol and the basse de viole); but I would also suggest that he write something that did not exceed the students' abilities on transverse flutes and violins — and perhaps on theorbe?

Incidentally, none of the evidence I have collected suggests that Les Arts Florissants might have been written for use at either the Hôtel de Guise (where Mlle de Guise reigned) or for a musical event at court (where Mme de Guise had been playing an active social role since the Queen's death in 1683), and that it was reused a few months later, with the Canticum tacked on. Their Highnesses being human, I suspect that they were always perfectly willing to have the Charpentier's works performed at their private musicales. But there is a big difference between ordering the musicians to perform something they have already learned and rehearsed, and commissioning a work that would absorb much of their free time. Judging from the Florentine resident's letters back to Florence, not only was Mlle de Guise preoccupied with business matters and dynastic issues that summer, she was also more interested in Italian music and painting than in the arts that were flourishing at the court of Louis XIV. As for Mme de Guise, although she loyally supported her royal cousin, she set off for her duchy of Alençon in May of 1685, and she appears not have returned to the capital until fall. If Les Arts Florissants was intended for her use, the event would of necessity have to have been scheduled for early 1685 or the winter of 1685-86. However, in Charpentier's notebooks Les Arts Florissants follows works written for early 1685; and it immediately precedes a composition for late November 1685.

In short, the opera almost certainly was intended for performance during the summer of 1685. Two allusions in the libretto confirm this dating. The first is an indirect reference to rivers that come to the gardens of Versailles — that is, the machine de Marly, which was set into action for the first time in June 1684 but did not actually bring water to the chateau until the completion of an aqueduct during the second half of 1685. The second is the emphasis on "peace" — a very temporary state of affairs that began with the truce of Ratisbon of August 1684 and ended during the first half of 1686, when Louis XIV went on the offensive against Spain and Savoy, and the League of Augsburg coalesced. In sum, for the better part of 1685, the libretto of Les Arts Florissants corresponded to the state of affairs in France; but by 1686 the libretto — indeed the central theme of the opera — was hopelessly "outdated" and was not longer appropriate for performance.