Go to the
opening page of Patricia's "Musings"
Word-Music Relations
Go to
The introductory page
about manuscript XLI
Thirty years
tracking Marc-Antoine Charpentier!
a Musing on reciprocity, and on the joys of scholarly discovery
¡°Exempts l¡¯un et
l¡¯autre de cette basse et sotte jalousie dont ceux d¡¯une meme profession
sont presque tous animez , nous nous communiquions bonnement nos d¨¦couvertes¡±
(S¨¦bastien de Brossard about his friend Étienne Louli¨¦)
¡°There is a
destiny That makes us brothers: None goes his way alone: All that we send
into the lives of others Comes back into our own.¡± (Edwin Markham)
My
seventy-eighth birthday will descend upon me in early November 2010. That
may be why identifying Charpentier¡¯s theoretical ¡°manuscript XLI¡± in early
November 2009 means so much to me. That this discovery took place only a few
days after my last birthday doubtlessly makes me nostalgic about some
of the more important evidence discovered about Charpentier and his circle
during the past three decades. Yes, thirty years! During those thirty years,
I¡¯ve had the honor and the privilege of playing sometimes a solo role, and
sometimes a collaborative role in many of those discoveries. But without the
generosity of the researchers named below (in this Musing I prefer to call
them ¡°seekers,¡± chercheurs), I could never have made my way along the
twisted and obscured path that has led not only to a broader, yet still
woefully incomplete understanding of Marc-Antoine Charpentier as a person, a
composer, and a theorician, but also to a sketchy understanding of his
protectors and the circle in which he worked.
Perhaps I should explain what I mean by ¡°discovery.¡± A discovery
is, literally, the ¡°un-covering¡± of a thing or a bit of knowledge that has
been there all the time, unbeknownst to everyone. Over the centuries, a
whole procession of seekers may well have thumbed through that bundle or
that volume, but none of them is known to have paused and focused on that
specific testament, wedding contract, letter, treatise. Then ― sometimes
after a long search, but sometimes by pure chance ― another seeker comes
upon that document and immediately realizes its significance, perhaps
because he recognizes the handwriting, perhaps because it is immediately
clear that it is a piece of the puzzle he has been trying to put together.
Some discoveries are more important to a seeker¡¯s work than others. For
example, discovering that Marc-Antoine¡¯s sister Étiennette bought a rente
in 1676 and redeemed it in 1682 was interesting because it provided her
address; but I would not describe it as a ¡°major¡± discovery in my particular
quest, because it added little to our understanding of her and her siblings.
By contrast, finding Étiennette¡¯s holograph will and her death inventory was
a major discovery: not only are these documents plumb full of facts about
the entire family, they also help us identify her wealthy protectors.
As the vignettes below reveal, be they major or be they minor,
most of the discoveries about Charpentier and his circle that were made
during the past thirty years resulted from my stubborn archival digging.
However, in a few cases a generous seeker handed me an important reference ―
on a platter, so to speak. In each instance, the seeker who set me heading
for a specific bundle or volume is the true ¡°discoverer,¡± and in my writings
I have always tried to make it clear that he was well aware of the
importance of the clue he was giving me.
During the thirty years of my quest for Charpentier the Man, it
has become increasingly clear to me just how important is this spirit of
reciprocity, which is reflected in the two quotes that begin this Musing.
I¡¯ve had the good fortune to benefit repeatedly from that spirit of
reciprocity, that incredible generosity that motivates so many of the
seekers with whom I have come into contact. These seekers take enormous
pleasure in spending hour after hour in libraries and archives, delving into
dusty volumes and sooty bundles. They don¡¯t see themselves as owning a
subject, a document, a volume: rather, they realize that none of us can
succeed alone. Thus they feel compelled to jot down any detail that piques
their imagination; and they feel true satisfaction when they share one or
another detail with a seeker who needs it more than they do. As these
seekers stand in line, day after day, waiting for the library or the
archives to open, they tell one another about the subject of their current
quest; and when someone encounters that name or that event, he jots the
reference down and passes it to the first seeker. Sometimes they don¡¯t even
know one another¡¯s names!
