The Italian Invaders!

Wow. Ok, that title sounds way too dramatic for the actual content. My apologies if you were expecting explosions, mutilation and bloodbaths, but really, this is a music blog. The most violent you’re going to get is a particularly loud diminished seventh chord.

Hint: This is when you generally hear it.

Anyway, today I am looking at how Italian influences on French music came about.

1: The seeds of something more sinister…

(Really, I should make my titles slightly less dramatic.)

The infiltration of Italian culture into France has never been a particularly foreign concept. Indeed, we can see François I (1494–1547) readily introduced Italians into his court and as a result there was greater refinement. Both François I and Henri II employed Italian artists such as Rosso and Primaticcio, who brought various Italian styles into France. Much like in our Baroque music era that we've looked at, interest in the arts changed depending on the monarch, before trickling down to the nobles and then the masses, so it stands to reason that if the king wanted something Italian, Italian was what he got, or if he didn't want Italian, he could feel free to banish them (as Louis XIV did).

2: The whims of a king…

During Louis XIV’s reign Italian music was not tolerated in court. After all, the king had his own personal composer to write songs that basically worshiped him (as mentioned in Lara’s Blog last week), so why have anything else, especially from a series of states with no monarch (gasp!)? It was only in his later years, where he seemed to go through a mid-life crisis, that his tastes changed drastically and he lost interest in what Lully was doing. It wasn't that he now liked Italians. No, Louis had moved away from frivolities that permeated the French court in favor of a more somber tone. I like to think he realized that he was in fact mortal and would one day have to meet his maker, and dancing around on a stage wasn't going to cut it. In any case, he endorsed a more serious kind of entertainment, and expected others to follow suit.
But they didn't.
The nobles of the French court didn't seem to like this change in pace, having spent many years fully immersed in comedie. Of course, they still attended whatever performances the king wanted, but now they were the ones who had to patronize new things.

Italian things.

French dealers 1690s

3: The Italian Invasion

Following Lully’s demise (as seen last week) there was no great French composer to take his place as main man, which allowed several composers with several different styles to take his place. Pieces by Corelli for example crossed the border and sold like hotcakes. Italian operas were included in French operas, as can be seen in Le Carnaval de Venise by André Campra, which is an opera within an opera. The story itself is about a company preparing to play an Italian opera, and the end of it includes snippets from an actual Italian opera, which stands at stark contrast to the French norm. They would only get snippets of these, rather than the entire opera because the manuscripts that were sold would be of the individual arias. Because it was not composed and played for the king, there was no more propaganda, but rather a comedic commentary by a goddess called Folly.

An example of Italian style melisma from Le Carnaval de Venise.

Among contemporary music critics there were those both for and against having the Italian style in France. François Raguenet particularly favored Italian music, and backed his opinion up with saying that French music focuses on the shaping of the highest part and the lowest part, and has a tendency to lump the rest together, whilst Italian music crafts all parts to be equally beautiful. On the other hand there were those such as Jean-Laurent Lecerf de la Viéville, who claimed that everything in Italian music is done to excess and thus becomes unpalatable to a nobleman’s diet.

So, who won this war? Post your opinion below.



Further Readings:
R. J. Knecht, French Renaissance Monarchy: Francis I and Henry II, 2nd edn (New York, NY: Longman, 1996), pp. 73-85

François Raguenet, from A Comparison between the French and Italian Music and Operas (1702)
and
Jean-Laurent Lecerf de la Viéville, from A Comparison of French and Italian Music (1704)
(both in Enrico Fubini, Music & Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe: A Source Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).)

Further Listenings:
A whole clip of André Campra’s Le Carnavale de Venise on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh7AsOZVEVI

If you can get onto Naxos (my advice would be to go through Christchurch City Library if you are a member) you can listen to individual tracks of André Campra’s Le Carnavale de Venise, and as a source of contrast between French and Italian I would recommend listening to tracks 8, 9 and 10 of disc 2.

A Musical Monopolizer

It has come to my attention in the last few days that my blog from last week may have portrayed Lully as the bullied child of baroque composers, who got his lunch money stolen and was generally picked on for being ‘different.’

