1643–1704 · France · Baroque
Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643 – 24 February 1704) was a French composer, countertenor singer and music theorist who worked in Paris. Sacred music dominates his legacy: masses, motets, magnificats and psalms, along with the opera Medea and several pastorales. The prelude to his Te Deum (H. 146) serves as the Eurovision theme.
Charpentier was born in 1643 in Paris or close to it. His father, Louis Charpentier, was a master scribe who kept up ties with the influential families of the Paris Parlement. The boy was well educated: at eighteen he enrolled at the law school in Paris, but he left after the first semester.
The family came from Meaux and served the crown and the church. His brother Armand-Jean took over their father’s duties, his sister Marie became a nun, and his sister Élisabeth married a dancing master who was also a musician. Charpentier spent his childhood in the Saint-Séverin district of Paris; nothing is known about his musical training.
In Rome he studied with Giacomo Carissimi. He is known to have kept company there with the poet-musician Charles Coypeau d’Assoucy, who wrote music for the French embassy. When he came back to France he knew thoroughly how music was being written in Italy at the time.
There is also a legend that he went to Rome in order to study painting and only later turned up with Carissimi. No documents support it, and it may well be untrue. His manuscripts, preserved in 28 volumes, do show real skill at the ornamental flourishes used by professional scribes, yet they contain not a single drawing or sketch.
After returning to France, Charpentier took a post as house composer to Marie de Lorraine, Duchess of Guise, who was known as Mademoiselle de Guise. She gave him a room in her recently rebuilt residence.
For many years he produced a large body of vocal works for the duchess: a mass, a magnificat, psalms, hymns and motets, and a Dies Irae for a requiem service. In the 1670s most of these pieces were written for three singers, two women and a bass, with instruments. Mademoiselle de Guise loved Italian music, and Charpentier freely applied what he had picked up in Rome.
Contrary to what is often claimed, Charpentier did not lead the duchess’s ensemble: it was directed by Philippe Goibaut, a courtier and amateur of music who was known as Monsieur Du Bois. The group later grew to thirteen performers and a singing teacher. Marginal notes in Charpentier’s manuscripts of 1684–1687 name the court’s singers and players, and “Charp” stands next to the haute-contre part.
Another of his patrons was Élisabeth Marguerite d’Orléans, the dowager Duchess of Guise, who was the daughter-in-law of his protector and a first cousin of Louis XIV. It was largely thanks to the backing of Madame de Guise that Charpentier’s ensemble could perform his chamber operas, although the exclusive right to put on operas belonged to Jean Baptiste Lully. The French-language operas and pastorales of 1684–1687 were most likely ordered by Madame de Guise and given at court.
While Charpentier lived at the Hôtel de Guise, he produced nearly as much music for clients outside as for the duchess herself. When Molière parted from Lully in 1672, Charpentier began working with the playwright’s company, and the arrangement lasted many years. Mademoiselle de Guise and her daughter-in-law may have played a part: on their advice Molière handed the music for Le Malade imaginaire to Charpentier instead of Charles d’Assoucy.
After Molière’s death in 1673, Charpentier kept writing for those who took over his company: Thomas Corneille and Jean Donneau de Visé.
In one production after another his scores called for larger forces than Lully’s monopoly on stage music allowed. By 1685 the troupe gave up defying the rules, which brought Charpentier’s work for the spoken theatre to an end.
From 1679 Charpentier wrote sacred music for the chapel of the Grand Dauphin, the son of Louis XIV, performed by a small ensemble of royal musicians. In 1683, when the court moved to Versailles, he composed the divertissement Les Plaisirs de Versailles.
In 1683 the king announced a competition for the post of music director of the court chapel. Charpentier was one of thirty-five candidates and got through the first round, but illness forced him to drop out. His notebooks show that from April until mid-August of that year he composed nothing. The king granted him a pension. When Queen Maria Theresa died, the composer was commissioned to write several works in her memory, including the motet Luctus de morte augustissimæ Mariæ Theresiæ reginæ Galliæ.
When Mademoiselle de Guise died, Charpentier was already working for the Jesuits. He served them as music master from the end of 1687 to the beginning of 1698, first for the Collège Louis-le-Grand, where Celse martyr and the sacred opera David et Jonathas were written, and then for the church of Saint-Louis.
At Saint-Louis Charpentier all but gave up oratorios; he now mostly set psalms and liturgical texts of other kinds, among them the Loreto litanies. His works of those years were often written for large forces, with singers hired from the Royal Opera.
