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Return
to my Musing on Charpentier's Roman Stay
Philip Grover's Evidence against the "Longueville Thread"
The following message, sent to me in May 2001 by Philip Grover, a
doctoral student at Oxford University, permits musicologists to henceforth
rule out my hypothesis that Charpentier went to Rome in the suite
of the Duke of Longueville. I thank Mr. Grover for permitting me to quote
portions of the message, thereby making his research findings available to
other scholars. He writes:
"At present I am completing a Ph.D. on the House of Orleans-Longueville and
am therefore very interested in the visits to Rome of Jean-Louis-Charles
d'Orleans, duc de Longueville. I am writing this short note just to confirm
what you might already have suspected, that in fact Charpentier was not
part of the Longueville contingent there.
Basing much of my work on the previously unused Longueville accounts, I have
uncovered complete listings for the Longueville household and these include
the names of household officers etc. who accompanied the young duke on his
various voyages. Unfortunately it would appear that Marc-Antoine Charpentier's
name does not figure in any of these various lists (though a small payment
was made in 1670 to a certain Jean Charpentier 'qui a servy de garcon
dud. carosse', but I imagine this was a common name and no relation of
the composer), and during the course of my four years' research I have not
come across his name in any other connection with the dynasty either. Nor
does his name figure in the lists of pensions given out by the House of
Longueville during the 1660s. It would therefore seem to me extremely unlikely
that the composer was part of any Longueville contingent staying in Rome.
Furthermore, it should also be recalled that JLC was defying family orders
- those of his mother, the dowager duchesse de Longueville, and his uncle,
the prince de Condé - to go to Rome in the first place, so it must
be considered unlikely that Charpentier would have even risked losing
Condé's support of his cousins by associating with the prince's errant
nephew. Finally, one should mention that the young duc de Longueville did
not, in any case, stay in Rome for the whole of this 'three-year' period.
Instead he made two entirely separate visits to the city (in between which
he returned to France and made several other voyages): his first stay in
Rome lasted only from November 1666 to February 1667, even if his second
stay during 1669 was somewhat longer, culminating, as you point out, in his
being ordained a priest in December 1669.
I hope these few facts might be of some interest. I aim to establish a much
fuller chronology for these various aspects of the young duke's life in my
forthcoming thesis on the House of Longueville. As you will no doubt know,
the Longueville have been almost totally (and quite inexplicably) ignored
by historians until now, so establishing a solid basis of research has not
been easy, but I am now writing up the results of my research."
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Charpentier's Roman Stay
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