I assure you, he was not.

As I previously mentioned, Jean-Baptiste Lully is among the enviable musicians that had a high and reliable income, not to mention was an esteemed favorite of the king. But that’s not all. Hopefully by the end of this post I will have convinced you that Lully was the play-ground bully of the school of French music, and that there was little anyone could do about it.

From the very beginning of Louis XIV’s reign, Lully was given the title of surintendant de la musique de la chamber du roi in 1661, the highest position a musician could hope for in the French court. Considering his very humble beginnings in Florence as a peasant and how he tried to portray himself as of higher birth than he actually was, we can perhaps see his own character parodied in his opera Le bourgeois gentilhomme (The Middle-Class Gentleman, 1670) where a middle-class gentleman tries to pass himself off as of higher class, trying and yet failing at singing serious songs or dancing minuets. (Click here to listen to it, or there is an example clip at the end of this)

Operas such as this one are what Lully is well-remembered for, despite him saying in the 1660s that opera would not work in France due to the nature of the language. In 1672 Lully took over the privilege of being the director of the Académie Royale de Musique, thus beginning what I like to call his musical monopoly. James P. Fairleigh describes that from this point on, “Lully had established almost absolute control over secular musical performances, not only in Versailles and Paris but in all the provincial communities as well.”  He achieved this by prohibiting shows to have dancers, or having music groups perform with more than two voices and six violins without his permission, for which he charged. As an example, a series of operas to be performed in Marseilles cost 2000 livres a year just for his consent.

He charged steep prices for his shows, and chose where the best (most expensive) tiers in the amphitheater would be, the “best” possible seats being on the stage itself.

A poster advertising for Lully's first production after he took control of Opera.

Lully controlled just about every aspect of his productions. His cohort Philippe Quinault would select the subjects for the king to choose from, following which he would write up a rough overview to be given to Lully who would arrange the order and acts as well as scenes. He then gave it back to Quinault who wrote the libretto (words), who would then have it revised by his peers before giving it back to Lully, who had the choice to take or leave the criticisms. The composer worked on the score until he knew it, then dictated it to his secretaries, beyond that not letting others besides the king see what he was working on.

The dictatorship which he created can be seen most of all in the rehearsals. Missed rehearsals or performances were met with fines per hour missed. Not content with just composing the music, he was often found listening at the back of the theater for wrong notes or extra flourishes, to which he felt at liberty to go up and smash the instrument over the player’s backs. It had even been said he kicked a pregnant actress in order to make her pregnancy fail.

Lully the Bully

Following this, it doesn't even surprise me that his death came from conducting. The cane he used to beat time in ballet class was used so vigorously it smashed his foot, which became infected by gangrene. He only lived for another eight weeks.

Jean-Baptiste Lully was the composer of the French court during Louis XIV’s reign, composing very beautiful and entertaining operas that not surprisingly were still played in France 100 years after his death, though it is probably fair to say his musical monopoly was not the result of super-human talent, but rather a result of being the playground bully.

Further reading:
Jérôme de la Gorce, ‘Lully,’ Grove Music Online. Accessed March 7, 2014, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/42477pg1.

James P. Fairleigh, ‘Lully as “Secrétaire Du Roi,” Bach, Vol 15, No.4 (1984), 16-22.

Wendy Heller, Music in the Baroque (New York: Norton, 2014), 121-129.

Robert Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), 204-214.

Caroline Wood and Graham Sadler, French Baroque Opera: A Reader (Brookfield: Ashgate, 2000), 22-26.

Further listening:

I found a particularly useful YouTube clip to understand how dancing was an integral part of Lully's productions, as shown in Le bourgeois gentilhomme: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBFigs-fjLs

Feel free to add any comments or queries below.

The French Baroque?

[This blog is part of one of my assessments for a music history course that I am currently taking. At the moment we are covering the Baroque period across Europe, and these blogs are a series of thoughts from my lectures and readings. The cartoon images are mine and can be used as long as it is cited back to me.]

