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Super Flumina Babylonis

Guillaume Gabriel Nivers
François Cosset
Étienne Moulinié
Pierre Bouteiller
Nicolas Clérambault
Jean-Baptiste Lully
Jean-François Lalouette
anonymous

Les Boréades
Francis Colpron
Hélène Plouffe
Susie Napper
Hervé Niquet

“Devotion has a lofty and beaming countenance; it makes marriage more benign, civil relations more courteous and life more distinguished. It is the flower of decency.”
François de Sales

Undoubtedly to tend the wounds of all sorts caused by decades of religious strife—and substituting mortal combat for models of piety as well as for battles of wit and literary bouts—strong currents of a profound fervour, even of a certain mysticism, ran through 17th-century France, and its acts of devotion showed the signs of an intense spiritual renewal. Proposed by the Council of Trent and launched by the writings of Pierre de Bérulle, future cardinal, this renewal witnessed the birth of a vast devout community, both lay and religious, along with the blossoming of many vocations. One needs only mention the likes of Madame Acarie, great mystic and friend to Bérulle and François de Sales—who had “infinite respect” for her—and at whose abode were translated the works of Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross; or Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, a Visitation nun who, after having had visions of Jesus, proposed a special veneration of the Sacred Heart. However, Christian perfection, which aims through various exercises at self-abnegation, must not be experienced only in ecstasy or manifestations of penitence. It must also in God’s love permeate the mundane and merge with the virtues of gentleness, cordiality, friendship and peace. It was a question of showing, as Aldous Huxley put it, “how everyday, active life could be made to subserve contemplation, and how the spirit of contemplation could be made to animate and transform active life.”

This renewal first affected the religious orders, both the contemplatives and those concerned with the outside world. The older congregations were reformed, such as the Trappist order by the abbé de Rancé and the Port-Royal des Champs abbey by the abbé de Saint-Cyran; and new ones were founded, like the Daughters of Charity by Vincent de Paul and the Sulpicians by Jean-Jacques Olier. Remarkably enough, new congregations for women proliferated and they were no longer subordinate to the masculine orders. Hence, notes Jean Quénart, “the end of hostilities now afforded a particular visibility for women, whom warfare had relegated to the background.”

François de Sales, with Jeanne de Chantal—a noble lady widowed at 28 and already a mother of four (she was to be the grandmother of Madame de Sévigné)—founded the Congregation of the Visitation of Holy Mary at Annecy in 1610. The order was originally destined for charitable work, visiting and caring for the sick and poor in their homes. But, several years later, under instructions from the archbishop of Lyon, the order was obliged to accept a monastic rule of strict enclosure. Obeying the Rule of Saint Augustine, the nuns would pronounce solemn vows—François de Sales was to dedicate his Spiritual Conferences to them in 1629—but the order was both contemplative and active, since it was to be in charge of managing boarding schools for girls. The convents of Visitandines (as they are known), centres for the dissemination of their founder’s ideas, expanded rapidly throughout the kingdom, and, after 1660, were also to be found in the Spanish Netherlands, Germany and Poland. Their high reputation and the esteem in which these institutions were held prompted high society and the great religious minds of the time to frequent their parlours assiduously.

Until her death in 1641, Jeanne de Chantal was indefatigable in her activities as founder and coordinator. After Lyon, Bourges and Dijon, she established the first Visitation Convent in Paris in 1619, and the French capital would count four such institutions before the close of the century. Financed by the commander Brulart de Sillery, the chapel of this first and most important Parisian convent, finished in 1634, was, with its dome, François Mansart’s first work of note. Conceded to the Calvinist faith in 1802 and known today by the name of “temple Sainte-Marie,” the small church sits at No. 17 rue Saint-Antoine.

Following the precepts of the Counter-Reformation, the nuns of the chief Parisian convents cultivated music as a tool of devotion essential to the ceremonies, considering it able to favour the attainment of Christian perfection through the exercise of the senses. Moreover, du Buisson reported in 1641 having heard at the Montmartre Abbey “music equal in excellence to that of the King.” The Visitandines were no exception. In front of a fervent assembly, the nuns, sometimes accompanied by a few instruments, would be heard on important feast days in works by the finest musicians: choral masses or petits motets for solo voices—these having been composed in great number during the course of the century for the use of convents in Paris and in provincial France.

Very late into the 17th century, the French publishing firm Ballard had printed masses in the old polyphonic style, close to Palestrina, that did not call for thorough bass—this part was sometimes published separately—like those by Henri Frémart, Artus Auxcousteaux and Valentin de Bournonville rediscovered in Quebec City. Perhaps with a didactic purpose, they were destined to the various parishes of the kingdom that could muster up a choir, however modest. Since the original scores required tenor and bass parts, in nunneries these were “redistributed among the female voices and the treble instruments, which creates a peculiar sound spectrum characteristic of feminine monastic music,” explains Hervé Niquet.