This same spirit of reciprocity animates this website,
especially its Fugitive
Pieces and its transcribed documents. Having taken the time to
copy something out or to have it photocopied, what is the point of leaving
it to yellow in a file drawer? It likewise is this spirit of reciprocity
that impels both Orest and me to spend hours helping seekers who ask our
help or advice. A month rarely passes that I don¡¯t receive a query from some
stranger: an Australian flutist who wants to explain French baroque tonguing
to her pupils; a British graduate student who has worked out the phrasing of
some French instrumental pieces and would like my input; a French author who
wants some precisions about
Jacques Dalibert the
Roman; an
American musicologist who wonders what was happening at the Hôtel de Guise
during the months that followed Mlle de Guise¡¯s death; a graduate student
(she didn¡¯t mention her nationality) with a question about German musicians
at the Abbey of Montmartre in the late 1670s. And so forth. I always say
¡°yes,¡± because wanting to be exclusive, to hold one¡¯s research tight to
one¡¯s chest, generally means excluding oneself from the nourishing waters of
reciprocity without which a seeker finds himself in a parched desert. So, I
reply to their queries with long emails, studded with quotes and references
from my research files. I always feel joy at the thought that I¡¯ve perhaps
made a difference to another seeker. And their questions usually stimulate
my own thinking.
Two names come to mind when I
think of the seekers with whom I have experienced this reciprocity for some
three decades. First came William Christie, who in the early 1980s was
literally ¡°seeking¡± the French baroque style, especially as embodied in the
music of Marc-Antoine Charpentier. I shared with him first my discoveries
about Charpentier and the Guises, and then my research into Latin
pronunciation and my progress in deciphering the rhetoric notated in French
music. In return he would set my thinking on the right path with a gentle
but pointed comment, he would invite me to attend rehearsals that would be
especially interesting rhetoric-wise, and eventually he invited me to work
with his singers. Not exactly a tit-for-tat type of reciprocity, but
reciprocity all the same. Around the same time, Catherine Cessac got in
touch with me and we discussed our working hypotheses about Charpentier by
the hour. In the process, we formed a Brossard-Louli¨¦ friendship: or, as
Brossard said, ¡°without reserve we talked with one another about our
discoveries.¡± While she was writing her Marc-Antoine Charpentier, I
shared with her my as-yet-unpublished discoveries, because I wanted her book
to reflect the most recent evidence, not the guesses of her predecessors
which, it was turning out, had often missed the mark. Catherine was always
ready to answer a transatlantic query, more often than not about the
Charpentier M¨¦langes, which had not yet appeared in print. She has
been a pillar of strength throughout those three decades. I wish to express
to both of these supportive and discreet friends my affection and my deep
gratitude.
Now, as I muse, I recall the
people with whom I came into contact somewhat more briefly, and who have
been so very helpful. J¨¦rôme de La Gorce copied out every allusion to the
Guises that he came upon while researching his book on Lully; Jean Duron
invited me to give papers on subjects guaranteed to stretch my horizons;
Theodora Psychoyou, Shirley Thompson, Jane Gosine sometimes ask me questions
and sometimes supply a detail missing from my own files; Françoise Waquet
and Françoise Hildesheimer are always ready to come to my rescue. I cannot
forget François Lesure, who yielded to my appeals and agreed to let me
examine every single sheet of the 28-volume Charpentier M¨¦langes and
record the watermarks; Georges Dethan, who facilitated my consultation of
the Foreign Affairs Archives; and the archivist Madeleine Jurgens, who spent
hours in the stacks at the Archives, vainly searching for some missing
Louli¨¦ documents. And there are several French graduate students who never
told me their names but who would occasionally give me a piece of paper
bearing a reference to a document that might prove helpful.
I¡¯ve never talked about the
emotions that one or another major discovery triggered in me; nor have I
written much about the trajectory of my research. A Musing about my major
discoveries, the people whose generosity played such a role in them, and the
emotions these discoveries triggered, therefore seems in order.
