John Powell, music historian and lecturer

John S. Powell is an expert in French Baroque opera. He prepared the performance score for La Feste de Ruel. He will be in town during the week of the performance, and will give a public talk on the opera and its rediscovery.

Dr. Powell is a widely published author on the French Baroque, music, dance, and theatre. He has also worked with a long list of specialists around the world to revive long-forgotten works for the stage. We asked him a little about himself.

What led you to your field of expertise?

My PhD dissertation was on music in the theater of Molière, which I came to after having seen a production of Le Misantrope in Seattle. I wondered if there might be any music for these plays, and it turns out that there was. From Molière’s comédies-ballets I became interested in French opera.

How do you think opera in France was different from other opera at the time?

Two ways:  its heavy emphasis on dance (the roots of French opera lay in ballet de cour) and its allegory. All French opera of the 17th century aimed to glorify Louis XIV, who was equated with the hero of the opera. In the case of La Feste de Ruel, the praise of Louis XIV is even more fulsomely obvious.

What is your favorite thing about Baroque opera? Do you like conventional opera, too, or does Baroque opera stand apart in your mind?

French baroque opera is a total Gesamtkunstwerk (to borrow Wagner’s term -- I like Wagner too):  music, dance, stagecraft, costumes, acting, gesture, allegory. I like all opera, all periods. I teach a course on the Mozart/da Ponte operas, and another course on Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen. For a few years I taught a course on Wagner and Tolkien, comparing Wagner’s Ring with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I have also taught a course on the Faust legend in music and literature.

Why is Charpentier a favorite? What is his appeal for you?

I first encountered Charpentier’s music in 1974 when he was comparatively unknown, especially in the U.S. I was looking for a topic for my Master’s thesis, and so I settled on his secular cantatas (which were unpublished, unperformed, and unrecorded). As a grad student in the mid-1970s I organized two concerts of these works.

What are some interesting things you’ve run across in your research?

 

One interest of mine is music that was brought to Nouvelle-France, which included French Canada and all of the Louisiana Purchase. This topic arose from a course I taught at the Université de Nancy, for which I read many of the accounts of the early French explorers. I have gone to archives in Quebec, Montreal, and New Orleans to investigate this music, which was mostly brought by the Jesuits. One thing I found amusing was a set of Lully opera scores in Montreal that had engravings of lady opera singers with low-cut tops…and some Jesuit (I presume) filled in their bodices with ink.

Dr. Powell's talk is free and open to the public.

7pm, Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Downtown branch of the Cincinnati Public Library

Huenefeld Tower Room

800 Vine St.

Cincinnati, OH 45202

1685

What sort of a world was it, in 1685? 

Queen Christina of Sweden

For starters, the absolutely strong monarchy of France was a bit of an anomaly. Only Sweden and its Queen Christina rivaled Louis' France in size and power. Neither Italy nor Germany had yet coalesced into nations; both were a patchwork of principalities. Spain was a complete mess, and even England was living through the turbulent Stuarts – 1685 saw the end of Charles II and the beginning of James II, who would make it through only three years before being booted off the throne much as his father had been. Louis of France was the only king sleeping soundly through the night in 1685.

The turmoil in England meant less than the usual brilliant literature, although Dryden and Locke were publishing. Eighty years before, the novel had been born in Spain with Don Quixote; it would be another 30 years before the first important English novel was written (Robinson Crusoe, 1719). 

Molière

The strong French court gave the arts room to flourish, as we have discussed. Molière worked for years with Lully creating the incidental music for his plays. When they fell out, he began working with Charpentier. Molière died in 1673, rather spectacularly. He often starred in his own plays, including his last, The Hypochondriac. When called on to cough in the play, he began coughing in earnest, hemorrhaging blood from his tubercular lungs. Once he got that under control, he declared that the show must go on and finished the performance. Afterward, though, his attack began again and he died that night. Lully himself died in 1687, also giving his life for his art. While conducting the court orchestra, he slammed his giant ruby-encrusted baton down on his own toe. Infection became gangrene; he refused amputation because he so loved to dance, and died. (Charpentier survived into the 18^th century, apparently dying quietly in his bed.)

Louis had a busy year, including the legalization of slavery in the French colonies and the outlawing of Protestantism in France. It was a bad century for human rights. He also around this time secretly married for a second time, to the devout Mme de Maintenon who greatly influenced him for his remaining decades.

Stradivari in his workshop

In music, 1685 was a very interesting year. Stradivari was busy in his workshop in Cremona. Seventeen-year-old François Couperin got his first paying organist job. Pachelbel, Biber, and Buxtehude were going full bore in Germany, as were Corelli and A. Scarlatti in Italy and Henry Purcell in England. Telemann, Rameau, and Vivaldi were all small children at this time, preparing to make their marks in the new century. And 1685 is famous for its births. Within these 12 months were born Handel, Domenico Scarlatti, JS Bach, and Lodovico Giustini, whom you probably haven’t heard of but who would be the first composer ever to write music for the newly invented piano in 1732.

Fun fact #1: Most of you reading this can hum the first movement of the Suite in D by the otherwise obscure composer Jean Joseph Mouret (born in 1682!), because it's the Masterpiece Theatre theme song and has been since 1971. Likewise, most people in Europe can hum a rondo from Charpentier's Te Deum, because it's the Eurovision Song Contest theme song and has been since 1954.

