Playing the Palace

A highly personal note to an international concert program

Andrew Appel — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 22:17:32 +0000

Plum Blossoms and Fleurs de Lis:
War and Peace in the Forbidden City and Versailles #

Four Nations Ensemble and Music From China
Sunday, April 21st at 6 PM
Salon Sanctuary Concerts in New York City
Thursday, April 25th at 8 PM
Market Square Concerts in Harrisburg Pennsylvania #

I met Albert Fuller in New York in 1967 after his recital on the Hunter College Harpsichord Series. He played Rameau, Couperin and Le Roux. At 16 years old my response was, “I want to do that.” It was not until 1972 after another concert, this time the Bach sonatas for harpsichord and violin, with Sergiu Luca that we spoke at length to each other. I had just auditioned to be part of his class at the Juilliard School and he invited me to join his friends at Sheila Chang’s very fine Szechuan restaurant. It was the first time I had enjoyed great Chinese cooking and he told me then, and often, that the two great world cuisines were Chinese and French. #

Albert’s New York apartment was a gentleman’s cabinet of interesting, quirky, funny, touching, elegant, and beautiful objects from all over the world, both modern and ancient. Egypt and New York, Paris and Beijing, Motown and Monteverdi were face to face. Every juxtaposition exhibited shared humanity and the need to communicate experience. The atmosphere was rich with genius. #

An evening at Albert’s always included listening to music and here I heard the Jazz pianist Don Shirley’s improvisations on Schubert, Rumanian choruses, Handel Arias and the latest disco hits. #

And so, though I had not seen it done before, in 1992 when I invited Music from China to join the Four Nations Ensemble in a program of court music from China and Versailles, my inclination was not entirely original. The idea flowered from those many evenings looking at and listening to the world with my mentor who loved sharing his passion for it. #

Pouring the wine
1977 on Fire Island.

There are things to be learned from our program. Chinese composers love creating images through music and the war jangle of the pipa will find a more restrained cousin in Couperin’s harpsichord. Sounds of nature heard in several Chinese works are also heard in Rameau’s chirping of birds and from Marais human sighs. The ornamentation and coloring of a melody on the erhu (spike fiddle) are akin to the proliferation of ornaments in Baroque music, particularly Parisian music. # #

I don’t want to sell Four Nations short. This program and the programs of contrasting repertories we have created over 25 years are unique and uniquely beautiful. If you can join us this week, we will create a chamber of music from two corners of the world. For the musicians on stage it is an evening of mutual admiration. It is possible that in our audience, listening for the first time to Ambush on Ten Sides or A Moonlit River in Spring, there will be ears and hearts opened to a different treasury of great music. And then, like my mentor Albert Fuller, I will be sharing a love of this great and grand world with others. #

For Tickets to these events click below: #

New York, NY #

Harrisburg, PA #

Playing the Texan Palace

Andrew Appel — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 00:35:15 +0000

TEXAS

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We made a final turn off the highway to a country road. We had been driving for an hour, had stopped at a Tex Mex roadside restaurant, and then watched as the highway modulated from urban sprawl to desert austerity but we were not prepared for the romantic vision as we made this turn. The road lead us towards a stone church to the left and a very large, square, silver-stone house surrounded by trees and a few outbuildings. Other than these buildings all we could see was a landscape of endless acres spotted with cactus and clumps of trees. “Do you think that’s where we are staying??” As we reach the high gate to the property, the GPS announced, “You have reached your destination. “ We dialed in the passcode and the gates open. #

The manor house on the Ranch

Soprano Dominique Labelle has joined the Four Nations Ensemble for two concerts in Fredericksburg Texas. Though we have heard of the qualities of the town and the hill country around it, we weren’t expecting the beauty of morning noon and night, nor the warm reception and appreciation that the next four days would bring. # #

Texas is gifted in offering the unexpected and extreme! My first two-step with the state came when I was a grad student at Juilliard holding a job at Sotheby’s auction house to make my preludes and codas meet. A Sotheby colleague wanted me to play at her wedding service in Amarillo. She needed 10 minutes of music and flew me down to do it. I stayed with a woman who looked like a Whistler portrait and lived in a French Chateau in the middle of town close to streets, schools and public parks that sported her family name. The rehearsal dinner was at a ranch famous for its eccentric owner. All invited women were in extravagantly beautiful dresses and the men sported French or English suits and cowboy boots. The backyard was divided up with metal fencing. On one side, closest to the house were the wedding guests looking at the hors d’oeuvres, on the other side were 15 to 20 baby lions looking at the wedding guests. This may not impress you, but for a New York kid it was dazzling. #

A decade later I brought the Four Nations Ensemble to Amarillo for a one week residency in a public school creating the model arts in education program that was adopted by the Symphony and run for years. During that time I met with a woman who has since become one of our Ensemble’s most important patrons. She and her husband lived in a Tudor style home from the 1920’s, emblematic of American comfort and success with one exception. Sandra loves music, piano playing, and singing. She felt that the home needed a music room. She had been delighted with Catherine the Great’s solution at the summer palace and decided to build a copy of it. Walking through her hallway reminiscent of Larchmont NY or Glen Cove IL, you arrive in a room with a floor of astounding marquetry, gold, white and yellow paneling, and a Hamburg Steinway waiting to be played under a grand chandelier. (Texans can have magical luck as well. One week when Sandra had moved the piano to a corner of the room, the grand chandelier came tumbling to the floor! Lots of shattered crystal but the piano unscathed.) #

Texas is a state of extremes. On one hand we hear of an education policy prohibiting the teaching of “higher thinking” in public schools as it is an affront to long held traditions and parental authority, and on the other, Austin has three Guttenberg bibles, Houston has the Rothko Chapel, Dallas had the opera company so dear to Maria Callas. Countless great musicians call Texas home. There is no state that can boast so healthy or generous a philanthropic community. #

So, we find ourselves now entering a world that reminds us equally of the movie GIANT and an ancient domaine in the Perigord. Our maître d’hôtel, a talented interior designer who decorated this home and many other properties, on occasion serves as cook and social guru for the couple who are our hosts. He is our caretaker for the weekend. #

The Sheep Barn, beautiful acoustic serving as our concert hall.

There is much to tell about the restored sheep barn, now beautiful concert hall, gallery and party pavilion; the 1830’s main house, restored respectful of its history and original proportions with a wing added for modern kitchen, grand bedroom and dining room; the dining room made theatrical by painted scrims from a New Orleans theater and spider web delicate lighting to make everything shimmer; the outbuildings (hen house, ice house) turned into guest quarters with kitchens stocked with everything and more; the landscape more exotic and haunting (made so at night by a wind that never ceased to moan and howl) than any seen in either painting or movie about the American west. # #

Sparky, the sweetest but probably least intelligent of the ranch dogs.