-
The first
discovery was the autograph will of Étienne Louli¨¦, Charpentier¡¯s
colleague at the Hotel de Guise. Back in the early 1980s I began
tracking Louli¨¦, much as Victor Hugo¡¯s Inspector Javert would track poor
Jean Valjean. (Why Louli¨¦? The answer is simple: I play recorder and I
was intrigued by the fact that Louli¨¦ was writing for teachers, not
players.) Guided by Brossard¡¯s statement about Louli¨¦¡¯s death date, I
began my search at the most obvious place: the Minutier Central des
Notaires of Paris. Fortified with strategies suggested by Sylvette
Milliot, who had learned the ins and outs of the Minutier while working
on her magisterial study of Parisian luthiers, I sat in the
chilly, dusty, and sooty reading room, going through r¨¦pertoire
after r¨¦pertoire for 1705 and 1706 (the notaries¡¯ lists of acts,
month by month) in search of Louli¨¦¡¯s will and inventory. In vain. Late
one afternoon, exhausted from a winter day spent running my eyes down
column after column of notarial entries, I went to the grey-painted and
no less sooty salle des inventaires. The lights were so dim that
it was hard to read, but I vowed to use every remaining minute casting
around for a clue. A very thin little volume
―
I think it was dark red ―
caught my eye. I¡¯d never looked at it before. The title was
Publications du Châtelet. I opened it in mid-volume. Most of the
documents dated from decades after Louli¨¦¡¯s death, but I vowed to be
conscientious and start at the beginning. Just before the closing bell
sounded, I came upon a reference to the last will and testament of
Étienne Louli¨¦, drawn up in 1701! Brossard¡¯s memory had failed him. The
next morning, by heart racing from excitement, I dashed to the Minutier
and requested the appropriate bundle of acts, hoping that the will had
not been purloined. There I saw Louli¨¦¡¯s beautiful handwriting and his
moving, very personal will! As I read it, I began weeping, almost
sobbing. I felt as if I were talking with him personally. Thanks to this
document I was able to find the inventory of his personal property,
track down his closest relatives and friends, and paint a picture of his
final years. All this helped me date his surviving manuscripts and
sketch his intellectual activities during the two decades prior to his
death. Through Marcelle Benoit, I was introduced to Yolande de Brossard
in 1986. She was preparing her little book on Brossard, I was working on
my Louli¨¦ article for Recherches. Yolande and I exchanged
information, to ensure that each of us was fully informed of the other¡¯s
work and that one author would not contradict the other owing to
discoveries kept secret. In a wonderful gesture of generosity, Yolande
informed me that she had located Louli¨¦¡¯s missing manuscripts in the
Royal Library in Brussels! I immediately hied myself to Brussels,
examined the watermarks, and
―
just in time for publication
―
inserted the evidence into my Louli¨¦ study. Yolande and I became
friends, and until her final decline, I saw her whenever I was in Paris.
