Music Notes from David Fallis

Opera Atelier’s Resident Music Director

Marc-Antoine Charpentier was born into modest circumstances in Paris in 1643. His father was a scrivener, and Charpentier received a good education at one of the Parisian collèges. In his early twenties he spent two or three years in Rome, where he studied with the leading Italian composer of the day, Giocomo Carissimi. On his return to France, Charpentier became a household musical servant, as singer and composer, in the service of Marie de Lorraine, duchesse de Guise. 

The House of Guise was an ancient one in France – members of the noble family had played prominent roles in the Wars of Religion in 16th-century France – but by the mid-17th century, the line had dwindled to a single male heir, who died in 1675, whereupon Marie de Lorraine became the duchess of Guise and enjoyed the vast revenues from the Guise domains.

She was determined to maintain the glory of the house as long as possible, and undertook major renovations to the Guise residence in Paris (the Hotel de Guise), establishing herself as a leading patron of the arts. She was particularly devoted to music and gradually increased the number of musical household staff who “belonged” to her. These musical servants were given lodging, meals, clothes, medical care and modest wages, but also time to prepare for the musical activities demanded by their mistress. 

Marie’s own preoccupations were with church music, and Charpentier wrote and sang in many liturgical works for the chapels in the Guise residence. But sometimes the Guise musicians were allowed to perform for other members of the Guise family, especially Élisabeth d’Orléans, who was a cousin of Louis XIV and enjoyed secular entertainments in her Paris residence, the Luxembourg Palace. Although we have almost no details surrounding the premiere, it was in the palace of one of these wealthy female patrons that Charpentier’s masterpiece La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers was first performed.

La Descente draws upon the full complement of the Guise musical establishment, and adds extra instrumentalists. The manuscript which contains the piece even has added indications of which of the musical staff sang which role. (Charpentier himself played the part of Ixion, the unfortunate occupant of Hades who according to mythology is bound to a wheel of fire which spins in the air in all directions.) Given the importance of the Orpheus myth in early Italian opera, it is interesting to note that Charpentier’s La Descente is the first known French operatic treatment of the story. (The story had been set a number of times in French pastoral dramas and cantatas.)

All of these details suggest that La Descente was a special piece, and its creators and patrons knew it. Although not on the scale of Lully’s lyric tragedies written for Versailles, it is a masterpiece of dramatic writing. Some scholars have wondered whether there is a third act missing, since the opera ends with Orpheus and Eurydice leaving Hades, and does not include the rest of the myth in which Eurydice is lost forever to Orpheus. But we must not forget the circumstances of the work, staged in a large room in either the Hotel de Guise or the Luxembourg Palace, with the musical staff already at its maximum. The length of La Descente makes it the most substantial work Charpentier undertook for the Guise household, and the title makes clear the storyline:  Orpheus’ descent into hell. Plus the musical ending is entirely suitable for an elegant aristocratic opera: a chorus and dance in praise of Orpheus, in which the residents of the underworld wish that his ravishing music could stay with them forever.

David Fallis