There are four ranch dogs. They spend the night patrolling the perimeter of the property making sure that uninvited critters don’t invade. Though not yet in evidence, I understand that the landscape is spotted with rattle snakes in the late spring and summer and wonder how the dogs know which critters to bully and which to respect. At night Loretta and I sat on our stone porch looking up at the stars and out over the fields. Every few minutes one of these dogs would walk up to us from the dark and request petting and then disappear into the dark. After a half an hour I shined a flashlight to notice that seated equidistance from us and from each other were the four dogs, protecting and guarding our guesthouse. Ranch hands. # #

The terrace, a vantage point to look at the stars, and protected by the ranch dogs.

Dinner at Sandra’s home in Fredericksburg with a parade of forks to your left! #

Our hosts, two couples who planned everything, had scheduled one dinner after another to keep us in the spotlight. Sandra’s dinner, at Boot Ranch where we would spend our last two nights, had us wondering why there were so many forks lined up by our plates until we realized that courses were simply not going to stop, each one more delicious than the one before. # #

Oh yes, there were concerts! The Fredericksburg music club run now by Mark Eckhardt has been in operation for 75 years. Similar to the small city academy of the 18th century in France and England, and the Collegium of Germany, this organization has been bringing performers to Fredericksburg and supporting music making in the town. Today, our hosts are in the process of building a concert hall for the community. Our first concert was a benefit, in the sheep barn, for this organization. Bathed in sunshine, the barn overflowing with white tulips and ranunculi, the patrons were fed Couperin, Purcell, Geminiani, Clérambault, French wines, and fresh salads. They listened in active silence. #

The public concert, a program of Baroque masterworks demanding for us and for the audience, boasted a full house. These audience members, unlike our hosts, were hard pressed to offer larger donations than $5 to attend the performance. Mostly elders on fixed incomes, they listened and loved music that was unfamiliar. Dominique, Loretta, Tanya and I were delighted with our treatment: Respected as artists and welcomed like friends! It was natural to be able to put out our best performances when made to feel so happy. #

And what of differing politics you ask? Yes indeed, we were in the world of mostly longtime Republicans and we are all old time Democrat liberals. But when people respect and even admire your humanity (each and everyone of our new friends would be delighted to dance at David and my wedding), it is so easy to talk over differing views and learn from each other. When opposites respect, then they attract and on several occasions we engaged in talks about the economy, education, foreign affairs, that were more than civil…they were enlightening. #

One last thing about Texans. There is an artful cheerfulness and allegresse to be enjoyed among them. This behavior is not unconscious. I know that each of our friends lives a real life marked with sadness, disappointments and painful events yet, they decide to live in a world of gratitude, active charity, and endless celebration. The Four Nations Ensemble will make every effort to infuse our Prestos and Allegros with Hill Country vitality and warmth. #

Court and Concert, notes to a program

Andrew Appel — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 20:54:11 +0000

Notes for Four Nations concert program for the Pittsburgh Renaissance and Baroque Series (Synod Hall on Saturday, January 12) and at the New Church in New York City (Monday, January 14). Check below blog for details. #

I prefer that which moves me to that which surprises me.
–François Couperin (from the preface of Book One of his harpsichord works) #

I prefer the bizarre to the insipid.
–Anne Louis Girodet (French painter and student of David) #

Eighteenth century France experienced revolution in every quarter. Society, government and art shed one series of long-held assumptions and hacked through thickets of philosophical thought to arrive at new values. From monarch to republic, from political marriage to marriage of affection, from subtle and decorous expression to inflamed, exaggerated, often ugly gesture, the trajectory of change in the eighteenth century rivals that of any epoch before or since. Our program looks at the changing landscape of French music from Versailles to the musician’s private music room to the public concert hall in Paris. #

Prude patroness of Clérambault and host of private concerts where Francois Couperin performed his royal concerts.

Imagine a concert in the music room of Madame de Maintenon at Versailles. Seated near the King and in the company of ten or fifteen favorites at court, you listen to François Couperin perform at the harpsichord. You enjoy the refined pleasure of a concert royal, a flute sonata of Jacques-Martin Hotteterre, a cantata by Louis-Nicolas Clérambault. Meticulously composed, each phrase is colored with the right chord and just the right turn of melody. The hours spent are luxurious. # #

Michel Blavet who lived with one creative foot in court and the other in the new public concert world.

Now imagine a concert in the home of the flautist Michel Blavet. Blavet has entertained and performed with the visiting German composer Georg Philipp Telemann, from whom the Frenchman receives a volume of six quartets inspired by the fine musicians Telemann met and admired in Paris. The audience in Blavet’s home, if any at all, consists of connoisseurs of the art. This music is often surprising and delights the mind as we hear a suite in which a French dance is followed by an Italian allegro and then leads to a jauntily exotic Polish dance. Each instrument shines with its unique color and character while an underlying counterpoint confronts the intellect. The hours are engaging and challenging. # #

Now imagine a public concert hall. A mass of 350 eager #

New spaces for new music in Paris.

concertgoers has purchased tickets expecting to be astounded by a rush of notes, unidentifiable sounds all unleashed by bow, breath, or finger. The performer on violin, flute, cello or harpsichord, naturally handsome, recognizes himself a star and not a servant or mere craftsman. Expect the very last musical word in Paris, or from Rome, or Venice, and later in the eighteenth century, Mannheim and Vienna. The hours are novel and thrilling. # #

With origins so different and audiences so diverse how should we recognize and understand this richness? How should we perform a courante by François Couperin, differently from one by François Francoeur? #

The embroidered refinement of Couperin’s music, emblematic of the last years of Louis XIV’s reign, challenges any harpsichordist. The simplest and most graceful melodies and delicately spiced harmonies are chiseled with agreements or ornaments, gracing all voices from soprano to bass. There are so many varieties of the trill, so many possibilities of its execution. The right hand might play a trill on the beat while the left executes a trill on the same beat–but delayed a fraction of a second. Couperin notates this clearly, demanding that we adhere to his minute directions. If the result sounds labored or awkward, then we have to work harder to achieve the grace he requires. Listeners hardly register the performer’s care, yet they feel it. This is the realm of noble sensibility and courtly taste. Passion is framed in perfect décor and, as Couperin has requested, moves us without surprising us. Click to hear: Premiere Courante from Troisieme Ordre #

Couperin and Hotteterre speak the same language as poet Jean de La Fontaine and dramatist Jean Racine. There is a regular and solid pulse in a dance of Couperin as there is in a verse Fable of La Fontaine or a monologue of Racine. In contrast, the length, shapes and imagery of each word or phrase render the art unpredictable and limpid. #

Is there sentiment? We will have to wait for Debussy and Ravel with their Tombeau de Couperin and Homage a Rameau to arrive at tributes as touching and beautifully turned as Couperin’s La Garnier. #

Though raised and educated in the world of Couperin, the violinist and composer Jean-Joseph de Mondonville knew that the level of refinement natural to Couperin would not read in Mondonville’s world of the public concert. For the latter, flashes of fashion, the thrill of virtuosity, the perception of entitlement lent by over-voluptuous melody made up the correct sound palate attractive to his subscribers. #

Mondonville by Quentin de la Tour (1747), a man of the concert stage exploring new sounds for the violin and confounding his audience with delights from his bow.

