The Ranums' Panat Times

 Marc-Antoine Charpentier
See other Musings about Word-Music relations
 

Access the other declamation  teaching sheets

My handouts for the Baroque Academy sponsored by the Festival of Ambronnay, 1998

 For other  Musings about Thésée, see:
Thésée at Ambronnay
 and Two Songs from Lully's Thésée

In 1998 I prepared the following crib sheets for the singers who were preparing Lully's Thésée.

First I explained that musical declamation was notated in the melody, and that roughly half of these musical clues reflected the constraints with which Philippe Quinault, the librettist, had to deal, and the other half reflected the lessons Lully had learned while listening to the tragedienne La Champmeslé. Then, working on a one-to-one basis, I walked them through the following 10 rules, which filled the following 7 sheets of paper.

The pages seem terribly didactic, but they worked ― usually within an hour!

The first four pages contain a discussion of the poetic constraints within which Philippe Quinault had to work; and my  presentation of how the notation reflects Lully's  rendering of La Champmeslé's declamation begins at the bottom of page 4:

Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4

The bottom of page 4, and continuing onto pages 5 and 6, contains my  presentation of how the notation reflects Lully's  rendering of La Champmeslé's declamation

Page 4, Page 5, Page 6

Page 7 shows some basic speech melodies

Page 7

Note: although the scanned pages can be read online, they generally do not print on a single page. If you want to print a specific page, I suggest that you right-click on the illustration, chose the option "Save Picture As...", and save it to a file on your computer (for example, "My Pictures").