French composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier was born in 1643, the same year four-year-old Louis XIV began the longest reign of any monarch in history. The immense cultural impact of the Sun King — a passionate patron of the arts, especially to propagate and glorify his unshakeable faith in his divine right to absolute rule — left no realm of creative endeavor untouched, as attested by the intricate intertwining of the monarchy with the music and theatrical works of Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687), to name just one conspicuous example. Lully’s state-sanctioned domination over French opera doomed many a composer in that country to aspire no higher than second-class operatic citizenship at best; even after Lully’s death, Charpentier’s 1693 opera Médée, his sole tragédie lyrique for the Académie Royale de Musique (directed by Lully from 1672 until the end of his life), was not a stellar success despite the appreciation with which it was received by critics and opera-hungry Parisians. (So enduring was Lully’s legacy that Jean-Philippe Rameau encountered resistance to his defiance of Lully’s operatic norms when Rameau’s first opera came into existence a half-century after Lully’s death.) Charpentier collaborated with Molière in the final years of the playwright’s life, and with his successor Thomas Corneille (Pierre’s younger brother and the author of the libretto for Médée), but Charpentier’s prodigious output of vocal/choral works consists overwhelmingly of a colossal body of liturgical music. It’s hard to think of another composer who more potently embodies the aesthetic of French Catholic devotion of the era. A memorable passage from this vast oeuvre is the marche en rondeau with which Charpentier began one of his half-dozen settings of the hymn Te Deum laudamus, made famous in part by its use since the mid-1950s as a signature sting for Eurovision. (On a personal note, this is also the ringtone on my mobile gizmo for calls from my spouse.)
1694 was the year Charpentier composed his Messe de minuit pour Noël (Midnight Mass for Christmas), one of many works he wrote for the Jesuits of the Church of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis in Paris’s Marais district. In ten of the twenty movements of this vocal setting of the mass ordinary, Charpentier ingeniously weaves the melodies of various noël tunes — French Christmas carols.
The Folger Consort, the early music ensemble-in-residence at the Folger Shakespeare Library, will perform the Messe de minuit pour Noël and other baroque works in a series of concerts from Friday, December 6 to Sunday, December 15. Prior to the concerts, Folger Consort Artistic Director Robert Eisenstein will present an online seminar about the program on Wednesday, December 4. This is an event in the Folger Frost Fair, which continues through early January.
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