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Mondonville’s reign at Paris’ Concerts Spirituels coincides with the city’s passion for Antonio Vivaldi. It was Blavet who composed the first French concerto using Vivaldi’s model. Both he and Francoeur sway like a pendulum between Couperin and Arcangelo Corelli. Mondonville’s violin sonatas, so full of vitality, bring us into the world of the Venetian concerto. Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons seem close at hand in La Cacia, the last movement of Mondonville’s F major sonata. Did the fox portrayed in Vivaldi’s Autumn escape, running from one score to another? Mondonville, however, is too original a personality to become a dull imitator. His fiddle takes us to the French countryside and his aria movements are pure Paris redolent of the douceur de vivre of Rococo painter François Boucher. #

If it is no surprise that the Italian composers Luigi Boccherini and Domenico Scarlatti could capture the flavor and thrill of Spain, then surely it should not surprise that Telemann captures the allure of Paris. He infuses its bon gout (good taste) with his very Germanic intelligence composing his finest chamber music in the six works we know as the “Paris Quartets.” Telemann conjures the worlds of theater and dance, countryside and city, enriched with pure instrumental sensuality and enlivened with a feather-light wit, creating a world of badinage that we usually think far beyond the natural subtlety of Germans. While Frederick the Great collected the best canvases of Jean-Antoine Watteau for his royal pleasure, The Great Telemann collected the voices of Couperin, Mondonville, Blavet and Francoeur for his “postcards” from Paris. After listening to his musical journal from France, we long to have been there, at court and at concert. #

Click to hear: Telemann Paris Q 2 tendrement #

Notes by Andrew Appel #

For information about the January 12 performance in Pittsburgh: http://www.rbsp.org #

For information about the January 14 performance in New York City: http://www.fournations.org #

Francois Couperin: The beginning of a long look.

Andrew Appel — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 22:26:44 +0000

Couperin Pieces de Clavecin Vol 1

Open Book One of Couperin’s Pieces de Claveçin and look at the first two pages of music. In contrast to the published volumes of d’Anglebert, Rameau, Le Roux and Marchand, Couperin opens not with a prélude, or improvisatory awakening of the instrument but rather with an Allemande Grave. Four of the five suites of Book 1 (and several in the following three volumes) have monumental works that serve as introductions to each collection of pieces, collections he calls ordres. Performed with the required repeats, these allemandes are impressive in stature and reminiscent of canvases of Charles Le Brun, the great history painter to Louis XIV. Each allemande establishes a compelling atmosphere but then explores textures, ranges, rhetorical figures and motion. With Couperin, our ears voyage through sound and time as our eyes travel over space and form in a painting by Charles Le Brun. The dark browns or greens of the land, the blue and white of the sky above and the gold and pinks of a distant sunset or the black and red horrors of battle all have comparable contrasts in the music of Couperin. These allemandes alone justify calling him Le Grand, the title bestowed on François Couperin during his lifetime. # #

PRESS HERE TO LISTEN TO LA RAPHAEL, A GRAND ALLEMANDE from the 8th Ordre #

Harpsichordists who explore and know Couperin’s world understand that grandeur is only one pose, one affect on the palate of this composer who believed more than any in the expressive capabilities of his instrument. Couperin demands more grace and control from his player than any other French claveçinist, and rewards our efforts to interpret his works with a harvest of the instrument’s most tender, limpid, filigreed, voluptuous, vulnerable and perfumed charms. He masters the harpsichord as Chopin masters the piano. #

The fall of the angels, Charles Lebrun and the grand style

With the publication of Book 1 in 1713, Couperin assumed his rightful position in a tradition of Parisian harpsichord composition already in full flower and influential throughout Europe. His earliest style is formed in the salon, theater and church of Louis XIV. If he were not a genius, his music might have been pompous. If he were not a genius his works might have been precious and obscure. Thanks to that genius, he takes the language of the later 17th century to its highest level. At the same time, he hints that Paris is headed towards a great change in artistic values. Indeed, just as the architect Gabriel mastered the decorative styles of Louis XV and then invented the contrasting style of Louis XVI, so too do Couperin’s Books 2, 3, and 4 for the harpsichord define the new musical rococo. His music parallels the exquisite melancholy of French painter Antoine Watteau and the virtuosity and wit of the pastel portraitist, Maurice Quentin La Tour, both younger contemporaries. # #

For this first in a series of records, I have chosen Couperin at his most dramatic, powerful, and often tragically brilliant. The third ordre is a finely chosen selection of pieces in C minor and major. While Couperin may have had no specific overall architecture in mind for this selection, he is successful in offering us great variety, ranging from the classical theatricality of La Tenebreuses and the tender sighing of Les Regrets to the riotous clowning of Les Matelotes Provençales. Let us remember that when he gathered the music for his first book of harpsichord works, he was amassing selections from over 20 years of composing. This is truly a retrospective collection of harpsichord pieces. #

PRESS HERE TO LISTEN TO LES REGRETS, from the 3rd Ordre #

Not so with the Huitieme ordre from Book 2. Couperin deftly groups contrasting pairs, two allemandes, two courantes, two gigues, a few other dances and his great Passacaille, all coming together to make a work that is best heard in its entirety, from the first dark B minor chord to the last. #

Couperin has written that he preferred that which moved him to that which surprised him. As we listen to his 27 ordres we become more and more aware of how beautifully he uses one note, one unexpected ninth or melodic turn to allow the composition to transcend any suspicion of pretty banality. But the painfully dissonant hammered chords of the Passacaille, the tragedy of its penultimate couplet, reach our ears with as much nobility and sentiment as a fountain statue in the park of Versailles or a tragic monologue in a play by Racine. Passion and poise are so perfectly balanced in Couperin’s music that though the real world might, at any instant, crumble under our feet, we are, as long as his music is our reality, living in a world of Calme, Luxe et Volupté. #