-
The next
crucial document took a long time to find. In the mid-1980s I¡¯d moved on
to Marc-Antoine Charpentier, because Wiley Hitchcock had assured me that
he didn¡¯t intend to search the archives for Charpentier the Man. Again
playing Inspector Javert, I began what I often describe as ¡°attending
every Charpentier wedding and funeral in Paris.¡± That is, I noted down
the marriage contracts and death inventories of every Charpentier I
encountered in the Minutier Central. (Those are the documents most
likely to name relatives and friends and to bear their signatures,
thereby permitting a seeker to be sure that two people with the same
first and last names are really the same person.) I worked my way
through r¨¦pertoire after r¨¦pertoire, starting in the
mid-1650s, continuing into the 1680s, and finally into the eighteenth
century. I jotted down the dates of wedding contracts, apprenticeships,
wills, and inventories. I say ¡°jotted down,¡± because that often was all
I could do in the mid- to late-1980s, owing to endless strikes at the
Archives Nationales. I would arrive in Paris for a two-week stay, only
to find that seekers would only be allowed to consult the r¨¦pertoires:
the magasiniers were refusing to deliver those sooty bundles of
documents. I accumulated pages and pages of references, including one
about a Charpentier-Edouard wedding in 1662. Not until my next visit to
Paris was I able to consult the document itself. And there it was, the
signature of the bride¡¯s adolescent brother, ¡°M. Anthoine Charpentier¡±
(¡°Marcq Anthoine Charpentier¡±), son of Louis Charpentier. I had found
the Charpentier notary! Strangely enough, I didn¡¯t weep over this
discovery. I recall smiling and heaving a sigh of relief: but it was too
early to rejoice. For example, I didn¡¯t know when their father had died,
and whether he had used the same notary. I shared my good news with
another seeker, Philippe de Bagneux; and while I was copying the
marriage contract by hand (photocopying a document was toute une
histoire, and the digital cameras that have facilitated research
were decades in the future), he came over and told me that he¡¯d perused
the r¨¦pertoire entries for the six months preceding the wedding
and had found, sandwiched in at the top of a page and in very small
writing, an allusion to the death inventory of a certain Louis
Charpentier. It proved to be the right Louis; but although the estate
papers provided the names of a few more family members, the list of ¡°titres¡±
(notarial contracts, I.O.U¡¯s, and so forth) was frustratingly short. Not
even Louis¡¯s wedding contract! Despite summaries of various notarial
acts signed by potential Charpentier relations and friends
―
some provided by Philippe de Bagneux, and others by Robert Descimon
―
there was no breakthrough. A lot of drudge work followed. For example,
following up an allusion in Louis Charpentier¡¯s inventory to some
Charpentier relatives in Meaux, I began working at Melun, in the
Departmental Archives of Seine-et-Marne: first the parish records and
then the notarial contracts for Meaux. While working at Melun, I met
Jean-François Viel, a young professional genealogist who was assembling
a corpus of information about late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Meaux. I showed him the wedding contract of Marc-Antoine¡¯s cousin, and
on his own initiative he began sending me photocopies of every document
he found for that particular family, all the way back to the late
sixteenth century! I am deeply indebted to him for helping me amass the
requisite evidence for portraying the Charpentier clan in my
Portraits. (See his ¡°Les Charpentier avant Charpentier,¡± in
Marc-Antoine Charpentier, un musicien retrouv¨¦.) I could never have
spent endless weeks at Melun, going through archival bundle after
archival bundle, and then at closing time settling down in the small
workers¡¯ hotel where I would plan the next day¡¯s work by the glow of a
dim bulb hanging down from a high ceiling! Today, in 2010, many gaps in
our knowledge about Charpentier remain. But by 2003 I had reached the
point of diminishing returns and could no longer financially justify my
prolonged stays in Paris. So, in 2004 I self-published my Portraits
around Marc-Antoine Charpentier, as a festive gift to the
Charpentier scholars attending the two conferences held that year in the
composer¡¯s honor.
-
But let¡¯s
return to the 1980s and early 1990s. I eventually found the papers for
the guardianship of the Edouard children. Earlier, I¡¯d located Jean
Edouard¡¯s death inventory of 1685, but it didn¡¯t contain all that much
that was new: Armand-Jean Charpentier , Marc-Antoine¡¯s younger brother,
signed the document, but there wasn¡¯t a word about Marc-Antoine. During
my next stay in Paris, I explored the series called Tutelles,
which records the selection of guardians for minor children. There I
found the Edouard tutelle: both Armand- Jean and Marc-Antoine
Charpentier were present. I hastily turned to the final page, for the
signatures. And I saw two signatures ¡°Charpentier,¡± each
followed by a showy paraphe. One signature was familiar: it was
Armand-Jean¡¯s mature one. (A comparison of photocopies of the Edouard
inventory and the Edouard tutelle, which are exact
contemporaries, confirmed that the signature was indeed Armand-Jean¡¯s.)
