Conference Agenda

The recent rediscovery of three cantates françaises by Philippe II, duc d’Orléans, sheds light on the development of the genre, permitting a new view of its history. Most narratives of the genre’s early history involve the poet Jean-Baptiste Rousseau and the composers of the first printed collections—Jean-Baptiste Morin, Nicolas Bernier, and Jean-Baptiste Stuck—all musicians in the orbit of Philippe d’Orléans. However, an account—probably penned by Voltaire—describes how Rousseau wrote his first cantates for Bernier at the behest of another patron, Rouillé du Coudray. This account better reflects the contents of the early cantate collections in that Bernier’s first book (1706) is entirely comprised of poems by Rousseau, whereas those of Morin and Stuck (both published in 1706) contain only two of his poems out of six cantates.

Philippe’s cantates date from the period before 1706 when his musicians were creating their first cantates, and they share many unique characteristics with those of Jean-Baptiste Stuck’s first book. Their approach to musical form and dramaturgy was quite different from those based on poems by Jean-Baptiste Rousseau. Rousseau’s solution to the problem of adapting Italian cantatas to “le génie” [the spirit] of the French language was principally a literary one: he rejected Italian cantatas’ pastoral monologues for clearly organized mythological narratives while preserving the Italian musical structure of alternating recitatives and arias. The cantates of Stuck and Philippe reveal that there was another, principally musical, solution. They largely adopted the monologues of troubled pastoral lovers from Italian cantatas, whose metaphorical language suggested particular aria topics and techniques. At the same time, these “troubled lover” cantates reflect French dramaturgical tradition: rather than relying on a strict structure of alternating arias and recitatives, they employ complexes that combine these forms in order to follow their characters’ rapidly changing emotional states more naturally. This “troubled lover” cantate topos had a profound influence on the repertoire that has yet to be recognized: its characteristics appear not only in Stuck’s first book of cantates but in collections by composers from the next phase of the genre’s history, particularly André Campra and Louis-Nicolas Clérambault.

Musicians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have described the harpsichord’s limited capacities, going so far as to enumerate the possible nuances of the harpsichord or compare it to a monochromatic spectrum, like a grayscale. These views are corroborated by the prescriptive attitudes expressed in many treatises of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. French composers of this period, however, seem to have felt differently about the instrument, though they did not express these views in treatises destined for amateur musicians. This paper argues for a reconsideration of the status of such treatises as analytical and pedagogical tools, as well as for a turn toward more holistically sourced evidence, which points to the French clavecinistes finding the instrument to be a source of rich color and expression in the right hands.

One of the most vocal proponents of this perspective was François Couperin. Contrary to his statements about the harpsichord’s limitations in L’Art de toucher le clavecin, Couperin begins his third book of Pièces de clavecin with a statement about the nature of expression at the harpsichord. The 13^th ordre opens with a well-known arsenal of literary and cultural references to the French cultural life. Unusually, the penultimate movement, “Les folies françoises,” stages a miniature masked ball in which human qualities, vivid stereotypes, and deep emotions are personified and paired with evocatively colored cloaks identified by dyers’ pigments. Here, Couperin combines specialized artisanal savoir faire with his understanding of philosophical debates of his time—notably, Charles Le Brun’s theories of the passions and René Descartes’s arguments about physiology. By bringing his conception of art, artisanal knowledge, and life to his harpsichord compositions, Couperin depicts as much about his status as a musician at the French court as what he thought the instrument could and should express. The example of Couperin has the potential to nuance discussions of class, craftsmanship, and expression in French baroque music, expand approaches to interpreting instrumental music from this period, and reframe modern approaches to the performance practice at the turn of the eighteenth century.

An obsession with witchcraft and a fixation on poison permeated French culture in the late seventeenth century, resulting in a series of witch hunts, the scope of which exceeded even the Salem witch trials. The court of Louis XIV vehemently feared sorcery, and his government held a hard line against witchcraft. Tensions reached a climax during a series of witch trials known as “the Poison Plot” (l’Affaire des poisons, 1677–1682). These events culminated in the arrest of Louis XIV’s mistress Madame Montespan in 1680, with the courtesan accused of seduction, poisoning, and participating in a Black Mass. The influence of the Poison Plot and the accompanying national panic on a succession of powerful French operatic sorceresses, however, has yet to be studied.

In this paper, I demonstrate that the years of the Poison Plot and its aftermath coincided with a succession of the iconic figures Medea (Thésée, 1675; Médée, 1693), Armida (Armide, 1686), Circe (Circé, 1694), and other sorceresses who trafficked in poisonings, incantations, and other magical acts, offering the public vivid embodiments onto which fears of witchcraft could be projected. While the narrative roots of these operas originated in Antiquity, the seventeenth-century depictions become more sinister when considering the sociopolitical context of the suspected poisonings and other criminal accusations in the court of Louis XIV and throughout France. As I argue, the depictions of witchcraft in late seventeenth-century French opera reflect the terror that surrounded the Poison Plot and its accompanying witch hunts, with operatic sorceresses representing the most feared aspects of magic at that time. My conclusions are supported by the absence of French operatic sorceresses or scenes depicting witchcraft outside the period of the late seventeenth century, a time when the Poison Plot and its aftermath left an indelible stamp on the collective French imagination.