View in a Park of Antoine Watteau

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Bastille Day

Andrew Appel — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 21:53:16 +0000

From the Salon to the Scaffold
Notes to a program at Maverick Concerts for July 14th, 2012
Bastille Day #

I prefer that which touches me to that which surprises me
The composer, François Couperin (1668-1733) #

I prefer the bizarre to the insipid
The painter, Anne-Louis Girodet (1767-1824) #

Nothing (happened)
The King Louis XVI, Journal entry for July 14, 1789 #

July 14th is the day we recognize as the boundary between the Old Regime and the new, republican world of France. But this revolution is only one manifestation of a large social movement traceable in all facets of society. Art, music, literature, city life, even food change throughout the 18th century in a metamorphosis of values and power. #

HISTORY LESSON I #

Louis XIV distrusted and disliked the nobility. His brother, cousins, and distant relatives all represented a greedy threat to his position of absolute power in France. Recent history taught him that a brother could not be trusted (his father Louis XII and uncle Gaston were always in crisis and competition). His frightful experience of the Fronde, a war in which the nobility wanted to wrestle power from the king, had him imprisoned in the Palais Royal while the streets of Paris became death traps for him and his supporters. #

Louis XIV trusted the enterprising, upcoming middle class. These wealthy, entrepreneurs who figured out how to sail the new seas of commerce and industry garnered Louis’ respect and were, for the moment, uninterested in taking his power. #

The gilded facade of Versailles

As he matured, Louis created a utopia of social and artistic delights for his nobles, robbing them of any political appetite or aspirations and filling them with courtly (frou-frou) values. Versailles became a most magnificent and unnatural gilded cage. Positions of decision and power went, one by one, to middle class brain trusts. # #

Both the nobility and the new bourgeoisie owed everything to the King and thus a perfectly balanced triangle was formed. At the two lower points, the bourgeoisie and nobility on either end looked up to the King for entitlement and advancement and looked at each other with jealousy and fear. Louis had the country in his control, in the palm of his hand. It was brilliant and explains his famous line, “the state is me.” #

It was a fragile balance. It could not last. Louis XV famous line, “after me, the flood” understands the fragility of this social order. That order collapses in 1789. The middle class realizes that their wealth and canny working of the modern industrializing world is all they need to hold power. The king has become simply the leader of the entitled nobility, for whom they have little respect or patience. The nobles are mostly poverty stricken and both incapable and disdainful of real work. Louis XVI simply can’t grasp the change in power and align himself wisely to maintain his position. #

OFF WITH THEIR HEADS. #

SOME MUSIC (click here for Leclair’s Deuxieme Recreation: Chaconne 1737) #

Music from the gilded cage court of Versailles is poetic, rarely dynamic. It presents us with a glimpse of the exquisite. All our passions are expressed in refined, tender, gentle ways. No large waves, no suggestion of great change, no rocking the boat on the canal as we might glide gently towards the setting sun, through the gardens and away from the marble and golden stone of the Chateau’s façade. #

François Couperin, in any movement, takes us to a place in our heart, treats us to a gentle perfume and array of delightful colors, enlivened as one note or a sweet unexpected harmony turns a smile into a sigh, or allows a golden ray of sunshine to emerge from a cloudy sky. He moves us but never shocks us in this courtly world of fragile beauty. If the music of 1714 seems always slightly melancholy and if the contemporaneous paintings of Watteau barely hide an ever present sigh it is because, as Verlaine says in one of his poems looking back to these times, “they don’t believe their own happiness.” #

Jean Marie Leclair incorporates elegance of courtly expression. But Leclair is an early matinee idol, a precursor of Paganini, an entrepreneur wishing to grab the imagination of a public made up of middle class music lovers who want to be wowed. There is exaggerated expression and surprises in harmony that might annoy Couperin’s perfectly ordered world but delight in the less exquisite life of the Parisian ticket buyer. Our flute sonata tonight does not shock as much as the violin works that Leclair used to astonish, but it does reside half way between the music room of Mme. de Maintenon and the public concert hall of the rising families of Paris. #

The most dangerous character in this carefully balanced courtly world is the one who cannot control his or her passions. She is an object of frightful fascination and Medea’s personality and story have the attraction and appeal of a roadside disaster to which our eyes are drawn and our minds want to but cannot avoid. Clérambault in his cantata Medée examines the fire, passion and poison of the uncontrolled heart, its danger and its dynamism and appeal. Clérambault introduces us to Medea as she contemplates the upcoming wedding of Jason with his newfound princess and we listen to the tortured soul that vacillates between helpless love, abandonment and intense fury. Unsuccessful pleas to heaven and love for help are followed by answered incantations to hell and its demons for revenge. For all its brilliant vocal writing and exciting accompaniment, please keep that woman away from Versailles! #

HISTORY LESSON II #

Marriage in the 16th and 17th century was a contract between families that secured lands, money and power. Romance was not a consideration and effect on the heart was immaterial. The nobleman’s house was in the shape of a squared off U. The bottom of the U presented the entrance into the home, the public rooms in which both families represented by husband and wife, presented themselves as a unified corporation to the public. Each of the far off wings was the wife’s private apartments and the husband’s. Their intimate lives took place as far apart from each other as the building could allow. #

The Petit Trianon, or the perfect middle class family home where Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI escaped for a preferred lifestyle.

The middle class copied the form of the noble building but redefined the purpose of the structure. The dining room was placed in front replacing the most formal salons. Here, husband and wife would meet for each meal with their children and enjoy the most intimate and loving times of the day. Husband and wife, at the end of each day walked into one side of the building to sleep together in their single bedroom. Family time and committed personal relationships were the stuff of middle class values. This was foreign to both Louis XIV and XV. But Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette as well as George III in England preferred these values and changed their lives to accommodate a new domestic happiness. In the Le Petit Trianon, Marie Antoinette’s private dwelling, the dining room is the central, magnificent living space. # #

Other than unleashed passion, CHANGE was the great fear of the nobility at Versailles. These people were born to entitlement from a distant past without a rational explanation for their good fortune. Any change could only mean separation from this socially elite position and so change is a nightmare. For the middle class, change means improvement. Each year, decade and generation seems to benefit from a changing city and world. Money and control increase as the vision of the world modulates. A dynamic society promises new and better tomorrows. #

