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My answer to dating the works in the "Roman" notebooks for 1671-1672 ...
and some musing about who commissioned these works
Late 1671 was a time of all-out war between Mlle de Guise and Mme de Guise,
as a result of the dynastic calamity (Louis Joseph de Lorraine's death in
late July, 1671). During this combat over the guardianship of the little
Duke of Alençon, Mme de Guise was threatening to move to the Luxembourg
Palace. In addition, a lingering fear of contagion had caused the musicians
of the Hôtel de Guise to fall silent once again.
This must have been an anxious time for Charpentier. With the Duke of Guise
dead, there was no reason for his presence at the Hôtel de Guise. (Indeed,
were some of the works that he had written for September 1671 and had copied
into his cahier 2 performed as scheduled?) A long interregnum had begun,
and with it a year of mourning. Even worse, Mlle de Guise and Mme de Guise
were fighting about everything. Would they fight over their ownership of
Charpentier, who in a sense "belonged" to both the Guises and the Orléans?
Would they end up abandoning him by tacit agreement, rather than allow him
work for the other? Even if Mlle de Guise decided to continue her protection
for him, she was already 56 — so elderly, for that era, that she could
die at any time.
Other patrons put an end to some of these worries circa November 1671. Judging
from the contents and paper of cahier IX, which is written on Jesuit
paper and contains five works intended for December services, several friends
of the Guises approached the composer late that fall.
One of them was linked to Rouen and, more specifically, to the church of
Saint-Nicaise. The name of François Harlay de Chanvallon, former
archbishop of Rouen and now archbishop of Paris immediately comes to mind,
for, if my hypotheses are correct, Harlay had sent a commission Charpentier's
way just a year earlier. Another name should however be proposed: François
Rouxel de Médavy, his successor, who came into possession of the
archepiscopal see in December 1671 and who was consecrated on February 17,
1672. [Gallia Christiana, X, col. 113]
Médavy
was the son of Pierre Rouxel de Médavy, comte of Grancey, a League
zelot. He was also the brother of Gaston d'Orléans's chamberlain!
Were the three chants in honor of Saint-Nicaise (H. 55-57) composed for the
day in December 1671 when Médavy took possession of his see? If so,
this would mean that cahier IX dates from 1671 and is more or less contemporary
with cahiers VI to VIII. This also means that works in the "Roman" notebooks
are slightly out of order. That would not be surprising: All it would take
would be for the composer to begin a new notebook in December 1671, having
forgotten that a few pages remained empty at the end of the notebook that
he later called cahier VI (which apparently dates from the spring of 1671).
Trained to save paper by his father, as Charpentier clearly had been (until
he began composing full-time for the Jesuits in the late 1680s, he routinely
extended the staves all the way to the edge of the paper, to avoid using
a new sheet of paper), it would be normal for him to return to cahier VI
for his Messe à 8 voix (H. 3), which seems to date from early
1672. Or was he working concurrently on the mass and on the various commissions
for December 1671? And so, having already begun his personal copy of the
mass, did he simply made a new notebook for the latter works, thereby putting
his Roman notebooks temporarily out of synch?
Whatever the reasons for this slight chronological discrepancy, which clearly
did not result from the works themselves but from the order in which the
composer copied them into his archives, one thing is clear: cahier IX contains
works for the month of December. In other words, if one supposes that my
general chronology of the works in the Roman series is correct, this means
that between folio 5 verso and folio 6 recto of cahier VI, there appears to
be a hiatus of eleven months (February 1671 to January 1672) ! That is to
say, the works composed for December 1670 fill cahiers I to V; and those
for December 1672 begin in cahier XII. In other words, two years
appear to separate cahiers V and XII. This apparent hiatus merits
investigation. Can we find the missing works for December 1671?
If these works exist, they should take the form of a cluster of works for
December and should should located approximately mid-way between cahier V
and cahier XII. These "missing" compositions for December do in fact show
up: they are to be found in cahier IX.
In other words, at some point before Charpentier set about numbering his
notebooks (a procedure that, as far as I can judge, did not take place until
the 1680s), the future cahier IX must have been taken out and put back slightly
out of order. That is, instead of putting it in front of the three
notebooks that contain the Messe à 8 voix, the notebook was
reinserted into the pile after the mass.
Note: Another Musing focuses on 1671-1672, and
especially on his "Mass for 8 Voices" |
