Richard Luckett on music less than baroque
When Voltaire came to summarise French achievements during the reign of Louis XIV he laid an entirely proper stress on what had been accomplished in the arts; martial triumphs would be forgotten as territorial gains slipped away, but the works of French writers, painters, architects, and even gardeners, were a lasting glory. One topic, however, presented certain problems, for Voltaire was uncomfortably aware that "French music, at least the vocal part, is not, agreeable.to any other nation." He suggested various reasons for this, noting that the climate was not such as to produce the lightness of voice possessed by the Italians, and observing also that French respect for the whole man had ensured that there were no native examples of the castrato voice. But these remarks were ancillary to his main point, which was that the root of the problem was.to be found in French prosody and the fact that the mute e was conventionally sounded in song. He went on to argue that it was in fact the great strength of French music that composers attended to words, and that Lully's success — and his claim to be considered a French composer, though Italian by birth — stemmed from his respect for language. He concluded his brief survey with an oblique but flattering reference to Rameau, who " new-modelled the art of music;" yet the. more informed amongst his readers would have seen that, though the praise was genuine, the observation was also ironical. For Rameau notoriously urged his singers to faster and faster tempi, and when it was objected that the words would be lost replied, contemptuously: "Who cares?" As on two occasions his librettist, Voltaire certainly did.
Despite this lightly polemical undertone, Voltaire's page-and-a-half on music remain relevant today. In the last fifty years music of. the period 1600-1760 has gained a mass audience, undoubtedly larger than any which it reached when it was originally written; it has caused the growth of a substantial industry devoted to the manufacture of instruments long assumed to be obsolete; and it' has provided the subject matter for the. researches and disquisitions of a small number' of distinguished scholars and a host of their less distinguished brethren. The statues of Bach and Handel have been refurbished and their pedestals further raised; Vivaldi,, Scarlatti and Telemann have been added to the pantheon, and their names cleared of the ignominy once associated with a.prolific out-, put; Monteverdi and Schatz are acknowledged as masters. If the reputation of Purcell languishes it is for a special reason: in the present state of musical performance in England those , musicians competent to perform him are not endowed with sufficient acumen to appreciate him, whilst those who appreciate him lack (with one or two exceptions) the competence to perform him. But French music remains a thing apart; though a certain amount of scholarly work has been done, some of it excellent, outside France the
public for French music of this period is comparatively small. The best known composer is Couperin, yet acquaintance with hiS work seldom extends beyond his harpsichord pieces and appreciation of those — despite Wilfrid Meller's outstanding book on the composer — is often superficial. It cannot have been the ' prettiness' of Couperin's music that prompted Bach to transcribe his works and to correspond with him, yet it is often for this quality that he is commended today.
Professor James R. Anthony, whose reputation rests on his work on French music, shows, in his newly published account of French music from Beaujoyeulx to Rameau,* that he is aware of the problem. Indeed, it afflicts the very title of his book. It is dubious whether any composer in any country ever thought of his work as ' baroque '; the word, which derives from the mime source as verucca, was generally associated with the odd and wartish. Our modern usage was suggested via its employment as a technical term by the art historian Wolfflin, and as a poetic term by writers such as Rilke, who refers in a letter to "baroque clouds" over Rome. Both specific sense and resonance have now been dulled; it has come to denote little more than a period. But in France, as Professor Anthony tells us, it was a term familiar to those involved with musical criticism and employed as a term of abuse to characterise the extravagance of the recherche and bizarre Italian style, a style peu nature!, not fit to be compared with French music, notable for its regularite and. to be commended because it was noble, intelligent, elegante and, needless to say, nature!. It is one of the merits of Professor Anthony's book that he is interested in matters such as this, though it is ultimately one of his principal limitatidns that his own critical vocabulary is subsumed in the terminology proposed by his