SOME MUSIC (click here for Trio in F: Presto of Johann Schobert 1760′s) #

As the Parisian, music hungry audiences, emulating noble accomplishments, learned to sing and play, magazines for music appeared in town. Each week a series of pages were printed and sent out to subscribers who would find favorite songs from recent operas, overtures and sets of variations for keyboard, often with violin, and new songs on recent books or events. Both Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the translation of Goethe’s Werther were met with songs to be sung by young Parisians who were moved to tears, and in the case of the Goethe novel, to suicide! #

Here the emotions are not restrained nor elegant but strong and sentimental. Instrumental music reflects the dynamic qualities of the rising middle class and rejects the static yet highly poetic nature of courtly art. Far from feeling this old music exquisite, the new audience heard it as insipid. Action, development, energy become the qualities that seize the imagination. It is the music of Devienne, one of the earliest composers at the revolutionary Paris Conservatory and the soul and spirit behind the flute as it entered into the 19th century. He and his colleagues begin their great migration from Couperin to Berlioz, from the touching to the bizarre, from the salon to the scaffold. #

Lamentations and Ululations: Notes before a program

Andrew Appel — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:55:12 +0000

Antonio Vivaldi came to prominence on the coat tails of Johann Sebastian Bach. This was a favor returned, as Bach’s own style went through a metamorphosis with his discovery of the Venetian master’s brilliant energy and rational, transparent, and effective form. Everything in Bach evolved, from harpsichord music to extended arias and choral writing. So, when the Bach Gesellschaft published its volumes of concertos, the Vivaldi works most influential on Bach were included. Today, Vivaldi is recognized as the master of the violin concerto and composer of The Four Seasons. #

The Greek neighborhood of Venice where Vivaldi lived and worked

Stravinsky accused Vivaldi of writing the same concerto several hundred times. This is a misunderstanding of the music. Not only are Vivaldi’s concertos remarkably varied, they are beguilingly unpredictable. A musician must carefully count measures otherwise he will almost always play at the wrong moment! As natural and symmetrical as a work might appear, Vivaldi plays with phrase lengths and confounds our expectations. This is part of his genius and makes for concertos, if sensitively performed that are never dull. # #

Until recently, Vivaldi’s best allies believed that his genius is most completely illuminated through his instrumental music. Now, with the exploration of his theater and church music, and with a better understanding of his difficult life, so much of it in the theater, we know that his vocal music gives the most complete picture of his brilliance, whether opera, oratorio (for mostly female forces written for La Pietá), mass, psalm or motet. #

He is like a Venetian painter in expressing texts through music using a large palate of string textures and colors and, when possible, an even larger one of instruments! When you listen to his dramatic motets, written most probably for the Giró girl (compelling singer and sister with whom he lived most of his mature life creating quite a scandal), you can enjoy the pictorial writing expected in Summer of The Four Seasons. Cascading scales, barking repeated notes, zephyr like triplets moving in warm, coordinated grace, joyful leaps and arpeggios. Then he adds the voice, more amazing than any violin solo, bursting in energy of virtuoso expression and athleticism. #

The six sonatas for harpsichord and violin by Johann Sebastian Bach are landmarks. They are the first works written in which the harpsichord plays an equal role to the violin. Telemann, Rameau, and Mondonville follow suit immediately but without knowledge of Bach’s sonatas. However, with his training as an organist and his family of keyboardists, Bach valued the qualities of the harpsichord and its possibilities in both chamber works and in concertos. #

The brilliance in this collection of six sonatas is the level of composition represented by each and every movement along with the variety of character, the difference in spirit from one sonata to the next. Whether he calls upon the Italian ornamentation à la Corelli in the E major sonata, the joyful German toccata writing in the G major, the graceful bucolic spirit of the A major, he gives each sonata its dramatic and expressive character making it impossible to favor one over another. SO if I say now that the F minor sonata is unique and particularly powerful and beautiful, you must realize that I would say this about any one of the six being performed. #

The F minor sonata is unique and particularly powerful and beautiful. It begins with the harpsichord alluding to an ensemble of oboes and continuo. There is something haunted and uneasy about the long introduction before the violin beings its arioso reminding us of the St. Matthew Passion. As the harpsichord simmers, the violin weeps, wanders and questions. The text is invisible, but the emotional intention is tangible. The third movement adagio reverses roles and the violin plays a progression of exquisite chords while the harpsichord elaborates with flowing 32 notes always reminding me of fallen leaves being blown here and there by the late autumn wind. It is equally beautiful and melancholy. The two fast movements find Bach at his most irritating! Uncompromisingly contrapuntal with serpentine and unruly lines, the hands are twisted into knots of anger, fear, growling, with only one or two glimpses of relief. In the final movement, Bach forces the keyboardist’s hands into positions on the accidentals (flats and sharps) that feel as if he is treading on narrow ledges above pits of smoke and fire. This is Baroque music, Baroque expression, Baroque demand, and Baroque genius. #

Johann Sebastian as a naïve composer? It is every harpsichordist’s delight to play one of Bach’s earliest works, a colorful scene for harpsichord. This capriccio takes its inspiration from Kuhnau’s Biblical Sonatas in which the older composer selects scenes from the Old Testament and creates musical tableau vivant. Bach follows suit in this scene of imploring, lamentation, resignation and jesting. The writing in the touching first movement is kin to the music for two recorders in Bach’s touching, early Actus Tragicus cantata. And though the final fugue cannot stand comparison with mature works from the Well Tempered Clavier, Bach’s ability to use the post horn motif as a counter subject shows him as a master, capable of bending textures and rules to his witty inclinations. #

Both abstract music of meditation and picturesque moments are the remarkable world of Heinrich Biber in his Rosencrantz sonatas, scenes and musical prayers of the miracles of the life of Christ. Biber was the most astounding German violinist of the 17th century, incorporating all the fire and imagination of the contemporary Italian fiddlers but adding to it a seriousness of thought typical of German art. Audiences are still thrilled by his surprising choices and powerfully evocative writing nowhere more remarkable than in his depiction on the Crucifixion. #

Unlike Bach, George Frideric Handel did not rely on printed volumes of Italian music to know and incorporate Italian style into his own. At a young age, irritated by accusations of mediocre melodic skills mostly by his critical friend Johann Mattheson, Handel moved to Italy. In little time he was working alongside Alessandro Scarlatti (voice) and Arcangelo Corelli (violin). Shortly after, with the composition of cantatas and a few operas under his belt, he was recognized as the greatest composer of Italian opera and brought this reputation to London where he became the hero and patriarch of British music. Handel was a man of the public theater, understanding the qualities and needs of singer, text, and orchestra. More important, he was an entertainer and sensed the changing passions of his audience. Without compromise, he honed his product to respond to the interests of England, ultimately leaving Italian Opera Seria and settling into English sacred oratorio, fitted for the concert hall. #