Charpentier taught composition to Philippe d’Orléans, the king’s nephew and future regent of France, succeeding his colleague Étienne Loulié in that role. To this high-born pupil he dedicated treatises on the rules of composition and on abridged rules of accompaniment. At the Royal Academy of Music his Médée, his only lyric tragedy, was staged.
Charpentier was also a respected theorist. In the early 1680s he studied how the harmony works in a mass for several choirs by the Roman Francesco Beretta. Two versions of his manual on composition survive in copies made by Étienne Loulié. In November 2009 a fourth treatise, written in his own hand in the last months of 1698, came to light among the holdings of the Lilly Library at Indiana University. So his work as a theorist is now seen to cover nearly twenty years.
Charpentier became music director of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris in 1698 and kept the post until he died, six years later. Among his well-known works of that time is the Mass Assumpta Est Maria (H. 11).
He also wrote for religious houses: the Carmelites of the rue du Bouloir and the abbeys of Montmartre, Abbaye-aux-Bois and Port-Royal.
Little of what he wrote in his final years survives, because after his death the royal administration took away everything he had composed for the chapel. Charpentier died at the Sainte-Chapelle on 24 February 1704 and was laid to rest in the chapel graveyard, which was later closed down.
Very little of Charpentier’s music was published in his lifetime: a few airs from Circé (Paris, 1676), some airs sérieux et à boire, and the score of Médée (Paris, 1694) from the publisher Christophe Ballard. The composer himself kept his manuscripts with great care: they are written legibly in ink and gathered into numbered volumes. He left them to his nephew Jacques Édouard, a bookseller.
In 1709 Édouard published a collection of twelve small motets, but it failed to interest buyers. In 1727 he sold all 28 volumes of autographs to the Royal Library, now the National Library of France. Study of the manuscripts and of the watermarks in their paper allowed scholars to date the works and to learn for which events many of them were written. A facsimile edition only began to appear in 1990.
At his death his output is thought to have run to about 800 numbered works; today 28 volumes of autographs survive, holding more than 500 pieces that he sorted himself. These volumes are known as the Mélanges (Meslanges).
Wide attention to Charpentier’s music appeared only in the twentieth century. In 1953 one of his eight settings of the Te Deum, H. 146, was found; its prelude still serves as the Eurovision theme. The American musicologist H. W. Hitchcock compiled a catalogue of his works, published in 1982, and since 1981 a Marc-Antoine Charpentier Society has been at work. An asteroid, 9445 Charpentier, is named after him. Not all sources have been studied, and there are still many gaps in the composer’s biography.
Sacred music dominates his legacy, with about 500 pieces: masses, motets, psalms, hymns, magnificats, cantatas, the Leçons de Ténèbres and works in other genres. His contemporaries singled out his skill in sacred vocal writing for special praise. Among his works for the musical theatre, the best known are the lyric tragedy Médée and the pastorale Les Arts florissants. The prelude to his Te Deum hymn (H. 146) is also popular.
He left oratorios, masses, operas and pastorales, together with plenty of short pieces that do not fit neatly into any category. Many of his small works for one or two voices with instruments are close to the Italian cantata of the day; he called them airs sérieux, or airs à boire when the words were French, and cantatas when they were Italian. His Italian-style oratorios on Latin texts he preferred to call by the Latin word canticum. The secular side of his output includes stage music, operas, cantatas, sonatas and symphonies. His music blends French and Italian styles.
He wrote during the so-called transitional period, when the old modality and the new tonal harmony coexisted and enriched each other. Charpentier was also a theorist: his treatises on the rules of composition and on accompaniment were created for the musical training of Philippe d’Orléans. His theoretical works include Remarques sur les messes à 16 parties d’Italie (H. 549), Règles de composition (H. 550) and Abrégé des règles de l’accompagnement (H. 551).
Much of his music is known through his autographs: Charpentier divided the 28 volumes into two series, one numbered with Arabic numerals and the other with Roman ones, each running in chronological order. Little appeared in print in his lifetime: airs from Circé in 1676, a few small vocal pieces and the score of Médée in 1694. Most of what he wrote for the chapel in his last years has not survived.
Among the well-known works of his later years is the Mass Assumpta Est Maria (H. 11). For the theatre Charpentier also wrote for Molière’s company, for example the music for Le Malade imaginaire. The site catalogue has David et Jonathas (H490), an edition for voice and orchestra at the level Medium+; this sacred opera was written for the Collège Louis-le-Grand. It is a good place to begin, and the Te Deum prelude can follow.