Bach, Vivaldi and Scarlatti hanging... Poor Lully

Bach. Handel. Scarlatti. Vivaldi. Names that we can gladly hold up a large sign to labelled ‘Baroque’. Only with deep reflection and perhaps a quick Google search can we find some French names: Lully (don’t let the name deceive you, he’s Italian-born) or Lambert, but none of these are the ‘greats’ for the general public. Considering that being a musician in France during the “Baroque” period could be one of the highest paying and most reliable jobs (cue a sad sigh of any musician today), we should be surprised at the lack of renown of French names. But, perhaps there is good reason for this.

1 – “If it aint Baroque, don’t fix it”

Among contemporaries and historians in France, it has been argued at length whether music during the period of seventeenth and eighteenth century should be labelled Baroque. As with all music periods the name heavily generalizes everything and lumps together what are more often than not completely different styles from across different cultures.

For instance, the word Baroque inspires the image of very structured, ornamented music that remains simple but beautiful (cue Vivaldi’s Four Seasons). The French pieces of this time can be said to fit in to this mold, but yet do not.

D’Anglebert’s, ‘Chaconne, Mr. De Lully’ takes ornamentation to a whole new level as described by Wendy Heller, with basically every beat including a trill on either one or both hands of the harpsichord, the ornamentation often being left to the performers ‘good taste’ (although if you have not been gifted with ‘good taste’ you should talk to someone who does. Also, the rhythm for this piece is uniquely French, and named inégalité for a reason. Notes which are written as equal value would be interpreted by the performer to be played with much liberty, swinging the rhythm in a strong-weak fashion, another feature only found in French music.

French historians such as Norbert Dufourcq argue that music of this period cannot be named baroque, for the most accurate description of music is Classique. The term encapsulates the fashion of the music being much more subtle than in other areas of Europe, to match the high level of class displayed at the French court.

Ornamentation Table from Jean Henry d'Anglebert, Pièces de clavessin (1689)

2 - What’s language got to do with it?

A practical reason as to why there is such a dramatic difference in the seventeenth and eighteenth century between music from France and music from other areas can be linked to the language itself. More rhythmic differences can be found particularly in pieces that are sung (or where instruments are to play the melody as if being sung).

This can be seen in Michel Lambert’s ‘Par mes chants’, where the rhythm is obscured for emotive purposes, and where the pace constantly shifts in response to the words between duple and triple meter, as noted by Heller. The French language affects pieces such as this as the emphasis falls on the second to last or last syllable of the verse. Unlike Italian, English or German Baroque pieces, the French preferred syllabic writings, placing a higher value on a flow of emotions rather than obeying rules of meter. Not that the French ever have.

Michel Lambert, 'Par mes chants' (1689)

So, can this music be classed as Baroque, or do we need to redefine our standards of labeling periods?

Something to keep in mind is our recent past. Last week I purchased a CD that is labelled “Pure 80s” which presents what a group of editors decided would be a generalized form of hits during the prescribed decade. Now, comparison time: Baroque music spans across about 150 years. This is ten. Baroque music extents across many languages and countries. With the exception of a particularly languid Julio Iglesias song, these are all either English or American groups. Does all the music of the 80s sound like the tracks on my discs? No way. Does all the music we have from the Baroque period sound like Handel’s Masses or Bach’s Concertos? Of course not.

So there is, of course, a place for composers of Louis XIII-XV’s court among the labeling of Baroque. As for our opinion of what Baroque should sound like, rising above the sense of style and flamboyant meter, French music from the era remains elegant and structured, heavily ornamented, and most of all has a courtly grace which can indeed match any sign-posted Bach, Handel, Scarlatti or Vivaldi piece.

Further reading:

Wendy Heller, Music in the Baroque (New York: Norton, 2014), pp. 112–121.

Catherine Massip, ‘Paris, 1600–61’, in The Early Baroque Era: From the Late 16th Century to the 1660s, ed. by Curtis Price (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 218–228.

James Anthony, French Baroque Music from Beaujoyeulx to Rameau (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1997), pp. 10-11.