But there is something that sets Handel apart from his models and followers in mid 18th century opera the way Mozart stands so inexplicably high when heard alongside Paisiello and Cimarosa. These others, including Hasse, Porpora, Leo, write melodies as delectable and vocal music as idiomatic but Handel and Mozart enter the spirit of a character in such a way that beauty and motivation, elegance and empathy come together and give us, the audience and performer, the opportunity of KNOWING the person, glimpsing the heart and mind under the surface melody. This insight, akin to the vision of Freud and Shakespeare, allows Handel to give us Cleopatra and Miriam as if they have been transported. They stand in front of us today to tell us what they have seen and have known. #

Andrew Appel #

Sans Souci-Notes before a concert

Andrew Appel — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 00:00:50 +0000

Garden exterior at Sans Souci

A journal of our visit to Sans Souci and notes on a program of the Four Nations Ensemble in New York City on March 7th, 2002 # #

A day at Sans Souci, Frederick the Great’s favorite home, is immersion in a Rococo world. The gardens cascading below the pavilion (it is neither a palace nor chateau but a Prussian Trianon) are as visually complex as the interior walls are energetic with silver and gold traceries and shell work. The Four Nations Ensemble’s concert (March 7th in New York City) is a program of sonatas from Sans Souci written to fill the music room central to life at Frederick the Great’s favorite home. There, a select group of heady friends could commune in a German dwelling for the muses, a Helicon. #

The philosopher's salon at Sans Souci

This King was a francophile (his collection of Watteau is a revelation and he felt the German language “crude and almost barbaric”), an industrious flautist-composer, and a rococo obsessed art patron. At his death, his nephews and nieces simply closed the doors on his encrusted rooms and decorated their palace apartments in solid wood triangle, parallelograms and quadrangle forms. Moving from a Frederick wing of a palace to a Fredrick Wilhelm II wing is shocking in disagreement. There is no modulation from one generation to another, only a well marked boundary # #

Marie Antoinette preferred afternoons with sheep and bagpipes in an imitation peasant village at Versailles but Frederick’s whim was to import Voltaire and employ C. P. E Bach along with the other fine composers of mid 18th century Germany for his edification and pleasure. Pleasures that charm the sense and captivate the mind! #

Voltare's bedroom at Sans Souci.

Rococo music is reputed as being fussy, pretty, superficial, decorative, and inconsequential. But listen to what Frederick writes in a letter to his sister about some music he has written for her. “In the adagio I was thinking of the long months since our parting and therefore found the tone of painful lamentation. In the allegro I indulged my hope for seeing you again.” These are the words of a young romantic and not the fashion obsessed aristocrat. They also represent a series of musical values that belie the reputation of music at Sans Souci. In fact, it is at Sans Souci where the Empfindsamer, or sensitive stile enjoyed its greatest flowering. # #

Four Nations has performed important rococo masterpieces from the sensual and voluptuous sonatas of Francoeur to the beguiling, sparkling complexities of Locatelli’s trios. However, from the first notes of Franz Benda’s F minor sonata for violin and continuo we realized that our concept of rococo music would need to expand. This music is almost uncomfortable in its search. The florid ornamentation, though demanding great virtuosity, does not amuse or astound but acts as a destabilizing element in these three movements. This is not “pretty.” It is expressive. Dark and compelling, it lives outside the world of courtly tastes and manners. #

Franz Benda (1709-1786) is known as the father of the German violin school and 33 of his sonatas are found in an important manuscript for all performers and amateurs of late Baroque music. The music explores many aspects of contemporary style and violin technique. It present a panorama of German musical thinking of the mid 18th century. But as an anthology it demonstrate the art of variation, of improvised, rococo ornament. Each movement presents the violin part in two and sometimes three versions. Richly ornamented and then more richly ornamented, this is a “how to” for elaborating a melodic line. Other composers have given us similar examples of their elaborations; Corelli, Tartini, Nardini, even Bach. Like his colleagues Benda ornaments slow movements but unlike his contemporary’s scores, we have here written out elaborations for Allegros and Prestos! There is imagination in these sonatas that challenges and rewards the violinist who chooses to tackle them. #

The music room at Sans Souci where JS Bach performed for the court of Frederick the Great

Frederick’s love of thought and art is remarkable among monarchs. However, Frederick had limitations and though he was surrounded by Bachs, he never quite understood the towering quality of either J. S. or his son, C. P. E. Bach. Though no one’s music from Berlin speaks more vibrantly than Carl Phillip’s, it seems that he was kept in the shadows throughout his career in Berlin. Johann Sebastian’s visit, though a curiosity for the King, was not fully recognized as the event of the century at Sans Souci. The arrival of the dedicated score for The Musical Offering went unnoticed. In a perverse manner, we will skip over C. P. E. Bach to look at a lesser-known keyboard player in Frederick’s service, Christoph Schaffroth (1709-1763). (2014 is the tercentenary of Carl Phillips’ birth and we plan to celebrate.) # #

Schaffroth was part of Frederick’s earliest musical establishment and seems to have been unaffected by empfindsamkeit music. His sonatas are beautifully composed in an Italian gallant mode. They are structurally simple. We do however need to ask ourselves to what extent these simple lines should be elaborated with ornaments in Benda’s fashion. Should the bass lines of repeated notes be varied as C. P. E. Bach urges? #

Rococo traceries in Frederick's music room

Of all the works on our program, Johann Gottlieb Graun’s Trio in G for flute, violin and continuo meets our expectations for the delight and vitality we have come to expect from rococo music. Johann Graun (1703-1771), student of Tartini, teacher of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, and admired by Johann Sebastian Bach has left unexplored chamber music delights and this work will make you want to know more. How fine that he gives the cellist rococo riffs that respond to the flute and violin. Here there is lyricism and sparkle that reminds us of the silver and gold that shimmers by candlelight or sunlight in every room at Sans Souci. And yet, all the embellished charm is supported by excellent counterpoint. No wonder Johann Sebastian sent his favorite son for lessons with this modern master. # #

There is one important instance in which Frederick opted towards “tomorrow” rather than “yesterday”. He was committed to the education of his nephews knowing that Frederick Wilhelm would be king. A series of letters between Frederick and Antoine Forqueray, the Parisian viola da gambist, chart arguments for teaching the prince to play a noble viol rather than the vulgar cello. The arguments are beautifully drawn by the French virtuoso but to no avail. In 1773 the King sent for one of the two Duport brothers, both cellists. Jean-Pierre Duport (1741-1818) joined the king’s orchestra and gave lessons to the future Frederick Wilhelm II. This was a fruitful decision. Beethoven wrote his opus 5 cello sonatas for performance with Duport in Berlin. Frederick Wilhelm’s abilities and love of the instrument inspired Mozart and Haydn to write quartets that place the instrument a leading role and are now part of the core chamber music repertory. Duport’s own sonatas are lyrical, operatic, often dramatic and stormy works written with the architectural clarity of early Classical music. #

The 1711 Strad Cello once Duport's used to perform with Beethoven-always in famous hands!

