-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Graham Sadler, A French Baroque miscellany, Early Music, Volume 49, Issue 2, May 2021, Pages 316–318, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caab034
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
As part of his policy to establish French artistic supremacy in Europe, Louis XIV encouraged the development of a national musical style spearheaded by two genres that differed radically from anything composed abroad: the tragédie en musique and the motet à grand chœur. The role of Jean-Baptiste Lully in giving the former its distinctive character is well known. But although he never held an official post in the Chapelle du Roi, Lully also played a crucial part in shaping the grand motet, as the genre is nowadays anachronistically known. His eleven motets of this kind, mostly written for state occasions, brought to the genre a new breadth and character that it retained for the best part of a century.
Three of Lully’s finest motets à grand chœur can be heard on a recording by the Namur Chamber Choir and the Millenium Orchestra, conducted by Leonardo García Alarcón: Jean-Baptiste Lully: Dies iræ · De profundis · Te Deum (Alpha 444, issued 2019, 83′). The first two were performed at the funeral of the much-loved queen Marie-Thérèse in 1683, whilst the third was written to celebrate the baptism of Lully’s own son in the presence of the king in 1677. The Te Deum has gained notoriety as the work in which the composer, directing a performance ten years later, stubbed his toe with his cane, thereby causing the injury that led to his premature death. Happily, the myth that he was audibly marking the beat with the cane has recently been dispelled, since Lully, as was the custom, used a scroll of paper to beat time (see P. Holman, Before the Baton (Woodbridge, 2020), ch.3). Still, I suspect that this anecdote will continue to feature in programme notes for many years to come: se non è vero…
