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Hyver

Michel Corrette
Joseph Bodin de Boismortier
Nicolas Clérambault

Karina Gauvin
Les Boréades
Francis Colpron
Hélène Plouffe
Susie Napper
Alexander Weimann
Margaret Little
Matthew Jennejohn
Chloe Meyers
Sylvain Bergeron
Éric Lagacé

• Nominated at the 2006 Prix Opus, Disque de l’année Musiques médiévales, de la Renaissance, baroque
• Nominated at l’ADISQ 2006, classical / vocal
• Nominated at the 2006 Juno Awards

Orpée en Hyver: French cantatas in concert

But above all, let us not forget that in the 18h century what the artist was supposed to offer to the public was an organized discourse whose meaning was clear to everybody, and not the more or less inscrutable product of a subjective reverie.
Marguerite Yourcenar

Let us imagine a wealthy salon, noble or bourgeois, in Paris around 1740. Suppose that the master of the house is a music lover and that, to treat his friends on cold winter evenings, he hires the best singer and several instrumentalists, with whom he or his wife may also play. That is all that would be required to hear several cantatas, on mythological themes or evoking the passage of the seasons, several suites of dances, and some concertos.

During the first third of the 18th century, the cantata blossomed in France in such salons, away from the royal court. An adaptation of the Italian cantata, with its rather linear succession of recitatives and da capo arias, the French form quickly departed from the original model, and became freer. If, as Jean-Baptiste Rousseau put it, in the cantata “the recitatives are the body and the airs the soul,” the latter were souls that took highly diverse forms, while the former often became transformed into measured ariosi or, sometimes, were interspersed with ritornellos to serve as the central section of the airs.

The French cantata was written for one voice and basso continuo, sometimes accompanied by one or two instruments concertants. Despite the relatively modest number of musicians required, and although the voice serves both as narrator of the action and as a character within the action, it resembles a short scene from a tragédie en musique just as much as the Italian cantata resembles a fragment of an opera seria.

Most French cantatas have mythological subjects. They relate, with fastidious refinement, the amorous adventures of the gods, goddesses, and heroes of antiquity. The minor poets who authored the libretti usually ended with some moral for lovers, some little lesson that they believed could, within the limits of decency, be drawn from their story. Though we don’t know who wrote many of these libretti, we do know that texts by Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, Antoine Houdar de La Motte, Pierre-Charles Roy, Antoine Danchet and Marie de Louvencourt were, with considerable success, set to music by Philippe Courbois, André Campra, or Nicolas Bernier, masters of the generation of composers who strove to blend the delicacy of French music with the vivacity of Italian music and whose maxim was les goûts réunis.

Nicolas Clérambault published his cantata Orphée in his first book in 1710. The libretto—by a M. de Rochebrune, a member of Houdar de La Motte’s circle—tells of the mythic musician who, according to legend, could tame and charm not only men, beasts, and gods, but also plants and stones. Orpheus descended into the regions of the dead to recover his wife Eurydice, who had died of snakebite shortly after their marriage. Accompanying himself on the lyre, he succeeded in obtaining Pluto’s permission to bring his beloved wife back to life. But we know his tragic fate: he lost his wife a second time and, in despair, ended his days stoned to death by the Maenads.

To focus on the power of music, doubtless, Clérambault’s work only relates the happy part of the story, the deliverance of Eurydice, and ends just before Orpheus, succumbing to the temptation to break the condition that Pluto imposed on him, turns back to look at her as he leads her from the underworld, and thus loses her for ever.

This cantata, one of the most dramatic in the repertoire, “did more for Clérambault’s fame than all the rest of his work” according to Catherine Cessac. It was sung five times by Mademoiselle Lemaure in 1728 and 1729 as part of the Concert spirituel series, and was considered throughout the 18th century to be a model of its genre. In form it is very free, structured for emotional expression. As James R. Anthony puts it, “the key dramatic action in which Orpheus pleads with Pluto for the release of Euridice, is rendered musically by two ariosi separated by a contrasting air tendre placed in the centre of the cantata.” It makes use not only of daring dissonances but also of keys that were rarely used at the time. As the hero pleads, for example, it passes from F sharp major to G sharp minor.

Though primarily known for his instrumental music, Joseph Bodin de Boismortier composed in all the genres of his day. He was one of the very few musicians who managed to make his living by his pen; he had no position in the church or court but his works were the delight of the salons of the Comte de Clermont and the Prince de Carignan. He composed the four cantatas on the theme of the seasons that he published in 1724 as his opus 5 at the beginning of his career, probably when he was at the home of the Duchesse de Maine in Sceaux. He may well have been the author of the poems he set; he certainly showed a talent for versification in the prefaces to his many publications.

L’Hyver is the most elaborate of these cantatas; it calls for two melody instruments and an obbligato bass viol. With vivid contrasts and dramatic skill, the voice evokes the bleakness of the cold and the fury of the storms, and tells of how Comus, Apollo and the Muses were moved to bring back spring and all its frolics. And so the last air, with its da capo, magnificently ends the important cycle of four French cantatas illustrating the seasons.

Boismortier had his Don Quichotte chez la duchesse—possibly an allusion to his first protector, the Duchesse de Maine—performed at the Académie royale de musique in 1743, with Mademoiselle Fel as Altisidore. With a libretto by Charles-Siméon Favart, this short ballet comique is full of intrigue and surprises and includes a number of dances, which were performed by La Camargo and by Louis Dupré. The work was soon published as opus 97 by Boivin and Le Clerc, which meant that the work, in whole or part, could be performed, as was the custom, anywhere, not just in a theatre, and with fewer musicians.

A musician whose wit, grace, and imagination we appreciate today, Boismortier well merits being identified by Hervé Niquet as “a skillful melodist, interested in all the instruments; Boismortier is the Poulenc of the 18th century.”

In French art of the Enlightenment, humour is often juxtaposed with fantasy and hedonism. The Concertos comiques of Michel Corrette also belong to the theatre; they were written as interludes for shows presented during the Saint-Germain and Saint-Laurent fairs at the Opéra comique and the Comédie italienne. To make his audiences smile, Corrette took popular songs and elaborated on them. In each of the Concertos’ movements, themes are briefly varied, sometimes with changes of rhythm, and the choice of instrumentation is left to the performers. Composed around 1760, the twenty-fifth of these concertos, Les Sauvages, is probably the most remarkable of them all. It starts off with a tune—we don’t know if it is by Campra or by Rameau—to which two Indians from Louisiana danced at the Saint-Germain fair in 1725. This is followed by the air “Quand on sait aimer et plaire” from Le Devin de village by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and, finally, by a very popular song of the day, La Fürstemberg, in gavotte time.

In proposing, as James R. Anthony puts it, “a chamber music adapted not for the court but for the salons of Paris and the châteaux of the country and later for the Concert sprituel,” 18th-century French composers used brief forms; forms that were optimal for, as François Sabatier puts it, “expressing as much as possible in a minimum of time” and “ tempering the heat of the passions.” This is music that knows how to charm with clarity, elegance, and delicacy. These very qualities remain the essence of French music, of the music that Debussy characterized as being “something like fantasy within sensibility,” and, he went on to say, that was designed to deliver jouissance immediate, to be enjoyed in the heat of the moment.

— © François Filiatrault, 2005
Translated by Sean McCutcheon