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If Frederick had no particular interest in “yesterday’s” music of Johann Sebastian Bach, the great master held the accepted style in Potsdam in questionable esteem. He labeled this music “Prussian Blue.” Prussian Blue is a dye that appears rich but when subjected to sunlight (scrutiny?) fades quickly. What a razor sharp insult worthy of Jane Austen! Even so, Bach takes his compositional brush and adorns already baroque melodies in rococo decoration. He does this remarkably in his flute music. Bach, to his expense during his lifetime, loved to fuse any two or three stylistic characteristics that appealed to him. He lays Italian ornaments on a French sarabande. He can fuse the Vivaldi concerto form with that of a Da Capo aria. And he can mate a ritornello virtuoso concerto with a German fugue. The response from his contemporaries was often an irritated, “What is THAT?” #

Two of Frederick the Great's flutes made by Quantz

And so, with his monumental B minor sonata for flute and harpsichord as well as this more domestic work in E major for flute and continuo, Bach has gone Empfindsamkeit and written what he feels is a modern chamber piece. The E major sonata was probably written for one of Frederick’s court flautists. But beyond anything else that was heard in this royal music room and in the words of John Dryden, it is music charms the sense and captivates the mind. # #

Berlin and the Sing-Akademie

Andrew Appel — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 02:33:17 +0000

The melancholy that pervades French 18th century art springs from an observation that nothing lasts; nothing fine, happy, exquisite, delicious, amorous, luminous, nothing lasts. Leaving Versailles is leaving Eden and leaving Paris is done with regret. Heaven on earth may well be a moment in which our taste buds are being ravished, our eyes delighted, and all our senses satisfied while seated in a restaurant looking inwards to the belle époque décor and outwards to a river of humanity in promenade on a Haussmann boulevard. #

Music Room at Sans Souci Photo David Hamilton

My next music project is a program around Frederick the Great and his world at Sans Souci. And so, my partner David and I flew to Berlin, a city neither of us had visited before and both of us longed to know. I wanted to explore the park and palaces in Potsdam and to visit Frederick’s opera house on the great Berlin Avenue, Unter der Linden. Equally important to us are the collections of ancient art on Museum Island, a conglomeration of buildings from the early 19th through the early 20th century built to house collections and individual works of art and archeology. Most personally, I wanted to know the city where Jewish European culture had its greatest moments and its most tragic ones. This was the city where Sarah Itzik (Jewish saloniste and aunt to Felix Mendelssohn) studied harpsichord with Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, and where my stepmother lived in hiding when her father was arrested and taken to the death camps. I needed to spend time here to balance memory and heritage. # #

When taking your first city walks, it is difficult to come up with a character that describes Berlin. Every main square is a construction site. High cranes define the skyline and loud construction machinery bang and hum grind out the score. From these construction sites large violet or purple pipelines travel long distances over our heads to transfer quantities of underground water to the Spree River or to some large canal. Old facades are patched and repaired, there are acres of apartment block complexes from the communist past and there is the wide scar that runs through the city where the wall used to define boundaries and set limitations. Berlin, like its history, is not an easy city to understand, even to enjoy. But its art treasures are second to none, its 18th and 19th century history of liberal accomplishment and inclusive society is inspiring and starting with the passionate involvement and support of Frederick the Great through the 19th century, its music history is central. #

The Berlin Sing-Akademie where Mendelssohn conducted Bach's St. Matthew Passion

Now here is an interesting historical event that weaves everything together. Our hotel is a short walk to Unter der Linden, very close to the Spree River and the walking route to the Pergamon, Altes and Neues Museums. We pass two great churches framing the most important concert hall of Berlin. Just beyond and on the Boulevard is Frederick the Great’s opera house. This building was burned and bombed so often but always reconstructed (it is under restoration now). It was here that Carl Heinrich Graun produced his presently unappreciated late Baroque operas. Beautiful works. As we walk towards the river, to our left we notice a small, neoclassical building. It is a temple that serves now as a state theater. But looking in our guidebooks we see that this building was the 1827 concert hall built for the Sing-Akademie of Berlin. The Sing-Akademie was an amateur run organization based on the London Academy for Ancient Music. The London “club” was dedicated to the music of Corelli and Handel in the face of the moderns Pleyel and Haydn. It was an organization that looked backwards with respect and nostalgia. # #

The Berlin institution was founded in 1791 by Carl Fasch. He was a court harpsichordist and student of C. P. E. Bach. Music of living and dead composers made up his programs. Beethoven visited in 1796. By 1800 there were over 100 members. The membership came from the wealthy Berlin Bourgeoisie including many Jews, most important, the Itzig family. Sarah Levy Itzig (1761-1854) studied with Wilhelm Friedemann Bach and collected manuscript of the Bach family, including many of J. S. Bach. Her library, combined with Carl Friedrich Zelter’s and C. P. E. Bach’s widow’s holdings made up the most important Bachiana collection in the world and was the library of the Sing-Akademie. Aunt Sarah urged Felix Mendelssohn to study with Zelter, the director after Fasch, and grow with the influence of Bach’s music. On March 11, 1829, in this small temple-like theater, just to our left as we walked to see the great Pergamon alter, Zelter handed over his baton to young and already famous Felix Mendelssohn to conduct the first performance of the St. Matthew Passion in over 100 years. It was a defining moment in Bach’s central role in Western music as well as one of many moments in which German Jews lead the entire country into a moment of astounding light. #

If this building and its history were Berlin’s only call to me, it would be more than sufficient to make me grateful and joyful to be here. Now, on to Sans Souci! #

Leaving Versailles

Andrew Appel — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 21:38:19 +0000

The perfectly groomed trees of Versailles

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It snowed this morning over Versailles and so, just as during my first visit here in 1969, today there is a rare view of the 17th century classical gardens by Andre Le Notre, one of history’s greatest landscape architects. All white, the grounds are an abstract composition in perfectly cut leafless hedges, trees, alleys and statues. The grounds are closed for a second day but the town of Versailles is sparkling in silver sunshine all focused by frigid breezes in the coldest winter in 30 years. There is a crystal energy that magnifies our feelings joy and accomplishment. #