The other was the signature of ¡°Sieur Marc Antoine Charpentier bourgeois
de Paris demeurant au grand hostel de Guise.¡± It didn¡¯t bear the least
resemblance to the known signatures of Marc-Antoine Charpentier! It was
a masterful imitation of a late-sixteenth-century hand. (The signature
appears on the cover of my Portraits.) I chuckled as I
scrutinized it; and I kept chuckling until the chuckle became an audible
giggle. I feared that I¡¯d burst out laughing, right there in the main
reading room of the Archives Nationales! Marc-Antoine clearly was making
a statement; but although, in the privacy of my study, I¡¯ve often mused
about what that statement may have been, I¡¯ve refrained
―
and will continue to refrain
―
from sharing my imaginings with others. I want seekers to experience the
pleasure of musing freely on that astonishing signature and what it
might tell us about Charpentier. Any musing should include the fact
that, in 1691, Charpentier did not use that archaic signature on
a contract involving the new organ at the Jesuit coll¨¨ge (see
E. Kocevar in my
¡°factoids¡±: he employed the unadorned, cursive signature we¡¯ve known for
decades and that he had used, for example, back in 1684 for a receipt at
the Com¨¦die Française. In other words, the archaic-style signature of
1685 is totally different from the signatures of 1684 and 1691!
-
Sometime later, in the scell¨¦s of the Châtelet I found a
reference to the seals placed on the doors of the lodging of the late
Étiennette Charpentier, Marc-Antoine¡¯s eldest sister. This turned out to
be a major discovery. As I went through the bundle, I first came upon
the complaint she lodged against her niece¡¯s husband, Jacques Mathas.
When I reached the scell¨¦ of her apartment and shop, I knew by
its thickness alone that it was promising! In the scell¨¦ was a
reference to death inventory, which was just as thick. The latter was
accompanied by her will, which is so suggestive of her personality, down
to its phonetic spelling. Those documents speak eloquently of
Étiennette¡¯s literacy (and terrible spelling!), her personal taste, and
her devotional preferences ―
some of them doubtlessly shared by her siblings. In her business acumen
and her generosity, Étiennette embodied all that was admirable in the
family; her siblings and her niece and nephew clearly could be quite
feckless. These documents contained other key information: for example,
I learned no formal inventory was made of the possessions of her late
brother Marc-Antoine (no wonder my hunt for it had been so unsuccessful
...). And they have shown a bright and not always flattering light on
the inter-personal relationships within the Charpentier family.
-
The
next important discoveries were made in Florence, Italy, at the Archivio
di Stato. Working in Florence was
Orest¡¯s idea: he rightly suspected that we¡¯d find
gossip there about Paris, because the Guises had been in exile in
Florence during the 1630s, and because Mme de Guise¡¯s sister was the
current Grand Duchess of Tuscany. On two separate occasions we spent two
weeks in Florence, perusing reports sent from Paris, 1660-1689, by the
Medicis¡¯ agents. No tourism for us! Working from opening to closing,
with a brief break at the nearby cafe for a bowl of peasant soup or a
pasta, followed by a ¡°cappucc¡¯,¡± we would work our way through
one foot-high busta after another. It was like standing with our
ear to the doors of the Florentines in Paris and the Medici householders
in Florence, listening to a constant flow of court gossip. Sometimes the
discussion was boring, sometimes it was very exciting, and sometimes it
was downright hilarious. I learned that Mlle de Guise was importing
Italian music in the 1680s, and that almost daily she was treating her
guests to musical entertainments. And I learned that Monsieur Du Bois
had sent something to the Grand Duke¡¯s musicians
―
in all likelihood a copy of one of Charpentier¡¯s oratorios for St.
Cecilia. (See my ¡°Un Foyer d¡¯italianisme chez les Guises,¡± in Un
musicien retrouv¨¦.) I made another important discovery there: a
volume compiled by Pietro Guerrini during a visit to Paris in 1685 that
was full of loose tinted drawings, among them a view of Marly. I alerted
the archivist to the importance of the volume, and he placed it in the
Reserve. I was pleased to learn that Francesco Martelli has edited the
manuscript under the title
Il Viaggio in Europa di
Pietro Guerrini
(Florence: Olschki, 2005). It contains one important allusion to music
at the Hôtel de Guise.