subject, and that the larger perspectives suffer accordingly. As a chart his book is admirable. It provides information, examples and references; it sketches the social background, and it conveys a winning enthusiasm. At the same time the chart is projected in such a way that the clarity given to the lie of the land often distorts detail. Thus he discusses his subject generically, taking stage music first and tracing it through from 1581 to 1733, and following this with similar accounts of religious music, music for lute and keyboard, instrumental and solo music, and vocal chamber music. This is admirably clear, but it becomes irritating when subdivisions of different genres, such as trvedie lyrigue and operaballet, are also treated apart, and the procedure as a whole militates against any kind of productive cross-referencing. In the period of a hundred and fifty years so covered there were vast changes: in society — the wars of religion, the Fronde, the Regency; in French Baroque Music James R. Anthony. (Batsford E6). instruments — the conquest of the lute by the harpsichord, of the viol by the violin family, of the old wide-bore woodwinds by the new multi-jointed narrow bore instruments pioneered by the Hotteterres; in the organisation of musicians and the exercise of patronage. The rigid categorisations implied by Professor Anthony's methods work against our sens of this, and they sometimes lead him astray in other ways. His account of lute music ends with a blanket condemnation, he finds it "mannered, precious, even decadent; its melodies are surcharged with ornaments, its rhythms fussy, its harmony often aimless, and its texture without unity." Curiously enough it was French lute music of the seventeenth century that was the most easily exportable genre; Lullian opera was modified when it crossed the borders, but we find, Herrick in his poems on two occasions singing the praises of the "rare Gotire" — not an instrument but a lutanist, Ennemond Gaultier, Sieur de Neves.
The limitations of Professor Anthony's book stem, so far as organisation is concerned, from a lack of imagination. Given the scope of the subject some fairly tight ordering was essential; perhaps it need not have been quite so rigid. The difficulty is that, so often, Professor Anthony is dealing with the unknown; he praises Charpentier, but the inquirer who would substantiate his claims must go to works only to be found in manuscript in the Bibliotheque Nationale. Since the subject is still so unexplored dogmatic statements are dangerous; Anthony remarks, of a set of variations on les folies d'Espagne from D'Anglebert's Suite in D minor that "they may have been the model for the only two eighteenth century sets of harpsichord variations on this tune" and goes on to cite examples by Couperin and Dandrieu. But the statement is false, since Michel Corrette contributed a third set, though it is to-4)e found tucked away at the back of a teaching militial. Professor Anthony can scarcely be blamed for having failed to notice this, and the point is less a criticism of his book than a vindication. He draws attention to so much that is unknown and worthwhile, and now that he has done so it is to be hoped that others will follow the routes he has established and tell us in more detail what is to be seen from them.
In the end the things worth knowing will be valuable because they will be performed; only when a work has been established in performance will criticism be able properly to illuminate it. In Schnabel's edition of the Beethoven piano sonatas there is a marvellously contorted piece of advice about the value of practising a particular rhythmic pattern in every possible incorrect way in order to play it correctly. Something like this has happened with seventeeth and eighteenth century music; we have had Landowska's steely Couperin, Malcolm's whimsical Rameau, and a number of prettified pillagings from the operas, made up into suites of dance music. Yet the moment has come when convincing performances are becoming more common; Kenneth Gilbert has demonstrated
that Miller's arguments for the greatness of Couperin can be conveyed in performance, the Kuijken brothers have opened up a whole
new repertoire of viol music, and Nicholas d'Harnoncourt with the Concentus Musicus
has begun to make sense of Rameau. Their use of the right instruments proves that the reactionaries of eighteenth century music, Balbastre who defended the " noble " harpsichord against the " bourgeois " piano and Le Blanc who thought the 'cello a "miserable canker" were wiser than perhaps they knew.
This school of performers has given Anthony's book a particular relevance, for its achievements make the volume less a sum mary of where scholarship has got to than an indication of how far there is still to go. In the meantime it is both a guide and a signpost.
Previous page