Mlle de Guise

In the quiet of his rooms on Mlle de Guise’s Paris estate, Charpentier wrote and wrote and wrote. (Fun fact #2: the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana has a manuscript in Charpentier’s own hand!) Out of all the wars and anguish of a difficult century, it’s the arts that have survived and have the most meaning for us today.

The Opera, La Fête du Ruel

“La Feste de Ruel” is a far cry from Mozart’s complicated shenanigans or Verdi’s epic dramas. This was to be a political piece with a very pointed message:  I, Armand, have a bodacious garden, and you, Louis, are the Best. King. Ever. 

If you were less annoying, maybe. But I doubt it.

The shepherdess Iris is in love. Not with her handsome swain Tircis, who pleads in vain for her attention, but with the outdoors: “I love the sweet songs of the birds, I love our flowered fields, I love the rippling of the waters, the eternal greenness of these gardens.” Other characters try to talk her round, but in a startlingly modern move, she rejects love-making for landscaping. “One will sooner see the sun stop in its tracks, before I might subject my fate to the capricious whims of an annoying husband.” Presumably she lives happily ever after.

Pan

 Then -- unexpected plot twist -- the god Pan arrives! Even more unexpectedly, he doesn’t care what the shepherds get up to. Let them live their own lives! (I’m telling you, this opera was way ahead of its time.) He has his own message: the garden is green and the world is safe enough for shepherds, all because of the great Sun King. He has vanquished the enemies of France and brought peace. He has built giant canals across the land and brought prosperity. He has created palaces for himself and brought glory. O happy subjects, to live in such a time, with such a monarch!

Louis as celestial object

Plot-wise, meh. The libretto was probably written by a friend of Armand’s. The frequent sun references are hardly even allegorical. “But I see the Sun appearing, all nature adores him, how brilliant he is, how he inspires love!” It doesn’t take an English major to winkle out the hidden meaning here. 

 Charpentier, though, took the project seriously. (Of course it’s never a bad idea to butter up a king with jobs to hand out.) He gives Iris and Tircis some lovely music to sing. A chorus of shepherds echoes Pan’s paeans to Louis. Charpentier takes care that a forgettable libretto won’t be so quickly forgotten when the most powerful man of his age is listening to it.  Too bad Louis never heard it.

This little piece of art is a fascinating snapshot of life 1685, in the world inhabited by Armand, Charpentier, and Louis.

Charpentier vs. Lully

Charpentier

We don’t have a ton of biographical detail about Marc-Antoine Charpentier, possibly because he led a fairly quiet life. Perhaps he is best considered in relation to who he was not: Jean-Baptiste Lully.

Lully

Lully was older by nine years. This allowed him to grab (okay, he also earned it on merit) the plummest job for composers going: Superintendent of Music for the Royal Court. Among other things, this meant Lully had a chokehold on music publication in France. But Charpentier did have the good fortune to find a permanent place with Mlle de Guise, a cousin of Louis’ and a leading patron of the arts. As long as he composed buckets of music for her (which he did) she didn’t mind him taking on outside jobs, too. And her influence with her cousin made it possible for Charpentier’s music to get published. 

Lully got this amazing bust

Lully wrote sacred music sometimes, but mostly operas, dances, theatre music, and other popular genres. Charpentier wrote his share of secular music, but most of his output is sacred.

Lully was actually born an Italian, but he became a French citizen and claimed that he had no Italian influences in his music, that it was in the purest French style. Charpentier was a dyed in the wool Frenchman, who was proud of the Italian influences he picked up studying in Rome with Italian composers.

Lully led an outrageous private life, fathering at least four children with his wife and enjoying numerous affairs with both men and women. Charpentier seems never to have married. After his patroness’ death he got a job with the Jesuits and later at Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. 

Charpentier got this wierd engraving

In his lifetime Lully towered over his contemporaries, even influencing composers like Purcell, Handel, and Bach decades after his death. Charpentier had a much lower profile. 

But about 100 years after the time we are discussing, the ancien régime fell to the guillotine. Everything the aristocrats had loved, especially their music, fell out of favor, and in time was lost to history. Lully, Charpentier, Marais, Couperin, Rameau – all were now equal in their obscurity. But by the mid-20^th century that began to change. First the harpsichordists rescued the divine music of this time. And in 1953 musicologist Carl de Nys “discovered” Charpentier. Interest in him has remained strong throughout the intervening decades as Baroque music has been re-explored. Charpentier is among the most recorded and most likely to appear on a concert program from his era. Lully has been much slower to find his audience. Lully’s momentum is gathering, to be sure, but Charpentier’s appeal to modern audiences would have seemed remarkable to his contemporaries, when everyone lived in Lully’s shadow.

In the mid 1680s, Louis began to turn away from Lully, as the composer’s debaucheries became too much. Charpentier had been quietly writing and publishing gorgeous music for years, and his day job gave him free rein to take on other projects. It was a perfect opportunity for Armand to get ahead of the curve in what was clearly going to be a post-Lully world. He obviously sent Charpentier the plans for the refurbished garden, because the score is filled with marginalia describing where the musicians should be placed (have I mentioned that a grotto was involved?) and using the very position of the sun in the sky to provide the special effects. 

Shepherds in the garden. Seriously, this is what their lives were like

It would have been so perfect.