Charpentier/Lully: Te Deum

PROGRAMME

Anonyme
Te Deum - Plain chant 

Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643-1704)
Te Deum

Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687)
Te Deum

With his Te Deum, the Superintendent of the King's Music signed a major score, which established an official genre for a century. On 9 September 1677, in the Chapel of Fontainebleau, Lully conducted his Te Deum, composed for the christening of his eldest son, in the presence of Louis XIV, the child's godfather. The work is commensurate with the event: a masterpiece of musical architecture, the imposing orchestra requiring trumpets and timpani. The Te Deum remained the most performed religious work of its time: a royal wedding, a military victory, a cure for the king... 1677 was the year of Lully's most magnificent creations, composed for a monarch at the height of his glory, including the tragedy Atys, which became the " King's opera ". Of the ten or so performances of the Te Deum conducted by Lully, history has only remembered the one in the Church of the Feuillants, which caused the composer's death in 1686: it was while beating the bar that, carried away by zeal, he pierced his foot with the end of his cane. Lully died of gangrene on 22 March 1687, but his aura remained intact until the end of the monarchy.

Charpentier is the Angel of French Baroque music, but it is in the few years he spent in Italy in his youth that he developed his sense of pomp and circumstance as much as his sensitivity. The music he heard in Rome was demonstrative, colourful and profound, with many musicians placed throughout the church. In France, from 1661 onwards, Lully had turned the Grand Motet into a monument: Louis XIV's superintendent of music subsequently produced several masterpieces requiring all the musical forces available, including for his own Te Deum in 1677, which was particularly inspired and grandiose. It was in this vein of the Versailles ceremonial that Charpentier wrote the Te Deum that would make him famous in the twentieth century: performed for the military victory at Steinkerque in 1692, probably in the church of Saint-Louis-des-Jésuites, where Charpentier was the Maître de Chapelle, this work, which glorified the King's arms, was a great success, but was never performed before Louis XIV. Since its rediscovery, this powerful fresco, whose prelude opens with the timpani and trumpets’ martial rhythms, has come to symbolise the Grand Siècle of the arts, but also of Louis XIV's conquests.


Concert dedicated to the memory of Joëlle Broguet, Founder of ADOR - the Friends of the Royal Opera