-
One
day, in the early 1990s, I encountered Laurent Guillo in the underground
catalogue room of the old Biblioth¨¨que nationale. He¡¯d come across an
eighteenth-century sales catalogue that mentioned a sizeable number of
manuscripts by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, chiefly operas. He gave me a
slip of paper with the call number of the catalogue, then returned to
his own work. The result was my article, ¡°Quelques ajouts au corpus
Charpentier,¡± also in Un musicien retrouv¨¦. I doubt that I¡¯d ever
have thought to search for eighteenth-century sales catalogs! Laurent
Guillo¡¯s generous gesture, for which I remain most grateful, broadened
our understanding of Charpentier¡¯s musical output.
-
Then, in November 2005, after the excitement of the Charpentier
Tercentenary had subsided and I was ready to turn to other subjects,
came an e-mail from Otto Eckle, a graduate student at the University of
Frankfurt, Germany, asking if I¡¯d noticed the similarity between the
representation of ¡°Mr Charpentier¡± in the Almanach royal
for 1682 and the portrait of Charpentier in the Manskopf Collection at
the Frankfurt University Library. My jaw dropped! An exchange of lengthy
e-mails ensued, and by the dawn of 2006
―
despite an exasperating crash that paralyzed this website for almost two
weeks ―
our joint presentation of the watercolor portrait was posted. Otto Eckle
described his inspection of the portrait and what he had observed about
the inscriptions and the watermarks; I presented the portrait from a
perspective that I hoped would initiate a scholarly debate about its
authenticity. That is, is it a mid-eighteenth-century copy of an older
portrait of Charpentier, done from life? Or is it a
late-nineteenth-century or early-twentieth-century fake, done on
mid-eighteenth-century paper? I¡¯ve received a few e-mails from amateurs
expressing strong ¡°gut¡± reactions, one way or the other; but thus far no
serious scholarship has been brought to bear on the questions I ask in
my Musing
about the portrait. Meanwhile, during this silence of the
scholars, the watercolor is fast becoming the portrait of
Charpentier. (Skimming through 20 pages of Google Images produced 21
versions of this portrait, and slightly more than that for the
black-and-white Almanach portrait.) I would never have learned
about that portrait without the intervention and collaboration of Otto
Eckle. This is yet another instance of how scholars can come together
for the benefit of all.
-
Around the same time, I received an exciting e-mail from Joseph Bergin,
the historian of French prelates during the Ancien R¨¦gime. He had been
reading the pages of my Portraits where I hypothesize about
Charpentier¡¯s education. Recalling that early in his research he had
consulted the registers of the Paris Faculty of Law, he dug out those
old files. And he found that, in the fall of 1662, there was a new
student called ¡°M. A. Charpentier.¡± He sent me the reference; and when I
next went to Paris, I was able to inspect document and the
signature
of ¡°Marcus Anthonicus [sic] Charpentier,¡± complete with its
misspelled name. This document is crucial to our understanding of
Charpentier, because it sheds light on how ¡°savant¡± he was. He
had completed the full cursus in one of the Parisian coll¨¨ges,
and he consequently was well-schooled in Latin, in the classics, in
philosophy, and in rhetoric. The document also revealed that this
deserving and quite penniless orphan was almost certainly being helped
by the Talon family. (Earlier that year a Talon had signed
Marc-Antoine¡¯s sister¡¯s wedding contract.) Without Joseph Bergin¡¯s
generosity, we would still be hypothesizing about Charpentier¡¯s
education, instead of reasoning on the basis of fact.
This brings me to 2009, the
thirty-year mark of my search to understand Marc-Antoine Charpentier the
Man. I haven¡¯t retired, however. In fact, I look forward to sharing with
other seekers my interpretation of the context in which Charpentier drafted
the newly discovered treatise. Above all, I look forward to the pleasures
―
and the treasures ―
that scholarly reciprocity showers upon us all.
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