Before returning to the opera house at 2 PM for rehearsal and a 4 PM performance of Le Roi et le fermier, we float through a morning fueled by the resonance of an excellent performance and unforgettable audience response. Today I have several friends who are arrived from Paris, and even a couple from New York City. This is true of many of my colleagues and the impression is that after our first performance in the opera house we have begun to shoot roots in the palace. #

Parisians & New Yorkers waiting in the hallway for Matinee performance

No two performances are the same and from day to day a weakness can appear or new insights emerge. This performance is stronger than last night’s and the audience response is equally enthused. The singers, the orchestra, Ryan and the production crew take in the approval, the warm response. Nothing feels better than this. # #

Many of the musicians in the Opera Lafayette orchestra have studied in Europe; some in Paris, some in Basel, some in Amsterdam and The Hague. We decided to return to America and make our lives at home, in the country where we most clearly “spoke the language” and understood the society. Some of our friends however remained in Europe to grow their careers. #

What seems clear when we look over the course of our tour with Le Roi et le fermier in Washington, New York and Versailles is that our roles, our audience and our challenges as Americans are significantly different from those of musicians who live in France or Italy. In America, we are advocates of what is felt as esoteric, elegant, but distant beauty. Often, after we play we listen to people say how we have taken them to a special but far off place. They listen to Baroque music as a foreign language from beautiful times gone by. They see wigs. The response is warm and appreciative. However, in Paris, at Versailles, the audience is listening to something they own. This 18th century opera comique is about who they are and how they got there. It is evidence of a shared cultural journey and the French are both thrilled to hear it, even before the first note sounds, and grateful to have us present this work to them. They are complimented by our efforts. Their reception of the work is visceral. And in their response, our work is validated. #

Gabriel's library for Louis XVI-a masterwork of French style and elegance

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Leaving this world is difficult but each member of the orchestra and each soloist feels that we were given a great gift by Opera Lafayette and as we read our tea leaves or blow out our cake candles or look at the first star rising over the snow covered gardens, I’m sure that each one of us is wishing that we will be back here again. #

A recording of Opera Lafayette’s Le Roi et le fermier will be released by Naxos in the coming season and our previous performance of Le Deserteur is presently available. I recommend you get to know Monsigny’s work. And I also recommend a trip to Versailles…but not until May! #

My next stop in Europe is Berlin and next program is music from the court of Frederick the Great. I hope you will travel with me through this cold European landscape and through the warmer climates of the music of Graun, Benda, Duport and Bach. #

Your Palace correspondent! #

Andrew Appel #

Stripping away Rococo excess—The Music of Monsigny-The Libretto of Sedaine.

Andrew Appel — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 05:19:49 +0000

Saturday, February 5th 230 AM #

Last week I made a few notes about Ange-Jacques Gabriel, the architect of the opera house at Versailles. Gabriel had mastered one style (the voluptuous Rococo of Louis XV) and created a new one (the opulent classicism of Louis XVI). Towards the end of his career he rejected the sinuous and undulating decorations of the Rococo for fluted columns and the rectangle. Gabriel celebrated the entitlement of aristocracy and his style change was not a political comment, not a revolution in that sense. Had he lived longer his head would have found itself in the same basket as Richard Mique’s, his follower and architect to Marie Antoinette. Mique designed the new Queen’s peasant village and little theater. #

Sedaine by David

But the stripping away of Rococo excesses by the librettist Michel-Jean Sedaine (1719-1797) and the composer, Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny (1729-1817) has more of a revolution even if it was unrecognized as such at court. Sedaine turned away from the past, from Racine and Corneille. The world of classical kings and heroines was of no interest to him and the ethic of courtly composure and checked passions is crumpled up into balls of paper and thrown into his poubelle (trashcan). Sedaine takes us into the world of the rustic hero and the sentimental heroine. His language is common and his humor, though sometimes reminiscent of Moliere, is not sharp, fine and probing but rather large-boned and gruff. This is the stuff of music hall entertainment. Courtiers are humiliated and ridiculed. The brilliance of the King is even questioned though his goodness taken as a given and his person, loved. Unlike the courtiers in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the courtiers of Sedaine are not monsters and personages of subtle evil. Choderlos de Laclos’ Mons. Valmont and Mme. Merteuil seduce and then destroy you. The villains in Le Roi et le fermier are cartoon figures. You hear them coming from a mile away and chuckle as you flee their villainy. # #

Denis Diderot, one of Paris’ greatest critics of everything but particularly art, said that François Boucher was the greatest living painter but so dishonest. He praised the prudish morality and sentimentality of Jean-Baptiste Greuze. He felt secure in a world of earth tones, of browns and whites and probably abused by the endless rainbow and unchecked eroticism of Boucher. In many ways, the comparison of Greuze to Boucher is like the relationship between Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny and Jean Philippe Rameau (1688-1746). The music of Monsigny rejects the rococo excesses of Rameau and comes up with a music that is made of simpler stuff. #

Monsigny

An opera of Rameau begins with a French overture, grand, complex, steeped in tradition. An overture of Monsigny is a modern fanfare and allegro. Simple and clear energy replaces learned, demanding tradition. A Rameau opera has one grand aria for each act. A Monsigny opera is a string of popular songs. A Rameau opera is made of rhetorical, recitatives, complex singing accompanied by the continuo section. Monsigny’s theater form allows the actors to talk their parts, doing away entirely with the recitatives that plunged Marie Antoinette into a deep princesses’ sleep on May 16, 1770 at the inauguration of the opera house when she attended a performance of Persée, a Lully tragedie-lyrique. Rameau lives up to the entitled eroticism of Boucher’s paintings with dance music that celebrates corporal beauty. Monsigny leaves out dance and seems a prude by comparison. # #

What Monsigny does offer is music for the new city of Paris, and ultimately, the new world of the middle class. Each aria is immediately attractive and accessible. Artifice does not conceal intention and the emotional message is front and center. Critics of Rameau complained that there was enough music in one of his stage works for 10 operas. Only 20 years later, Joseph II would exclaim of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, that there was too much music. But in between these two giants of the opera stage, Monsigny and Sedaine give us an experience of theater that successfully puts an end to the Old Regime form that no longer spoke to anyone, not even the most elevated families of Versailles, and launches into a direct and honest world of common human experience. REC SESSION Bill Sharp #