Tag Archives: le concert spirituel

Couperin’s Leçons de Ténèbres

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Leçons de Ténèbres is a genre that became popular in France in the 17th and 18th century.  It’s a set of texts from the Vulgate version of the Book of Jeremiah to be sung on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of Easter week.  Over time setting these texts became something of a competitive exercise as they came to play a similar role to Handel’s oratorios in 18th century England.  They were musical works that one could listen to during Lent when most other musical outlets were unavailable.  The fashionable set would roam from church to church in search of the finest settings and the finest singers. Continue reading →

The other Iphigénie

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Euripides’ Iphigenia at Tauris formed the basis for an opera almost a century before the more famous one by Gluck.  Henri Desmarets; one of the more notable successors to Lully at Versailles/Paris began work on an Iphigenia opera to a libretto by  Joseph-François Duché de Vancy in the 1690s but work was interrupted by Desmarets being exiled from France for marrying a minor without her father’s permission.  Eventually the Académie Royale de la Musique entrusted the task of completing the opera to André Campra who teamed up with Antoine Danchet as librettist.  The end result was a tragédie lyrique in five acts and a prologue that premiered in 1704 to some success.  An even more successful revival in 1711 led to multiple productions across France and abroad before it was effectively replaced by the Gluck work in 1779. Continue reading →

The other Médée

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charpentiermedeeCherubini’s Médée of 1797 is undergoing something of a revival at the moment albeit in an Italian version.  But there’s an earlier and less known version of the same story with a libretto by (as opposed to based on) Corneille.  It’s Charpentier’s Médée of 1693.  It’s a tragédie lyrique with all the expected elements; an allegorical prologue in praise of Louis XIV, a classical subject, five acts, gods, spirits and demons and lots of spectacular theatrical effects.  The Lully formula in fact. Continue reading →

Words (almost) fail me

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If I had been languishing in obscurity for 250 years like Joseph Bodin de Boismortier I think I’d rather stay that way than be rescued by Hervé Niquet and the French “comedy” duo Dino and Shirley (Corinne and Gilles Benizio).  To be fair their take on Boismortier’s 1743 ballet-comédie Don Quichotte chez la duchesse isn’t nearly as bad as their previous brutal murder of Purcell’s King Arthur but it’s really weird and patchy.  It’s rather hard to describe in fact.  It’s a sort of mash up of farce, commedia, slapstick and pastiche in which bits of baroque opera occasionally break out.  It’s also staged as meta theatre with the stage interacting with the pit and Niquet himself ending up in the action.

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