The principal work on this disc is the Mass Super flumina Babylonis in six parts by François Cosset. Born in Picardy around 1610, Cosset first worked in Saint-Quentin and in Laon before becoming director of music at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Reims. Apparently without leaving this position, he took on a like post at Notre-Dame in Paris, succeeding Jean Veillot in 1643. However, following criticism from Queen Anne of Austria concerning two flawed performances of a Te Deum in 1646, he returned to Reims, as indicated by a deed of 1650. We lose track of him some fifteen years later. Cosset wrote eight masses in 4, 5 and 6 parts published as of 1649 by Robert III Ballard; the last mass was published posthumously in 1673 under the title Missa sex vocum super flumina Babylonis. Few of these polyphonic masses were published after this date and the Missa pro defunctis in five parts by Pierre Bouteiller remained in manuscript form. Little is known of this composer: born around 1655, he began as a maître de chapelle in Troyes before moving on to Paris as “a player of the viol and other musical instruments.” He left only thirteen petits motets and the aforementioned requiem mass, collected by Sébastien de Brossard. The traditional, sober and sometimes austere polyphonic writing of the masses by Cosset and Bouteiller contrast nicely with both the plainsong and the enticing, occasionally Italianate inflections found in the petits motets by French musicians of the time.

Distinct from the grand motet, a composition for soloists, choir and orchestra, the petit motet was a work of modest dimensions written for one, two or three voices with a basso continuo and at times a concertato instrument, a flute or a violin. The performance could be adapted to various circumstances, however, as Clérambault indicated in the Avertissement to one of his publications: “[The motets] are all in two parts, but they can even be sung by one voice alone; if only two people are available, they will be sung in two parts; if there are four, six or more people, they will be sung in choir with as many first trebles on one side as there are lower trebles on the other, with the accompaniment of the organ.” In women’s convents, the petits motets were hence often “sung en chapelle, that is with all the nuns in unison; the sound produced by this ‘tutti solo’ is a typically French sound,” according to Hervé Niquet.

Born close to Carcassonne in 1599, Étienne Moulinié began as a cantor at Saint-Just Church in Narbonne before joining his brother Antoine in Paris, where the latter obtained a position for him in the royal institutions. From 1627 until the prince’s death in 1660, he was in charge of music for Gaston of Orléans, the king’s brother. He composed ten or so books of airs de cour, and although he composed no petits motets—a form that would only appear a generation later—he accommodated the intimate genre of the air to domestic piety (one may see in this the influence of protestant practice) in his Mélanges de sujets chrétiens de 2 à 5 parties… avec la basse continue published in 1658.

Guillaume Gabriel Nivers, born in Paris in 1632, figures among the most important organists of the Grand Siècle—a very pious man, he himself added Gabriel to his given name, thus mark his devotion to the mystery of the Incarnation. From 1678 to 1708, he was organist at both the Chapelle royale and Saint-Sulpice in Paris; in 1686, he was organist and singing master at the Maison Royale at Saint-Cyr. Assigned by Louis XIV the task of reforming plainsong, he also composed two books of petits motets; the first, published in 1689, was destined for convents of nuns, and the second, three years later, “for the usage of the Ladies of Saint-Louis at Saint-Cyr.” Born in 1676, Nicolas Clérambault, also a Parisian, was employed by several congregations: after having been organist for the Jacobins of rue Saint-Jacques, he followed the footsteps of Nivers at Saint-Sulpice and at Saint-Cyr. It was for the services of this latter institution that he composed and sometimes published his petits motets. His instrumental works remained unpublished and most of them come from the collections of Sébastien de Brossard.

It is somewhat surprising to discern a rather Italian inspiration in the fourteen petits motets written by Jean-Baptiste Lully, also all manuscripts conserved by Brossard; the staunchest advocate of French music demonstrates in them a graceful suppleness of which Carissimi would not have been ashamed. Those designed for three soprano voices were probably composed for the convent of the Filles de l’Assomption, founded in 1622, while the O dulcissime Domine was destined for the salute to the Holy Eucharist. A disciple and one-time secretary of Lully, Jean-François Lalouette, born in 1651 in Paris, was director of music first at Rouen Cathedral, then, in 1695, at Notre-Dame de Versailles; five years later, he held the post of choirmaster at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, succeeding André Campra. He composed two books of petits motets, published in 1726 and in 1730.

Clearly, 17th-century France was not only the theatre of battle clamour and regal splendour. Under the archways and domes of many a convent, there rang out the fervent voices of humble nuns, those anonymous figures of the vitality and expressiveness that accompanied all manifestations of faith during what is still today considered the great century of French spirituality.

“But I must scold you for saying our Corbinelli is the devil’s mystic; your brother is bursting with laughter, and I scold him as well as you. How! the devil’s mystic? A man who thinks of nothing but destroying the empire of the devil; who constantly attaches himself to his foes, the saints of the church; a man who sets no value upon his body, who endures poverty with a Christian, or what you would call philosophic, resignation; who never omits celebrating the perfections and existence of God; who never judges his neighbour, but always excuses him; who passes his life in the exercise of charity and usefulness, insensible to pleasure and the enjoyments of life; who, in short, notwithstanding his ill fortune, is wholly resigned to the will of God! And this you call being the devil’s mystic! You must own, that this is not the portrait of our poor friend; the expression, nevertheless, carries with it an air of pleasantry which at first excites a laugh and may surprise the ignorant. But I resist, as you see, and support the faithful admirer of Saint Teresa, of my grandmother, and the fortunate John of the Cross.”
Madame de Sévigné, Letter to Madame de Grignan, January 15, 1690.

— © François Filiatrault, 2001.
Translation: Jacques-André Houle